2/28/2024 Herbert Matthews’ great interview, sixty-six years later. By: Guillermo Suárez BorgesRead NowI never did another story that gave me more professional satisfaction… I only take credit for having correctly interpreted what I saw and heard, for having realized that the extraordinary young man who opened his heart to me in whispers, for three hours, would be the one around whom the hopes and passions of Cuba would be concentrated, for a tide of victory. Herbert Matthews interviewing Fidel in the Sierras. This is how Herbert Matthews, the distinguished American journalist and editorialist who arrived in February 1957 at Epifanio Díaz’s farm, in the vicinity of the Sierra Maestra, to meet with Fidel, responded to his critics. Days before, the guerrilla leader had instructed the guerrilla to obtain an impact interview with a respected correspondent outside Cuba, but the unexpected betrayal of Eutimio Guerra left Fidel in such a compromised security situation that the visting journalist also was in real danger. “Without the press, Fidel Castro would be no more than an outlaw… isolated and ineffective,” said Matthews, who, as a profound connoisseur of Cuban and Latin American affairs, suspected that behind the iron censorship ordered by Batista in Cuba, there was a well-kept secret that was waiting to be told. In Refugio 106, the former offices of The New York Times in Havana, the possibility of the famous U.S. newspaper obtaining the exclusive of the moment was discussed for the first time: “Fidel is alive”. Ruby Hart Phillips, the paper’s snooty correspondent in Cuba, would professionally keep the secret. The arrival of Herbert and his wife Nancie hours later in the Cuban capital ratified the willingness of the newspaper’s editors to run the tremendous risk of going into the eastern mountains in search of that news. Everyone expected Matthews to reveal the name of the young journalist who would undertake the risky assignment, but they were surprised when he smilingly said: I will go up there myself. A well-oiled network of collaborators of the July 26th movement throughout the Island would be in charge of taking him to Fidel. The days would be hard for him and Nancie, undercover as American tourists interested in investing in the eastern zone. Many years later a specialist in Psychological Operations of the U.S. Army Southern Command would write: The propaganda and political warfare of the Cuban Revolution, when examined in its original context, illustrate a well-planned and executed psychological operation that influenced numerous audiences and led to behavioral changes that ended up helping Fidel Castro take power, while commanding a numerically and technologically inferior force. All kinds of reactions were generated by that front page of The New York Times’ Sunday paper on February 24, 1957. In the Presidential Palace they wondered how Matthews, now close to 60 years of age and under the prescription of his cardiologist, had managed to withstand the rigors of that journey and overcome the postures of the Batista troops in the Sierra, trained and armed by the United States. Edmund Chester, an American, former journalist of the Associated Press and CBS television, then hired as Batista’s press secretary and advisor for his speeches, superficially concluded that it was a trick of his experienced “colleague” and recommended the regrettable denial in the pen of the then Secretary of Defense, Santiago Verdeja, published by Bohemia Magazine. At Calzada 55, the advisors of Arthur Gardner, U.S. ambassador in Havana and a fraternal friend of Batista, refused to admit that they had not heard anything. Gardner’s fury would be such that, already replaced and disqualified, he would devote much energy to ruin Matthews’ professional career. Despite censorship and threats here and there, the three articles resulting from Matthews’ interview with Fidel spread like wildfire. The major U.S. newspapers ran versions of the interview, the nascent television reported it exclusively and an army of journalists began to plan their next trip to the Sierra Maestra. From that moment until November 25, 2016, the media in the U.S. did not stop monitoring Fidel’s trajectory. They followed him at every step. His meeting with Herbert Matthews would be but the first of many memorable exchanges with the main U.S. opinion leaders, whom he turned, without telling them, into the people who would explain the Revolution to the audience of the irate adversary. As the Revolution concretized the Moncada program, Cuba’s enemies attacked Matthews mercilessly, holding him responsible for the new destinies of the island and even undeservedly claiming that he “invented Fidel”. The unrepeatable Ernest Hemingway, his friend since the dark nights of fire and death shared during the Spanish Civil War, would write: Herbert Matthews is the most severe, the most capable and the bravest of today’s war correspondents, he has seen the truth where it has been most dangerous to see it… he stands today as a giant beacon of honesty… Author Guillermo Suárez Borges is a researcher with the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba. Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World Archives February 2024
0 Comments
To say that I was awed is an understatement. Standing in front of Picasso’s 11.5 ft. x 25.5 ft. celebrated painting Guernica is one of the most sobering encounters I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. Displeasure because the massive composition’s theme is revoltingly gruesome. Since that dastardly first-of-its-kind-waging-of-wars, nations have not learned to abide by and practice peaceful and harmonious existence. World War 2 was followed by wars in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Near East/Palestine (8 wars), Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza, to name but a few. And in each of these wars massive bombings and aerial bombardment have been the weapon of choice, resulting in the death of millions of human beings. Aerial bombardment is brutal, heinous, and vicious. Aerial bombardment is the cowardly weapon of arrogant, fascistic, hegemonic, and egotistical maniacs. Aerial bombardment is the screen behind which powerful thugs hide to absolve themselves of crimes against humanity. Aerial wars’ indiscriminate annihilation of mostly innocent civilians, reducing them to paupers and beggars, goes against every decent norm. For well over 35 years I’d been showing Guernica to my students, expounding on the painting’s blending of a heinously ghoulish theme executed in the cubist style on a-never-seen-before massive scale. One of the world’s most prominent museums, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, is finally home to this one-of-a-kind artistic expression bearing witness to ghastly human depravity. On my last visit to Spain some 12 years back, I spent well over an hour studying Picasso’s ingenious blending of form and theme in monochromatic colors. Standing in front of the composition, I viewed it from every angle, and I relived years of lecture terms, phrases, descriptions, questions, answers, student responses/opinions, and so much more. On April 27, 1937, mostly German and Italian warplanes conducted the first large-scale aerial bombardment on the town of Guernica. Nestled in northern Spain and with the complicity of Franscico Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, the Germans wanted to test their newly fabricated war machinery – the Nazi Luftwaffe’s planes and their newly designed bombs – produced solely for destruction on a massive scale. Because of its remoteness, Guernica was chosen as the perfect out-of-sight out-of-mind target. Like today’s Gaza, Guernica was reduced to massive rubble shrouding innocent civilians whose flesh, blood, bones, and sinews cloaked the bleak landscape of rubble, rebar, and crater-size pocked apocalyptic destruction where once high-rise structures, streets, and alleyways existed. And hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, and schools are being targeted – deliberately and mercilessly. In response to this nightmarish bombing, Picasso isolated himself in his studio for a lengthy time and vented his fury by working long hours and in isolation on what is perhaps the world’s foremost artistic political statement. Here is what I see today in Picassos’ composition: to the far right is a Gaza woman holding her arms to high heaven; she is screaming, pleading, imploring the gods for deliverance. At the top is a light, accompanied by a hand holding a lamp as though to shed light on the unfolding carnage. Call this the 90 plus journalists killed by Israeli snipers and drones so as to draw a curtain on what God’s chosen are doing in Gaza, today’s “graveyard of children.” In addition to its military strength, Israel is adept at conducting its carnage under the cover of dark. And its powerful choking of US media is adept at portraying it as the victim. To the top left Netanyahu and Co., along with Biden and Co., prance bullishly over the devastation as they squash the emaciated mother holding on to her dead infant. How many white shrouds have to be buried to appease the Hebraic God of revenge? And how many corpses have to be pulled out, with bare hands, from under the rubble? And how many tattered remains have to be placed in makeshift bags? Careful scrutiny of the foreground depicts newsprint, Picasso’s manner of telling the world “I am Guernica: Remember Me, Remember What Heinous Crimes You’ve committed.” And the crushed supine figure holding onto a broken weapon represents trampled, crushed justice under the weight of brute force. It is worth noting that while Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and scores of mostly European artists have produced a massive volume of compositions under the title Massacre of the Innocents, a theme associated with Herod (the Not so Great), King of Judea, and around the time of Christ’s birth, Picasso’s Guernica stands in a class of its own. And is it not ironic that right around the time Christendom is about to celebrate the birth of its Savior, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer, the Israelis are raining down 2000-pound bombs, some of them the awful phosphorus kind that vaporize their victims? To date the equivalent of three Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs have been dropped on a starved, thirsty, disoriented 2.3 million displaced citizenry. And could we say that to date, timed with Christmas 2023, Israel has massacred over 8,000 thousand innocent children – and counting. And the West, today’s bastion of Christianity, is abhorrently supportive and silent? Yes, in the last few years Fascism has slowly sneaked into our halls of justice, our public spaces, our airwaves, and our digital formats. Joe “I am a Zionist to the Core,” Netanyahu’s puppet and apologist, has draped himself in the Israeli flag and has fashioned and emblazoned his tie, his shirt, his suit, and his rhetoric in the same style and rhetoric of Netanyahu, his alter ego and master. On December 10, 2023, Spain, the only Western nation with the moral fortitude to express its outrage at the Gaza carnage, held a solidarity event in the Basque city of Guernica’s market square, the same square that was bombed by the Nazis and Fascist forces way back in 1937. An aerial view depicts a massive Palestinian flag (the size of the entire square) in mosaic form the tesserae of which were held by citizens, trade unionists, artists, anti-war and anti-fascist groups, along with a large depiction of Picasso’s image depicting the mother, her child in her arms, crying to the high heavens. And for a whole minute the sirens blazed in solidarity with Gaza’s mothers and children. Viva Espana. Viva Palestina. Author (Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. Courtesy: CounterPunch.) Archives February 2024 Should one claim that, unless they have studied the Science of Logic, these scientists don’t know what they are doing? Doubtless, they know what they are doing but, philosophically speaking, they often do not know what they know and beyond a certain point this limitation cannot but have a regrettable influence on their work (Sève 2008: 91) Introduction The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored it, the latter where ‘pro-science’ but also sought to determine the limits of science within capitalism [1]. This was not meant to undermine the cognitive validity of scientific result. Scientific results are related to society at large yet have inherent dynamics that exists in relative autonomy from this embeddedness. Hence, the dialectical approach to science is neither externalist nor internalist, but about the constitutive dialectics between the internal workings of science and the society in which it finds itself. Science is not an innocent activity, performed outside society. Lewontin and Levins write: ‘To do science is to be a social actor, whether one likes it or not, in political activity’ (1985: 4). Denying this fact is itself political, and it implicitly provides support to the prevailing system. Yet, even if science has been commodified, it is still highly important. As Richard Levins puts it: ‘When we say that all science is class science, that is not equivalent to saying that all scientific claims are lies. Class science can give powerful and valid insights into the world but within certain boundaries and restrictions’ (Levins 1981: 9). What is the Purpose of Science? We could say that contexts constrain but do not determine the cognitive veracity of research. This implies that a dialectical understanding of its relation to society is required. Of course, some contexts are more conducive to scientific progress, but even the narrow confines imposed by market imperatives cannot halt the forward march of science, even if it might slow it down. Also, views that are ignored for a period, might gain traction when the context changes, and science also contributes to such a change (Kosambi 1957). The relationship between science and society is complex and nonlinear. In line with Desmond Bernal (1939), science is not directly productive – aiming at producing an economic surplus – but reproductive, aimed at the reproduction of the processes that enable our societies to function and survive. In this view, it represents use value instead of exchange value (Lewontin and Levins 1987). It does not imply that science should uncritically contribute to whatever system is in place – suggesting a technocratic view of science, where the scientists are detached from the rest of society. If this happens, science becomes what Lewontin (1991) named a ‘institution of social legitimation.’ This shrinks the freedom enjoyed by the scientist, as she must simply accept the context in which she finds herself. It also makes the ethical responsibilities and philosophical basis of scientist seem irrelevant (Raju 2022). It makes science more about production that reproduction – more about supporting the status quo ante than questioning it. As such, the scientist is alienated and proletarianised.[2] By contrast, the view that scientist have a responsibility, ‘to insist upon the truth’ and to ‘see events in their historical perspective’ (Chomsky 1967), entails that science should seek to further the continued reproduction of society. It should ground the aims of science democratically in the needs of the people, not the interests of the prevailing social and economic system. This is simultaneously a liberation of science: “Only in science planned for the benefit of all mankind, not for bacteriological, atomic, psychological or other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He belongs to the forefront of that great tradition by which mankind raised itself above the beasts, first gathering and storing, then growing its own food; finding sources of energy outside its muscular efforts in the taming of fire, harnessing animals, wind, water, electricity, and the atomic nucleus. But if he serves the class that grows food scientifically and then dumps it in the ocean while millions starve all over the world, if he believes that the world is over-populated and the atom-bomb a blessing that will perpetuate his own comfort, he is moving in a retrograde orbit, on a level no beast could achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor” (Kosambi 1957) Such a democratisation also requires scientific literacy. To make everyone a ‘reasonable sceptic’ as Lewontin (1991) says, we cannot glorify science as another religion, nor dismiss it cynically. Science is too important to be left for the experts. Science is a process; it is about change, not stasis. And it has the capacity to alter the scene on which it emerges. This indicates another aim than short-term profit: ‘The real task is to change society, to turn the light of scientific inquiry upon the foundations of social structure’ (Kosambi 1957). It echoes Marx’s understanding of science as a revolutionary force. If scientists find that the reproduction of society is threatened by the prevailing socioeconomic model, it has an obligation to criticise this society, and their own complicity in its development. If scientists disavow such findings, or delink them from historical and societal context, their analysis becomes too shallow and unsystematic to have any scientific value. Against this, science must seek to understand its conditions of existence scientifically (Raju 2021). The legitimate critique of positivism or scientism does not warrant dismissal of science as such. Disregarding natural science means undermining the critical potential of the dialectical approach at a time when its resources are direly needed. Instead, we should seek to identify the points at which science turns into ideology – grasping how ‘wrong theoretical assumptions may eventually lead to useful previsions and right performances, until a threshold of accumulating contradictions is reached’ (Bizzarri and others 2017: 13). The ideal suggested here does not entail making use of scientific results to confirm philosophical concepts, as if philosophy is outside science and untouched by it; nor does it mean passively accepting empirical findings at face value. Instead, it means dealing with tensions in how scientist interpret them and the theories that inform their views. We must unearth how philosophy operates within science and aim to contribute to its further development from the inside. This entails making scientists aware of the theoretical assumptions behind their views and the vagueness that many of them exhibit (Soto and Sonnenschein 2021). Weak Nature and Metabolic Rift Does science itself, as one such social institution, and as one set of cultural practices, remain the same within this different kind of naturalism? (Gallagher 2018: 117) Let us turn to nature. Lewontin held that the ideological biases of biology ‘prevent a rich understanding of nature and prevent us from solving the problems to which science is supposed to apply itself’ (1991: 15). This introduces a false dichotomy between holism and reductionism which influences the research that is undertaken. Another, dialectical, notion of nature might lead to another kind of science, but this progress is hindered by current scientific ideals, as well as the political-economic dimension of science (Supiot 2021). The different iterations of the dialectical approach share an emphasis on the idea that nature is not simply a static background for our actions, and that it also does not work on us a mechanical or external manner. Instead, nature is a complex system which is caught up with our activities, even if it also maintains autonomy from these. To concretise, I sketch Luca Illetterati’s Hegelian and Foster’s Marxist understanding of nature. In The Capital, Marx emphasised that the soil was being robbed for the nutrients necessary to sustain its fertility. He took this to indicate how the current organisation of production, capitalism, causes a rift between the social metabolism and the metabolism of nature, which sustains all life, and this rift can only be amended within another societal system (Foster 2022a). Metabolic rift denotes the breakdown of the relationship universal metabolism of nature and the social metabolism that sustains our society, which ultimately depends on the universal metabolism, ‘the biophysical conditions of production’. The universal metabolism of nature exists prior to and apart from human activity. It also interacts with and enables the social metabolism, which is a concrete shape of this ecological metabolism. Labour mediates between these metabolisms. While we can affect the universal metabolism of nature, we must grant nature autonomy – not regard it is wholly internalised by society. Nature places constraints upon human activities, and even if we may constrain nature in return, there are limits to how much we can change natural processes without undermining its capacity to sustain our societies. Contrary to the caricature, Hegel believes that science provides the content upon which philosophy must work, that ‘the empirical sciences […] have readied this material for philosophy by discovering its universal determinations, genera, and laws’ (Hegel 2010: 41). Further, he holds that nature is an enigma that can never be solved. It is not only beyond our conceptual capacities, but beyond itself. Our logical categories cannot deduce the concrete instance of nature because it is too contingent to display these categories reliably. In other words, nature lacks the capacity to control its own becoming (Di Giovanni 2010). Nature is weak because it is riddled with contingency and fails to be a completely logical sphere. Yet it displays a fragmented rationality, through its concrete shapes – which is also why detailed knowledge of its particularities is needed, why philosophy depends on science to provide its content. Conversely, science requires philosophy to be able to distil the logical principles that are displayed by nature. Philosophy cannot impose categories on science from without but should strive to ‘situate the sciences within their broader non/extra-scientific contexts’ (Johnston 2019: 55) and show how they contain more metaphysics than they are aware of. Hegel’s view indicates that there is already a rift in nature – pace Foster – before the emergence of a specific mode of production. This rift enables subjectivity to emerge, and it also changes retroactively by this emergence. In other words, subjectivity emerges from within the incompleteness of nature, not as opposite to it. This indicates how knowledge about nature enabled by nature itself. New Nature, New Science? The inability to articulate its own conditions of possibility characterises so-called contemplative materialism. Foster says that avoiding the contemplative stance is ‘exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism […] is, in the final analysis, all about’ (Foster 2022b: fn22, 7–8 emphasis original). Emergent levels of organisation, which are interdependent yet autonomous, solves the problem. But if Heron (2021) is right, the notion of ontological incompleteness found in Hegel is also needed the cognise the emergence of the subject that can set itself apart from nature immanently. The notion of weak nature also suggests why science is simultaneously socially constructed and cognitively valid. It is because the distortions and contradictions we disclose are indicative of the nature of reality itself. It is the inchoate structure of nature that enables subjectivity (as self-determination) and allows us to understand it rationally, even if this understanding can only be aporetic. It is this inconsistency that enables the subject to emerge from within nature. Here, the rift is present in nature before the emergence of modern society, even if our current social system may exacerbate it. More important than their possible tensions, these approaches share the notion that no level is unconstrained or isolated from others but in a constant and formative interaction with them. Together, part and whole form a processual totality. Teleological causality is actual as it emerges from the interaction between different levels and scales. Dialectics thereby overcomes the mechanistic worldview that undergirds the contemplative stance, which dismisses everything that cannot be explained through efficient causality. Hence, a dialectical view of nature can provide a richer and more radical understanding of nature, the object of science, and of science itself – in which it includes subjectivity or self-determination as its own self-negation. Nature is beyond itself, not only external to us but to itself, and thus cannot control its own genesis. The same principle applies to science. Secondly, and implicitly, we get a more encompassing notion of causation, not as simple cause and effect but as complex, constitutive and reciprocal. Here, boundary conditions impose constraints that are not only limiting but also enabling (see Longo and others 2012). We are dealing with historical systems, whose space of possibilities are themselves subject to change. We should not limit the scope of naturalism to the confines deemed acceptable by a narrow conception of science. Instead, we need a naturalism ‘whose very core is the notion of life’ (Illetterati 2023: 188) – a naturalism which explains its own conditions of possibility through this living and constructive relation to the world. Marx held that there would be a unitary science in the future. It would, however, only be possible after the shackles of bourgeoise society has been lifted, in his view. But this view seems too unilinear, and erects a barrier between ideology and science, instead of admitting that ideology is an inherent part of science – without thereby undermining its cognitive validity. It also undercuts the degree to which science affects the scene on which it appears, and the revolutionary force that science was for Marx. Instead of waiting for a revolution to inaugurate a new relation between the sciences and between science and philosophy the, we should foster a relationship that prefigures a new society and contributes to its establishment. As we are constituted through our relationship to nature, the breakdown of this relation alienates us both form ourselves and from nature. A renewed concept of nature combats this alienation. It allows us to understand how freedom is ontologically possible and makes us aware of what it at stake if we do not exercise this freedom consciously and responsibly. Not only does it suggest another way to understand natural processes; it also pertains to the becoming and function of science itself, as part of a larger totality. Only within such a totality can the function of science be ascribed. We might never get a truly unitary science, not even if a new society is inaugurated, but we can achieve many advances through attempts at establishing a new naturalism and another mode of interaction between science and society, nonetheless. Bibliography Bernal, J.D. 1939. The Social Function of Science (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd.) Bizzarri, Mariano, Ana M Soto, Carlos Sonnenschein, and Giuseppe Longo. 2017. ‘Saving Science. And Beyond’, 1.1: 11–15 <https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-5876_1.6> Chomsky, Noam. 1967. ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, New York Review of Books El-Hani, Charbel Niño, and Claudio R. M. Reis. 2021. ‘Research Strategies and Value Outlooks in Scientific Practices:For an Organicist Thinking and a Pluralist Methodology in the Biological Sciences’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/research-strategies-and-value-outlooks-in-scientific-practices> Foster, John Bellamy. 2020. The Return of Nature : Socialism and Ecology. (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022a. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022b. ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity’, Historical Materialism: 1–26 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-20222279> Gallagher, Shaun. 2018. ‘Dynamics and Dialectic’, Constructivist Foundations, 14.1: 114–17 <http://constructivist.info/14/1/114> Di Giovanni, George. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in The Science of Logic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. xi–lxii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010. The Science of Logic, ed. by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) Heron, Kai. 2021. ‘Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective’, Science & Society, 85.4 (Guilford Publications Inc.): 501–26 <https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2021.85.4.501> Illetterati, Luca. 2023. ‘Beyond a Naturalistic Conception of Nature: Nature and Life in Hegel’s Early Writings’, in Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy, ed. by Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 187–208 Johnston, Adrian. 2019. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone, Diaeresis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press) Kosambi, D. D. 1957. Exasperating Essays: Exercises in the Dialectical Method (Poona: People’s Book House) Levins, Richard. 1981. ‘Class Science and Scientific Truth’, in Working Papers in Marxism & Science (New York, NY: The Science Task Force), pp. 9–22 Levins, Richard, and Richard Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Lewontin, Richard C. 1991. Biology as Ideology : The Doctrine of DNA (New York, NY: Harper Perennial) <https://doi.org/LK – https://worldcat.org/title/214484329> Longo, Giuseppe, Maël Montévil, and Stuart Kauffman. 2012. ‘No Entailing Laws, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere’, ACM Proceedings of GECCO: 1379–1392 Raju, Archishman. 2021. ‘The Revolutionary Science of W. E. B. Du Bois and D. D. Kosambi’, Science for the People, 24.1 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol24-1-racial-capitalism/revolutionary-science/> ———. 2022. ‘Science and Imperialism: Scientists as Workers for Peace’, Science for the People, 25.3 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol25-3-killing-in-the-name-of/science-and-imperialism-scientists-as-workers-for-peace/> Sève, Lucien. 2008. ‘Dialectics of Emergence’, in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 85–97 <https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583818> Soto, Ana M., and Carlos Sonnenschein. 2021. ‘The Proletarianization of Biological Thought’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/the-proletarianization-of-biological-thought> Supiot, Alain. 2021. ‘Labour Is Not a Commodity: The Content and Meaning of Work in the Twenty-First Century’, International Labour Review, 160.1 (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd): 1–20 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12205> [1] This text is more suggestive than argumentative. I will not discuss the historical relation between ecology and Marxism and will only be able to indicate how the dialectical view indicates a more ecological scientific ideal. I will not discuss how dialectical principles can be found within science, nor interpret concrete sciences dialectically. I save this for another, more systematic article. For a discussion, which informed this article, of how the organicist perspective requires a context-sensitive and pluralistic approach, see El-Hani and Reis (2021). [2] Proletarianisation involves a ‘fragmentation of skill’ and ‘specialisation’, which makes the scientist more replaceable and thus left in a more precarious position. Moreover, alienation concerns how ‘the producers do not understand the whole process, have no say over where it is going or how, and have little opportunity to exercise creative intelligence’ (Lewontin and Levins 1987: 202). Soto and Sonnenschein (2021) explain how the process of proletarianisation has affected biology, as new technologies have been introduced and undermined theory, with some even declaring its end. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Habonim Dror: How Israeli Regime Recruits Left-Wing Americans to Fan Zionism. By: Shabbir RizviRead NowOne of the most profound awakenings for Westerners since the launch of the Palestinian resistance operation Al-Aqsa Storm has been their understanding of how influential the Zionist lobby is. This lobby, which works in line with the US State Department when it can and independently and subversively when it cannot, tends to influence major arenas of societal interest. On the surface level, one can simply follow the money and understand the phenomenon: the Israeli lobby pouring millions of dollars into buying US politicians, Zionist hate groups unleashed to stifle Pro-Palestinian students on college campuses, celebrities and artists flown out to Israel to pose with Israeli Occupation soldiers in order to paint them in a positive light. However, more devious and subversive groups exist within American society, specifically designed to “normalize” the concept of not only an Israeli regime, but the imperialist-settler ideology of Zionism. These organizations are designed with the American “left” in mind: Using left-wing, pro-worker sloganism, Zionist groups specifically target left-wing movements, students, and youths in order to indoctrinate them into aligning with the Zionist cause. One of these groups is known as “Habonim Dror.” Habonim Dror is believed to have promoted the ideas of “social justice” and “peace” while running six Zionist student camps across North America. The group actively recruits young Jewish students from across the US and Canada (though they have more minor concentrations in New Zealand, Brazil, the UK, and other countries) indoctrinating them in their camps, and even including a year-long program to send them to Occupied Palestine. At first glance at their website and mission, it is clear that they are intent on separating themselves from the ruling Benjamin Netanyahu regime in Tel Aviv. Habonim Dror emphasizes the need for “Labor Zionism” and even goes as far as suggesting “ending the occupation,” but ultimately succumbs to the same-old “Two-State Solution” rhetoric that forces Palestinians to deal with an aggressive, genocidal and brutal “neighbor.” “Labor Zionism,” which can save you a few syllables if you just call it what it is - Zionism - was a mutated appeal to the labor movement in North America. Habonin Dror was established in the 1930s as an appendage faction of the mainstream Zionist movement, and it has until now taken a backseat role in picking up Jewish youth who at first were resistant to the idea of Zionism. For decades, the Israeli occupation has enjoyed total control of its image, and so its initiatives were less aggressive. Now, Habonim Dror represents a wave of Zionism meant to capture what would be dissenting Jewish voices and reprogram them to be tools for colonialism and imperialism. Its mission is designed to “meet the moment” of a resurgent left-wing movement in the United States, particularly after the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the Bernie Sanders presidential run in 2016, and the George Floud Uprising of 2020 - all three of which propelled left-wing movements and revived an interest in socialism in an otherwise deeply reactionary society. Habonim Dror may use veils like “socialism” and “progressivism” to define itself. However, its “principles” mention nothing of anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. The group’s “socialism” is a “national socialism” for its own fascist occupation - it is not rooted in internationalism or global worker solidarity. It is a corrupted “socialism” that uses sloganeering and symbolism that are aesthetic to socialism while driving a deeply reactionary and imperialist political line. Habonim Dror encourages its members, who can join as early as high school, to participate in local social justice issues, including police brutality, immigration reform, climate change, and other popular left-wing issues that have gained much attention in American society. It further trains participants to be (according to their website) “leaders, change-makers and activists in their communities.” Offering attractive scholarships, opportunities to travel to Occupied Palestine, a rich network of connections that could offer promising careers and formal leadership training programs, Habonim Dror seems similar to a fraternity or an innocent summer camp. However, it is adamantly dedicated to the Zionist cause - which demands the existence of “Israel.” It is a simple equation. Habonim Dror targets what would otherwise be neutral, uninterested, or otherwise hostile Jewish youth and codifies a “left wing” Zionism in them, then encourages them to embed themselves into their communities and local movements as leaders and changemakers. They represent the face of Zionism where Zionism would otherwise be unwelcome, and thus rebrand Zionism through a false definition. These initiatives are crafted to normalize collaboration with more “hardline” Zionists. By infiltrating otherwise progressive movements, ‘Labor Zionism’ agents can influence those around them to embrace Zionism and the Israeli occupation. Zionists know that principled left-wing movements outright reject their racist ideology. In order to adapt, groups like Habonim Dror have been crafted to mutate Zionism in order to appeal to a left-wing wave that does not have strong principles of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. The Palestinian issue is purposely framed as complicated and “sensitive” in American society. “Left Wing” Zionists can then be deployed to command the conversation in progressive circles, rejecting any idea of a true liberation for Palestinians. As long as Zionism itself is not seen as the main issue, the Israeli occupation is framed in a positive light. A prime example of the type of influencer Habonim Dror seeks to create is the aggressively Zionist and Islamophobic actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen joined the group in his late teens in the 1980s, attending summer camps and ultimately moving to the occupied Palestinian territories for a year, working alongside other Zionist youth. Later, he would play the roles of deeply racist caricatures that fueled the fire of Islamophobia at the height of post-9/11 hysteria in the United States. Cohen now spends his time as a critic of the US right-wing lobby while simultaneously spreading Zionist propaganda and continuing his racism against Muslims. He came out in fierce defense of the Israeli response to the Palestinian resistance operation Al Aqsa Flood. Clearly, even “Labor Zionism” falls short of condemning the occupation, despite its insistence that it does. Some Habonim Dror activists have established networks with influential politicians such as staunch Zionist senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. The very existence of Habonin Dror activists threatens to normalize “Israeli” existence within progressive movements in the US, which at a critical movement like now are condemning the Tel Aviv regime. The group further prides itself on the collaboration of groups that are not Zionist in nature, citing various statistics of group participation in outside movements and leadership positions held, all while demonstrating their loyalty to the Israeli occupation, despite their alleged denunciation of “occupation.” This is a key goal for Habonin Dror: Zionists understand that isolation will only bring about their disaster. Therefore, groups like Habonim Dror must branch out in order to normalize the Israeli regime. This is their main factor of success. If local movements aren’t careful, they could be collaborating with Zionist infiltrators that could subvert Palestinian solidarity when it counts the most. Picture this scenario: a climate activist group is concerned about the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, as US weapons used themselves are a climate issue. Moving to condemn the genocide, grassroots organizers are then blocked by leadership that is Habonim Dror “activists.” A key voice within the US political realm is then silenced because of meticulously devised Zionist infiltration within an otherwise left-wing group. Habonim Dror isn’t the only Zionist youth group seeking to build a generation of Zionist influencers and “activists.” There are many different Zionist youth groups - some that are more “left-wing” in nature, and others that are “hardline.” Careful attention must be paid in order to understand how Zionists can subvert movements, organizations, and ideas - especially by weaponizing “progressivism” when a progressive movement is beginning to take shape and action. Let it be clear: there is nothing “progressive” or “left-wing” about the Israeli occupation or Zionism. At its core, it will always be a racist, colonial ideology that threatens war, expansionism, and exploitation. No rebrand can ever take away these core features of Zionism. Author Shabbir Rizvi Political analyst that specializes in US foreign and domestic policy, geopolitics, and military science; Anti-war organizer. Republished from Islam Times. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 "An accursed evil": Darwin's Struggle to Write "On the Origin of Species". By: JEFFREY S. KAYERead NowToday is Charles Darwin’s 215th birthday. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, when Darwin was 50 years old. After a period of extraordinary scientific creativity in his late 20s, after returning to London from the five-year circumnavigation of the HMS Beagle, a period that included his working out of the theory of evolution via natural selection, Darwin did not publish on the subject of evolution for the next 19 years. Why? There are a lot of reasons. As part of my dissertation research into Darwin’s life, I looked at that question as well. As a treat for my readers (I hope it’s seen that way), I’m resurrecting a selection of that old work of mine (written in the mid-1990s, with only a few editorial changes). Hopefully, readers will tolerate, if not enjoy, this deviation from the usual fare on this blog. I had often thought of publishing this work, but the vicissitudes of establishing myself as a psychologist, raising a family, and other matters, pushed the Darwin work off my personal agenda. I’m posting a portion here, partly as a tribute to Darwin on his birthday, but also because I think it speaks to the difficulties adherent to living out one’s personal dreams in a complex world, considering the sociological, economic, cultural, and personal pressures that steer our lives, often in ways that we don’t always understand. As the selection below begins, Darwin has completed his years’ long task of studying and classifying barnacles. He undertook the work because he sorely felt his lack of credentials in biology. The lack of such professional recognition meant, he felt, that his work on biological evolution would never be accepted by the academic elite and scientists. Once he completed the barnacles job, the question of publishing his evolutionary ideas rose before him again…. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In November 1854, Darwin accepted a prestigious position on the council of the Royal Society, and then, later that winter, moved the entire family to London for a month. The visit was practically a debacle. His children became terribly ill, and a close scientific acquaintance, the kind of younger scientist Darwin thought would be a supporter whenever he finally published on evolution, suddenly died at age 39. Still, Darwin’s presence at the Royal Society represented his commitment to take more interest in and remain close to London scientific circles. He spent his 46th birthday at a rare party given by Lyell's brother-in-law, Leonard Horner. Charles Lyell was the most famous geologist in the world at that point, and had been a mentor and supporter of Darwin’s scientific career. While he suspected Darwin’s “transmutationist” heresies, he overlooked them and in many ways, Darwin had been seen up to this point as one of Lyell’s more prominent disciples. Shortly after his return to Down from London, Charles began two projects directly related to his studies on the proof of organic evolution. He began keeping pigeons, in order to study the heritability of their physical and behavioral variations. He also initiated a study of seed dispersal, as he was troubled with problems concerning the geographical distribution of plant life, an important topic in his analysis of how evolution via natural selection occurred. The seed project soon began to overwhelm him with its difficulties, and he feared a repetition of the barnacle job, in that it threatened to become a years long research project in and of itself. Such a project would swallow up most of Darwin's time, leaving him farther than ever from the completion of his chosen life's work, the scientific proof of evolution by natural selection. This is not what he wanted at this point in his career. Even more disturbing, the complexity of the data Darwin was collecting and analyzing for a future work on evolution began to overwhelm him. In March 1855, Darwin told his cousin William Darwin Fox that he doubted "whether the subject will not quite overpower me" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1989, v. 5, p. 294).[1] When, later that same spring, the seed experiments began to go awry, Darwin complained to Hooker, "All nature is perverse.... I am getting out of my depth" (p. 326). Even a year later, in March 1856, shortly after Charles turned 47, he confided again to Fox that he still feared a breakdown, "for my subject gets bigger & bigger with each months work" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 58). A sense that time was growing short loomed over the entire project. Darwin was very self-conscious about growing older, and despite all his work, he still did not feel ready to begin writing his hoped-for book on species. The rear of Down House in the Kent countryside, the home of Charles Darwin over the last forty years of his life. (Photo: English Heritage) During these years Darwin remained decisively committed to the importance of family. The children at home were intimately informed about the progress of their father's research. He was most happy when all the children were at home, even as he feared for their future in an "old burthened country, with every soul struggling for existence" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 55). By the time Darwin was 47, having had seven children, with two others lost in infancy and childhood, he said about his children that "one gets, as one grows older, to care more for them than for anything in the world" (p. 56). And, as if to highlight the sentiment, Emma became pregnant again that very year, although this was almost certainly an unplanned pregnancy. The early years of Darwin's middle age were marked by a widening circle of social and scientific acquaintances. He joined the upper-class pigeon-breeders' Philoperiston Club only weeks before his 47th birthday. There were also new responsibilities shouldered, whether it was as treasurer to the Down Coal and Clothing Club, or as reviewer of papers for the council of the Royal Society. The extent of Darwin's activities at this time belies his image as an invalided recluse for all the years he lived at Down. Besides his English associates, Darwin initiated contact at this time with naturalists and scientists all around the world. One of the naturalists with whom he corresponded was Alfred Russel Wallace, then doing field work in Borneo. Wallace's solution to the problem of species' geographical distribution would entail an independent discovery of the mechanism of natural selection. This discovery would exacerbate both developmental and internal conflicts Darwin was having during the early years of his middle age, a struggle that centered around what to do about publishing his theories. Alfred Russel Wallace, from London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company (active 1855-1922) - First published in Borderland Magazine, April 1896 (Source: Wikipedia, public domain) Even as he turned 47 years old, Darwin remained content to gather more data in order to refine his theory of evolution. He did not feel ready to go public with his ideas. He did inform a larger group of acquaintances privately about his project — and received largely censure in reply — but he did not consider setting his findings down on paper until Charles Lyell decisively intervened. Lyell was a famous geologist and proponent of scientific uniformitarianism, the idea that natural processes that can be observed now have always (or nearly always) been in effect. Lyell had also taken on the role of Darwin’s mentor in the years after Charles’s return from the long Beagle voyage. When Lyell visited Down in mid-April 1856, Darwin finally explained to his mentor his full theory of natural selection. — Imagine! He had kept the theory a secret for approximately twenty years from the man who most supported him in scientific circles! — Lyell was aware that Wallace, at least, was working on similar problems, and seemed to be concerned about establishing scientific priority for his disciple's views. He also thought that with Darwin's theories published, he could critique them in a future edition of his major work, Principles of Geology, and therefore possibly be able to control the debate over evolution. In the end, Darwin could not abide by Lyell's suggestion for a quick essay or pamphlet on natural selection. His ambition, as well as his sense of scientific integrity, chafed against the format of a simple sketch. After a few months, Darwin had decided, in the middle of his 47th year, to write the full book he had envisioned. It was a momentous moment for him, for he had to accept the role of an iconoclastic innovator. The planned multi-volume work was to be titled “Natural Selection.” On one hand, Darwin seemed fully confident in the future success of his ideas, and the certainty that they would revolutionize natural science. But on the other hand, he still felt keenly his own scientific isolation, in addition to a lingering sense of dilettantism. "I shall have little sympathy from those, whose sympathy alone I value," Charles complained (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 236). Both his emotional and physical health fluctuated. With Emma suffering through a difficult pregnancy, Charles leaned even more for support upon his friend at Kew Gardens, Joseph Hooker. As Darwin went over his materials once again, following an outline not too different from that envisioned in his initial 1842 and 1844 private sketches of the subject, he made subtle but important changes in his theory. There was a new emphasis on inherent variability, on the relativity of good-enough adaptation, and the addition of a principle of divergence as a corollary to natural selection. Meanwhile, Darwin struggled with the meaning of what he was about to do. He agonized over his own quest for fame, as well as his continuing fear that writing the book would be too much for him. He also had qualms over the amount of time and energy the project required. Months after Wallace's theory was announced, necessitating a switch in strategy from a very large multi-volume compendium on the subject of evolution and natural selection to the writing of a shorter book-length abstract, Darwin, then aged 49, told Hooker, "It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 174). Even as Charles turned 48, Emma was arguing with her husband that he was so overwrought he should return to Malvern’s spa for a dose of water treatment. But Charles was reluctant. He worked persistently at his manuscript. He travelled to London to further the career of his young protégé, John Lubbock. When he did finally return to hydropathy for relief, in April 1857, it was at Moor Park, not Malvern. Moor Park was much closer to home than Malvern was. After a week, Darwin was feeling better. “I can walk & eat like a hearty Christian,” he wrote to Hooker, “& even my nights are good…. I have not thought about a single species of any kind, since leaving home” (p. 377). But back home in May, he was already sick again, telling Hooker, “I fear that my head will stand no thought, but I would sooner be the wretched contemptible invalid, which I am, than live the life of an idle squire” (p. 403). Distracted also from scientific work by concern for his children's health — there was a diphtheria outbreak in the neighborhood — and by disputes among his friends, at times Darwin wished he could sunder all relations, all affections. "A scientific man ought to have... a mere heart of stone," Charles told his scientific correspondent Thomas Huxley later that summer (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 427). By autumn, he told his cousin Fox, "A man ought to be a bachelor, & care for no human being to be happy!" (p. 476). Charles remained especially dependent upon Emma's care and love. A few months after he turned 49, Darwin offered to take over the care of the children in order that Emma might have a rest. Darwin continued to work away at what he felt would be a gigantic magnum opus on evolution. Scientific problems kept arising. He worked obsessively, such that his frequent correspondent, his cousin Fox, remonstrated him for his perpetual overwork. Meanwhile, Darwin had tentatively sent a chapter of his work to his botanist friend, Hooker. He was immensely pleased when Hooker, who was still averse to accepting evolution as a theory, much less natural selection, told Darwin his new work was scientifically formidable. Darwin wrote to Hooker: “You would laugh, if you could know how much your note pleased me. I had firmest conviction that you would say all my M.S. was bosh, & thank God you are one of the few men who dare speak truth. Though I shd. not have cared much about throwing away what you have seen, yet I have been forced to confess to myself… if you condemned that you wd. condemn all — my life’s work — & that I confess made me a little low — but I cd. have borne it, for I have the conviction that I have honestly done my best.” (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, p. 102). On June 18, 1858, Darwin received an extraordinary package in the mail. It was a letter and a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace. The manuscript was entitled, “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type.” Darwin read it and dashed off a note to Lyell. He told him to read Wallace’s manuscript, and added: “Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled… if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters. “I shall at once write [Wallace] & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have a value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.” (p. 107) In one of the great coincidences in the history of science, Wallace had worked out the concept of natural selection in the jungles of the Malay Archipelago just as Darwin was preparing his long book on the subject. The crisis then precipitated by Darwin's loss of scientific priority found its solution via the intervention of Lyell and Hooker, who saw to it that both Darwin and Wallace’s essays were jointly published in a scientific journal. But, crucially, Wallace’s paper forced Darwin to reassess the value of his work, and he decided its importance was not diminished by Wallace's discovery. Charles understood that the significance of his own contribution lay in the multifaceted discussion of the theory's application. When the joint Wallace-Darwin papers were presented at the Linnean Society, their effect was minuscule; Darwin had reckoned correctly. Through mature reflection, he knew that the theory had to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Perhaps Charles could suffer the difficult loss of priority, the loss of a portion of his dream, because he was then also recovering from the very recent death of his youngest son. His daughter, Henrietta, too had just caught diphtheria. Most importantly for Darwin, the crisis over the Wallace events proved that, as he was about to enter upon a new and ominous period of his middle age, he could count upon the love of his wife, the friendship of Joseph Hooker, and the cautious backing of his mentor, Lyell. Perhaps this is why his double loss — of scientific priority and of his youngest son — did not destroy him. Darwin's perseverance against tremendous pressures, illness, and catastrophic loss, is not easy to analyze. Darwin himself thought that energy of mind, steadiness, and ability to sustain rigorous and long-continued work were his peculiar strengths. It appears to me that Darwin was able to contend with much strife due to the stability of the life structure he constructed during his 30s and 40s. In this, Darwin may have been very prescient in choosing a wife who could provide immense emotional support over the years (even though she was quite religious and Charles was not). Cropped and rotated version of Image:Origin of Species.jpg, which is off the title page and the facing page of the 1859 Murray edition of the Origin of species by Charles Darwin. (Via Wikipedia) Within a month of the Wallace events, though feeling old and weak, Darwin began preparing an abstract of his earlier, larger planned book. He entitled the new manuscript “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” In his later book, The Descent of Man, Darwin would make quite clear that all the races of men were of one species, a topic that was then still considered unsettled. While Darwin found value in the work he did, he still feared few would recognize its importance. With the publication of Origin of Species in Darwin's 50th year, Charles achieved, seemingly in one leap, a preeminent position in the scientific world. Yet his accomplishment was the result of long-prepared, gradual development during the years of early adulthood, mid-life transition, and initial middle age. Furthermore, the composition of the book was difficult, and Darwin more than once sought rest and hydropathic treatment at Moor Park spa. Darwin believed that he worked from an instinct for truth, but the pursuit of his dream of scientific accomplishment almost overwhelmed him. Even as he was finishing Origin, Charles fretted that his entire life's work had been for nought. At an extreme, he thought he might be insane. More than once, he told his friends how he longed to finish his "accursed" book, after which he could be "free" (see Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, pp. 247, 270, 326, 328). He felt in his 50th year that, with the publication of Origin, his career had come to an end. The book had "half killed" him (p. 350). Yet, at other times, Charles also called his book "my child" and felt "infinitely pleased and proud" of it (p. 365). Lyell was helpful once again, this time in procuring a publisher. But Darwin realized very well that his book would be "one long argument" against anti-evolution theorists such as Lyell himself (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, p. 278). Accordingly, Darwin fervently hoped that his former mentor would be converted to evolution and natural selection. "Remember that your verdict will probably have more influence than my Book," Charles told him (p. 329). Darwin, uncertain of surviving a perilous future in scientific circles, and unwilling, perhaps, to surpass Lyell's accomplishments, fervently wished that the latter would accept evolution. Darwin knew that with the publication of his book, he was abandoning his former teachers and many naturalist friends. Neither was he sanguine about the response of his early mentor John Henslow, botany professor at Cambridge, to transmutationist heresy. Charles was resigned to Henslow's disapprobation. (Henslow died in 1861, and never was a major critic of Darwin’s work on evolution.) Darwin was barely ready to shoulder the responsibilities which his lonely scientific opposition would incur. Retreating to yet another water cure in Ilkley, he was joined by Emma and the children. Meanwhile, Charles was very dependent upon the approval and support of Hooker, Lyell (up to a point), and, increasingly, the young scientist Thomas Huxley. But it was Lyell who mattered most to Darwin, and the latter alternately argued and pleaded with the old geologist to accept the theories propounded in Origin. In the midst of this crisis, Darwin kept injuring himself repeatedly, hurting his ankle, his writing hand, and suffering repeated outbreaks of boils and rashes. As for Lyell, he never was able to “go all the way” with evolutionary theory in general, or natural selection in particular. The disappointment Darwin felt on this score led to a partial estrangement in his relationship with his former mentor, and increased Darwin’s sense of embattlement in the first years after the publication of Origin. When the full critical assault against Darwin's theory got underway, Origin had been in the bookstalls almost a year. Charles was turning 51 years old, and confused about what to do with the rest of his life. He was reticent about engaging with polemics with his scientific opponents. When Huxley offered to undertake the defense of Origin in the pages of various magazines and journals, Darwin was very grateful. He even egged Huxley on, especially as they shared an opponent in the powerful superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum, Richard Owen. In the scientific conflict with the powerful Owen, Darwin found access to his anger and aggression. He learned how to hate. It helped that he could hate, because he suffered from self-loathing. Over and over in his letters, Charles describes himself as "odious" or "arrogant" or "egotistical" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, pp. 409, 457; v. 8, p. 141). In Owen, Darwin may have found a shadow figure. He often criticized aspects of Owen's personality that he found egregious in himself. For instance, Charles castigated Owen for his obsequiousness before the aristocracy, and for his slavishness to the court of public opinion. While these are not manifest traits in Darwin's own personality, he struggled through much of his adult life around issues of satisfying his social superiors, and was especially sensitive to public opinion. We can infer that what Darwin found so awful about Owen — the latter's propensity to bend his scientific integrity to the dictates of social approval — was an internal struggle within Darwin's character as well. When Darwin's theory began to divide the scientific world into warring camps, he suffered greatly for the destructive forces he believed he had unleashed. When, a few years later, the disputes degenerated into personal attacks over plagiarism among even his closest friends, the inner conflict Darwin suffered paralyzed him. But as he turned 51, Charles felt supported enough by Lyell, Hooker, Huxley and a few others, that he was willing to undertake a campaign for the support of his ideas. He was also trying to find a way he might continue his scientific work. On one hand, Darwin wished to finish the mammoth task of documenting the facts that had been presented in Origin as only an abstract of a treatise. This would mean many years spent on a multi-volume book, essentially a rewrite of the earlier omnibus manuscript, Natural Selection. On the other hand, Charles wanted to make new discoveries, and to remain a natural scientist. His work on the book which would become Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication, the companion volumes to Origin, was stalled again and again, as Charles found himself incapable of applying himself to the task. Instead, he looked to new objects of study — orchids, insectivorous plants, and the sexuality of flowers — in order to find suitable projects with which to apply his dream of scientific discovery. Footnotes [1] The references to Burkhardt & Smith in this post are to various volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, published by Cambridge University Press (1985-2023), which were edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. At the time I wrote this material, this was the most comprehensive, scholarly, and accessible reference available for Darwin’s letters. Today, all the letters are online and accessible at Cambridge University’s fantastic resource, the Darwin Correspondence Project. The final volume of the printed work, number 30, was published last year. Hence all the quotes I use from Burkhardt & Smith in this article can be found at the DCP. (Later editions of the Correspondence sometimes had different editors.) Author: Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from 'Hidden Histories' Substack Archives February 2024 On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.” Catastrophe The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order). Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza--said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further. Safe Passage Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?” Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks. Domicide On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity. The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza. As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.” Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives February 2024 Revolution Has Survived and Flourished Despite U.S. Attempts to Destroy It February 2 marked the 25th anniversary of the Bolivarian Revolution. On that day in 1999, Hugo Chávez, a left-wing Venezuelan army officer, assumed power and initiated a socialist revolution that had ripple effects across the region and world. Invoking the legacy of Simón Bolívar, who had led much of Latin America’s liberation from Spanish colonization in the 1820s, Chávez’s government enacted measures to retake national control over Venezuela’s oil resources and to use the revenues to fund social programs. The government led by Chávez also strove for greater regional integration to undercut dependance on exploitation by the U.S. and provided a model for Third World nations striving to overcome a legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism. On February 4, Venezuela Analysis and the Orinoco Tribune hosted a webinar assessing the legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has consistently been misrepresented in U.S. media. Carlos L. Garrido, a philosophy lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and member of the editorial board of Midwestern Marx, opened the webinar by stating that the Bolivarian Revolution was a monumental historical event that brought the working class to power and inspired the rebirth of left-wing movements in Latin America. The U.S. predictably used the entire tool kit of its weaponry to try to sabotage and destroy the revolution, kidnapping Venezuelan leaders, mounting coups, and imposing draconian sanctions that have failed to dislodge the Venezuelan government or crush the spirit of the revolution.
When Liger Smith pressed further, asking the professor why the U.S. imposed sanctions if socialism was a failed system, the professor’s face turned red and she gave a convoluted answer. Liger Smith said that, on that day, he decided to try to undertake his own objective study of Venezuela to find out the truth for himself. When he undertook that study, Liger Smith said he found out that the Bolivarian Revolution was not a failure but a great success, and that socialism was a more humane and superior system to capitalism. The primary success of the Bolivarian Revolution was that Venezuelans were able to regain control of their economy and oil that had been for years stolen by Western corporations. Chávez’s government and that run by his successor Nicolás Maduro improved the material conditions of the majority of the country’s people by using oil and other revenue to a) increase popular access to affordable health care and education; b) build schools; c) reduce inequality and malnutrition; and d) establish pensions for the elderly.[1] Further, the Bolivarian Revolution introduced new forms of popular democracy and helped to combat anti-indigenous racism. The reason that Venezuela is so widely demonized is because it has come to function as a thorn in the side of Western capitalism and U.S. imperialism; it is a country that the U.S. ruling elite cannot control or exploit and which has adopted an independent foreign policy. U.S. sabotage efforts—which Liger Smith said include efforts to lure skilled workers out of the country and steal Venezuelan assets—ultimately cannot and will not succeed because Venezuelans do not want to go to a past era where they lacked true independence. The second webinar speaker, Cira Pasqual Marquina, a professor of political science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas, spoke about the significance of communes to the Venezuelan revolution and how those communes embody its egalitarian values and push for participatory democracy. Marquina said that the communes draw on some of the living practices of Venezuela’s indigenous population, and Soviet and Chinese communes as well as the 1871 Paris Commune that Karl Marx wrote about. Marquina said also that, when Chávez came to power, he invited people to read a Hungarian philosopher, István Mészáros, who wrote about some of the accomplishments and failures of Eastern Bloc socialism which Venezuelans could learn from, emphasizing the need for popular participation in decision-making. The third speaker, Saheli Chowdhury, an editor of the Orinoco Tribune, emphasized that the Bolivarian Revolution occurred during a dark time following the collapse of the Soviet Union when the U.S. was imposing neo-liberalism everywhere—a harsh economic model that fueled vast social inequality and misery for people across the so-called Third World. The Bolivarian Revolution brought a ray of hope in that time, signifying decolonization and resistance to neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism and that a different world was possible. In Latin America, it helped inspire a) the election of Evo Morales, a socialist who was the first Indigenous president of Bolivia; b) the return to power of the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and c) the rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that had been pushed by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Chávez’s visionary policies were evident in his efforts to expand Venezuela’s ties to Asian countries and establishment of a strategic partnership with China and Iran as part of a coalition against the U.S. Empire. Chowdhury said that, in the 1990s, we were all told that history had ended and that capitalism had won, but the Bolivarian Revolution proves that history continues to be written by the people. The fourth speaker, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza, founder of the Orinoco Tribune, emphasized that, for all the disparagement in the media and some genuine problems with Maduro’s rule, Chavismo remains the dominant political movement in Venezuela. This is primarily because of its past achievements in empowering working class people and bringing them material benefits. Rodriguez-Espinoza predicted that Maduro would win Venezuela’s next election because Chavismo is bigger than any one person and people will vote to sustain the revolution. He also said that U.S. intelligence was recently behind a coup plot by far-right-wing activists who they were helping to arm.
An advocate of “open markets,” she is considered a traitor because of her support for U.S. sanctions and the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s government by a foreign power, and is as much of a joke as Juan Guaidó, a puppet of the U.S. who now teaches at Florida International University. Shaw said that, “if Machado did what she did in the U.S.., she would be in jail.”[2]
Telesur’s perspective is rightfully sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution, whose historic achievements will be recognized by historians years from now.
AuthorJeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. This article was produced by CovertAction Magazine. Archives February 2024 Historical Materialist View of Ideas The collections of ideas we hold are historically conditioned by the mode of life we exist in. They reflect, in the realm of ideas, the limitations and possibilities of the mode of social life that dominates the era – of the forms of social intercourse which pervade our everyday lives. A feudal peasant cannot concern themselves with their social media profiles – with the likes their posts get, the shares it receives, and the subscribers or followers they have accumulated. These are, however, central concerns for most people today. We live in the era of profilicity as the dominant identity technology. As is evident, all the collections of ideas, concerns, aesthetic experiences, desires, beliefs, etc. which are tied to the profile-based mode of identity curation are dependent and grounded in the technological developments our era has achieved. In Marxist terms, these developments at the level of how we think (about ourselves and others) presuppose developments in the forces of production. Likewise, in most of the Western world, no youngsters would concern themselves with who their families will arrange them in marriage with. These preoccupations belong to an era that has passed – to a mode of social intercourse humanity has overcome. This is a central component of historical materialism – the “law of development of human history” which Engels’s eulogy tells us Marx discovers. It is pithily formulated in the famous 1859 preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."[1] Ideological Institutions and False Consciousness The ideas that come to dominate a form of life do not exist in a transcendental realm. They are, instead, embodied materially through institutions and people. The influence these institutions hold varies. Their purpose, however, is the same: to sustain the consent of the masses (the subaltern) for the dominant order. They are tasked with ensuring the smooth reproduction of the current mode of life. In being the dominant institutions that pervade people’s everyday lives, they don’t simply get us to consent (which implies a conscious act of acceptance) but shape our spontaneous and common-sense worldviews to such an extent that we are unable to recognize, with the exception of those grand moments of rupture called ‘events’ in the history of philosophy, the conditioned and implanted character of our thoughts. Like the slaves in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are deeply unaware of the structures which contain the horizon of how we view reality. Plato could not have been more correct in emphasizing the painful character of the hypothetical cave’s escapee. It is not easy to have our notions of reality so easily overturned – to have our desires, beliefs, aesthetic experiences, etc. demolished. Like the escaped slave, who painfully needs to readjust their eyes, the overcoming of bourgeois ideology is a painful process – not a spontaneous and immediate ‘moment’. When our conditions of life are so systematically pervaded by lies and manipulations, all aimed at preventing us from rocking the boat, truth is painful. Truth is dangerous. The quest for truth has always had, as W. E. B. Dubois notes, “an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent, [but] nevertheless, men strive to know.” From the killing of Socrates to the killing of King, class society has shown its proclivity to fight back viciously when threatened by the truth tellers. This was, once again, already prophetically described by Plato’s allegory. Capitalism "is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself... Reality [needs to be] turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Capitalist ideology is as capable of accepting truth as vampires are of consuming garlic. Truth, which almost always stands on the side of the masses, is its Achilles heel. Shift in the Dominant Ideological Apparatuses The institutions that disseminate and enculturate us into bourgeois ideology, however, don’t all play an equal role. Some are far more influential than others. In the medieval world the church was, without a doubt, the “dominant Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA). In the transition to the modern world, as Louis Althusser notes, “the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.” Schools would come to replace the church as the institutional cornerstone of bourgeois ideology – the most dominant force for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony. In some ways this is still the case. It is in the universities, for instance, where the ideas trafficked by popular culture are first developed in their utmost coherence. It is impossible to conceive of ‘wokeism’, today’s dominant form of liberal cultural intercourse, without the laying of its ideological foundations decades ago in the academy with the CIA manufactured compatible left. The ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ so popularly debated in TV late-night roundtable discussions is far from being rooted in the communist tradition. Quite the opposite, that which today is called communism by the rightist pundits was explicitly produced to challenge Marxism. They were tasked with the role of being ‘radical recuperators,’ as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. Their job was (and is) to recuperate dissenting attitudes in the masses, especially young people, into the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. As Michael Parenti correctly observed, these ABC (Anything But Class) theorists are tasked with developing “conceptual schemas that mute Marxism’s class analysis.” However, in the last decade a new ideological terrain has obtained the dominant position within bourgeois hegemony: social media. The average American today spends around two to three hours on social media. While for a select few it might just be filled with innocent pictures of cute cats, for the vast majority of people social media plays a role akin to a technological polis – a place where the battle of ideas, or better yet, the dissemination of the dominant ideas, occurs. While schools might still create the ideological foundation people are enculturated into, they often find themselves unable to comment on pressing issues of the day (with the exception, of course, of universities). Through social media, on the other hand, one encounters nonstop active manipulation on on-going events, with its scope and consistency far outweighing the influence university discussions on political affairs might have. Its impact, however, cannot simply be understood through quantitative metrics. Qualitatively, these social medias have revolutionized how we create our identities. As I have previously written, "We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those ‘users’ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which don’t are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these ‘social validation feedback loops’ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are ‘seen as being seen’. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio’s book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day." Social Media, Profilicity, and Ideological Manipulation The potential for ideological manipulation brought about by the emergence of profilicity is, in some ways, far more potent than ever before. Following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, when 68 thousand bot accounts were used to make the imperialist narrative viral on twitter, I did a case study of how social media manipulation was used to legitimize the coup. I wrote: "The imperialist usage of bots and fake accounts engender an artificial general peer which functions as the condition for the possibility of imperialism’s control of a real one. This is because, at a certain nodal point, when the fake accounts and booster bots make something trend, the artificiality of the general peer’s reaction loses its artificial character, a real-people composed general peer picks up the baton from there and glazes the reaction with an ‘organic’ and ‘spontaneous’ vestment. In the age of profilicity, imperialism’s ability to control general peers is an indispensable tool for the attainment of its ends." Regardless of how powerful the armed forces of an empire are, if it is not able to hegemonize the discourse on historical and contemporary events, its legitimacy – both nationally and internationally – will totter and make it susceptible to being overthrown. Firms like CLS Strategies, along with the complicit Silicon Valley social media monopolies, function as indispensable tools of capitalist-imperialism in the age of profilicity. At a time when identity is constructed through the curation of profiles mediated by second-order observation and general peer powered social validation feedback loops, the ability to manipulate general peers amounts to the unprecedented capacity of capital and the state to control what people think. Additionally, the abstract character of this general peer conceals the manipulation itself. People construct their profile identities on the basis of how they would like to be seen as being seen, but the general peer doing the seeing has its eyes filtered through parental control imperialist glasses. How an event will be seen is determined by them – fake accounts will be made and boosted, dissenting accounts will be censored. This condition is depicted well in an old Soviet joke where a Russian and an American diplomat meet: the American asks “what are you here for,” the Russian replies “to learn about American propaganda techniques,” the American says, “what propaganda,” and the Russian replies “exactly.” Censorship is an integral component working in conjunction with controlling what is seen through the usage of bots and other forms of boosting pro-establishment narratives. On all major social media platforms (yes, even on Elon Musk’s so-called free speech loving ‘X’), those accounts with substantial following that challenge the imperialist narrative on key issues are often outright banned.[2] It is a very interestingly functioning tech-polis, where certain speakers are given a microphone to speak over others, others are muted or lowered to a virtually inaudible volume, while others are poof, disappeared completely. The Institute I work for is not unacquainted with these censorship tactics. Seven of our tiktok accounts, the platform we received hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views in, have been outright banned. As Edward Smith, Noah Khrachvik, and myself have previously noted, "Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech—a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher…" [In the capitalist-imperialist mode of life], the freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth. The power to control the flow of ideas through these various means makes social media, as the dominant (or, at least, one of the dominant) ideological terrains of our day, virtually (pun intended) unmatched. What Should Communists Do? Some on the communist left often denigrate the role of social media work. ‘It’s just online, it has no bearing in reality,’ is a frequently expressed sentiment. Sometimes online ideological work is contrasted dis-favorably to protesting in the streets. Those in the streets are said to be actually doing something, while those who are online are not. There is a rational kernel to this overall incorrect sentiment. It is true that the anti-social characteristics of the ‘identity socialists’ (as I call them in The Purity Fetish), those which spend all their days online starting twitter beefs and splits, calls for a spiritual rekindling with reality. They must ‘touch grass,’ as the expression goes. But it is incorrect, on this basis, to denigrate online work as a whole, or to consider it ‘unreal’ in relationship to protests. Social media has, as I argued previously, developed itself into one of the most important ideological terrains of our day. It is a field where, as Gramsci would say, the war of position must be waged. No matter how much censorship, shadow banning, and manipulation occurs in this ideological field, it is still one of the most important places communists must participate in, waging the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. To ignore online work today is the equivalent of the French revolutionaries ignoring the institution of the church in their struggles against feudal absolutism. There is a key difference here, of course. Whereas the church in its heyday as the dominant ideological apparatus had to be fought from without, today social media, as the dominant ideological terrain, presents an internal field of struggle. The war of position on social media, necessary though it might be, is, of course, not sufficient. If every twitter (excuse me, ‘X’) account followed the Midwestern Marx Institute, or any other organization on the communist left, that does not mean we are anywhere near to grabbing power. Real, in-life organizing cannot be avoided. Organizing in your workplaces and communities continues to be the most important thing one can do. It is that baseline work that Silicon Valley cannot ‘ban’ you from. To wage a successful war of positions on social media requires mediums through which the people convinced to our side online can get involved in organizing in their communities. People must be ‘shuffled’ from simply agreeing with these ideas online to helping build organizations on the ground – to building working class, counterhegemonic institutions. The war of positions online must be conjoined with preparing the material and institutional foundations (i.e., parties and mass organizations) for the war of maneuver on the ground. Of course, just because these organizations would be ‘on the ground’ does not permit them to avoid the war of positions online. Online War of Positions What is the best way to wage the war of positions online? Is condemning everyone we don’t perfectly agree with as being whatever buzzword is popular the way to go? Clearly, this purity fetish mode of engagement, as I have argued before, leaves you surrounded only by those whom you already agree with. You reduce the pedagogic and recruiting tasks of the communist to someone who just sings to the choir. The battle of ideas, the war of positions, is fundamentally rooted in convincing. You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you. Talking down to working people with middle class patronizing attitudes is quite literally the opposite of what a successful war of positions looks like. You do not want the HR or DEI managerial departments to be the first thing someone thinks of when they speak to you. Quite the opposite. We live under a moribund capitalist mode of life. That will be reflected in some of the spontaneous common-sense worldviews of the people this mode of life produces. We must be patient and flexible, not snappy and rigid. Our goal is to convince. To win the hearts and minds of people. The first thing which must be recognized, then, is that any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will fail. The starting point (i.e., the spontaneous worldview) people have differs – often more or less depending on certain regional, generational, and other differences. We must take these into account in all conversations. But how should we start? What should we look for? Well, Gramsci is here perhaps our most important teacher. If I want to get from A to B, I cannot simply teleport directly from A to B. Maybe the technology will come around one day that allows me to do so. For now, if I want to get from A to B, I need to find a point of contact, a road, or series of roads, that when connected in my passage allows me to arrive to my destination. The process of convincing is no different. If there is no point of contact, there can be no ‘winning over’ of someone to our side. The process of ‘winning over,’ like the process of getting from A to B, is a voyage, an undertaking, or, in short, a process. It does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. In order for this process to begin, the point of contact must be found. Every spontaneous worldview the masses hold, deeply though they might be entrenched in various forms of bourgeois ideology, must nonetheless contain some rational kernels, ‘points of contact’ we can locate and start the voyage through. This is, for Gramsci, the essence of the war of positions. The task for communists, for the intellectual leadership of the working class movement, is finding, in the incoherent, ambiguous and spontaneous common-sense understandings and feelings of the masses, those rational kernels which can be disarticulated from their current worldview, and rearticulated towards Marxism. (See my chapter with J.P. Reed in the Elgars anthology on Gramsci for more). Concretely, how does this look? Well, for instance, in the U.S., the vast majority of people agree with the values of the Declaration of Independence. However, the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, etc., have been unrealized for the mass of people under the dominant order. How can these egalitarian and emancipatory values be actualized under a system that produces, on the one hand, enormous wealth controlled by the few, and on the other, immense misery, debt, and oppression for the many? It is impossible. The universal ideals of the capitalist class have always been limited to their class – it has never been, from the start, anything more than the liberty of capital to exploit, and the sham ‘democracy’ of the capitalists to pick the political puppets that rule over the mass of people. This is why, as I have noted before, "In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, [in the 1820s and 30s] thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the Jeffersonian ideals of the Declaration of Independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion… Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the Declaration of Independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit [can only] be carried forth today by socialists and communists." So, here we have an example of a point of contact, a rational kernel, within our people’s common sense that can, and has historically been attempted to be, disarticulated from its bourgeois worldview origins, and rearticulated towards various socialist ones. This is an example that has been used since the 1820s. But, how, in the age of profilicity, can we specifically do this through social media? The essential elements remain the same. Find the individuals and institutions which play the most influential roles in shaping the common sense of various sections of the American masses. Within the worldviews they craft, find the rational kernels, the points of contact, you can establish a common ground with in discussions with working class viewers and readers of these ideologues. Always start the discussions with those points of contact – the ideas within their worldviews that can be dislocated from the worldview itself and used as a pathway for the new outlook. These rational kernels, of course, will differ with different sources. For instance, some weeks ago I commented on a video from Andrew Tate, the man that was once the most viral person on the internet. This is someone which holds great ideological influence in our societies, specifically in the youth, which embodies the future of any revolutionary project. The video I comment on is one where Tate describes wage labor as a form of wage slavery. This is, for Marxists, clearly a point of contact, a ‘rational kernel’ within the Tateian worldview. On the basis of this point of contact, I develop upon the often politically ambiguous history of the critique of wage slavery (for instance, while being a pillar of the socialist critique of capitalism, it was also a central component of the southern planter’s defense of chattel slavery, which they held was less evil and nefarious than wage slavery). Then, on the basis of the agreement with Tate of the slavish character of wage labor, I develop a critique of how this understanding is stifled by the Tateian worldview that had just formulated it. For Tate, the critique of wage slavery and the ‘matrix’ is not the basis for a collective emancipatory project. It is not rooted in a scientific, Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy. Hence, it is completely unaware of the internal laws of motion and contradictions which push the system towards its own destruction. He is unaware of the proletariat’s role as the gravedigger of the mode of life that produced them as a class. Perhaps it is less of a question of ignorance on Tate’s part, and more one of an awareness of his class interests as a part of the (often mocked) new bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is the same, a stifled understanding of that phenomenon we have gravitated to as a ‘point of contact,’ and an individualized formulation of ‘escaping the matrix’ through getting rich yourself (a gig that through ‘Hustlers University’ he greatly profits from). Tate did not create this form of radical recuperation, and neither is he the only one that preaches it today. It is central to what Dubois called the American Assumption, the notion that through hard work one can lift themselves up and become rich. The difference is that in the 19th and 20th century this ideology occurred within the confines of a direct apologetics of US capitalism. Post-1848 capitalism enters a distinctly reactionary stage, where even the veneer of progressivism that dominated the previous period is undone. In this post-1848 world, As Georg Lukács long ago noted, the defense of capitalism has to, in one form or another, present itself as an “indirect apologetics”. The superficial and culturalist critique of an often misidentified ‘capitalism’ (or matrix) has become an essential component for acquiescence to the system the critique takes as its object of critique. What has occurred in the Tate commentary is precisely what Gramsci expects of us in the war of positions. We located the rational kernel and, on the basis of a superior understanding of the phenomenon, dislocated it from the Tateian worldview and towards a Marxist one. In the process we showed the role Tate plays as a radical recuperador for the ‘matrix’ he, in a very sophist-like manner, charges people to help ‘escape’. After this video came out hordes of the liberals who think a hammer and sickle in their social media bios makes them communists came after us for ‘platforming’ Tate and lending credence to his ideas. This criticism, of course, is devoid of any semblance of the Marxist understanding of the war of positions. Neither the convincing of Tate himself, nor the sharing of his ideas, were the purpose of the video. What the video achieves (or at least attempts to), is quite literally the opposite – to be as efficient as possible in bringing people away from Tate and towards Marxism. One can argue that I failed in this enterprise, that a better job could have been done. But not deny, however, that this is the best route for combatting ideological opponents. It produces a double whammy, a removal of a follower to your opponent and an addition of a follower to your revolutionary project. This is the same double effect the black proletariat’s general strike during the Civil War had (removing the productive base of the Southern economy while adding soldiered, spies, and workers to the Northern forces), allowing them to win the battle for the forces of human liberation. Tate is far from being the only individual we ought to be doing this with. At the Institute, every major pundit of the bourgeoisie, even those who present themselves as ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-Deep state’, receive this treatment. We have commented in like manner on figures all across the American bourgeois political spectrum, from David Packman to Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson. In each case we attempt, again, to find the point of contact (rational kernels) that can be dislocated from these worldviews and rearticulated towards Marxism. Engaging with these figures is also an excellent source for overcoming the algorithmic insularity that structures online spaces. People who wouldn’t encounter Marxist positions in their algorithms are opened to the possibility of this encounter when we discuss the ideologues that denizen their algorithms. People naturally want to make sense of the world around them. “All men by nature,” as Aristotle long ago noted, “desire to know.” No worldview is better capable of understanding the world, of helping people make sense of it, than Marxism. This is a task, therefore, which is often quite fruitful. That doesn’t mean, of course, that one doesn’t encounter zealots who religiously buy into these worldviews in dogmatic ways. But they are often the exception, especially amongst the youth. Most people are willing, if approached correctly, to accept the transition towards an outlook that helps them understand their surroundings a lot better – an outlook that, as the great Henry Winston teaches us, gives us vision even when our sight is lost. To succeed in this task requires getting our hands dirty; having the willingness to engage with some of the scummiest of the bourgeois ideologues in hopes, not of convincing them, but their working class listeners, that an alternative is not only possible, but necessary. This is the task at hand for communists willing to wage the war of positions on social media – one of the most important and influential ideological fields in the contemporary world. NOTES [1] My article on how this relationship of determination is not fatalistic: ‘Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor’. [2] One of the ways to work around it is through mass reporting, such as we have seen over the last few months from the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement. Without a doubt these forces have won the information war – largely thanks to the flood of stomach-twisting videos telling the truth about the Israeli genocidal campaign against Gaza. Like the banks we were told were ‘too big to fail,’ these imperialist narrative-challenging images were too popular and widespread to censor. While Silicon Valley has definitely censored the leading voices speaking out for Palestine, they have not succeeded in censoring the millions of relatively smaller accounts who have taken it upon themselves to document the truth and expose the elite’s lies. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024 Dear Malik, I am sitting here in bed with you in my arms. It is 11:59 PM, and you are fast asleep. Did you know you sleep talk? Yes at 21 months, you sleep talk. Sometimes you just chuckle and then roll to the other side, and other times you manage to touch my face and say “mama” while your eyes are closed. I am looking up at the ceiling fan and it’s lying perfectly still. Our vases are on the shelves- we’re not afraid of them falling. The windows are closed when we sleep. It gets chilly at night. Then you wake up to the sound of birds chirping at our window on our clean white sheets. We don’t hear anything except the birds here. You open your eyes and I am the first thing you see. If I am not there, you don’t panic, you just come to the living room and give me a hug. I couldn’t fall asleep like you, however. I was too busy holding you, and thinking of those who look like you, breathe like you, related to you. You are from a place where 21 month olds never sleep with messy hair. Your cousin told me he likes to comb it in case he never wakes up. “I want to die while looking nice” he said. You are from a place where 21 month olds do not sleep talk. They wake up multiple times at night afraid that the ceiling fan falls on them. You are from a place where no house has vases and the windows at night are always open. Leaving them closed will guarantee shattered glass. You are from a place where 21 month olds do not sleep on clean white sheets. Instead, they are buried in them. You are from a place where if 21 month olds wake up and do not find their mothers next to them- it is most likely they will never see her again. I do not know why I felt the need to tell you this. You won’t read this letter for a decade or two. But I wanted to remind you that the place you are from, despite the proximity of death, is a place worth remembering, worth loving, worth being proud of. To be from Gaza means that you are a child of extreme creativity. Did you know your older cousins can power a generator using just cooking oil? And your cousin Shahd knows how to crotchet the most beautiful dolls for you. A few weeks ago she made you a rabbit with overalls. You loved it. To be from Gaza means you know how to live life, often times because it is not guaranteed. It means you feel the beauty of our waters, and don’t mind sleeping on the fine hot sand. Children from Gaza don’t put on sunscreen- they don’t mind feeling the sun’s touch. To be from Gaza means seeing those who look like you perish in an instant. It means hearing the country where you live tell you that they deserve it. It means seeing the number of thousands of Palestinian children dead- and growing numb to it since we don’t hear their stories, know their names or see their photo collages on our screens. Instead, we just see them wrapped in bloody white sheets if they are lucky enough to even be whole when they die. But, my love, being from Gaza means you can understand deep love and deep hatred better than others. You understand that the talking heads’ hatred of you is not a reflection of you. Your humanity is in tact and your faith even stronger. Their’s is the one that is so deeply lost. Being from Gaza means you understand that the success of the Palestinian people, of your people, means the success of the down-trotted everywhere. From Ferguson, to Mexico, to Palestine- being from Gaza means you know that justice is the most important human pursuit a person can have. Even if they dehumanize you like they do to all other Black and brown folks, being from Gaza means you know that all walls and empires fall. Eventually. Our resilience is stronger than their hatred. Remember Gaza, for being from such a marvellous, beautiful, creative place means you understand that it is worth fighting for. Such a place can never die. I love you. Sincerely, Your mother AuthorThis article was produced by hebh jamal. Archives February 2024 2/16/2024 Planned BBC smear on UK Palestinians will rely on Israeli spy source By: Asa WinstanleyRead NowCiting Israeli “terror” allegations, the BBC plans to broadcast an attack on prominent British Palestinians in a television program presented by pro-Israel reporter John Ware. The Electronic Intifada has learned that the episode of Panorama is likely to be based partly on “confidential evidence” which has almost certainly been provided by Israeli spies. The BBC and Panorama declined to comment when asked a series of detailed questions about the forthcoming program. Panorama is the BBC’s flagship current affairs program. The episode is scheduled for 19 February and is titled “Hamas’ Secret Financial Empire.” Ware’s producer Leo Telling sent out letters last month to at least four prominent British Palestinians and Muslims, offering an opportunity to respond to allegations raised in the episode. Ware and Telling were also behind a discredited 2019 episode of the show which alleged “anti-Semitism” in Labour, the UK’s main opposition party, during the leadership of Palestine solidarity campaigner Jeremy Corbyn. The producer wrote that they “intend to broadcast a 30-minute Panorama documentary primarily about Hamas,” the Palestinian resistance group, and “how support for Hamas has also grown beyond Gaza, including in the UK.” Addressing Anas Altikriti, a prominent British Iraqi campaigner and broadcaster, producer Telling asserted that the program “may also include evidence of the support you have voiced for Hamas, which as you know is designated as a terror group by the UK government.” As “evidence” of such “support” for “terror,” the producer cited four posts to X (formerly Twitter) by Altikriti, where he called into question some of Israel’s most high-profile atrocity propaganda about the Palestinian military assault on 7 October. These Israeli narratives have been widely discredited and called into question across the world. While the producer conceded that “there is currently no evidence (at least, of which we are aware) that 40 babies had been beheaded,” he claimed to have “gathered evidence” of other crimes. Telling’s equivocal wording comes despite the fact that the “40 babies” claim has been definitively proven to be a total fabrication, and not simply an unproven claim. Despite Telling trying to give the impression of new evidence, the claims he makes in the letters about Hamas fighters’ alleged behavior on 7 October strongly resembles already discredited and debunked Israeli claims about the alleged killing of babies and alleged sexual violence. “Babies were shot in the head at very close range,” “women were raped and sexually molested” and “breasts were cut from women” the producer claimed. But even official Israeli government figures do not support such claims. The database of names of “Victims of October 7” maintained by Israeli newspaper Haaretz lists the death of one baby that day: 10-month-old Mila Cohen. According to press reports, Cohen was killed by a stray Palestinian bullet fired in the course of breaking into a settlement home in order to take captives – and not executed as claimed by the BBC. Furthermore, the graphic Israeli claim the producer put forward about alleged mutilation of a women’s breasts very closely resembles a discredited, fiction-like Israeli account put forward in a now-infamous New York Times piece from December by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jeffrey Gettleman. As my colleague Ali Abunimah explained last month: “The article is an emotionally manipulative fraud aimed at justifying or distracting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” Central to the fraudulent Times story was the claim that an Israeli woman called Gal Abdush was raped and killed on 7 October. But Abdush’s family – no friends of the Palestinians – have denied this, insisting there’s is no evidence the woman was raped and saying they were misled by the Times. Gettleman’s article has sparked growing dissent within the Times newsroom. An episode of the paper’s high-profile podcast The Daily based on his reporting was scrapped before broadcast “amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject,” The Intercept revealed. Despite such loud Israeli claims about “mass rape” on 7 October, not a single alleged victim has come forward. The Electronic Intifada Podcast’s livestream and other independent media sources have repeatedly debunked Israel’s “mass rape” story as atrocity propaganda. A similar letter went out from the Panorama producer to Azzam Tamimi, a prominent British Palestinian academic and broadcaster, who has written two books about Hamas. The producer similarly accused Tamimi of “support you have voiced for Hamas.” Instead of tweets, Telling cited two public talks Tamimi gave in November. In those talks, Tamimi emphasized that Hamas are “a Muslim movement. They train their members on Islamic values before they train them on resistance tactics. And they are told that in warfare in Islam, you don’t ever harm noncombatants.” Tamimi accused Israel of lying propaganda. He said that, “the Israeli story [about 7 October] that was marketed to the Westerners was mostly lies. They claimed that Hamas went in, killed civilians and beheaded babies. And it’s nonsense.” As well as promoting Israeli propaganda narratives, the BBC producer’s letters also twisted basic facts. Putting the program’s allegations to Altikriti, the producer described one of the campaigner’s tweets as a response to “a post by UK women.” Yet the tweet Telling cites was actually a response to a pro-Israel lobby group, We Believe in Israel, which was spreading the Israeli propaganda about rape. The group is actually run by a man, Luke Akehurst, and the post in question does not quote women. After another similar post to X by @Israel – an account run by the Israeli foreign ministry – Altikriti had responded that they were “murdering liars.” Yet in his letter, producer Telling misleadingly described this as “a post by Israeli women,” neglecting to mention that it was an official government account. These inaccuracies do not bode well for the integrity of the upcoming BBC program. The Electronic Intifada has spoken to a third campaigner, a British Palestinian, who has received a similar letter from the same producer. They asked not to be named, citing potential pre-broadcast legal action. The Electronic Intifada also understands that a fourth recipient of the letters from Telling cited “the Israeli authorities” providing “confidential evidence” against that person. The context of the letter’s citation of “confidential evidence” suggests that its ultimate source was the Shin Bet, Israel’s local spy agency, notorious for its assassination and torture of Palestinians. Ware has a long history of promoting the Israeli military and intelligence establishment’s narratives and of relying on Israeli spies as his main sources. On Monday Altikriti responded to Panorama on X, writing that “I have no idea,” why the BBC were coming to him (a British Muslim campaigner) to comment on a program about Hamas. “There used to be a time when the BBC’s Panorama … shaped events and public opinion,” Altikriti wrote. “But for a while now, most of its outings seem to be more befitting of CBeebies” – a TV channel for young children. He said that he would not be taking the BBC’s request for comment seriously and described Ware as “discredited.” Tamimi also posted to X, quoting Altikriti’s post and writing: “I too received a similar request from the BBC Panorama team. John Ware is a discredited journalist who does not deserve attention.” “Entirely misleading” John Ware and Leo Telling were also behind a much criticized episode of Panorama in 2019. “Is Labour Antisemitic?” seemed determined to scupper Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s chances in the then-upcoming election. The episode relied almost entirely on Israel lobby sources, often without even disclosing the sources’ agendas or names. In one particularly contentious part of the program, Panorama claimed that two left-wing Labour activists – summoned by party officials for questioning as part of the “anti-Semitism” witch hunt – had asked Jewish party official Ben Westerman, “Are you from Israel?” Panorama did not seek the activists’ side of the story, or even name them. Rica Bird and Helen Marks – both Jewish women – stridently denied Westerman’s account, and even produced an audio recording which verified their version of events. Bird later told Al Jazeera that Westerman’s claim was “an absolute lie.” In a 14,000-wordessaylater posted to the website of Israel lobby publicationFathom, Ware stood by Westerman as “honest” but speculated that he may have “misremembered.” An independent barrister tapped by Labour to investigate claims of racism in the party described the episode as “objectively entirely misleading.” Martin Forde told Middle East Eye last year that “I had a fuller picture [than Panorama] because I interviewed not only some of the participants in the programme; I also interviewed those who hadn’t participated in the programme from the alternative faction.” Forde was referring to the fact that the episode relied heavily on the partisan claims of pro-Israel lobby group the Jewish Labour Movement, ignoring pro-Corbyn groups like Jewish Voice for Labour. Eight out of the 10 anonymous Jewish speakers in the episode claiming to have been the victim of “anti-Semitism” in the party were actually current or recent senior JLM figures. The very first speaker was Ella Rose, who was both former JLM director and former officer in the Israeli embassy itself. But Ware and Panorama’s history of relying on Israeli sources has a much longer history. Back in 2006, Ware fronted another Panorama attack on British Muslims and Palestinians, titled “Faith, Hate and Charity.” Its primary target was Interpal, a British charity focused on aid to Palestinians. The episode posited a global Muslim conspiracy, led by Hamas, to use various charities around the world “to avoid being labeled terrorists.” One of the episode’s primary sources was Reuven Paz, a former senior Shin Bet officer. An investigation launched by the Charity Commission – the British government’s regulator – soon after Ware’s broadcast ultimately concluded there was no evidence of the documentary’s central claim of an Interpal “terror” link. The BBC also had to apologize and pay undisclosed libel damages after accepting the program had defamed Waseem Yaqub, former general manager of Islamic Relief UK. After the program aired, the Muslim Council of Britain called Ware “an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist.” Israeli spy agencies have for many years falsely accused Palestinians in Britain of being “Hamas affiliates.” No comment Telling was a producer on the 2019 Panorama episode but is now executive producer on this episode about Hamas – a promotion perhaps awarded after he helped besmirch Corbyn. As well as putting the main points of this article to them before publication, John Ware, Leo Telling and the BBC were all asked about the nature of their contact or collaboration with Mossad, Shin Bet, Unit 8200 or other Israeli spy agencies in the making of this upcoming program. A spokesperson for the BBC declined to comment: “We do not comment on investigations.” Leo Telling also declined to comment. John Ware declined to comment on the forthcoming program and therefore did not deny collaboration with Israeli spy agencies. But he did deny being “discredited,” and asserted that his 2019 Panorama episode had been “vindicated in court proceedings.” He did not deny neglecting the basic journalistic duty to seek Bird and Marks’ side of the story. But his Fathomessay alleged that Westerman “could not remember” the women’s names. He also asserted that “Mr. Forde’s criticism was itself objectively entirely misleading” and pointed to another 14,000-word essay on the Fathom website. Finally, he denied that his 2006 program had relied heavily on the Shin Bet. AuthorAsa Winstanley This article was produced by Asa Winstanley. Archives February 2024 2/16/2024 "In The War Of Propaganda, It Is Very Difficult To Defeat The United States"By: Caitlin JohnstoneRead Now
One under-appreciated moment from Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin came after Putin implied that NATO powers were behind the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. Carlson responded by asking why Putin wouldn’t present evidence of this to the world, so as to “win a propaganda victory.”
“In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media,” Putin replied, adding, “The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.” I don’t know about the specific nature of his Nord Stream insinuations, but Putin is definitely correct about the strength of the American propaganda machine. Of all the fronts one could possibly choose to challenge the United States on, propaganda is surely the least favorable. The US empire has by far the most sophisticated and effective propaganda machine ever to have existed, operating with such complexity that most people don’t even know it exists.
In a “fact-checking” article titled “5 lies and 1 truth from Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson”, Politico Europe labels the above claim a lie on the basis that Russia has state-run media whereas US media is privately owned.
“The biggest news media companies are privately owned and operate without direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not willing to collaborate.” At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.” EU4FreeMedia is a European Union narrative management operation set up to help integrate “Russian journalists in exile” into leading European publications, ie to provide maximum media amplification to Russian expats who have a bone to pick with the current government in Moscow. It is run with participation from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded media op under the umbrella of the US propaganda services umbrella USAGM.
I really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in the west.
There’s an old joke that goes like this: A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other. “Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American. “To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet. “What American propaganda?” asks the American. “Exactly,” the Soviet replies. In reality the nature of the US-centralized empire allows it to run a massive, nonstop international propaganda campaign through mass media platforms which are mostly privately owned. A diverse network of factors feeds into this dynamic which I’ve detailed in my unusually lengthy article “15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists”, but the gist of it is that anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end. The fact that these mass media outlets look independent but function as propaganda organs for the US empire allows its propaganda to fly into people’s minds without triggering any gag reflex of critical thinking or skepticism, which wouldn’t be the case if people knew those outlets were feeding them propaganda. Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.
The invisibility of US propaganda is further aided by the subtle methods by which it is administered, which we’ve seen exemplified beautifully in the coverage of Israel’s ongoing US-backed mass atrocity in Gaza.
In an article titled “Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows,” The Intercept reports that a review of 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza found that the outlets consistently used word choices which served Israeli information interests. “Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around,” The Intercept’s Adam Johnson and Othman Ali report. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” This is the sort of manipulation that a casual news consumer wouldn’t notice. Unless you’re on alert for bias and are keeping track of what words are and aren’t being used where, you’re probably not going to notice the absence of emotionally-charged words when reporting on Palestinians who are killed by Israelis.
This type of slant shows up in all sorts of ways, like today’s headlines about the IDF killing a six year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab along with her family. Reliable propaganda organs of the empire like CNN, The New York Times and the BBC have respectively gone with the headlines “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car under Israeli fire”, “Missing 6-Year-Old and Rescue Team Found Dead in Gaza, Aid Group Says,” and “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”. In contrast, Al Jazeera reports on the same story with the headline “Body of 6-year-old killed in ‘deliberate’ Israeli fire found after 12 days,” and Middle East Eye goes with “Hind Rajab: Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped under Israeli fire for days”. It’s easy to spot the difference when they’re placed next to each other like I just did, but unless you’re really watching out for it and have a good background on what’s going on here you’re likely to miss what’s happening. If you’re like most people and don’t read past the headline, you’d never know from the imperial media headlines that the child was killed by Israel, and you’d certainly never know about her terrified phone call for help while trapped by IDF fire and surrounded by the bodies of her dead relatives. If you look to the legacy media and its algorithmically-boosted online iterations for information about the world, you went one more day with a distorted perspective of what’s happening in Gaza. The western press constantly write headlines like this when trying to minimize the impact of someone’s death at the hands of a party they sympathize with, particularly with regard to Palestinians. Last month the BBC published an article titled “Record number of civilians hurt by explosives in 2023”, as though they were mishandling fireworks or something instead of being actively killed by Israeli bombs. The BBC later revised their atrocious headline, but revised it in the opposite direction, replacing “Record number” with “High number” to further minimize the impact. Contrast this with the BBC’s headlines when it’s reporting on Ukrainians killed by Russian airstrikes . Here’s a recent one titled “Ukraine war: Russian air strikes claim five lives in Kyiv and Mykolaiv”, and another titled “Ukraine war: Baby killed in Russian strike on Kharkiv hotel”. Got it? In Ukraine people die from bombs because Russia launched Russian airstrikes and killed them very Russianly, whereas in Gaza people get hurt by explosions because they got too close to some type of explosive material.
Last week The Washington Post ran an opinion piece titled “Is America complicit in Israel’s bloody war in Gaza?”, which is already a ridiculously skewed headline because the answer is self-evidently yes — implying that there’s any question of this skews things in America’s favor. But even this was too much for the Post’s editors, who re-titled the piece “Has the Israel-Gaza war changed your feelings about being American?” to keep Americans from thinking too hard about Israel’s bloody war in Gaza and their country’s complicity in it.
In a Wednesday article titled “Biden Tries Again With Arab Americans in Michigan”, New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman wrote the absolutely insane line “The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel seems to be affecting Biden’s election prospects.” And then The New York Times actually printed it. Read that line again. She’s saying Arab Americans are rejecting Biden because of the October 7 Hamas attack, which is of course absurd; they’re rejecting Biden because he’s backing a genocide in Gaza. She wrote this nonsensical line because in the New York Times you can’t say things like “Israel’s genocide in Gaza” or “the president’s facilitation of crimes against humanity”, and you won’t be hired if you’re the sort of person who’d be inclined to. Instead we’re pretending that for some inexplicable reason Arab Americans are just hopping mad at Biden because October 7 happened. But again, these little manipulations fly under the radar if you’re not on the lookout for them. Such is the brilliance of the US empire’s invisible propaganda machine. That’s why it’s very difficult to win a propaganda war against the United States, that’s why westerners have been so successfully manipulated into accepting a status quo of endless war, ecocide, injustice and exploitation, and that’s why the world looks the way it looks right now. Author
This article was produced by Caitlin Johnstone.
ArchivesFebruary 2024 2/16/2024 The International Court of Justice Censures Israel for Its Genocidal War. By: Vijay PrashadRead NowOn January 26, 2024, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released their 29-page order that found “plausible” (paragraph 54) evidence that Israel was conducting a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. The court intervened in that war due to South Africa’s application that Israel had violated its obligations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). South Africa came to the ICJ two months and three weeks into Israel’s brutal military bombardment against the Palestinians. The 84-page indictment from South Africa, presented to the ICJ on December 29, 2023, included statements made by Israel’s high officials calling for the total annihilation of the “human savages” in Gaza and included details of how Israel was acting on such statements. The ICJ agreed with South Africa’s claims and called upon Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts” that are genocidal (paragraph 78). The order is not a final verdict since there was no trial. These are “provisional measures.” It would take the ICJ several years to adjudicate whether Israel is actually committing genocide against the Palestinians. The ICJ did not directly call for a ceasefire or a “cessation of hostilities” (as it had done in March 2022, when it ordered Russia to “suspend the military operations”). However, it is hard to read paragraph 78 in any other way than that it calls on Israel to silence its guns. Twenty years ago, the ICJ studied the building of a wall around the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In July 2004, the ICJ found that “the construction of the wall by Israel… is contrary to international law.” There has been a relentless battle over the jurisdiction of the ICJ to rule over Israel’s behavior in the OPT, including in 2022 when a legal opinion was sought by several states over the finding of a UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry chaired by the South African judge Navi Pillay. Pillay’s report found “reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli government’s de-facto annexation policies.” Israel contested the ICJ’s jurisdiction in the case. Now, with this charge of genocide, the court established its jurisdiction and Israel accepted it by participating in the proceedings. Provisional Measures The ICJ was set up by the United Nations as a dispute settlement mechanism between states. South Africa took its dispute with Israel to the ICJ, accusing Israel of violating an international treaty. Having looked at the dispute, the ICJ found for South Africa and offered “provisional measures” to defend the rights of the Palestinian people. The order by the ICJ has no appeal. It is final. The ICJ gave Israel one month to show that it has taken measures to protect the Palestinians. If Israel either fails to respond or does not respond satisfactorily, then the ICJ will send its order to the UN Security Council (UNSC) for enforcement. The UNSC will be bound by the UN Charter to enforce the order. Israel has already rejected the order. That means that the order will be sent, a month from now, to the UNSC. At that point, it will be interesting to see how the three veto-power Global North countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) will react to the order. On January 25, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson Vedant Patel said that the U.S. government believes that “the allegations that Israel is committing genocide [are] unfounded.” Patel said that Israel should “take feasible steps, additional steps to prevent civilian harm,” but that there is no genocide being conducted by Israel. This will set up a showdown at the UNSC. Algeria, a member of the UNSC at this time, has asked for a meeting to be held to discuss the verdict and to have the UNSC call for an immediate ceasefire. The Reputation of the Court Alongside the ICJ order, Judge Xue Hanqin wrote a separate opinion, in which she noted that 60 years ago, the governments of Ethiopia and Liberia had brought South Africa to the ICJ for its role in South-West Africa (now Namibia). The ICJ, she wrote, rejected the case, and this “denial of justice gave rise to strong indignation” against the ICJ “severely tarnishing its reputation.” Judge Xue came to the ICJ in 2010, and—due to her seriousness of purpose—was elected to be the court’s vice president in 2018. In March 2022, Judge Xue voted against the provisional order that called upon Russia to suspend its military operation in Ukraine (by the time of that order, just over a thousand civilians had been killed in the war, whereas by the time the ICJ took up the Israeli bombing, more than 25,000 civilians had been killed). In the case of Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinians, Judge Xue raised the issue of erga omnes (“towards all”), which implies that this is a case where Israel’s actions harm the world community and Israel must be impelled to stop its war on behalf of all of humanity. “For a protected group such as the Palestinian people,” Judge Xue wrote, “it is least controversial that the international community has a common interest in its protection.” There are three Asian judges on the court, with Judge Xue joined by Judge Iwasawa Yuji of Japan and Judge Dalveer Bhandari of India. Judge Bhandari has had a distinguished career in India on the Delhi High Court (1991-2004), on the Bombay High Court (2004-2005), and on the Supreme Court (2005-2012) before he was elevated to the ICJ. Only five judges appended their opinion to the order, one of whom was Judge Bhandari. In his opinion, Judge Bhandari went over the legal merits of South Africa’s case, but made sure to put on the record his view that other international laws than the Convention on Genocide apply to this war and that all parties must adhere to these laws. While the order itself did not directly call for a cessation of hostilities, Judge Bhandari did so. “All participants in the conflict,” he wrote, “must ensure that all fighting and hostilities come to an immediate halt and that remaining hostages captured on 7 October 2023 are unconditionally released forthwith.” It is likely that Judge Bhandari affixed his own opinion to the court in order to register the necessity of asking directly for such a direct ceasefire. The Reaction of Israel and Its Allies Israel’s reaction to the order by the ICJ was characteristic. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that the ICJ was an “antisemitic court” and that it “does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people.” Strangely, Ben Gvir said that the ICJ was “silent during the Holocaust.” The Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its allies against European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and Communists took place between late 1941 and May 1945 (when the Soviet Red Army liberated the prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof). The ICJ was established in June 1945, a month after the Holocaust ended, and it began work in April 1946. To try and delegitimize the Court by saying that it remained “silent” when it was not in existence, and then to use that false statement to call the ICJ an “antisemitic court” shows that Israel has no answer to the merits of the ICJ order. What is interesting is that the Israeli judge at the ICJ, Aharon Barak, joined the majority of the judges in a vote of 16-1 to say that Israel is not allowing in humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, and that Israel must “prevent and punish the incitement of genocide.” It is hard for Israeli high officials to consider Barak “antisemitic” or to disparage his credentials. Barak has held high positions in Israel, such as Attorney General (1975-1978), Justice on the Supreme Court of Israel (1978-1995), and President of the Supreme Court (1995-2006). Barak did vote against the claim that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide by the Israeli government. “Genocide,” he wrote in his own opinion, “is more than just a word for me; it represents calculated destruction and human behavior at its very worst. It is the gravest possible accusation and is deeply intertwined with my personal life experience.” While Barak, the Israeli nominee on the ICJ for this case, did not vote on the accusation that genocide is being conducted in Gaza, Judge Barak nonetheless agreed that there was “incitement of genocide.” The difference between the two hangs on a thread, haunted by the ghost of the dead 30,000 Palestinians (nearly half of them children). Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in trouble politically within Israel, welcomed the fact that the ICJ did not order a ceasefire and then said that his War Cabinet will continue to prosecute its war. This spin on the verdict is implausible. It will not convince anyone, least of all the judges of the ICJ who have found the accusation of genocide “plausible” and have called upon Israel to stop its genocidal war. Author Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives February 2024 2/16/2024 Eyes on the South: Low intensity conflict & escalation-risk in Lebanon. By: Sammy IsmailRead NowHezbollah fighter, on border guard duty, sitting astride a motorbike blocking the pathway of an Israeli Merkava tank that had broken through the electric fence into Lebanese territories, the photo was taken by Al-Manar correspondent Ali Sheaib, Jalet al-Mahafer, 2022 (Illustrated by: Mahdi Rtail, Al Mayadeen English) More than 100 days have passed since the Al-Aqsa Flood came crashing down on the colonial outpost of US imperialism in West Asia; the tide has been only gaining momentum since. The war quickly spilled over beyond the territories of Occupied Palestine to include south Lebanon most notably. Revisiting Johan Galtung's Conflict Theory, this paper will borrow theoretical concepts introduced by Galtung to analyze and structure the Al-Aqsa Flood. Galtung introduces a set of simplistic classifications and twin criteria that bring burgeoning conflicts into perspective and allow for a formal analysis. The two classifications that I chose to expound on are Scale and Intensity. Scale will be useful to lay out the overarching context to then zero in on Lebanon which is the primary subject of study for this paper. Intensity serves to demonstrate conflict as being dynamic fluctuating along lines of escalation and de-escalation. An interesting nuance that Galtung formalizes is that between Latent Conflict and Manifest Conflict. The former describes the underlying tensions, between two parties, that are not yet explicitly acted upon (typically, this state of affairs is understood to be "Negative Peace" where Direct Violence is absent). The latter describes the state of affairs where strife is actively occurring (Direct Violence breaks out). Development from Latent Conflict into Manifest Conflict can also be understood using the heuristic of Galtung's ABC Triangle of Violence. In the Triangle, Galtung pinpoints three focal points in conflict: Attitude, Behavior, and Contradiction. In the case of liberation struggles, as is the struggle against Zionist colonialism and US imperialism, the Contradiction is the nexus, the primary focal point from which violence spirals out: the spiral of violence originates from Contradiction and develops into Attitudes and Behaviors. In Attitude, it develops as latent conflict. In Behavior, it develops as manifest conflict. Conflict Scale: Beligrents and Fronts Gaza became ground zero for the war on October 7th, but the Al-Aqsa Flood has resonated throughout the region since. Beligrents in support of the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza have included the Palestinian resistance factions in the West Bank, the Lebanese Resistance, the Islamic Resistance factions in Iraq, the Yemeni Armed Forces (in cooperation with the Yemeni resistance), and the Islamic Revolution's Guard in Iran. Beligrents on the side of the Israelis have included the US-led occupation coalition in Syria, the US-led occupation coalition in Iraq, the US-led aggression coalition in the Red Sea, and the Takfiri terrorist network in the region (Daesh, Jaish ul-Adl, etc.). Fronts from which operations are being launched directly against the Israeli occupation, in addition to Gaza, include most notably South Lebanon (which serves as the second battlefront of this war), the West Bank (where lone-wolf stabbing/shooting/ramming operations and counter-raid concerted action by underground resistance cells have increased in frequency), in addition to Syria, Iraq, and Yemen (from where drones and missiles have been launched against the occupied territories most notably al-Jalil "Galilee Heights", Um al-Rashrash "Eilat", and even recently Haifa). Complimentary fronts, from where operations don't directly target "Israel" but rather aim to build up pressure on "Israel" and its imperialist proppers to consolidate a ceasefire in Gaza. These complimentary fronts include the Red and Arabian Seas (where the Yemeni Armed Forces and Resistance have enforced a naval blockade against Israeli and "Israel"-bound ships), northeast Syria (where the US-led coalition occupation bases are being shelled by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq), and Iraq (where, similarly, US-led coalition occupation bases are being shelled by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq). Mired "Israel" thrashes at the entire region Throughout modern history, all parties involved in materially supporting the Palestinian resistance have been punished by being subjected to imperialist and zionist terrorism. Prior to the war, it had manifested primarily as economic sanctions (with the exception of Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria which had frequently fallen subject to Israeli military aggression in addition to economic sanctions). After the war, especially after being frustrated by the little-yielding ground invasion of Gaza, this terrorism had manifested in brazenly more savage means. Over the span of the war, the Israeli occupation bombed Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, while the US occupation forces bombed both Iraq and Yemen. Jointly, the US imperialist forces and the Israeli Occupation Forces assassinated prominent resistance commanders: including IRGC commander Razi Mousavi (by "Israel"), Hamas politburo official Saleh al-Arouri (by "Israel"), Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah commander Moshtaq al-Saidi (by the US), and most recently Hezbollah high-ranking commander Wissam Tawil (by "Israel") In addition to a US-UK large-scale aerial aggression against Yemen last week, and the Daesh twin-terrorist bombings that targeted hundreds of Iranian civilians earlier this month. Digressing briefly, Iran has long been sanctioned for materially and consistently supporting the Palestinian resistance: Economic embargos, political subversion, covert sabotage operations, assassinations, terrorist attacks, etc. The Islamic Republic of Iran, even before getting involved in any proactive military action, before becoming neither a front nor a belligerent, has been subjected to imperialist warmongering and the terrorism of imperialism's takfiri footsoldiers: affirming the persistent neocon tradition of hawkishness in the White House but, now, discreetly through proxies. Conflict Intensity: escalation or de-escalation Carrying on with Galtung's theory, violence as he defines is tripartite Direct Violence (commonly militaristic), Structural Violence (commonly in law or regime), and Cultural Violence (commonly in beliefs and consequent attitudes). The latter two are latent forms of violence: characteristic of Latent Conflict. The former is the manifest form of violence: characteristic of Manifest Conflict. Manifest Conflict follows from an escalation in Latent Conflict. Similarly, escalation beyond a certain threshold would lead a Manifest Conflict to become an Escalated Conflict. Furthermore, Galtung details that a Conflict if escalated develops into Crisis or War (throughout the paper, I will not be committing to the gradation-escalation levels of conflict, crisis, and war; I will be using War and Conflict interchangeably). Conflict is not a sudden state of affairs that flutters in and out of existence at the whims of the conflict parties but rather is a long-lasting state of affairs that fluctuates along a scale of intensity, escalating and de-escalating: becoming dormant at times and resurfacing at others based on the development of events, and ceasing to exist only when the contradiction of interests is resolved (i.e. Positive Peace or Sustainable Peace is achieved). This prospect of escalation is best understood as formulated by the Fourth Law of Dialectics: Quantity into Quality. A state of affairs intensifies accumulatively till it reaches a threshold whereby quantitative increase is not possible anymore and the state of affairs changes qualitatively into a different state of affairs (Politzer, 1946). Gaza and South Lebanon: the build-up to the war Despite the macroscopic scale of Al-Aqsa Flood, Gaza, and south Lebanon remain thus far the only active battlefronts against the Israeli occupation. Throughout recent history, both Lebanon (primarily the South) and Palestine (primarily Gaza) have suffered severely under the plight of US-sponsored Israeli aggression: massacres, forced displacement, and occupation. In this struggle, the two nations grew more radicalized against their enemy (bearing arms and organizing their people into resistance movements) and steadily consolidated their binational solidarity (institutionalizing their alliance and proliferating it as the Axis of Resistance). In Gaza, in recent years, the latent structural violence of colonialism has been brazenly intensifying, especially with the extremist right-wing cabinet headed by Netanyahu (installed in late 2022) and the increasingly frequent incidents of settler violence in the West Bank and al-Quds. October 7th, 2023 was the threshold day. Violence broke out on a large scale after the Palestinian resistance had launched the long-deliberated operation that was the natural result of years of intensifying oppression. Latent Conflict developed into a Manifest Conflict and escalated at a sharp pace with the savage bombing campaigns and the ground invasion. The aggression against Gaza quickly snowballed into an all-out War (a high-intensity conflict). In Lebanon, the front erupted following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance. (Despite the intertwined stakes of Lebanese national interest and Palestinian national interest in contradiction to Israeli security) there was no buildup of a recent Latent Conflict between Lebanon and the Israeli occupation that reached a threshold on October 8th (in contrast to Gaza). The eruption of the front in south Lebanon came to echo Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, i.e. in solidarity with the people of Gaza and their valiant and honorable resistance (as the opening of the resistance's military statements commonly read). Patience and far-sightedness However, other latent frustrations in Lebanon preceded the eruption of the battlefront. In addition to solidarity with Gaza and anticipating long-term advantages to Lebanese national interest, a key factor that goes unnoticed is the latent economic frustrations. To digress again, when discussing the war build-up, a key prospect that commonly goes unnoticed is the radicalizing effect that the economic crisis has had on the Lebanese. In addition to national interest, binational solidarity, and religious fervor which are the primary drives mobilizing the Lebanese towards anti-zionist resistance, the prospect of accumulated economic frustration has radicalized a large segment of the Lebanese population against imperialism which was perceived to play a key role in enabling such a drastic crisis in Lebanon. For the past five years, the Lebanese have experienced the worst socio-economic crisis in recent history after the Ponzi scheme engineered by the US-propped central bank chief crashed. A systematically un-industrial rentier economy structured by the US and the Gulf back in the 1990s broke down: coupled with active efforts to economically pressure Lebanon to draw political concessions regarding the resistance. In addition to a sectarian consociational regime of governance that is doomed to recurrent cases of zero-sum game gridlock, making it impossible for a government to make decisions regarding the economy, public policy, or foreign relations. Recent years have exercised an extensive economic strain on the Resistance. Lebanese stability recurrently faltered as "protracted social conflict" seemed to sharpen in light of dire economic conditions (Edward Azar, 1990): with Christian right-wing parties and liberal NGO-type groups blaming the resistance for the crisis (for refusing to make the political concessions dictated by the West and the Gulf States that would restore the old insovereign rentier economic system). Thus, the extensive social and economic strain on the milieu of the Resistance or the "masses of the Resistance" (as Sayyed Nasrallah commonly refers to them), radicalized them further against the US: who pulled out the centerpiece of the make-shift kaleidoscopic Lebanese economy they had engineered sending it crashing down on Hezbollah. This new level of anti-imperialist radicalization among a segment of the Lebanese reaffirmed the aptness of the decision to organize into anti-zionist resistance factions; for "Israel" is understood to be an advanced outpost for imperialism in the region, and the security of "Israel" is understood to be one the primary objectives of imperialism in the region (in addition to accumulating super-profits for oligarchs). If this frustration has been discharged satisfactorily by any means, it was through anti-zionist military action. It's poetic justice for the Lebanese to threaten Israeli security after being economically bullied for five years to concede to "Israel" its security by disarming the resistance. Low-Intensity Conflict in South Lebanon In Gaza, a latent conflict steadily intensified until a manifest conflict broke out: quickly escalating into a high-intensity conflict. In Lebanon, however, the conflict was the result of intensifying latent frustrations, national interest, and binational solidarity. On October 8th, the front erupted in Lebanon and it has steadily escalated since, however, it has thus far remained, arguably, a low-intensity conflict. Since the commencement of the first operation, the Lebanese resistance has deliberated not to give in to the appeal of adventurism (going all in for all-out war): for a set of reasons elucidated in the speeches of the Secretary-General of Hezbollah (which include losing the advantage of a surprise attack, the weakened Lebanese economy, as well as the comparative advantage of low-intensity conflict etc). This strategy of decisively targeting Israeli military sites within the framework of a low-intensity conflict has proved effective in accumulatively inflicting small losses on the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces), and building up pressure on "Israel". The immediate and announced objective of the operations from Lebanon has been clear: building up pressure on "Israel" to concede to a ceasefire in Gaza. In the long term, the persistence of the status quo of low-intensity warfare within the frame of the laws of engagement of deterrence between the Lebanese resistance and the Israeli Occupation Forces is a lot more harmful to "Israel" than it is to Lebanon given the nature of the conflict (profit-driven colonizers vs a popular indigenous liberation movement). "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." -Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary Ho Chi Minh to French Colonizers on the eve of the liberation war (1946) Low-intensity conflict: accumulative small gains, minimized losses On the Lebanese battlefront, as aforementioned, the war burgeons within the framework of a low-intensity conflict which allows for decisive contained hits: accumulating in advantage. In 100 days, the Lebanese resistance has executed more than 700 operations against the occupation. The resistance targetted all front-line military sites along the borders and even managed to target 17 settlements, according to figures cited by the Secretary General of Hezbollah in a speech earlier this month. While the IOF continues to underreport losses fearing demoralization in the settler society, Israeli media outlets report that hospitals have been abounding with injured soldiers and cemeteries with killed soldiers. Israeli media also report that thousands of Israeli soldiers have been incapacitated; estimates range from 4,000 (confirmed) up to 30,000 (estimated). The primary objective of the Lebanese battlefront, as is the case with other complimentary fronts, has been to build up pressure against the Israeli-War Cabinet to agree to a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange deal on the terms of the Palestinian resistance, and dissolving the blockade against Gaza. The secondary objective of the Lebanese resistance, as is the case with other complimentary fronts, is the respective national interest (in Lebanon it manifests as consolidating the equation of deterrence and tipping its balance against "Israel" so that it concedes occupied Lebanese territories, namely Shebaa farms). Both of these objectives are being steadily worked for in Lebanon. IOF losses in the north have been steadily accumulating:
The IOF spokesperson cited intense exhaustion as being a key factor behind the blunders of the IOF in Gaza and the underwhelming efficiency of the ground operation: Explaining that most soldiers have been on duty continuously without substitution because their compatriots are mobilized in the north. Phase 3 in Gaza: de-escalation or redirecting escalation? Due to the ongoing pressure against "Israel", whether through the admirable steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance, the intensifying decisive operations by the Lebanese resistance, the blockade against Israeli navigation in the Arabian and Red Seas by the Yemeni Armed Forces and the Yemeni resistance, the increasingly frequent strikes against US occupation bases in Syria and Iraq by the Iraqi Resistance, and the international efforts to condemn "Israel" spearheaded by South Africa in the ICJ, the vehemence of the US-sponsored death machine in Gaza seems to be getting slowly quelled. The US has announced that it will be pressuring the Israeli government to mitigate its genocidal war which has been detrimental to both parties' international PR. The IOF has announced that it has started shifting to a lower-intensity Phase 3 (decreasing the bulk of troop presence in Gaza, relying more on airstrikes, and employing targeted raids). Ever since the preliminary steps of Phase 3 started coming into effect under the plight of US pressure against the fascist Israeli War Cabinet, Netanyahu, along with his genocide boyband, seems to have started looking for different avenues to continue the war to perpetuate his ill-fated political career against a seemingly imminent soft-coup by the Biden administration. "Israel" is pushing Hezbollah to its limits: Amal Saad "Just as Israel revealed its plan to withdraw thousands of troops from northern Gaza for the next phase of its ongoing war, the senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri was killed in a targeted assassination in Beirut," Amal Saad writes in a recent piece for The Guardian published on January 5th shortly after the assassination of Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut. Amal Saad elucidates the significance and possible implications of this grave attack against Lebanon which seemed to try to nullify the deterrence enforced by the Lebanese resistance against the IOF since 2006. "Hezbollah is in all likelihood concerned that a failure to respond decisively will invite Israel to go on an extrajudicial killing spree in Beirut – not just against Hamas but also eventually against its [Hezbollah] own officials," she explains. "This would require a carefully measured retaliation that simultaneously signifies an escalation in terms of scope and intensity, but falls short of all-out war." The Lebanese resistance's retaliation followed one day later. A combined Kornet-Grad artillery attack by the Resistance pummelled the Meron airforce base which served as an intelligence military command hub for the occupation. The operation, as Amal Saad had reasoned, was a high-intensity retaliation falling short of an all-out war. Furthermore, she explains that the objective of the Israeli attempt at undermining the deterrence equation seemingly serves as an attempt at provoking Hezbollah into an all-out war. "An even greater concern is that Israel is seeking to provoke Hezbollah into a full-scale war that would involve the US as a co-belligerent." "...whether or not Israel, which is incapable of confronting Hezbollah on its own, is seeking to drag the US into a full-blown regional war." Commenting on this, Amal Saad later emphasized that "Hezbollah is keen to avoid an all-out war – but it is ready for one." This was later emphasized in the latest speech by the Secretary General of Hezbollah on January 14th. "We have gone to war within the framework of this low-intensity warfare," he said "[However] since 99 days we have been ready for war, we do not fear it. We will not hesitate. we will venture on this war [if it's forced upon us]. We will fight with no boundaries any limits or any restrictions," Sayyed Nasrallah warned. Hypothesizing Netanyahu seems to have foresaw the imminent dead end in Gaza. Complete withdrawal will turn Gaza into "Israel’s" Cuba: stuck in a perpetual Missile Crisis. Persisting with the ground operation will turn it into "Israel’s" Vietnam: a swamp of attrition warfare that would surely end his career and possibly end his state: steadily inching away at it. The only way "Israel" could achieve the objectives of its ground operation (i.e. uprooting the resistance) is if every last Palestinian in Gaza was killed or expelled from the strip. Killing two million people in the 21st century is not beyond "Israel" but it would end the US' morally credible soft power. It would strip the latter’s imperialist foreign policy of its leading pretext. Netanyahu's plan seems to be spreading out the conflict: so that they can advertise the war as asymmetrical against "Israel" to legitimize direct US intervention. Netanyahu is desperately flailing to provoke large-scale retaliation from the Axis of Resistance to justify a US invasion of the region to rebalance power relations in favor of "Israel" and perpetuate Israeli security for a couple more decades. Netanyahu acts in line with the outdated teachings of his neocon mentors of the early 2000s, but the pragmatics of the US oligarchy have since recognized the futility of savage militarism in West Asia and have since switched course for proxy warfare and color revolutions for being more efficient. Author Sammy Ismail Lebanese communist, Philosophy and Political Science graduate from the Lebanese American University, columnist and news-editor at Al Mayadeen English, twitter: @klashinkovv First published in Al Mayadeen Archives February 2024 2/16/2024 A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn't Matter Who The President Is By: Caitlin JohnstoneRead NowSo it turns out the dementia symptoms Biden’s supporters have long dismissed as a “stutter” are actually exactly what they look like. The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.” Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.” Hur reports that in interviews Biden couldn’t even remember things as fundamental as the years of his term as vice president, or when his son Beau died. Hur also writes that Biden’s memory had gotten worse between the aforementioned recorded 2017 interviews and the interviews with the president last year. In short, the president’s brain don’t work. It’s shot. The “leader of the free world” has rusted out gray matter. It’s like swiss cheese in there. And it is indeed getting worse. During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice. If you were still laboring under the delusion that it matters who the US president is, the fact that an actual, literal dementia patient has held that office for three years now should dispel that notion once and for all. The US empire has been marching along in exactly the same way it was before Biden took office, completely unhindered by the fact that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots is in a state of degenerative neurological free-fall. Literally anyone could hold that office and it would make no meaningful difference in the way the US empire is run. A coma patient could be president. A jar of kalamata olives could be president. The position which Americans hold elections over in the belief that it could bring positive changes to their country and their world is nothing but a figurehead. Which is a bit of a problem for Americans who would like to change certain aspects of their government’s behavior, like for example the backing of an active genocide in Gaza. Whose conscience do they work to appeal to if the person they were told is in charge actually isn’t? Who do they vote for if the people who really call the shots aren’t even on the ballot? The fact that the US president has dementia exposes the uncomfortable truth that the functioning of the empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. There’s too much power riding on the behavior of the US government from year to year for the electorate to be permitted a say in it. The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is run not by the official elected government of that nation, but by unelected empire managers who filter in and out of each administration and maintain a steady presence in government agencies and government-adjacent institutions. These empire managers form alliances with corporate powers and working relationships with the many nations, assets and partners who function as members of the undeclared US empire. Which means there’s not really any way for Americans to vote their way out of this mess. If you have a problem with genocide, militarism, economic injustice, authoritarianism, or any other crucial building block for the US-centralized power structure, you will never be permitted to have any influence over those things through the official electoral system. Voting in western “democracies” is done to give us the illusion of control, like letting a toddler play with a toy steering wheel while you drive so they can feel like they’re participating. That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, just that there’s no way out of this mess that involves voting. We’re already seeing pro-Palestine activists throwing significant obstacles in the operations of Israeli weapons dealers, and the push to educate and inform the public about what’s happening in Gaza has caused Israel to lose control of the narrative so severely that it’s now resorting to desperate online influence ops. Measures like this can be implemented across the board to bring about the end of the imperial power structure. Once enough people begin turning against the empire, using the power of our numbers to force real change will quickly move from impossible to possible to likely to inevitable. But we’ve got to stop hanging all our hopes on the electoral system first. Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote. But don’t let that performative ritual distract you from the real project: to wake up our fellow humans and begin forcing real change. AuthorThis article was produced by Caitlin Johnstone. Archives February 2024
The Central American nation has called on Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada to stop sending arms to Israel
The Nicaraguan government has started legal proceedings to take Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and other violations of international law.
In a statement, Managua said it has informed the governments of “the [UK], Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada of its decision to hold them responsible under international law for gross and systematic violations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, international humanitarian law and customary law, including the law of occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in particular the Gaza Strip.” The statement also states that Nicaragua called on the nations above to “immediately halt” the supply of weapons, ammunition, technology, and other components to Israel as it suspects these items may have been used to “facilitate or commit violations of the Genocide Convention including [...] acts of genocide, attempted genocide, complicity in genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide.” Managua has also warned that the suspension of funds for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) by the four governments shows their disregard for their obligations and continues to facilitate violations of international law by Israel. “Nicaragua has underscored that this act contributes to the collective punishment of the Palestinians and to the apparent objective of forcing the Palestinian population to leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories, particularly Gaza, and preventing the exercise of their right to self-determination,” the statement reads.
Nicaragua shares the stage alongside Turkey, Jordan, Venezuela, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Namibia in its support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.
On 26 January, the ICJ ruled on provisional measures in South Africa's case against Israel, which ordered the latter to stop attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, stop incitement against Palestinians as a group, provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a report in one month detailing measures being taken to ensure that these orders, alongside others, are met.
However, the ICJ failed to demand an end to Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza or call for a ceasefire.
AuthorNews Desk
This article was produced by The Cradle.
ArchivesFebruary 2024 |
Details
Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|