Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
April 22, 2018
Hello All – The silence and complaisance of the US media and our political elite about what is happening in Israel/Gaza reveal some of the fundamental problems with our government's policies in the Middle East. On four consecutive Fridays, the protests in Gaza have been met with Israeli sharpshooters firing live ammunition. Thirty-seven Palestinians have been killed, and more than 1,700 have been wounded by bullets. A total of 5,000 Palestinians have been wounded, a great many struck by rubber-coated bullets, which can break bones. Israeli journalist Amira Hass (Haaretz) writes that "the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres said its medical teams have given postoperative care to people 'with devastating injuries of an unusual severity, which are extremely complex to treat. The injuries sustained by patients will leave most with serious, long-term physical disabilities.'" The head of the MSF medical team states that "half of the more than 500 patients we have admitted in our clinics have injuries where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone. These patients will need to have very complex surgical operations and most of them will have disabilities for life." The World Health Organization, according to Amira Hass, "also criticized Israel for harming medical personnel, saying 48 medical staffers have been wounded by Israeli fire while trying to evacuate the wounded. At least three were hit live bullets. In addition, 13 ambulances were hit by live bullets or tear gas grenades."
Can Americans do anything useful to protest/stop this slaughter? Our government gives the Israeli military more than $3 billion each year. Past and present US administrations have regularly given Israel US diplomatic cover at the United Nations and elsewhere; in the present case, the Trump administration has refused to allow discussion of Israel/Gaza in the Security Council. These connections (and many more) give the United States significant leverage over Israel's war-making. As recently as August 2014, during Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" assault on Gaza, after a month of slaughter Israel bombed several UN schools in which Gazans had taken shelter, This was too much for the Obama administration; it spoke out sharply, and Netanyahu brought the war to a halt. Just like that. Under the present circumstances, this same option is available to the Trump administration. By not using this option, it is complicit in Israel's massacre.
We can contrast this non-response of the United States to the killings in Gaza to the recent attack on Syria in response to the alleged poisoning of civilians by the Assad government. ("Alleged" in the sense that only now has the UN chemical inspection team arrived in Syria.) In the essay below by Richard Falk ("Featured Essays"), the many questions surrounding the rationale and purpose of the US-UK-French attack on Syria are summarized and addressed. In a nutshell, and at a cost of several hundreds of millions of dollars, the Trump administration appeared to risk World War III in order to show that he was a strong military leader. Significantly, no major US news outlet editorialized against this [Link]. Indeed, the only significant critique of Trump's military attack on Syria came from mainstream Democrats and some Republicans who said that it wasn't strong enough, and that it failed to improve the possibilities for regime change in Syria.
Thus we have a policy of tolerance toward the killing of dozens of innocent people in Gaza, and a policy of military reprisal for the killing of dozens of innocent people in Syria. Why? Some decades ago, in their book about the mainstream media called Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky proposed that, in cases like this, the media and the political elite can be counted on to differentiate between worthy victims and unworthy victims. Not coincidentally, worthy victims fall at the hands of official US enemies (Russia, Cuba, now Syria, etc.), and unworthy victims are those who are slaughtered by official US allies (Indonesia, Israel, Colombia, etc.). We are reminded of this important tool of media analysis in a just-published article called "A Tale of Two Atrocities: Douma and Gaza" [Link]. Yet those working for peace and justice maintain that there is no such thing as an "unworthy victim," that – as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" – "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
News Notes
Actress Natalie Portman's refusal to appear at the Israeli "Genesis Prize" ceremony, where she was to be honored and which has awarded her $2 million, is rocking Israel. Her refusal to appear on the same stage with Netanyahu, while the killing of people in Gaza was underway, was praised by leftwing Haaretz correspondent Gideon Levy and attacked by a member of Netanyahu's cabinet as "bordering on anti-Semitism." You can read The New York Times version here.
Friday, April 20th, was the 19th anniversary of the school shooting/massacre at Columbine high school, and the day chosen by many student groups for a nationwide walkout against guns and gun violence. You can read about this and see some pictures here.
Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist whom I admire and whose writings often appear in this newsletter, has advanced an interesting explanation for the poison attack on a former Russian/UK double-agent and his daughter. It addresses the question of why the supposed super-poison didn't kill its intended victims, and how this suggests that the Russian government may not have been responsible.
Following the death of four US military personnel in Niger last October, we might ask "What are those military people doing in Africa?" The New York Times just published some interesting photos and satellite images showing the construction of a new drone base in the Sahara Desert/Niger. Now you know.
Cynthia Nixon, who is running against Andrew Cuomo to be the Democrat nominee for governor in the next election, recently received the almost-unanimous support of the Working Families Party. But the nomination seems to come at a great price for the WFP, as Cuomo has demanded that his allies pull out of the WFP, and that none of his allies should give any money to the community groups that are involved in the WFP. It will be interesting/important to see if Westchester Democrats speak up/protest these heavy-handed tactics from Cuomo. Read a good article from The Nation here.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Ongoing – CFOW holds a vigil/rally each Saturday at the VFW Plaza in Hastings (Warburton and Spring) from 12 to 1 p.m. Everyone invited; please join us!
Ongoing – CFOW stalwart Elisa Zazzera manages Hastings' "Community Supported Agriculture" (CSA). The CSA partners with an upstate farm to provide fresh vegetables each Wednesday. Highly recommended. To learn more about this, and/or to sign up for the next growing season, go here.
Monday, April 23rd – In Albany, a march and rally will demand that Gov. Cuomo do the right thing, fight climate chaos, and bring our state's energy profile into the 21st century. The demands are stop the pipelines and power plants, 100 percent renewable energy, and make the polluters pay. For more information about the event, go here.
Tuesday, April 24th – The Hudson Valley Community Coalition will hold a rally in Port Chester to protest increased ICE presence in Westchester County. This "Rally for Solidarity and Resistance: Not one more deportation," will be held at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church, 181 Westchester Ave. in Port Chester, starting at 7 p.m. For more information, go to the event Facebook page.
Thursday, April 26th – Pace Law School's Land Use Center will hold a "Housing Summit" on the topic of "Novel Strategies for Novel Times." The Summit, they write, "will examine the critical importance of workforce housing to the continued economic prosperity of the region and discuss working with local governments, and through the courts, to bolster its production." All this takes place in the Judicial Institute on the Pace Law campus in White Plains from 8:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. For more information, go here.
Thursday, April 26th – This year's WESPAC Annual Awards Dinner will honor three stalwarts for peace and justice: Laura Case, Zelltzyn Sanchez, and Tomiko Morimoto West, with a keynote address by The Peace Poets. At the Women's Club of White Plains at 6 p.m. This is a last call to purchase tickets. To do so, and for more information, go here.
Sunday, April 29th. – Hastings Takes Action/NYCD16 Indivisible Environment Committee invites us to a forum on "Indian Point: An Ever-Present Danger." It will take place at the Hastings Community Center from 2 to 4 p.m. Speaking will be Karl Rabago, Executive Director of Pace Energy and Climate Center; Manna Jo Greene, Environmental Action Director of Clearwater; and Richard Webster, Legal Director of Riverkeeper. Peter D. Wolf (of Hastings), the CEO of Center for Sustainable Development, will moderate. For more information, go to the event Facebook page.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's tax cut legislation are often targeted, depending on current events. We meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to make a financial contribution to our work, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent "Featured Essays," I especially recommend the article about the role of grassroots peace organizing in bringing about the critical negotiations between North and South Korea; an assessment of the dangerous opportunities for destruction that the Obama administration bequeathed to John Bolton; Steve Fraser's insightful article on how the teachers' strikes illuminate the changing understanding of "social class" in today's America; and a moving and inspiring article ("Our History") about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which happened 75 years ago this week.
Rewards!
This week's Reward for stalwart readers is something off the beaten path. The "Intercept" website has produced a podcast, an audio drama by Wallace Shawn, called "Evening at the Talk House." During a get together of artists and writers, as the promo says, "as drinks and hors d'oeuvres are consumed, small talk evolves into more sinister topics. 'Evening at the Talk House' is a stark reminder that all it takes is complacency to enable the dirty work of an authoritarian regime." – So, something ripped from today's headlines; check it out here.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Destroyed and Saved: To Defeat ISIS, the U.S. Helped Turn Old Mosul Into Rubble — But Won't Help Rebuild It
By Pesha Magid and Shawn Carrié, The Intercept [April 22, 2018]
---- The streets of the neighborhood resemble a bizarre, space-like desert of pulverized stone and bomb-twisted metal. It was here, in the Old City of Mosul, that the final battle to remove Daesh, also known as Islamic State, reached a violent crescendo last year. The neighborhood is home to the famous al-Nuri Mosque with its iconic hunchback minaret, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, proclaimed a caliphate in Mosul. As Iraqi forces closed in and defeat became imminent, Daesh rigged the 850-year old mosque with explosives and blew it up, just to rob them of a symbolic victory. Today, the sprawling grounds of the al-Nuri Mosque are a scrap metal yard. Rusty cars are piled on top of each other. Men push around carts collecting parts that can be recycled. It's the only area where any rubble has been removed, even if only to make space for a junkyard. In the surrounding neighborhood, the destruction spreads out, spanning block after block. … Today, people speak about the Old City's residents with hushed tones of pity: many of them saw their entire livelihoods vanish in one day, often at the same time they lost family or friends. No other part of the city was damaged as badly. Yet in the Old City, state-led rebuilding efforts are almost non-existent. No one knows how long it will take to make the Old City livable again – most estimates say it will take years. [Reward More] Last summer, Tom Engelhardt wrote an essay about the role of the USA in "rubbleizing" much of the Middle East. Read his interesting essay here.
Attacking Syria
By Richard Falk, ZNet [April 20, 2018]
---- Historically minded observers pointed out alarming parallels with the confusions and exaggerated responses that led directly to the prolonged horror of World War I. The relevant restraint of the April 14th missile attacks seems to be the work of the Pentagon, and certainly not the hawk-infested White House. Military planners designed the attack to minimize risks of escalation, and possibly even reaching behind the scenes an undisclosed negotiated understanding with the Russians. In effect, Trump's red line on chemical weapons was supposedly defended, and redrawn at the UN as a warning to Damascus, but as suggested above this was the public face of the attack, not its principal motivations, which remain unacknowledged. [Read More]
---- Historically minded observers pointed out alarming parallels with the confusions and exaggerated responses that led directly to the prolonged horror of World War I. The relevant restraint of the April 14th missile attacks seems to be the work of the Pentagon, and certainly not the hawk-infested White House. Military planners designed the attack to minimize risks of escalation, and possibly even reaching behind the scenes an undisclosed negotiated understanding with the Russians. In effect, Trump's red line on chemical weapons was supposedly defended, and redrawn at the UN as a warning to Damascus, but as suggested above this was the public face of the attack, not its principal motivations, which remain unacknowledged. [Read More]
Top Six Reasons Pompeo should not be Secretary of State
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [April 21, 2018]
---- NBC is reporting that Mike Pompeo lacks the votes in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to have his nomination to be Secretary of State be favorably reported out of committee on Monday night. Democrats on the committee have expressed fears that Pompeo, a warmonger, will reinforce the worst tendencies of Trump. Pompeo has been director of the Central Intelligence Agency for the past year. He was tapped to succeed ousted former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, according to Trump, in large part because Tillerson was "all right with" the Iran deal negotiated by the UN Security Council in 2015. Fears that Pompeo might drag us into a hot war with Iran may also have swayed some Republican members of the committee, which has a GOP majority. Here are some reasons that the Committee is right to have the severest reservations about Pompeo as Secretary of State: (1) Pompeo has openly stated that he intends to undermine the Iran Deal (JCPOA). [and 5 more reasons] [Read More] And while we're at it: if Pompeo becomes Secretary of State, his replacement as head of the CIA may be Gina Haspel. To prepare for her nomination and the fight against it, read "Gina Haspel, Trump's Pick to Lead the CIA, 'Ran the Interrogation Program,' Said Former CIA Lawyer," by Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast [April 18, 2018] [Link].
Protest & Political Activity Increases In Trump Era
By Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance [April 19, 2018]
---- People have noted that the last year has seen an escalation of protest activity in the United States. Many of these protests are generated by opposition to Donald Trump, e.g. protests against immigration policies, and many have partisan leanings, e.g. the Women's March, the March for Science and others were brought on by events or circumstances, e.g. the March or Our Lives against gun violence. Protests began on the weekend of Donald Trump's Inauguration; indeed there may have been more protesters at the inauguration than supporters of the president. The Washington Post has conducted a poll that measures how widespread political action has been in the Trump era. The Post reports, "Tens of millions of Americans have joined protests and rallies in the past two years, their activism often driven by admiration or outrage toward President Trump, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll." The long term impact of this new activism is hard to predict. [Read More]
WAR & PEACE
Will Congress Write the President a Blank Check for War?
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [April 20, 2018]
---- This coming Monday, April 23, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to review a bill that would virtually give President Donald J. Trump a blank check to wage war anywhere in the world any time he pleases. The Constitution places the power to declare war exclusively in the hands of the Congress. However, for the past 75 years, Congress has allowed that power to drift toward the executive branch. The new bill, should it pass, would effectively make the transfer of the war power from Congress to the president complete. It is hard to imagine a worse time in American history for this to happen. [Read More]
'Russiagate' Allegations Continue to Escalate the Danger of War With Russia
By Stephen F. Cohen, The Nation [April 18, 2018]
---- In the decades following [the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis], Washington and Moscow enacted forms of cooperation to limit their conflicts and prevent a recapitulation of the Cuban episode—mutual codes of Cold War conduct; a myriad of public and secret communications; nuclear-arms agreements; periodic summit meetings; and other regularized processes that kept the nuclear peace. But the new US-Russian Cold War has vaporized most of those restraining conventions, especially since the conflict over Ukraine in 2014, and even more since the "Russiagate" allegations against candidate and then President Donald Trump began in 2016. [Read More]
The War in Syria
The Great Game Comes to Syria
---- An unusual triple alliance is emerging from the Syrian war, one that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East, unhinge the NATO alliance, and complicate the Trump administration's designs on Iran. It might also lead to yet another double cross of one of the region's largest ethnic groups, the Kurds. However, the "troika alliance"—Turkey, Russia and Iran—consists of three countries that don't much like one another, have different goals, and whose policies are driven by a combination of geo-global goals and internal politics. In short, "fragile and complicated" doesn't even begin to describe it. How the triad might be affected by the joint U.S., French and British attack on Syria is unclear, but in the long run the alliance will likely survive the uptick of hostilities. But common ground was what came out of the April 4 meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meeting in Ankara, the parties pledged to support the "territorial integrity" of Syria, find a diplomatic end to the war, and to begin a reconstruction of a Syria devastated by seven years of war. While Russia and Turkey explicitly backed the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, Iran was quiet on that issue, preferring a regional solution without "foreign plans." "Common ground," however, doesn't mean the members of the "troika" are on the same page. [Read More]
War with North Korea?
(Video) Korean Peninsula in Historic Peace Talks - Thanks to Activists, Not Trump
From the Real News Network [April 21, 2018] – 13 minutes
---- South and North Korea are considering a peace treaty after six decades of war. Simone Chun says this is the result of years of grassroots organizing and protests. After six decades of conflict, it looks like the war on the Korean peninsula may finally be coming to an end. Since the early 1950s, South and North Korea have technically been at war with each other. From 1950-1953 the United States waged a devastating war on North Korea in which the U.S. killed some 3 million people, 20 percent of the nation's population. The U.S. burned most of the country's major cities to the ground. After this U.S.-led war, South and North Korea never signed a peace treaty, which means generations of Koreans on both sides of the demilitarized zone have grown up in a perpetual state of war. Well, now that all appears to be changing. South Korean officials confirmed this week that they are in talks with North Korean officials and are considering drafting a peace treaty for the first time. [See the Program]
---- South and North Korea are considering a peace treaty after six decades of war. Simone Chun says this is the result of years of grassroots organizing and protests. After six decades of conflict, it looks like the war on the Korean peninsula may finally be coming to an end. Since the early 1950s, South and North Korea have technically been at war with each other. From 1950-1953 the United States waged a devastating war on North Korea in which the U.S. killed some 3 million people, 20 percent of the nation's population. The U.S. burned most of the country's major cities to the ground. After this U.S.-led war, South and North Korea never signed a peace treaty, which means generations of Koreans on both sides of the demilitarized zone have grown up in a perpetual state of war. Well, now that all appears to be changing. South Korean officials confirmed this week that they are in talks with North Korean officials and are considering drafting a peace treaty for the first time. [See the Program]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
Boulder Sues Exxon Over Climate Change: Wildfires, Droughts and Water Are a Few Reasons Why
From InsideClimate News [Apr 18, 2018]
---- In Boulder, Colorado, climate change means extreme weather and wildfires. It means worrying about water security for people and farms, and about heat waves and mosquito-borne diseases. These aren't just future risks—they're problems the city and its surrounding county are facing now. On Tuesday, the city and Boulder County joined San Miguel County, home to the ski slopes of Telluride, in suing two fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil and Suncor—over the costs of dealing with climate change. Their lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions by communities that are attempting to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the problems climate change creates. Until now, the plaintiffs had been coastal cities and counties worried primarily about sea level rise. The new case takes climate litigation to the middle of the country, where the risks take on new shapes and high costs. [Read More]
(Video) "Polite People Get Poisoned" -- Lois Gibbs' Keynote Address at SW PA Air Quality Event
By Mark Dixon [Published on Apr 14, 2018]
---- Jumping straight to the point with, "polite people get poisoned," Lois Gibbs delivered a powerful keynote speech last night with essential messages for those working to resist the massive and devastating petrochemical expansion led by the Shell Ethane Cracker Plant in SW Pennsylvania. This keynote address took place at the Clean AIr Council's major event, "Building a Future Full of Hope and Promise: Improving Air Quality in Southwestern Pennsylvania." [See the Video]
INTERNATIONAL LAW/"THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR"
How Obama's Lawyers Gave John Bolton the Keys to Armageddon
By Victor Kattan, Haaretz [Israel] [April 18, 2018]
---- We now have a situation where the permanent members of the Security Council can no longer agree on the basic rules of international law within the Council's core field of activity concerning the maintenance of international peace and security. The danger is not when lawyers argue about law or even when the lawyers are ignored by politicians; at least there is a standard by which these politicians can be judged, and perhaps even held to account, when the dust has settled. The danger is when nobody can agree on what the law is. Perhaps the lawyers back in the Obama days did not want to be left out of the decision-making process. They may have thought it would be safer to have a lawyer present in the Situation Room with the President, the National Security Advisor, and the Chiefs of Staff. Perhaps they thought they were just doing what good lawyers always do, which is to please their clients. Of course they could never have imagined in the "halcyon days" of President Obama that one day Donald Trump would become their client and their commander in chief. Nor could they have imagined that John Bolton would be ensconced in the West Wing whispering in his ear. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
America once fought a war against poverty – now it wages a war on the poor [The Poor People's Campaign]
By Reverend William Barber and Dr Liz Theoharis, The Guardian [UK] [April 15, 2018]
---- Access to healthcare is just one of the issues facing the 140 million people who live in poverty in the US today. Over the past two years, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation. We have met with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas, to South Charleston, West Virginia, to Selma, Alabama, where we met Callie, gathering testimonies from poor people and listening to their demands for a better society. On Tuesday, we announced a Poor People's Campaign Moral Agenda, a set of demands that is drawn from this listening tour, as well as an audit of America we conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, 50 years after the original Poor People's Campaign. As grim as the situation was in 1968, the appalling truth is deep inequalities still exist and, in some ways, we are worse off. [Read More]
Why do Red State Teachers need to Strike for a living Wage? It is about Class
By Steve Fraser, Tom Dispatch [April 18, 2018]
---- Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe. The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere are a stunning reminder that class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our origin story would allow. Insurgent teachers are instructing us all about a tale of denial for which we've paid a heavy price. Are teachers professionals, proletarians, or both? One symptom of our pathological denial of class realities is that we are accustomed to thinking of teachers as "middle class." Certainly, their professional bona fides should entitle them to that social station. After all, middle class is the part of the social geography that we imagine as the aspirational homing grounds for good citizens of every sort, a place so all-embracing that it effaces signs of rank, order, and power. The middle class is that class so universal that it's really no class at all. School teachers, however, have always been working-class stiffs. For a long time, they were also mainly women who would have instantly recognized the insecurities, struggles to get by, and low public esteem that plague today's embattled teachers. [Read More] Also useful/interesting on the same subject is "What's at Stake in the Teachers' Strikes?" by Pedro Noguera, The Nation [April 19, 2018] [Link].
Also useful/interesting – Thomas B. Edsall, "The Democrats' Gentrification Problem," The New York Times [April 19, 2018] [Link]; and Peter Maass, "James Comey Sees Himself as a Victim of Trump. He Refuses to See the Victims of the Justice System," The Intercept [[Link].
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
(Video) Meet the Palestinian women at the forefront of Gaza's protests
By Mersiha Gadzo & Anas Jnena, Aljazeera [April 20, 2018]
---- The Great Return March is a non-violent, grassroots movement that calls for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, as per the UN Resolution 194, from which they were expelled in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Thousands have been participating in the mass sit-in, with dozens of tents erected along the border with Israel. Each tent is labeled with the name of the town that the family was expelled from in 1948. It's the largest mass protest Gaza has seen since the first Intifada. The Palestinian territory with nearly two million population can only be accessed via Egypt and Israel but an Israeli-Egyptian blockade has been suffocating the Strip for 11 years. Living conditions have deteriorated over the years and unemployment wavers around 43 percent. Residents say they have reached a breaking point. Palestinians have been protesting along Gaza's border every Friday afternoon for years, but what is noticeably different this time is that a large number of women and girls have been actively participating on a scale not seen before. And that's why this Friday's protests have been labeled the "Women's March of Gaza". [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
By Marcus Barnett, Jacobin [April 2018]
---- On the eve of Passover 1943 — the nineteenth of April — a group of several hundred poorly armed young Jews began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the first insurrections against Nazism. For a small group of fighters, realizing — in the lyrical words of one militant — that "dying with arms is more beautiful than without," an isolated group of Jewish militants resisted for twenty-nine days against a much larger foe, motivated by a desire to kill as many fascists as they could before they themselves were killed. The uprising, etched into the collective memory of postwar Jewry, remains emotive and emboldening. That their heroism was a crucial part of the war is disputed by nobody today. But less known is the extent to which the uprising, far from being a spontaneous one of the masses, was the product of planning and preparation from a relatively small — incredibly young — group of Jewish radicals. [Read More]
Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out
By Yanis Varoufakis, The Guardian [April 20, 2018]
[FB – Yanis Varoufakis was (for a time) the Finance Minister of the Syriza government in Greece.]
---- For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom. No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill. [Read More]
The History of White Power
By Kathleen Belew, New York Times [April 18, 2018]
---- When neo-Nazi and alt-right demonstrators attacked counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., last August, killing one and injuring several others, many Americans responded with surprise that white supremacists were suddenly in their midst. But white-power activism is not new, nor has it been part of an underground history. We knew. And we forgot. Twenty-three years ago, on April 19, 1995, a Ryder rental truck filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing killed 168 people, including 19 children — the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks. And yet, in these 23 years, the bombing remains misunderstood as an example of "lone wolf" terrorism. People repeat the words of the bomber Timothy McVeigh, an avowed white-power advocate who before his execution pointed out how scary it was that one man could wreak "this kind of hell." But in fact, the bombing was the outgrowth of decades of activism by the white-power movement, a coalition of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and militias, which aimed to organize a guerrilla war on the federal government and its other enemies. [Read More]
