Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
December 11, 2022
Hello All – Concerned Families of Westchester holds a peace vigil/rally each week in the center of Hastings. Yesterday's vigil called for a Christmas Truce – a ceasefire – in the war in Ukraine. The focus on a Christmas Truce was/is in support of a campaign by national peace organizations such as Code Pink and Peace Action, recalling the Christmas Truce of 1914, which interrupted fighting in the First World War. The agitation for a Christmas Truce is part of the broader worldwide effort to move towards negotiations, a ceasefire, and an end to the fighting in Ukraine.
Needless to say, the Christmas Truce of 1914 was a spontaneous move by the soldiers on both sides of the front line. There was nothing "official" or 'authorized" about it; in fact, it terrified the high commands of all the armies. On Christmas Eve, English, German, and French soldiers left their trenches and met in "no-man's land." For several days, enemy soldiers put down their guns and mingled to become friends. They played football (soccer), ate meals together, and sang Christmas carols. This symbol of hope and courage sadly came to an end, and the soldiers returned to their trenches to resume almost four more years of trying to kill each other.
Yet the Christmas Truce of 1914 remains in our historical memory as an inspiration for peace action in the midst of war. As is evident from the mainstream news and the articles linked below, "negotiations" is now an idea to be discussed, even if it is rejected by the Politicians and Generals who lead us into battle. But the way out of the war in Ukraine will not be through military power. Neither side is capable of achieving its goals on the battlefield. And the war itself is creating chaos through much of the world. It has to stop; and stopping begins with negotiations and a ceasefire.
Some perspectives on ending/not ending the Ukraine war
Next To Starting a War The Worst Thing Is To Keep It Going
By David Mandel, The Socialist Project [Canada] [December 6, 2022]
---- Once the war began, the humanist position is to demand a rapid, negotiated end to it in order to minimize the loss of life and socio-economic infrastructure. For after starting a war, the most reprehensible act is to keep it going when there is no hope that continued fighting can change the outcome. [Read More]
(Video) "Russia Is Losing the War":
From Democracy Now! [December 8, 2022]
---- We go to Moscow and speak with Russian dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, who says war fatigue is sweeping Russian society. "It will end badly for us in Russia," says Kagarlitsky, who adds that Russian elites are increasingly uncomfortable. "Russia is losing the war, and Russia is going to lose the war inevitably." [See the Program]
News Notes
The homecoming of basketball star Brittney Griner is great thing; it also offers one of those slilces-of-life that opens up some of the deeper currents of life in the USA. "A Vindication for Agitation: Brittney Griner Is Coming Home" by The Nation's sportswriter Dave Zirin has some interesting insights race and gender and sports in the Homeland.
You might not see it on US mainstream media, but on Aljazeera and (I suspect) much of the rest of the world the Palestinian flag is omnipresent at the World Cup games in Qatar. What is this about? In "On 'Hate' and Love at the World Cup: Palestine is More Than An Arab Cause," Ramzy Baroud drills down on this interesting question. [Link].
We are familiar with Juan González for his decades as the co-host on Democracy Now! But Juan's day job has been/is being a premier NYC journalist, writing for the New York Post. Now, at the age of 75, Juan is leaving NYC for Chicago, where his wife holds a teaching position. Of great interest, therefore is his valedictory talk given last week at the Columbia School of Journalism, (Video) "Reflections on 40 Years of Fighting for Racial and Social Justice in Journalism."
Last week we lost anti-Vietnam War stalwart Don Luce, dying at the age of 88. Unlike most of us, Don opposed the Vietnam War from within Vietnam itself. According to his obituary in The New York Times, "His relentless campaign against the war and his exposure of South Vietnam's "tiger cages" [tiny prison/torture cells] were instrumental in turning the American public and Congress against the war." He was expelled from Vietnam in 1971; in reporting his expulsion, Time magazine said, "Don Luce is to the South Vietnamese government what Ralph Nader is to General Motors." Don Luce, presente!
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 (winter schedule) on the first Monday of each month; the next vigil will be January 2nd, from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here; and to make a financial contribution to the project, go here. (And for Susan Rutman's video of October 2022 in Vermont, go here.) If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers focus on that great USA contribution to world culture – Underground Comix – as we remember Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died two weeks ago. Part of her fame stems from her marriage to that titan of comic-art, R. Crumb; and their relationship can be glimpsed (in part) in the wonderful, full-length film "Crumb." "Trailblazing Funny Woman" is the title of an interesting write-up in The New Yorker, while the memorial in The Gutter Review ("Lived a Bunch, Loved a Bunch: Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb") has many pictures; and there are lots of her pictures and comix on-line; enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Noam Chomsky: "We're on the Road to a Form of Neofascism"
An interview with C. J. Polychroniou, ZNet [December 9, 2022]
Q. "What's the actual connection between neoliberalism and neofascism?"
Chomsky: The connection is drawn clearly in the first two sentences of the question. One consequence of the neoliberal social-economic policies is collapse of the social order, yielding a breeding ground for extremism, violence hatred, search for scapegoats — and fertile terrain for authoritarian figures who can posture as the savior. And we're on the road to a form of neo-fascism. … One component of the policies was a form of globalization that combines extreme protectionism for the masters with search for the cheapest labor and worst working conditions so as to maximize profit, leaving decaying rust belts at home. These are policy choices, not economic necessity. … The ground is well prepared for the rise of neofascism to fill the void left by unremitting class war and capitulation of the mainstream political institutions that might have combated the plague. … As the class war intensifies, the basic logic of capitalism manifests itself with brutal clarity: We have to maximize profit and power even though we know we are racing to suicide by destroying the environment that sustains life, not sparing ourselves and our families. [Read More]
(Video) A Life in Struggle: Exclusive with Leila Khaled, Icon of Palestinian Resistance [50 minutes]
From BreakThrough News [December 6, 2022]
---- BT's Rania Khalek sat down with Palestinian icon and revolutionary Leila Khaled in Beirut, Lebanon to discuss her life and participation in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. [See the Program] With her family, Leila Khaled fled Palestine for Lebanon in 1948 at the age of 4. In 1969, at the age of 25, she hijacked a plane. She did it again a year later. Leila Khaled – get to know this stalwart of the Palestinian resistance.
Nancy Fraser's Lessons From the Long History of Capitalism
By Rhoda Feng, The Nation [November 29, 2022]
----- Theories of capitalism have always also been theories of crisis. John Maynard Keynes linked the instability of capitalism to the instability of aggregate demand, and Marxist thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that capitalism depends on noncapitalist markets to survive but disavows and destroys them. In her new book, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It, Nancy Fraser—one of the best-known feminist political theorists working today—advances a similar argument but adds that capitalism should be viewed as an "institutionalized societal order" on par with feudalism. She calls for a broader understanding of capitalism that isn't exclusively focused on private property, the means of production, wage labor, and accumulation. Just as we need an expanded view of capitalism, so too, she argues, do we need a broader conception of socialism. [Read More]
There Is No "Migrant Crisis": It's the bordered logic of global apartheid itself.
[FB – Harsha Walia is the author of the imo very interesting book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.]
---- To be a modern nation-state in a state-centric world presupposes the necessity of a secured border. Borders maintain hoarded concentrations of wealth accrued from colonial domination while ensuring mobility for some and containment for most—a system of global apartheid determining who can live where and under what conditions. … We are witnesses to the horrific impacts of this categorization and control of people. Suffocation in the back of cargo trucks in Texas and Arizona, dehydration in blistering heat in the Horn of Africa's eastern corridor, unmarked graves in the Sonoran and Sahara deserts, deadly pushbacks of migrant caravans in Melilla and Croatia, and wet cemeteries throughout the Mediterranean are the deathscapes of borders' victims. [Read More]
War & Peace
'War Is Over, If You Want It': US Can End Its Complicity in Horrendous Yemen War Today
By Kevin Martin, Common Dreams [December 9, 2022]
---- Over 400,000 Yemenis have perished since the war broke out in 2014, making it the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe, according to the United Nations. Partisan loyalty cannot be allowed to override the suffering of the people of Yemen. Biden has had plenty of time to shut this war down, and has failed to do so. Congress must act, and is on solid ground in terms of its Constitutional authority. … Today, we can get Congress to pass a War Powers Resolution to end US complicity in Yemen's catastrophe. Congress already did so in 2019. President Trump then vetoed it, and the vote to override the veto failed. Since then, thousands more Yemenis have suffered and died. President Biden's pledge to end "offensive" weapons transfers to the Saudi-led coalition soon after taking office was insufficient to end the war. A mostly successful truce earlier this year recently expired, and violence has escalated. The time for more definitive action is now. [Read More]
Dismantling Racism and Militarism In US Foreign Policy
From the Friends [Quakers] Committee on National Legislation [December 10, 2022]
---- The major challenges facing Americans today—pandemic disease, climate change, economic inequality, racial and gender injustice—cannot be solved without international solidarity and human compassion. The prevailing, militaristic conception of "national security" is steeped in racism and perpetuates white supremacy. The Racism-Militarism Paradigm is a way of looking at the world, widely shared among the U.S. policymaking community and much of the public, which arises from a largely unacknowledged doctrine of white supremacy and the necessity of using violence to uphold it. This paradigm establishes a rigid hierarchy, based on race, that values white lives more than any other—at home and abroad. It embraces militarism as the most effective mechanism to guarantee this ordering of society and the world. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse
By George Monbiot, The Guardian [UK] [December 9, 2022[
---- There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world's 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren't. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the United States of America. This is one of several major international treaties the US has refused to ratify. … While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we'd call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state. … Thanks to such failures of care over many years, we now approach multiple drastic decision points, at which governments must either implement changes in months that should have happened over decades, or watch crucial components of civic life collapse, including the most important component of all: a habitable planet. In either case, it's a cliff edge. [Read More]
Radical tactics are likely to help the climate movement, not hurt it
December 8, 2022]
---- Radical actions across the climate movement are gaining popularity. From Just Stop Oil in the U.K. to Save Old Growth in Canada to Letzte Generation in Germany, there is a wave of activists employing increasingly disruptive tactics to demand climate action. These tactics include throwing soup at a Van Gogh painting, going on a hunger strike and blocking motorways during rush hour. Why are people resorting to these tactics? … Despite the noble goals, the public doesn't tend to like these protests. Activists often hear the words "I support your cause, but not how you're going about this." That is quite understandable — most people don't enjoy having their lives disrupted. However, even with a high level of public disapproval, activists are convinced that these radical tactics are necessary and effective. To understand why they think this, we'll have to look at some previous cases of successful social change, as well as some relevant academic evidence. [Read More] Also of interest is this segment from Aljazeera's program "Generation Change" – (Video) "What is legitimate protest?" [December 11, 2022] [Link].
Civil Liberties/"The War on Terror"
Guantánamo's First 7,627 Days - Will America's Forever Prison Finally Close on Biden's Watch?
By
---- As of December 8, 2022, Guantánamo Bay detention facility — a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country's never-ending Global War on Terror — has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. It told the story of the military officers and staff who received the prison's initial detainees at that U.S. naval base on the island of Cuba early in 2002. Like the hundreds of prisoners that followed, they would largely be held without charges or trial for years on end. Ever since then, time and again, I've envisioned writing the story of its ultimate closure, its last days. … There is no way to fathom the harm caused by the torture, cruel treatment, legal limbo, injustice, and dehumanization that has become the definition of Guantánamo. But for the first time in all these years, its actual closure might realistically be on the horizon. One can always hope, right? [Read More]
The State of the Union
"Fascism never disappears because people come to their senses" – Robin D. G. Kelley on the midterm elections
An interview with Deborah Chasman, Boston Review [November 21, 2022]
---- Every racial regime in the United States is an expression of class power. Trumpism has always been fragile because its ideological foundations are based on the deceptions Cedric [Robinson] identified in Forgeries of Memory and Meaning (2007): the myths of white patrimony, patriotism, nationalism, non-white inferiority, shored up by exploited and oppressed white people who believe they will one day get a larger share of the pie. … I understand why many are happy that the Democrats did surprisingly well in the midterms; it is important that the Democrats held the Senate and the basic protection of reproductive rights sailed to victory in many states. But that was not the result of a sudden, rapid diminishing support for emergent fascism or some wholesale abandonment of Trumpist ideas (which, by the way, are not really Trump's but have circulated for decades). It was the result of all the hard work and mobilizing to get out Democratic votes, to resist voter suppression at every turn, to raise money, to outmaneuver the right. And still, most of these races were exceedingly close, and Democrats did not always prevail. [Read More]
(Video) Supreme Court Weighs Voting Rights Case Based on Fringe Theory That Could Upend Democracy
From Democracy Now! [December 8, 2022]
---- The Supreme Court is considering a North Carolina redistricting case that could have far-reaching implications for voting rights in the 2024 election and beyond. At stake in Moore v. Harper is whether North Carolina Republican lawmakers had the authority to overturn a state Supreme Court ruling that redrew the state's congressional map due to partisan gerrymandering. The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to embrace the notion of "independent state legislature theory," a radical conservative reading of the Constitution that claims state lawmakers have sweeping authority to override courts, governors and state constitutions. [See the Program]
Israel/Palestine
'Deliberate Ambiguity': Israel's Nuclear Weapons Are Greatest Threat to Middle East
---- As western countries are floating the theory that Russia could escalate its conflict with Ukraine to a nuclear war, many western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Israel's own nuclear weapons capabilities. Luckily, many countries around the world do not subscribe to this endemic western hypocrisy. 'The Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction' was held between November 14-18, with the sole purpose of creating new standards of accountability to be applied equally to all Middle Eastern countries. [Read More] Also of interest – "Israel's Nuclear Weapons 'Deliberate Ambiguity'," by Judith Deutsch, Counterpunch [December 9, 2022] [Link]
Our History
The revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the backgrounds of the Pacific War
By Noam Chomsky, Liberation Magazine [1971]
FB – Wednesday, December 7th, was the anniversary (1941) of the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, triggering the US declaration of war. (It was also Chomsky's 94th birthday.) Reading this article for a writing project in the late 1980s, it challenged and changed what I thought I knew about WWII in the Pacific.
---- Introductory Comment by Chomsky: "The title and subtitle of this essay may seem unrelated; hence a word of explanation may be useful. The essay was written for a memorial number of Liberation which, as the editor expressed it, "gathered together a series of articles that deal with some of the problems with which A.J. struggled." I think that Muste's revolutionary pacifism was, and is, a profoundly important doctrine, both in the political analysis and moral conviction that it expresses. The circumstances of the anti-facist war subjected it to the most severe of tests. Does it survive this test? When I began working on this article, I was not at all sure. I still feel quite ambivalent about the matter. [Read More]
