( Tomdispatch.com ) – This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny — a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.

In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises — in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s  — as we then called it  — “cultural imperialism.”

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That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.

One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.

Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.

In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.

Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism — the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.

The Empire Strikes Back!

Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred  — not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.

If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved — temporarily, we hoped — to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11th found us.

Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw — on television, no less — being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.

I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.

It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland — then-American President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.

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Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.

Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.

Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.

True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.

And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.

Warnings from the Fish

Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.

Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”

In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”

What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.

Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, California, a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.

To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out

On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.

Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.

To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?

President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.

Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.

As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.

Copyright 2023 Ariel Dorfman

Via Tomdispatch.com )

( Tomdispatch.com) – “There must be some kind of way out of here…”

As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.”

While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had faced mounting local opposition and this festival was, in essence, a coming-out party for the movement to defend a priceless bit of urban green space from the bulldozer’s blade.

Now, accompanied by the dull hum of drones and the buzz of helicopters overhead, officers of the “peace” descended from all directions, their fingers on the triggers of their semi-automatics. The orders came down with the force of live rounds: “Get on the ground! Now!”

“I was playing ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ funnily enough,” remembers Suede Cassidy frontman Jeremiah Percival. “Around halfway through our set, they started arresting people… pointing AR-15s… traumatizing kids for nothing. It was very stormtrooper-esque. It’s a good reminder to know how fascism is in this country and how it’s very much alive.”

“It was after dark,” recalls Stop Cop City activist Priscilla Grim. “I was walking to see the concert. And I noticed that there was a drone tracking me. And the next thing I knew, men started chasing me, and I fell. They had me turn over on my stomach. And there was the red light of the gunsight to the right of my head. It was… frightening!”

Priscilla and 22 other protesters nabbed that night would go on to be charged with “domestic terrorism” — conduct allegedly “intended to intimidate the civilian population” or to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government of this state” — under a Georgia statute originally meant to deter would-be killers in the wake of the Charleston A.M.E. massacre. “I was completely shocked when I heard that I was being charged with domestic terrorism,” Priscilla told me. “For wearing black! In a forest! It’s absurd. It’s illegitimate. It’s an abuse… And as a survivor of 9/11, I am insulted that the state of Georgia thinks that they can do this.”

The Makings of an American Inquisition

Today, no fewer than 42 such cases are being prosecuted by Georgia’s attorney general. All 42 defendants stand accused of damaging property, not people. The only injuries that occurred were by police and correctional officers on the bodies of the accused. Some were then held for a month or more before being formally charged with a crime.

Georgia is hardly alone. The New York City Police Department recently attempted to charge multiple protesters with “terrorism” after they peacefully occupied a subway station to protest the choking to death of Jordan Neely, an unhoused New Yorker, by an ex-Marine. In an absurd turn of events, the charges were ultimately downgraded from “terrorism” to “criminal trespassing” before being dropped altogether last week.

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And across the country, such police work continues under the guise of counterterrorism. Since the George Floyd movement, it’s been possible to see the makings of a future American inquisition in which the machinery of state is increasingly weaponized against the body politic itself — especially against its most leftwing, most marginalized parts.

Though the fanatics of the far right have been responsible for the preponderance of deadly political violence in recent years, it’s the heretics of the left — antiracists and antifascists, environmentalists and anticapitalists, pro-choice feminists and LGBTQ+ liberationists — who have attracted the most attention from police, prosecutors, and inquisitorial politicians.

It is they who have been profiled as “domestic terrorists,” branded as “violent extremists,” and subjected to terrorism-based sentencing enhancements, often yielding harsher prison terms and crueler punishments than those for their right-wing counterparts. As a result of such disparities, hundreds of participants in the George Floyd protests remain caged in federal facilities to this day.

The Long, Hot Summer of 2020

On May 31, 2020, just days after George Floyd’s murder, President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) all but declared war on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. Attorney General William P. Barr went before the press and promised to deploy federal forces to apprehend “radical agitators,” identify “criminal organizers and instigators,” and “coordinate” with “our state and local partners.”

“The rioting is domestic terrorism,” Barr went on to state, “and will be treated accordingly.”

Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli had a nearly identical message for the media: “Cities across America burn at the hands of antifa and anarchists while many political leaders are refusing to call it what it is: domestic terrorism.” A DHS whistleblower later affirmed that Cuccinelli and others had specifically instructed him to play up “the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups” in his intelligence assessments — and downplay threats of terror from the far right.

And so began a long, hot summer of inquisition into, and counterinsurgency against, the Black Lives Matter movement. By the second week of June, more than 13,643 protest participants had been arrested by state and local authorities. Some, like a group of three teens in Oklahoma City, even faced charges of felony “terrorism” for alleged acts of property destruction.

By the time the protests were over, some 326 people had been apprehended by federal agents, including members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). At least 54 U.S. Attorneys’ offices were involved, as were all 56 of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

In May 2023, new reporting on FBI activities would reveal that the agency had improperly run “batch queries” of foreign intelligence sources for information on 133 individuals, all of whom were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests” in 2020. They were looking for “counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees.” According to recently declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they were also spying on American citizens without “any specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity.”

In 20 of the cases prosecuted at the federal level, there is evidence of direct involvement by FBI agents in the arrests themselves. And in two particularly egregious cases, U.S. Marshals and their deputies functionally acted as judges, juries, and executioners, with “Violent Offender Task Forces” fatally shooting two suspects — antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington and Black Lives Matter advocate Winston Smith in Minnesota — on sight.

Up until January 6, 2021, the supposed danger posed by left-wing “extremism” continued to be deemed greater than, or at least equal to, the threat of right-wing terrorism. No matter that the right had been responsible for the lion’s share of lethal incidents linked to extremism of any kind.

There were, of course, no terrorism bulletins released ahead of the events of January 6th. Nor would there be terrorism enhancements after the fact awaiting those who participated in the Capitol siege. Such charges were reserved for Americans of a different description.

A Bipartisan Inquisition

The inquisition did not end with Trump’s first term. For all the rhetoric about criminal justice reform — and for all the conspiracy theories claiming that the president had “quietly” pardoned thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2021 — Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has doubled down in a determined fashion on an inquisitorial strategy of counterinsurgency in the name of counterterrorism.

In the White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” released in June 2021, the administration pledged to “disrupt and deter those who launch… attacks in a misguided effort to force change in government policies that they view as unjust.” Subsequent documents, like last fall’s “Strategic Intelligence Assessment,” a joint product of the FBI and the DHS, confirmed what many in the Black Lives Matter movement already knew: that federal intelligence agencies had set their sights on “threat actors” motivated by “real or perceived racism or injustice in American society.”

Over the course of the Biden presidency, the DOJ has prosecuted Trump-era protest crimes with vigor and enthusiasm, while federal prosecutors have expanded the use of terrorism sentencing enhancements, delivering dozens of political prisoners to the doorstep of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A grossly disproportionate share of them have been people of African descent.

The vast majority of federal cases involve offenses against property or “commerce.” At least 17 have faced felony charges for unlawful use of the Internet (for instance, “using an instrument of interstate commerce to incite riots”). One of every three defendants was charged with obstructing “interstate commerce,” one in five with crimes of “civil disorder,” and another one in five for “conspiring,” “attempting,” or “aiding and abetting” some underlying crime they did not themselves commit.

Take the case of a young Black woman named Tia Pugh, of Mobile, Alabama, who was initially charged with two simple misdemeanors for breaking a window on the night of May 31, 2020.

“We were attacked first,” she would recall. “I was getting my people out of there… We get killed for less.” After being tracked down on Facebook, then interrogated by the FBI, she was brought up on felony charges for interfering with the police “during the commission of a civil disorder” which “adversely affected commerce.” Facing more than five years in prison, her sentence was reduced to time served after she spent more than a year in pretrial detention in an Alabama jail.

Though many have seen their charges dropped, others have seen their cases pursued to the bitter end by local prosecutors. Black activist Brittany Martin was, for instance, convicted in 2022 of “breaching the peace” for shouting in officers’ faces during a peaceable assembly in Sumter, South Carolina, in 2020. Although the alleged offense typically carries a maximum penalty of 30 days, prosecutors charged her with a crime of a “high and aggravated nature.” Last spring, she was sentenced, while pregnant, to no fewer than four years behind bars.

Future Enemies of the State

By any measure, the white supremacist movement is now officially acknowledged to pose the deadliest terrorist threat in America. The White House, the DOJ, and the DHS have made much of their commitment to confronting such far-right forms of terror, but the numbers coming from the federal government tell a different story.

On June 6th, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released its annual internal audit, assessing the Department’s strategy to “address the domestic violent extremism threat.” The audit revealed that investigations into white supremacist, “racially motivated,” and “anti-government/anti-authority” activity fell dramatically from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, the number (and share) of investigations involving “abortion-related” (including “pro-choice”) extremism skyrocketed, increasing by more than 800% and surpassing that recorded in any other year on record.

There is little mystery as to who is being targeted by such investigations since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which revoked a pregnant parent’s right to choose. Last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray clarified which side was the most suspect and which side considered the most victimized: “You might be interested to know that, since the Dobbs decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70 percent of our abortion-related violence cases, are cases of violence or threats against pro-life… where the victims are pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that.”

The case of Pilsen Community Books (PCB), a worker-owned bookstore on Chicago’s Lower West Side, is illuminating in this regard. PCB was recently revealed to be the subject of an FBI “assessment,” based on three factors: its status as a “not police friendly place”; its role as a “meeting, planning, and networking venue”; and its recent use by “pro-abortion extremists…to prepare for a pro-abortion direct action.” In other words, it’s a dangerous hotbed of constitutionally protected activity.

“Everything is very much out there in terms of what we believe and what we do,” says worker-owner Mandy Medley. “I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way… Community organizing is not illegal and should not be treated as such.”

Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security and its national network of 80 “fusion centers” have been hard at work collecting and aggregating data on “anarchist” or “environmental violent extremists.” And they’ve cast a wide net, even ensnaring writers and artists in their web of surveillance.

State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., inquisitorially-minded Republican politicians have been pressuring the FBI and DHS to crack down ever harder on their ideological adversaries. Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced legislation that would designate “Antifa,” and “any other affiliated group or subsidiary of Antifa” to be a domestic terrorist organization based on its “unlawful conduct” and its belief in “communism, anarchism, socialism… and lawlessness.” That same month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on “Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” at which Greene called for a clampdown on the newest enemy of the state: “The movement that wants to use trans terrorism against Americans.” No mention was made of the very real movement that approves of the use of terror against trans Americans.

One such trans American was Manuel Terán, an indigenous forest defender known as Tortuguita, who was killed by a barrage of 57 bullets one cold January day in that Atlanta forest. While it was a state trooper who fired the fatal bullet, it was DHS, the FBI, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that provided the intelligence for the operation. In the months since Tortuguita’s killing, those very agencies have continued to beat the drums of war, warning of the threat of “violent extremists in Georgia” and singling out those motivated by “anti-law enforcement sentiment.”

In a real sense, it may be that this latest American inquisition has simply come full circle, returning us to our historical roots: to a society where the caging of Black people, the spilling of indigenous blood, and the violent policing of the body politic are the stuff of business as usual — a society where state terror, in the name of counterterrorism, is accepted as a way of life.

On the other hand, if Black Lives Matter and the movement for bodily autonomy are any indication, it may be that we, as a society, have a lower tolerance for state terror than we once did.

Copyright 2023 Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

Yesterday, Friday, buses full of Israeli protesters attempted to head to Huwwara near Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank to show support for the small town of 7,000 that was burned out by fanatical mobs of Israel squatters on Palestinian land last Sunday.

Majdi Mohammed and Isabel Debre of the Associated Press report that the Israeli army intervened to prevent the protest, firing military-grade tear gas and stun grenades at them before tackling and manhandling them. Protesters were put in stress positions on the ground and two were briefly detained. Soldiers accosted former speaker of the Israeli parliament or Knesset, Avraham Burg, knocking the elderly statesman to the ground.

The protesters were a mix of Jews and Palestinian-Israelis, waving Palestinian flags and posters condemning the pogrom conducted against the innocent civilians of Huwwara on Sunday by fascist thugs from the squatter movement. They were blocked by the Israeli army.

Since the army stood by and allowed the pogrom last weekend, the protesters made sardonic comments about how the military seemed perfectly capable of intervening when it wanted to. Huwwara is not in Area A, the 40% of the West Bank that is policed by the toothless Palestine Authority created by the failed 1993 Oslo peace process. It is under direct Israeli military occupation.

According to the 4th Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute that authorizes the International Criminal Court, for occupation troops to allow a pogrom to be carried out against an occupied subject population is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

On Wednesday, thousands of Israelis rallied, blocked roads and went on strike in what they called a “day of disruption.” The extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir of the fascist Jewish Power bloc was made “Minister of National Security” by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which would be like appointing the leader of the Proud Boys as head of Homeland Security in the United States. Ben-Gvir instructed police to act harshly against what he called “anarchists.”

Isabel Debre and Ilan Ben Zion at AP report that “police arrived on horseback in the center of the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv, hurled stun grenades and used a water cannon against thousands who chanted “democracy” and “police state.” A video posted on social media showed a police officer pressing his knee into a protester’s neck and another showed a man who reportedly had his ear ripped off by a stun grenade. Police said protesters threw rocks and water bottles at the officers.”

Some 11 Israelis were put into hospital by police brutality. One had his ear torn off by a stun grenade.

Note that these tactics, of deploying stun grenades against civilian protesters and using water cannon (often filled with foul-smelling “skunk water”) are routinely used against Palestinians in East Jerusalem or in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The protesters demanding adherence to the rule of law and speaking out against Netanyahu’s plans to gut the judiciary were subjected to the Apartheid state’s technologies of control.

After one crowd gathered outside a hair salon Wednesday evening where Netanyahu’s wife Sara was having her hair done, the prime minister called them “terrorists,” the term he applies to all Palestinians. His coalition in parliament just passed a law imposing the death sentence on “terrorists,” a term the Israeli right even uses for human rights organizations that expose their crimes.

So now Israel’s dissidents opposed to Netanyahu’s plan to make sure the judiciary can never complete its trial of him for corruption are “terrorists” and “anarchists” who must be treated “firmly.”

Welcome to the club, folks. The non-fascist Israeli public, the vast majority, are now Palestinians as far as the Netanyahu regime is concerned.

Making Michigan lecture series – Keeping Resistance Alive

“In 1954, Chandler Davis was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His fellows on the stand were his colleagues Mark Nickerson and Clement L. Markert, and his student friends Edward Shaffer and Myron E. Sharpe. All were “unfriendly witnesses, refusing to confess” their political dissent.

Davis, unlike the others, based his refusal to answer only on the First Amendment, waiving his protection under the Fifth Amendment. Thereby he deliberately invited a citation for Contempt of Congress, so as to give himself standing to argue in court that the Committee’s proceedings were unconstitutional. He got the citation, but he did not prevail in court; his appeals were exhausted in 1959 and he served prison time in 1960.

Meanwhile, he and Professor Nickerson had been dismissed from their positions at the University. Davis’s deliberate and strategic approach to this assault on intellectual freedom was reflected throughout his long life of activism. His actions and those of his colleagues were eventually acknowledged by the Faculty Senate with the creation of the Davis/Markert/Nickerson Lecture in Academic and Intellectual Freedom in 1990.

This Making Michigan discussion will reflect on Davis’s life, actions and legacy at U-M and beyond and will seek to understand and recognize his contributions.”

Panelists for this discussion included:

“Steve Batterson, professor emeritus of mathematics, Emory University, and author of a forthcoming biography of Davis, The Un-American Treatment of a Red Mathematician in the 1950s (Monthly Review Press). Batterson is also the author of Stephen Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier (American Mathematical Society Reprint, 2000). Batterson will focus on Davis’s stand on the First Amendment — rather than the Fifth — in refusing to answer HUAC’s questions, in comparison to others who relied on that strategy and those who did not.

Peggie Hollingsworth, assistant research scientist emerita, Environmental and Industrial Health, School of Public Health. Hollingsworth was chair of the Faculty Senate when the DMN Lecture was created and served as the lecture’s longtime organizer as director of the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund. Hollingsworth will focus on Davis’s legacy at U-M, including the creation of the lecture and his annual engagement with it.

Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is a specialist in United States Literary Radicalism, and the author of many books including American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Wald will focus on Davis’s strategy in the context of American leftist activism, in the McCarthy era and since, including Davis’s concern in the years before his death about the rise of a “new political blacklist.” ‘

The normal professional ascent of a talented, energetic and ambitious academic suddenly shifted its trajectory in 1913. It did so sharply in two directions. Socialists and progressive liberals hailed Beard for his realistic analysis of the Constitutional Convention as the birthplace of a national government intended from the beginning to serve as the political adjutant of the country’s economic elites. For the left, Beard became and remained a heroic figure and an avatar for the way critical history should be written. Conservatives, however, never would forgive Beard for his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as an assembly of politicians—however brilliant and learned–acting of necessity in the aggrandizement of the elites who had sent them to Philadelphia in 1787, more or less setting the pattern of American politics ever afterward. For making such an argument and documenting it, he became the most famous and influential historian in the country, but also the most notorious and controversial.

The battles over Beard’s interpretation of the Constitution paled by comparison with the fallout from the part he played during the national debates over American intervention in the Second World War. By then he also was the country’s leading public intellectual. He used his influence to oppose Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interventionist policy, arguing that this war—like the Great War that preceded it—primarily concerned empire. He based his appeal on the impartial foreign policy traditions enshrined in Washington’s Farewell Address. Forsaking those traditions in favor of supporting the British, French, and Soviet empires in a war that would be the most catastrophic in history seemed to him like the beginning of the end for an authentic American democratic civilization.

Beard despised the Nazis, but he thought that their defeat was only incidental to the chief aim of the United States government, to establish its hegemony over the world economy. As with the Constitutional Convention and all the American wars beginning with the Revolution in 1775, he understood the Second World War at its deepest level as an economic event. The spectacular rise of American government power that then began with the creation of the military-industrial complex would be the chief legacy of the war and make the United States a permanent garrison state on eternal watch for the welfare and augmentation of the corporate capitalist order. Beard did not get everything right about the Second World War, but he clearly saw the direction in which the country was headed.

In September last year, Beard came under attack on yet a third front, his alleged racism. The attack occurred in the pages of The New York Review of Books in an article by one of the country’s most eminent historians, Eric Foner. I wrote the following letter to the editors of that publication.

To the Editors:

In “The Complicity of Textbooks” (NYRB, September 22, 2022), Eric Foner asserts, “Charles and Mary Beard, in a textbook written in the 1920s, pretty much ignored the abolitionist movement, reflecting not only racism, certainly present in their book, but also the ‘Beardian’ understanding of history as a series of struggles between economic classes, with political ideologies being essentially masks for economic self-interest.”

The Beards certainly were not imbued with all the enlightened attitudes of our time toward human equality. As we might expect of most Americans born in the 1870s, it is unlikely that either one of them could pass a strictly graded sensitivity-training-in-the-workplace examination.

Nevertheless, the Beards did well in debates about human equality of their own time. Mary Ritter Beard advanced women’s history as a vital research field. The Rise of American Civilization, the textbook cited by Professor Foner and which she co-wrote with her husband, brought new attention to women’s issues.

Charles Austin Beard, the leading historian and public intellectual of the day, vigorously opposed anti-Semitism in American life. In 1917, he protested the firing in New York City of three left-wing Jewish school teachers—Samuel Schmalhausen, Thomas Mufson, and A. Henry Schneer—who, according to the New York Times, had been sacked for “holding views subversive of good discipline and of undermining good citizenship in the schools.” Beard vouched for these men and protested in a letter cited by the Times that there had been “no little anti-Semitic feeling in the case.” He also became involved in another notorious anti-Semitism episode more than twenty years later, the denial of an appointment for the historian Eric Goldman at Johns Hopkins University despite the unanimous backing from the history department. Beard, a visiting professor there at the time, criticized the decision as a flagrant instance of prejudice.

Beard also attacked anti-Semitism as an evil force worldwide. In the early- and mid-1930s when many in Europe and America cheered Adolf Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism, Beard relentlessly attacked the Nazi regime. He condemned the Nazis for their anti-Semitism and racist attitudes generally. Writing for The New Republic in 1933 and 1934, he condemned “the customary Nazi savagery in dealing with the Jews” and protested lectures by Nazi spokesmen trying to influence Americans “for the benefit of Hitler’s propaganda game.” In a 1934 address delivered at the New School for Social Research, Beard portrayed Nazism as “a low diabolical philosophy” responsible for a reign of terror in the heart of Europe. That October, he criticized Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law School, for accepting an honorary degree from the University of Berlin. An honor from the Nazis counted against the recipient, in Beard’s moral economy. In a 1936 Foreign Affairs article, he castigated the Nazi system of education for its obsession with racial hygiene and program of crushing “all liberty of instruction and all independent search for truth.”

Did the Beards’ economic interpretation of the Civil War reflect racist motives as Professor Foner states? The Beards hated slavery as an irredeemably evil institution. Their account of slavery begins, “In the bitter annals of the lowly there is no more ghastly chapter than the story of this trade in human flesh.” Slavery comes up for sustained discussion throughout the first volume, always as a tragedy for the country. Among the Civil War-era writers the Beards admired, Ralph Waldo Emerson receives singularly high praise and not only for his penetrating discernment of the connections between property and politics. They also note with evident approval his “resounding blows at slavery as an institution.” They do present the pro-slavery case that the South made for itself, while pointing out that its self-deceptive nature led to the region’s crushing military defeat and long-term economic ruin. They also examine the North’s economic agenda, essentially following the reasoning advanced in brief by Henry Adams—an exemplary historian for them—in his autobiography. Adams synthesized in a single image the ultimate significance of the Civil War as the triumph of Northern economic interests: “The world after 1865 became a bankers’ world.”

The analysis by the Beards, however, cannot be attributed legitimately to racism. They wrote their book during the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Partisans of President Wilson’s interventionist policy in that conflict, they subsequently became disillusioned by the imperialist greed that triumphed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.The war to make the world safe for democracy had taught the Beards to discount professions of idealism about freedom as a persuasive explanation of Washington’s wartime policies. To this rule, they did not make an exception for the Civil War. Not racism, but the logic of their conviction about war in general guided them in their interpretation of the Civil War.

Richard Drake
Missoula, Montana

The letter did not find favor with the NYRB editors. This outcome was perhaps understandable. The editors explain on their website that they receive thousands of such letters. Nevertheless, some effort needs to be made to bring fairness and accuracy to the debate about Beard. We owe him that much. He was, after Henry Adams, our greatest historian. His idea about following the money trail for a proper understanding of American imperialism and militarism constitutes a shaft of light in the fog of propaganda enveloping us today. Dismissing Beard as a racist in this day and age can be an effective—though historically irresponsible—means for getting rid of him once and for all. As ever since 1913, canceling Beard would come as a consummation devoutly to be wished by the guardians of our national mythologies.

Republished with the author’s permission from Counterpunch

MSNBC: “Rashida Tlaib Asks U.S. to Recognize Palestinian Suffering | The Mehdi Hasan Show”

Israel’s ardent supporters in the caucus such as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) attacked Tlaib over the remarks.

The outrageous progressive litmus test on Israel by @RashidaTlaib is nothing short of antisemitic. Proud progressives do support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Suggesting otherwise is shameful and dangerous. Divisive rhetoric does not lead to peace.

— Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (@RepDWStweets) September 21, 2022

Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s message is riddled with logical fallacies. Rep. Tlaib did not say anything about supporting or not supporting Jews. She said that it was not possible to be progressive and at the same time to back the Israeli government’s Apartheid policies toward Palestinians.

That Israel has implemented Apartheid is obvious to anyone familiar with the definition of this offense against human rights in the Rome Statute or the UN Convention against Apartheid. Those reluctant to come to this conclusion either don’t know what Apartheid is as it is deployed in contemporary international law or are not fully acquainted with the plight of Palestinians under Israeli hegemony. Even long-time opponents of the charge have changed their minds once they’ve been confronted with the reality. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the respected Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, have all come to the same conclusion in the past year and a half.

Long time Jewish Voice for Peace activist Rabbi Jill Wise, who has been banned from visiting Israel (how democratic) concurs:

By design, under Israeli law, Palestinians have an inferior status to Jews legally, judicially, politically. This is incompatible with progressive values. This is apartheid. @RashidaTlaib is right.

— Rabbi Alissa Wise (@AlissaShira) September 22, 2022

Not only did Rep. Tlaib not say anything antisemitic but she also did not say anything about Israel having a right to exist or not. She said that the Israeli state is committing a tort. Human beings commit wrongs and crimes all the time. Maintaining that Israel is incapable of committing a violation of international law is the same as maintaining that Israelis are not human beings, which is a form of antisemitism sometimes called philosemitism.

Further, Rep. Tlaib did not say that Israel cannot be democratic. She said that it isn’t living up to those ideals. Human Rights Watch pointed out that, given numerous discriminatory laws and regulations toward the 20% of Israelis who are of Palestinian heritage, even inside Israel there are elements of Apartheid. These human rights violations are much worse in the Palestinian West Bank, which is under Israeli military rule and has been since 1967.

As for Israel having a “right” to be Jewish (majority Jewish; 100% Jewish?), countries don’t have a right to be any particular ethnicity. If Wasserman-Schultz were to say, “The United States has a right to exist as a white and democratic country,” or “The United States has a right to exist as a Christian and democratic country,” it would make as much sense as saying that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic country. Precisely because it is a democracy, the US will not be majority white in a few years (California already is not), and it may well not remain majority Christian over the coming century. It may become majority agnostics. Those who want to preserve the white or Christian majority in the US are on the political Right, and those who want the same things for Israel are also buying into an essentially right wing project.

If we look at other governments in our world who are against what they see as a dilution of their country’s racial purity, we’d have to finger Viktor Orban’s Hungary, for instance. Orban has spoken of the need to maintain “ethnic homogeneity” and has said that Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race.” He opposes Muslim immigration to Hungary because he says it would endanger the country’s Christian identity. Right wing Israeli politicians routinely make analogous arguments.

So Rep. Wasserman Schultz has actually vindicated Tlaib’s argument with her tweet. She has taken a right wing stance regarding Israel even though she has progressive aspirations for the United States.

As Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton note in their National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 272, the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency at that time, Bob Gates, in 1987 quoted a saying attributed to the Chinese about the Soviets, that “What the bear has eaten, he never spits out.” Gates later apologized for this glib and inaccurate assessment.

Because Washington refused to believe that the Soviets really wanted out of their quagmire, US officials in the Reagan era managed to get Stinger shoulder-held anti-aircraft weapons into the hands of the Mujahidin, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Since the US sent money through the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the latter favored the most hard line Muslim fundamentalists, the armaments and money the US sent to Afghanistan prepared the way for the Taliban takeover in the 1990s. Of the seven major Mujahidin groups, several were tribally-based and relatively secular-minded, but those groups were stiffed by the ISI.

The Stingers were not supplied until 1986, a year after Gorbachev started letting people know he intended to withdraw. So they just weren’t necessary. Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief in Islamabad, insisted that the stingers were the reason the Soviets left Afghanistan, but that simply isn’t true. Gorbachev had made that decisionn in 1985.

Savranskaya and Blanton curated some key documents on all this at George Washington University’s National Security Archives.

At a meeting on 14 March 1985 at the Kremlin with Soviet puppet leader in Afghanistan Babrak Karmal, a lifelong Communist from the Tajik ethnic group, Gorbachev said,

“However, while speaking about the positive shifts in the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan], at the same time we have to note, from the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist analysis and from the standpoint of realism, that your party still has to do a lot of work to solve its main task—-to ensure the genuinely irreversible character of the revolutionary process in Afghanistan. To a considerable extent, it has to do with being able to defend revolutionary gains. Of course you remember Lenin’s thought that one criterion of survival for any revolution is its ability to defend itself. You, comrade Karmal, naturally, understand, as other members of the Afghan leadership obviously do, that Soviet troops cannot stay in Afghanistan forever.”

(Emphasis mine). Not only were the Soviets leaving, but V. I. Lenin was ordering them to do so from the grave! Gorbachev gently suggested that Babrak’s class base was too small and he needed to enlarge it. He meant by this remark that the revolutionary socialist cadre organizations of the Parcham and Khalq were tiny and that Karmal could not hope to govern unless he formed a government of national unity. Gorbachev seems to have been pushing the Afghanistan Communist Party toward a strategy something like that of the First United Front in China in the 1920s, when individual communists allied with the Guomindang. (Alas, that alliance did not end well for the Communists).

At the subsequent Politburo meeting of October 17th, 1985, according to the diary of attendee Anatoly Chernyaev,

“I was at the Politburo today. There was a historical statement about Afghanistan. Gorbachev has finally made up his mind to put an end to it. [Gorbachev] outlined his talk with Karmal. He, Gorbachev said, was dumbfounded, in no way expected such a turn, was sure that we needed Afghanistan more that he did, and was clearly expecting that we will be there for a long time, if not forever. That is why I had to express myself with the utmost clarity: by the summer of 1986 you will have to learn how to defend your revolution yourselves. We will help you for the time being, though not with soldiers but with aviation, artillery, equipment. If you want to survive you have to broaden the regime’s social base, forget about socialism, share real power with the people who have real authority, including the leaders of bands and organizations that are now hostile towards you. Restore Islam to its rights, [restore] the people’s customs, lean on the traditional authorities, find a way to make the people see what they are getting from the revolution. And turn the army into an army, stop with the Parchamist and Khalqist scuffle, raise the salaries of officers, mullahs, etc.”

Here we find that Gorbachev had set a deadline for the Soviet withdrawal of 1986, and that he was frustrated by the faction-fighting between the mostly Tajik Parcham wing of the Communist Party and the mostly Pushtun Khalq wing.

Gorbachev read out some of the large number of letters the Kremlin had been receiving from grief-stricken mothers of the over 13,000 Soviet troops killed fighting in AFghanistan. Then he said, ““With or without Karmal we will follow this line firmly, which must in a minimally short amount of time lead to our withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

At the Politburo Session on 26 June, 1986, Gorbachev noted that Najib Ullah had succeeded Karmal. Najib was from the bigger Pushtun ethnic group and was prepared to widen his support in a way Karmal, a hard line Tajik Communist, probably could not. Gorbachev noted that two Soviet brigades had already been withdrawn, but that the US was playing spoiler in Afghanistan and trying to prevent a cross-faction alliance.

The increasing desperation of tone is notable. Gorbachev abruptly says, “Maybe we should invite Najib to Moscow? In short, we have to get out of there.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Reagan just could not believe Soviet assurances of these plans. He was enamored of the idea of “roll-back,” of actively defeating Communism, and saw the struggle as a zero-sum game.

You have to wonder what would have happened if Reagan and his people had taken Gorbachev at his word in 1985 and had been willing to cooperate in order to achieve an orderly Soviet withdrawal. Instead, they spent the next three years continuing to build up the hard line fundamentalist militias, and giving them powerful and sophisticated weapons and training. Although Bearden insists that the US did not directly train or fund al-Qaeda, the Arab volunteers who fought alongside the Mujahidin imbibed all the lessons CIA trainers gave the Afghan fighters about forming secret cells and planning out the bombing of buildings.

Gorbachev pulled the last Soviet tanks out of Afghanistan in February, 1989. Twelve years later al-Qaeda took down the Twin Towers, and the US went on to fight its own 20-year, fruitless war in Afghanistan.

Bear or eagle, they always in the end spit out what they tried to eat of Kabul.

Macron campaigned on raising retirement age to 65 and reforming pensions, which no one in France but a few corporate CEOs wanted.

NUPES garnered 131 seats, an incredible and unexpected performance. The old centrist left of the Socialist Party had fallen on hard times, but Mélenchon’s more uncompromising leftist approach appears to have hit a nerve.

Dalal Mawad at CNN quoted Mélenchon as saying, “The collapse of the presidential party is total, and no majority is presented. We have achieved the political objective that we had set ourselves, in less than a month, to bring down the one who, with such arrogance, had twisted the arm of the whole country, who had been elected without knowing what for.”

One of the members of NUPES was the Greens, whose leader, Julien Bayou, easily won his seat. Unlike in Germany, France’s Green Party had faltered in the teens of this century and lost representation in parliament. Now, as part of the alliance of Left parties, the Greens had been projected to make an even better showing than in 2012, when they gained 17 seats, according to Anne-Charlotte Dusseaulx and Arthur Nazaret at Le Journal du Dimanche. As of this writing, the Interior Ministry had not broken out NUPES wins by party.

Europe’s parliamentary systems are typically multi-party affairs and they offer more scope for diversity than the US de facto two-party system. The most Greens can practically do in the US is to establish caucuses inside the two major parties.

Not only will the Greens likely have a substantial presence in parliament, where they can work on climate and environmental issues, but Borne may be forced to turn to them on some climate legislation. If so, the Greens will be in a position to help shape national policy, Dusseaulx and Nazaret write.

Deliciously, Environment Minister Amelie de Montchalin was unseated by NUPES, along with two other cabinet members, who will have to depart government.

The fascist National Rally (Rassemblement national) of Marine Le Pen got 89 seats, a historic gain for Le Pen, who ran credibly for president (or perhaps Führer) against Macron but lost.

The old Gauillist center right, the Republican Party (and its coalition partner, the Union of Democrats and Independents), did even worse than the fascists, coming in fourth with 61 seats.

The French electorate is clearly dissatisfied, with inflation and energy prices hitting them hard just as in the rest of the world. Both the Left and the fascist right saw a big increase in support, though it is a relief that the Green-Red coalition of leftists and environmentalists did twice as well as the fascists. This round of parliamentary elections saw a relatively poor turnout, suggesting that many voters feel alienated from the political process.

It remains to be seen if Macron’s Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, will seek support from the Republican Party Gaullists to make up her majority, or from members of the Greens or the Socialist party. Although Macron is considered a centrist and served in a Socialist government, he is a Neoliberal close to France’s finance industry, and leans center-right, often attacking leftists and immigrants (i.e. Muslims, who make up nearly 10% of the population).

AP points out that Macron and Borne could negotiate support for legislation and policy on a case by case basis, bringing the Republican Party on board for some legislation but working with the left or greens on others.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – To begin, an anecdote. This past summer, a pigeon walked through my open balcony door while my attention was elsewhere. I shooed it out, but when I turned around two more pigeons walked out of my bedroom. In the 20 years I’ve lived in my apartment, this had never happened to me, though my balcony door was often open. All I could imagine was that those poor birds had gotten as disoriented as the rest of us in these pandemic years when nothing feels faintly normal.

But what is normal, anyway? Decades filled with war, inequity, poverty, and injustice? Really? Is this what we want — a society clearly failing its people?

There are, of course, many groups working in wonderful ways to improve our lives, each of them a harbinger of what’s possible. These would certainly include Black Lives Matter, reproductive-rights organizations, and climate-change groups, as well as newly empowered union organizing, and that’s just to mention a few obvious examples.

But here’s the truly worrisome thing. These days such social-justice groups, inspirational as they may be, can barely be heard above the clamor of right-wing organizing and conspiratorial thinking, which seems to be gathering strength, leading toward an accretion of power across this land of ours. They’re doing so locally by getting onto school boards and city councils; by using social media to spread ever wilder racist, misogynist ideas; by encouraging racial hatred that results in nightmarish murders, most recently in Buffalo, New York, where a young white man slaughtered African-Americans in a supermarket. And by doing all this and more, the right wing has grown into a set of movements that continue to flourish nationwide with far too little forceful opposition.

Right-wing politicians, extremist groups, and their social-media outlets are anything but new. For years, however, they lingered in the shadows. Donald Trump’s presidency gave them permission to emerge all too vocally and capture the fealty of so many Republican lawmakers and voters. The threats to legal abortion, voting rights, marriage equality, and education (via book banning and curriculum reshaping) are just a few obvious aspects of American life now being menaced by a set of authoritarian, nationalist, racist political movements that are unfolding daily. The question, of course, is: What should the rest of us do to counter all of this?

We live on an ever more climate-endangered planet and in a society threatened by growing amounts of disinformation, misinformation, and a tendency toward extreme individualism. Consider just the growing number of anti-vax, anti-masking Republicans who equate their choices with the personification of freedom, which is really a fear of loss of control — white control, rich control, male control.

Sadly enough, progressive ideas aren’t permeating our society anywhere near as quickly or defiantly as right-wing ones. In the increasingly dangerous world we inhabit, it’s not enough to fire up anger by sending people into the streets for a single day of protest, even to shout No!, Stop!, Not in our name! It’s a shame — since they should matter — but such flare-ups don’t engender real change. Only consistent, visible grassroots organizing, local and national, might lead to the kinds of change that could affect political consciousness and alter a country that may be going the way of Trump far too quickly.

History as Proof

It’s encouraging to look back and note that, throughout our history, grassroots movements have made a genuine difference. Those who worked at change, day in, day out, year in, year out often succeeded in their struggles. They won child-labor laws and social security, promoted women’s suffrage and civil rights, and remade American society in other equally important ways. Sustained grassroots organizing by laborers, miners, teachers, and so many others created national unions, some of which then fought successfully for legislation of all kinds, not to speak of the creation of the Department of Labor itself in 1913 to give that movement a “voice in the cabinet.” Through determined organizing, unionization reached a high point during the 1940s and 1950s.

Unfortunately, by the early 1980s, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, unions began losing members and clout, a defeat only compounded by their inability to stop a great migration of plants and factories overseas. That phenomenon would, of course, devastate large swaths of the country, especially the industrial Midwest. In its wake, it left blue-collar workers in economic despair and losing confidence in both unions and government. Over time, those feelings would only enhance a rightward political shift.

After so many years, however, a new uptick in unionization seems to be underway. The recent surprise vote in favor of unionizing an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, after two years of organizing efforts, offers a striking example of how a vigorous, progressive, and consistent grassroots movement can achieve change and spur yet more organizing by others.

Buy the Book

But what is organizing anyway? Who can do it? How is it done?

Let me try to answer those questions in a personal way. In 1969, in the midst of this country’s war in Vietnam that swept so many of us into the streets, I became a member of a collective that organized an antiwar coffee shop. We opened it close to an Army base and many young soldiers came in. We offered them free coffee and cookies, music popular at the time, and of course ourselves to chat with every day of the week. We even left coins in a jar on the counter that could be used in a pay telephone booth to get in touch with family or friends.

I can remember talking with soldiers, many of them destined for Vietnam. We discussed the state of the country, class, race, and especially, of course, the ongoing war and what to do about it. We listened as well, learning much about those mostly working-class soldiers of all races and creeds: how they grew up, how they felt about basic training, and how they had learned what they knew. We, in turn, began to understand what influenced the thinking of those young men, many from rural areas of the country, including the role of disinformation in their political consciousness. That coffee-shop collective offered soldiers knowledge as power, knowledge to change consciousness.

While antiwar demonstrations spread in those years, often filling the streets, such coffee shops and other antiwar projects spread, too. And of course — though it took far too long and far too many of those young lives — that war did end and we played our small part in that, something I tried to capture in my new novel, Can You See the Wind?.

Movements Then and Now

That was, of course, so long ago, but in the world of today, perhaps such activities might still have a place. What if, for example, organizers were now to begin setting up social-justice cafes — storefronts offering free coffee, music, talk, and educational materials aimed at informing and affecting political consciousness in this ever more social-mediated moment? Such cafés, or whatever their twenty-first-century equivalents might be, would offer an up-close, face-to-face way of countering rightwing disinformation, conspiracy thinking, and propaganda.

Many social-justice groups now do aim to reach out and educate. There’s a problem, however. Their good work isn’t coalescing into the kind of massive effort that can influence deeply. Much of the protest work of this moment, of course, begins (and ends) online — sometimes followed by sporadic flare-ups of street protests, little of it as effective as it should be when it comes to influencing opinion. Though helpful in spreading the word, social-media platforms are inadequate substitutes for street-by-street, action-by-action grassroots work that anyone can join because it’s visible, out there, and noisy rather than one person alone at her computer.

From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, street mobilizations and public action were remarkably commonplace. Though initially such movements were anything but well covered by mainstream news outlets, a growing alternative media offered them much-needed attention. Soon enough, though, mainstream newspapers and the TV news had little choice but to report on what was so obviously happening in the streets. How could they not, since the insistent demands for social justice were so noisy, ongoing, and hard to miss — and, in the process, people’s opinions began to change.

During those years, the creative actions taken included civil rights bus boycotts, sit-ins of many kinds, and protest marches of all sorts. There were also public teach-ins, women’s consciousness-raising groups, and storefront child-care centers that allowed parents to attend protests and speak-ins in those pre-Roe v. Wade days to demand the right to abortion. Though that right, won then, is now threatened, there will no doubt be a sustained fight to maintain it. A law may be rescinded but it’s difficult to erase from consciousness something that so many women have benefited from.

The messages of such actions were hard to miss and did indeed change public consciousness, as in the case of the civil rights movement. They not only led to desperately needed voting-rights laws, but also inspired generations of young people to become involved in progressive movements.

Unfortunately, these days, those on social media and in the streets are all too often right-wing organizers doing all they can to eviscerate voting-rights laws, aided and abetted by Republican state legislatures and a Supreme Court essentially taken over by right-wingers.

Another example of a protest movement that worked thanks to an organized grassroots struggle is the anti-Vietnam War movement. At the start of that conflict, most Americans were either supportive of or indifferent to it. After the growth of a massive antiwar movement and waves of protest and education to end that nightmarish conflict, much of it taking place in the streets or on university campuses, public opinion did turn against the war and helped force its end.

A more recent example of progressive action would be Occupy Wall Street in 2011 — essentially a tent city set up in New York’s financial district. Though it didn’t bring concrete change to Wall Street, it did change consciousness in this country about the growing inequality between the rich 1% and the rest of us. Perhaps one day an Occupy successor will develop, a grassroots movement in support of taxing the wealthiest Americans to finance so much of what society still needs.

The Black Lives Matter movement is the most recent example of how a consistent mobilization, not just online but out in the streets of cities across the country, can increase awareness of society’s injustice. Through it, systemic racism was brought to the consciousness of Americans in a new way, even as this country was all too sadly being increasingly barraged from the right by white nationalism and the great replacement theory. Sadly, there can be no real social justice as long as the messages of white nationalists proliferate.

What Does Change Mean Now?

In some sense, change is invisible until it succeeds and one thing is guaranteed: it won’t succeed if we wait for it to happen from the top down. History proves that. Though it feels like a nearly impossible task to shake up a nation already thoroughly rattled by Donald Trump and his Republican followers, it can happen. After all, in the end, the real lawmakers are indeed the people.

No doubt the pandemic has created a kind of vacuum in which each of us has been forced to make decisions for her or himself: to take a train, or not; to eat in a restaurant, or not; to meet a friend, or not — decisions that need to be made again and again as the next Covid-19 variant or subvariant hits. No wonder sitting at a computer feels like the least endangering act around, the best way to communicate and relate right now.

We’re born without political consciousness. It’s learned, handed down, exchanged, and absorbed. Think of this essay then as my way of reassuring you that a sense of helplessness has been overcome before and can be again. Each generation learns anew how to cope and bring about change. But history does teach us that sustained grassroots movements have a special impact on political consciousness, even as they influence legislators to meet public demands if they wish to remain in office. In addition, the solidarity of many acting in unison offers a sense of strength and a path out of despair for those involved.

However perilous and unnerving these times may be, they belong to us to either live with or change.

Copyright 2022 Beverly Gologorsky

Via Tomdispatch.com