Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
July 23, 2023
Hello All – After more than a year of fighting, the war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending. Someday – but when? – there will be a ceasefire and negotiations. But until that time, the killing will continue and the whole world will be in danger.
According to the Washington Post, the United States is pressuring Ukraine to be more aggressive, to launch the long-awaited counter-offensive that will include a dozen new, US-trained battalions and use some of the advanced equipment (tanks, artillery, etc.) sent to Ukraine in recent months. But this counter-offensive has stalled, and Ukraine has gained little ground this year. There are rumblings that Ukraine is "on probation," and that the funders and military suppliers of their army and government may be running out of patience.
It seems to me that the war is escalating on several fronts, and could spin out of control. Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus, and the Wagner battalion, sent into exile in Belarus, is now training their host army on the border with Poland, which has brought its own troops up to the border on its side. Russia has refused to continue the agreement with Ukraine allowing food exports, threatening to destroy ships and bombing the port of Odessa. Ukraine has increased (I believe) the intensity of attacks on Russian-held Crimea. And the United States has authorized an escalation of weaponry provided to Ukraine, with its cluster bombs already deployed on the battlefield and the promise of sending F-16 jet fighters now moved to the front burner.
One danger is that the war will expand to other countries. Perhaps the United States and Russia will fight each other directly, risking a nuclear war that will kill everybody. Certainly thousands of people in Africa and elsewhere will starve, as this week's breakdown of food exports from Ukraine shows. And, tragically, the countries involved in the war will have little time to address the climate crisis, whose destructive impact on all of us is already happening.
The question for Americans is, What can our country do to move away from war and towards peace? And for ordinary citizens the question is, How can we persuade our government to want to do this? One thing the USA could do to move away from war and towards peace negotiations would be to refuse to send new weapons to Ukraine that would escalate the war: cluster bombs, advanced artillery systems, jet fighters, and the like. There is some support in Congress for moving towards peace; perhaps we can help it grow.
Some Reading on the War in Ukraine
Weary Soldiers, Unreliable Munitions: Ukraine's Many Challenges
By Thomas Gibbons-Nerr, et al., New York Times [July 23, 2023]
---- This New York Times analysis of the war is based on a dozen visits to the front line and interviews in June and July with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, where many of the battles are being fought. Those visits showed the Ukrainian military facing a litany of new and enduring challenges that have contributed to its slow progress. Ukraine has done well to adapt a defensive war — wiring Starlink satellite internet, public software and off-the-shelf drones to keep constant tabs on Russian forces from command points. But offensive operations are different: Ukraine has made marginal progress in its ability to coordinate directly between its troops closest to Russian forces on the so-called zero line and those assaulting forward. Ukrainian infantry are focusing more and more on trench assaults, but after suffering tens of thousands of casualties since the war's start, these ranks are often filled with lesser-trained and older troops. And when Russian forces are driven from a position, they have become more adept at targeting that position with their artillery, ensuring Ukrainian troops cannot stay there long. ;Read More]
The Vanishing Point of the Laws of War [Food and Famine]
By Alex de Waal, New York Review of Books [September 11, 2022]
---- The United Nations has assessed that 276 million people worldwide today are "severely food insecure." Forty million are in "emergency" conditions, one step short of the UN's technical definition of "famine." By early this year the combined effects of the climate crisis, the economic fallout from Covid-19, armed conflict, and the rising costs of fuel and food had already caused a sharp increase in the number of people in need of relief. Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine suddenly shut down wheat exports from the world's breadbasket. For five months, Russian warships blockaded Black Sea ports and stopped grain cargoes from leaving, both to strangle the Ukrainian economy and to destabilize food-importing nations to pressure the US and Europe into relaxing sanctions. [Read More]
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!
The 26th of July is celebrated in Cuba as the anniversary of their revolution, the one that overthrew the hated (and US-supported) dictator Batista in 1959; and so the Rewards for stalwart readers this week are taken from the wonderful music of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club. I hope you will enjoy this short film about the reconstitution of the band; the album the musicians produced; and the full-length documentary film by German filmmaker Wim Wenders ($3 rent).
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025
Jonathan Swan, et al., New York Times [July 17, 2023]
[FB – This useful article stitches together several threads emerging from the MAGA rightwing and how a Trump victory in 2024 could lead to an Imperial Presidency, eliminating many civil rights and social protections in the process. This is a threat to pay attention to and to prepare for, in my opinion.]
----- Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands. Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president's recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control. Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control. [Read More]
Sudan's Repressed Democracy
By Rahmane Idrissa, New York Review of Books [July 18, 2023]
---- The fighting in Khartoum, now in its third month, is the latest disaster for a democracy movement that has long resisted Sudan's ruling regimes. … The events of 2018-2019 amounted to an attempted democratic revolution. Bare-handed youth and women were relentless and strategic enough to unseat al-Bashir and force a democratic transition during months of sometimes very dangerous initiatives: organizing demonstrations, including one at the army's own headquarters, distributing pamphlets, graffitiing buildings, using social media to gather support. … Now the "Sudan of the origins" is fighting against itself. But Hemetti and al-Burhan ultimately belong to the same military-Islamist apparatus, which is finally exploding in the face of its internal tensions. The real struggle is ultimately between them and the unarmed democratic revolutionaries. Those revolutionaries have been shoved to the sidelines now. But nothing in Sudan's history says they will ever give up. [Read More]
Oppenheimer and the Bomb
FB – The new biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, "the father of the atomic bomb," should open the door to useful discussions about the decision to use nuclear weapons in the last days of the war against Japan (1945), and perhaps even about the strong international movement today to ban nuclear weapons. But will it? So far, media commentary is primarily about the personality of Oppenheimer, and the "tragedy" that befell him when he was exiled from the science-policy loop for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To keep things in perspective, here is a link to a recent documentary film on "The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." And here is a link to some information about Joseph Rotblat, the atomic bomb scientist who quit the project when he learned that the Germans were no longer working to build a bomb, and who spent the rest of his life working for peace. But the life and work and failures of Oppenheimer tell us a lot about America and American science in the cold war, and so two good articles about the person of Oppenheimer are linked below. A future issue of the newsletter, reflecting on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6th & 9th), will have some things to say about why The Bomb was used.
Oppenheimer's tragedy—and ours
By Robert Jay Lifton, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [July 17, 2023]
---- In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was subjected to what was rightly called "an extraordinary American inquisition" under the name of a security hearing. Despite having served his country so devotedly in heading the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, he was now publicly humiliated, condemned as a security risk, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to step down from his government consultancies. Those hearings were skewed and manipulated in McCarthyite fashion. But while extremely harmful professionally and personally, the hearings were not Oppenheimer's greatest tragedy. His greatest tragedy was the success of his leadership in the creation of the weapon. His remarkable gifts as a physicist and as a human being were most realized in the building of a weapon that could lead to the destruction of humankind. …The "American Prometheus," as his biographers termed him, found his greatest life achievement in the creation of an instrument of genocide. In making the bomb, Oppenheimer became immersed in what I call nuclearism—the embrace of the weapon as serving humankind. But with the later development of weapons a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, he became an articulate critic of nuclearism, perhaps the most articulate of all critics. [Read More] Also of interest is "Creator and Destroyer: A rivalry to end the world," (about Oppenheimer and Edward Teller), by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review [April 2, 2005] [Link]
War & Peace
NATO Is a Warfare Alliance, Not a Force for Global Peace or Stability
---- At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe "anchors for global security" when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe. Our NATO allies are not, as Biden would suggest, anchors in a turbulent sea of demons but rather catalysts stirring the cauldron of war on behalf of US empire. The instability of the NATO alliance was evident in the controversy over the key issue of Ukraine membership. … Once again, we see that NATO's modus operandi is war. NATO has never been a defensive alliance. It invaded Yugoslavia in 1999 without a mandate from the UN Security Council. NATO waged a 20-year war in Afghanistan, leaving the people dirt poor and back in the hands of the Taliban. NATO illegally toppled the government of Libya in 2011. In addition to the present war with Russia, it has its sights set on China, building up a provocative Asia-Pacific military alliance with South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to counter China. NATO is also a cash cow for arms manufacturers, and it is the enemy of nuclear disarmament in its opposition to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
Big Heat and Big Oil
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker [July 16, 2023]
---- Scientists who calculate historic temperatures believe that this may well be the hottest it's been on Earth since at least the peak of an era known as the Eemian, a hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago, when rising temperatures pushed mastodons north from present-day Texas to the Yukon. This would mean that nothing even remotely resembling a human civilization has ever known a world this hot…. The Earth's temperature is going to go higher, no matter what we do: this month's all-time records will almost certainly be broken in the coming year, as the new El Niño gathers strength. Many scientists predict that we will at least temporarily pass the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase that nations vowed, in the Paris Climate Agreement, to try to avoid.…If the disasters we're seeing this month aren't enough to shake us out of that torpor, then the chances of our persevering for another hundred and twenty-five thousand years seem remote. [Read More]
Also of interest – "As Global Heat Waves Break Records in Mideast and Elsewhere, How Hot it too Hot for us Humans?," The Conversation [July 20, 2023] [Link]; and "As Skies Turn Orange, Media Still Hesitate to Mention What's Changing Climate," by Olivia Riggio, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [July 18, 2023] [Link].
The State of the Union
The UPS Strike Looms as Corporate America Cashes In
By Stephen Franklin, In These Times [July 21, 2023]
---- The backdrop of what could be the largest strike at a single employer in decades is that CEOs and corporate America are making record profits as unions—from actors to Teamsters to hotel workers—fight back and flex their power this summer. … UPS will seek to hold the line on expenses. That could mean pushing back on workers' wages or trimming health care costs. Full-time drivers and part-time workers now get premium health insurance, a rarity among U.S. corporations. … If the Teamsters strike, it appears that it would be the second or third largest strike at single employer in U.S. history, and the consequences for the U.S. economy could also be broad. But the reverberations of these negotiations and of any strike are also deeply impactful and are very much linked to the various and wide-ranging struggles taking place today between labor and corporate America. [Read More] Also of interest is "UPS Teamsters 'Just Practicing,'" by Alexandra Bradbury and Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes [July 19, 2023] [Link].
Vast majority of House Dems back GOP resolution saying Israel isn't an apartheid state
By, Mondoweiss [July 19, 2023]
---- On Tuesday the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that Israel is "not a racist or apartheid state." The final vote was 412-to-nine vote, with one present vote. … The nine Democrats to vote against the resolution were Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Summer Lee (D-PA), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Andre Carson (D-IN) and Delia Ramirez (D-IL). Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), a consistent advocate for Palestinian rights in congress, voted present. [Read More]. Also of interest is "On Israel and Palestine, US Electeds Are Out of Touch With Their Own Voters," by Phyllis Bennis, The Nation [July 19, 2023] [Link].
Israel/Palestine
[FB – Tens of thousands of people have rallied in several Israeli cities against the plan of the Netanyahu government to pass legislation that would severely weaken the Supreme Court and give more power to the governing coalition – in this case, himself. The decisive vote in the Knesset is planned for tomorrow around noon [5 a.m. EST]. Some useful background is provided from two articles from today's Haaretz, Israel's leading liberal newspaper – "Marching to Jerusalem: Democratic Israel's Most Powerful Act of Defiance Ever" [Link]; and "Israeli Reservists' Step Was a Last Resort, but Also Set Dangerous Precedent" [Link]. NB it must be remembered that this Great Debate is largely confined to Israel's Jewish citizens; the opposition to the government plans has not addressed directly issues of concern to Palestinians.]
(Video) Palestinian Attorney Noura Erakat: The U.S. is Normalizing Apartheid by Hosting Israel's President
From Democracy Now! [July 18, 2023]
---- As President Biden meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the White House today, several progressive Democrats have announced plans to boycott Herzog's address to a joint session of Congress. This comes after Biden invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the United States this year despite recently criticizing the makeup of Netanyahu's far-right Cabinet as "one of the most extremist" he has seen. The visits from Israeli leadership are an attempt to "normalize apartheid," says Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, who compares today's U.S. support of Israel to the nation's support for South African apartheid. "The United States is complicit and a pillar of Israeli apartheid in its provision of unequivocal financial, diplomatic and military support." Erakat also applauds the efforts of activists and politicians who have shifted Democrats' sympathies more toward Palestine than Israel, according to a recent Gallup poll. [See the Program]
Enough Carrots. It's Time for the U.S. to Use Sticks to Change Israeli Policy
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [July 20, 2023]
---- Those who believe Israel must solve its problems by itself must also admit that this experiment has failed and is hopeless. The superpower has responsibility for the regional reality here. We'd have had a different Middle East and a different Israel had America been different. No other country has the power to change reality like America, and no other country has so betrayed its duty. Endless peace plans, empty talk about the two-state solution, which Biden keeps promoting shamelessly, knowing it's leading nowhere. And Israel is further than it has ever been from ending the apartheid. It is America's right to gorge Israel with its taxpayers' money, to arm it to the teeth and support it blindly in international institutions. But why not condition all this support on something? On something in return? On a change of direction? [Read More]
Our History
Remembering Staughton Lynd's Life Of Defiance
By
---- The radicalism of the 1960s did not fall from the sky—it was built by the uncommon bravery of common people. One of those people was Staughton Lynd, a professor who accompanied movements for justice as a scholar, lawyer, and activist throughout his life. A conscientious objector to the Korean War, Staughton went on to join the Civil Rights Movement and oppose the Vietnam War through his scholarship and his actions. He passed away in Nov. 2022 just days before his 93rd birthday. A collection of his writings and speeches, My Country Is the World, was recently published by Haymarket Books. Activist, author, and lawyer Alice Lynd joins The Chris Hedges Report to remember her late husband alongside Luke Stewart, editor of My Country Is the World. Alice Lynd was a draft counselor and trainer of draft counselors during the Vietnam War. In 1968, she published We Won't Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors. [Read More]
