US voices concern over Bangladesh transfer of Rohingya

Agence France-Presse . Washington | newagebd.net

Published:  Dec 11,2020

Rohingya refugees stand in a queue after they disembarked from a Bangladesh Navy ship to the island of Bashar Char in Noakhali on December 4, 2020.- AFP photo

The United States on Thursday voiced concern over Bangladesh’s transfer of Rohingya refugees to a low-lying island and said that any movement should be voluntary.

Bangladesh, which has taken in nearly one million Rohingya who fled a brutal offensive in neighbouring Myanmar, has started the relocation of 1,00,000 of them from squalid camps on the mainland to Bhashan Char, a silt island frequently in the path of cyclones.

The United States reiterated its appreciation to Bangladesh for accepting the refugees but said it was ‘concerned’ about last week’s transfer of more than 1,600 Rohingya and plans to move more.

‘The United States concurs with the UN that any such relocations must be fully voluntary and based on informed consent without pressure or coercion,’ State Department spokesman Cale Brown said in a statement.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric earlier pointed to reports, corroborated by accounts on the ground to AFP, that refugees have been pressured into relocating.

Related Coverage:
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› Bhasan Char receives 1,642 Rohingyas

Bangladesh’s foreign minister AK Abdul Momen called the claims ‘a damn lie’ and said facilities on the island were ‘much better’ than the camps.

The United States called for Bangladesh to allow ‘thorough and independent technical and protection assessments’ of Bhashan Char to determine whether the island, said to be prone to flooding, is suitable for refugees.

The US statement comes after outgoing president Donald Trump slashed his country’s own refugee admissions to a record low, with the wealthiest nation planning to admit no more than 15,000 from around the world in the current fiscal year.

The State Department said the United States is the leading supporter of refugee programs inside Bangladesh, contributing $962 million since 2017.

The United States also reiterated calls on Myanmar to allow the return of the refugees — a prospect that few see as immediate.

The Buddhist-majority nation refuses to consider the mostly Muslim Rohingya as citizens and in 2017 launched a military campaign in which refugees recounted mass killings, widespread rape and the burning of villages

UNHCR seeks access to Bhasan Char

Shahidul Islam Chowdhury | Published: Dec 08,2020 | newagebd.net 


The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi has sought access for the UN partners, including the UNHCR, to the Rohingya people who have been relocated to the Bhasan Char island.

‘UNHCR and UN partners seek access to them in order to hear their voices, understand their wishes and see conditions on the island,’ Filippo Grandi said in a tweet, adding that any transfer must follow a voluntary and informed decision.

The Bangladesh government has recently relocated a total of 1,642 displaced Rohingya people of Myanmar to Bhasan Char from Cox’s Bazar camps amid concerns of the UN offices in Bangladesh and protest from several foreign rights bodies.

Over 300 other Rohingya people, who were rescued from boats in the Bay of Bengal from traffickers, have also been taken to the island earlier. 

The government has been providing humanitarian relief support to all the Rohingya people in Bhasan Char through the Office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s Office, additional RRRC Shamsud Douza told New Age on Tuesday. 

Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen on Monday said that the UN should help the Rohingyas in Bhasan Char in accordance with the mandate on the basis of which the UN worked in Bangladesh.

‘They should follow the mandate. It doesn’t matter where they’re [victims] living,’ he said.

The minister, however, made it clear that the arrangement made in Bhasan Char was for a short period as the prime objective of the government was to repatriate the displaced Rohingya people to their ancestral homes in Rakhine of Myanmar.

Asked whether the UNHCR has formally sought access to the island, it’s spokesperson Louise Donovan said on Tuesday, ‘The UN has been consistent in seeking access to Bhasan Char and to the refugees. We look forward to continuing a constructive dialogue with the government regarding its Bhasan Char project, including the proposed UN technical and protection assessments.’

The recent relocation was the first phase of transfer to the island as the government would take there about 100,000 members of the community to decongest existing camps situated in areas adjacent to borders with Myanmar.

The relocation of a section of Rohingya people from camps in Cox’s Bazar to the 13,000-acre Bhasan Char facility that was developed with all amenities, including embankments to withstand natural disasters such as cyclones and tidal waves, at a cost of more than US$350 million was essential to decongest camps on the security grounds, said the Bangladesh government.

Some 8,60,000 Rohingyas, mostly women, children and aged people, entered Bangladesh fleeing unbridled murder, arson and rape during ‘security operations’ by the Myanmar military in Rakhine, what the United Nations has denounced as ethnic cleansing and genocide, beginning from August 25, 2017.

The latest Rohingya influx has taken the number of undocumented Myanmar nationals and registered refugees from that country in Bangladesh to over 1.1 million, according to estimates by UN agencies and Bangladesh foreign ministry.

Not a single Rohingya has returned to their home in Rakhine as the Myanmar government has almost stalled the Rohingya reparation process resorting to various means, including near discontinuation of clearing of names of the refugees eligible to go back to the country, and an unwillingness to hold meetings of the bilateral joint working group and the tripartite mechanism led by China.

Rights groups urge Bangladesh to halt Rohingya relocation

Staff Correspondent | Published: Dec 03,2020 
(newagebd.net)


International rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged Bangladesh authorities to immediately halt a plan of relocating the Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char Island.

‘The authorities should immediately halt relocation of more refugees to Bhashan Char, return those on the island to their families and community in mainland Bangladesh, and follow due process including the full and meaningful participation of refugees in any plan for their relocation,’ London-based Amnesty International’s South Asia campaigner, Saad Hammadi said in the statement.

In separate statement, New York-based Human Rights Watch’s Asia director Brad Adams said Bangladesh government was actively reneging on its promise to the UN not to relocate any refugees to Bhasan Char island until humanitarian experts give a green light.

‘If the government were genuinely confident in the habitability of the island, they would be transparent and not hastily circumvent UN technical assessments,’ he said.

The AI and HRW statements came amid reports of a government plan to start the relocation of some 4,000 refugees to Bhasan Char next week, though Bangladesh authorities were yet to announce any date.

‘The relocation of so many Rohingya refugees to a remote island, which is still off limits to everyone including rights groups and journalists without prior permission, poses grave concerns about independent human rights monitoring,’ said Hammadi.

‘It is crucial that the Bangladeshi authorities must let the UN, rights groups and humanitarian agencies carry out independent assessments of Bhashan Char’s habitability first before taking any steps to relocate people there. No relocation plan, either to Bhashan Char or to another location, can be undertaken without the full and informed consent of the individuals involved,’ he added.

‘Some refugees already on the island have shared their anxiety with Amnesty International at being cut off from their families and community.

‘Bangladesh and other members of the international community have a critical role not only in protecting the rights of the Rohingya people but also in ensuring their full and meaningful participation in decisions that affect them.’

Bhashan Char is a silt island developed by the Bangladesh Navy, where the Bangladeshi authorities plan to relocate 100,000 Rohingya refugees.

Human Rights Watch said it recently spoke with 12 families, who said their names were on the list, but that they had not willingly volunteered to relocate. Some refugees on the list have fled out of fear of forced relocation.

In a statement on December 2, the United Nations said that it had not been involved in preparation for this transfer to Bhasan Char and that ‘any relocations to Bhasan Char should be preceded by comprehensive technical protection assessments,’ reiterating that the UN stood ready to proceed with such assessments ‘if permitted by the Government.’

European Union Ambassador Rensje Teerink said that the EU would not comment on relocation to Bhasan Char until the UN had been allowed to complete technical and humanitarian missions to the island.

Rohingyas suffer from severe mental health crisis: Report

United News of Bangladesh . Dhaka | Published: Dec 10,2020 | newagebd.net


Rohingyas in Bangladesh who survived genocide in Myanmar are experiencing a ‘severe’ mental health crisis, according to data in a new report published on Thursday by Fortify Rights.

The report includes quantitative data on Rohingya experiences with human rights violations in Myanmar, traumatic events in Myanmar, symptoms of mental harm-including post-traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety-functioning difficulties, as well as Rohingya opinions on returning to Myanmar.

‘The Rohingya mental health crisis is life threatening and has been largely overlooked,’ said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer of Fortify Rights.

‘The scale of the problem is massive but not insurmountable. Governments should prioritise the mental health of the Rohingya community and ensure survivors of the genocide in Myanmar can rebuild their lives with dignity.’

United Nations agencies estimate that 12 months after an emergency, approximately 15 to 20 per cent of adults will experience some type of moderate or mild mental health disorder.

However, data published on Thursday revealed that 88.7 per cent of Rohingya refugees experienced symptoms of depression, 84 per cent experienced symptoms of emotional distress, and 61.2 per cent experienced symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The data further shows how these symptoms adversely impact the daily lives and functioning of Rohingya genocide survivors.

The 99-page report titled The Torture in My Mind’: The Right to Mental Health for Rohingya Survivors of Genocide in Myanmar is based on participatory action research conducted between March 2018 to November 2020 by a team of ten ethnic-Rohingya researchers trained and supported by Fortify Rights.

The report provides new evidence of the severe mental health toll that genocide, human rights violations, and violence has on survivors.

The quantitative methods used in the report ensure the results are representative of the entire Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh.

The most highly reported symptoms experienced by Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh related to reliving traumatic events.

For example, 97.6 per cent of Rohingya experienced some level of ‘recurrent thoughts or memories of the most hurtful or terrifying event,’ ‘feeling as though the event is happening again’ (96.6 per cent), and ‘recurrent nightmares’ (82.2 per cent).


The trauma symptoms experienced by a majority of Rohingya are indicative of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a serious mental-health condition that can interfere with leading a constructive life.

Nearly all Rohingya survey participants reported personally experiencing or witnessing traumatic experiences in Myanmar: 98.6 per cent of Rohingya refugees experienced exposure to frequent gunfire in Myanmar, 97.8 per cent witnessed the destruction or burning of villages, 91.8 per cent witnessed dead bodies, and 90.4 per cent witnessed physical violence against others.

Some 86.2 per cent experienced the murder of an extended family member or friend by security forces, 70.6 per cent experienced the ‘death of family or friends while fleeing or hiding,’ and 29.5 per cent experienced the murder of an ‘immediate family member.’

Of those indicating the murder of an immediate family member, 99.3 per cent reported that security forces in Myanmar perpetrated the killing.

Many Rohingya participants also reported experiencing bodily harm in Myanmar, including torture (55.5 per cent), beatings by a non-family member (46.1 per cent), stabbings (29.4 per cent), or physical injury from being shot (5.1 per cent).

Eight Rohingya women (3.1 per cent) reported being raped, and 87.5 per cent of these women reported being raped by Myanmar security forces.

The research also found 34.3 per cent of Rohingya refugee men experienced sexual abuse, sexual humiliation, or sexual exploitation in Myanmar, compared with 31.1 per cent of women-figures that may be affected by underreporting.

In addition, 67.3 per cent of Rohingya survey participants indicated that they had witnessed sexual violence or abuse in Myanmar.

The report findings demonstrate that restrictions on education, freedom of movement, healthcare, religious expression, and other violations are pervasive in Myanmar and contribute to protracted symptoms of trauma, depression, and anxiety.

The vast majority of Rohingya also experienced symptoms of anxiety and depression, including ‘worrying too much about things’ (92.5 per cent), ‘feeling sad’ (91.3 per cent), ‘loss of interest in things they previously enjoyed doing’ (89.5 per cent), and ‘feeling tense or agitated’ (88.7 per cent).

Most of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (68.7 per cent) reported feeling ‘humiliated or subhuman,’ which also significantly contributes to mental-health distress.

According to the report, 91.3 per cent of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh face some level of difficulty carrying out common daily activities, such as maintaining basic hygiene, engaging in social or religious activities, or performing other daily tasks. Of those who experience functioning difficulties, 62.3 per cent attributed these difficulties to ailing mental health.

Participatory action research is intended to advance community-supported, action-oriented solutions.

The ten-member Rohingya research team who worked on this project conducted 495 household surveys, 13 pre-research focus-group discussions, 33 participant feedback sessions, and 16 community workshops with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The report includes a chapter profiling the research team, providing further insight into their contributions and the impact of the research process itself.

‘We shaped the whole project, and we shaped the goals,’ said one Rohingya member of the research team. ‘Regarding this project, one of the best things that makes me happy, that makes me confident, is that this project helps us serve our own community by ourselves, not by any others.’

Members of the research team also contributed to a participatory photo essay published in the report by award-winning Bangladeshi photographer Saiful Huq Omi, whereby each team member decided how they would be photographed.

‘Rohingya are not merely victims,’ said Matthew Smith. ‘The idea that persecuted groups can’t objectively represent themselves is false and pernicious. The Rohingya team did excellent work documenting information that will affect humanitarian priorities and efforts to ensure justice.’

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority indigenous to Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

There are an estimated 2.5 million Rohingya worldwide, including approximately 600,000 in Rakhine State and approximately one million living in Bangladesh.

More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh following attacks led by the Myanmar armed forces in 2016 and 2017.

Fortify Rights, a UN Fact-Finding Mission, Rohingya-led organisations, and others determined those attacks amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.

All Rohingya surveyed for this report (100 per cent) believe that the ultimate intent of the Myanmar military and government was to destroy the Rohingya people.

‘The human right to mental health for Rohingya is inextricably linked to ending the violations and ensuring justice and accountability,’ said Matthew Smith.

‘Many direct-service providers do excellent work to address the mental health needs of refugees and migrants, and Bangladesh and donor governments should ensure those efforts are brought to scale for Rohingya. Bangladesh should do everything in its power to remove any conditions that cause psychological harm to the Rohingya population.’

On Bullsh*t Jobs | David Graeber | RSA Replay

In 2013 David Graeber, professor of anthropology at LSE, wrote an excoriating essay on modern work for Strike! magazine. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” was read over a million times and the essay translated in seventeen different languages within weeks. Graeber visits the RSA to expand on this phenomenon, and will explore how the proliferation of meaningless jobs - more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union than latter-day capitalism - has impacted modern society. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get

DEBT: The First 5,000 Years While the "national debt" has been the concern du jour of many economists, commentators and politicians, little attention is ever paid to the historical significance of debt. For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors' children into slavery. By the same token, for the past five thousand years, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. Enter anthropologist David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (July, ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2), which uses these struggles to show that the history of debt is also a history of morality and culture. In the throes of the recent economic crisis, with the very defining institutions of capitalism crumbling, surveys showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the country's banks should not be rescued—whatever the economic consequences—but that ordinary citizens stuck with bad mortgages should be bailed out. The notion of morality as a matter of paying one's debts runs deeper in the United States than in almost any other country. Beginning with a sharp critique of economics (which since Adam Smith has erroneously argued that all human economies evolved out of barter), Graeber carefully shows that everything from the ancient work of law and religion to human notions like "guilt," "sin," and "redemption," are deeply influenced by ancients debates about credit and debt. It is no accident that debt continues to fuel political debate, from the crippling debt crises that have gripped Greece and Ireland, to our own debate over whether to raise the debt ceiling. Debt, an incredibly captivating narrative spanning 5,000 years, puts these crises into their full context and illuminates one of the thorniest subjects in all of history. ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People, and Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. This talk was hosted by Boris Debic on behalf of the Authors@Google program.

Place Culture Politics

David Harvey in conversation with David Graeber Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 6.30 pm Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance. DAVID HARVEY is the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. DAVID GRAEBER is Reader in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also worked extensively on value theory, and has recently completed a major research project on social movements dedicated to principles of direct democracy, direct action, and has written widely on the relation (real and potential) of anthropology and anarchism. He is currently working on a project on the history of debt.

Red Plateaus

We're proud to present this talk by David Graeber and David Wengrow, entitled The Myth of the Stupid Savage: Rousseau's Ghost and the Future of Political Anthropology. Originally presented at the PPA+ Conference at the University of Amsterdam in May 2019. 

Article: http://www.journaldumauss.net/?La-sag... 

Support us on Patreon at patreon.com/redplateaus or follow us on twitter @rplateaus

Novara Media

David Graeber: A Celebration of His LifeStreamed live on Sep 27, 2020

David Graeber’s life and work leaves an indelible mark on thinkers and activists from London through New York, from Rojava to Quebec. To celebrate his life and work Novara Media are hosting a live stream with academics, activists, and politicians who have been influenced by, and who were an influence on, his intellectual endeavours and activist pursuits. With: Molly Crabapple John McDonnell David Wengrow Dani Ellis Debbie Bookchin Aaron Bastani Grace Blakeley Alpa Shah Jeremy Corbyn Hosted by Ash Sarkar Subscribe to Novara Media on YouTube ⇛ http://novara.media/youtube Support our work ⇛ https://novaramedia.com/support

David Graeber is funny •Sep 7, 2020

Liquid Knowledge
David had a way of communicating ideas considered radical that made them sound like common sense. And with an unassuming sense of humor. -Beka Economopoulos

Artangel

Longplayer Conversation 2014: David Graeber and Brian Eno

The 2014 Artangel Longplayer Conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber took place 7pm, Tuesday 7 October 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society, London SW7. Longplayer is a thousand-year long musical composition conceived and composed by Jem Finer. The Longlayer Conversations began with a meeting in 2005 between New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson and Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing; they continue to take place in the context of this project. Watch, listen to or read about previous Artangel Longplayer Conversations here: artangel.org.uk/projects/2000/longplayer/conversations/ Find out more about Longplayer here: artangel.org.uk//projects/2000/longplayer/about_the_project/about_the_project

 

LondonReviewofGames

David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream Time

  01.19.2012 

The twentieth century produced a very clear sense of what the future was to be, but we now seem unable to imagine any sort of redemptive future. How did this happen? One reason is the replacement of what might be called poetic technologies with bureaucratic technologies. Another is the terminal perturbations of capitalism, which is increasingly unable to envision any future at all. David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for 2011: to promote his new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House), learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. He's done well on the first, failed the second, and the third may be on the way, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement that Graeber helped initiate. He teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is also the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and Direct Action: An Ethnography, among other books. David Graeber gave this talk in the School of Visual Arts theater on 19 January 2012 at 7. Q&A begins at 52:24 http://artcriticism.sva.edu/?post=dav... http://www.londonreviewofgames.org

GANGSTERISM AS FOREIGN POLICY
Assassinations are becoming the new norm

by Patrick Cockburn | Published: 00:00, Dec 11,2020


— Counter Punch/Fars News Agency

I WAS in Israel on November 4, 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. A video shows Amir loitering by an exit to the square for 40 minutes before Rabin appears, when his killer takes out a pistol and fires two shots point blank into Rabin’s back. His purpose was to prevent a lasting peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians by killing the man who was the most powerful protagonist of such an agreement.

The assassination was universally condemned amid plaudits for Rabin as a man and a statesman, but within a year Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister and progress towards a settlement stalled and went into reverse.

Twenty-five years later almost to the day, another assassination took place, this time in Iran, of a nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, as he was driving in a car east of Tehran. He was ambushed and killed by a squad of gunmen, alleged to be Israeli, who shot him and exploded a bomb in a car prepositioned at the scene of the attack.

This time there was no international condemnation of the action of what was, going by different accounts, a death squad operating in a foreign country against a foreign citizen. This free pass was because the target was an Iranian and Fakhrizadeh had been accused by Israel of playing a leading role in a secret plan to build a nuclear device. But these allegations were unproven, mostly dated from long ago, and the current activities of the dead man are unclear. What is evident, however, is that ‘targeted killings’ by assassins outside their home countries are becoming very much the norm as a way in which nations show their strength. The poisoning of the Skripals by Russian agents in Salisbury in 2018 and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi death squad in Istanbul the same year are good examples of this and the death of Fakhrizadeh is another.

This latest assassination was not justified primarily as an attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme, but as a legitimate and successful display of state power. The New York Times said approvingly that ‘Mr Fakhrizadeh has become the latest casualty in a campaign of audacious covert attacks seemingly designed to torment Iranian leaders with reminders of their weakness.’ It added that the operation confronted Iran with an agonising choice between retaliation and seeking to re-engage with the United States when Joe Biden becomes president, replacing the viscerally anti-Iranian Donald Trump.

Any description of this or other ‘targeted killing’ by Israel or anybody else should carry a health warning. Everybody involved has a reason for lying, just as they once did about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 2003. Anything leaked by intelligence agencies to a credulous media should only be consumed with a large measure of salt.

Without officially claiming the attack, Israel is sending a message to Tehran to the effect that ‘we may soon no longer have Trump in our corner, but we can still hit you hard’. A further motive is to sour Iran against a nuclear deal with the United States, embolden Iranian hard liners who always opposed it, potentially provoke self-destructive Iranian retaliation, and complicate Biden’s declared intention to return to Barack Obama’s 2015 agreement with Iran.

Notice several peculiarities about this assassination: those emphasising the enormity of the breach in Iranian security are not Israelis but Iranians, reputedly close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These paint a rather unlikely scenario of an ambush by a dozen assassins, some leaping from a car and others arriving on motorcycles, and in case they should miss their target, there is a Fiat car packed with explosives ready to detonate.

A more likely explanation is that the IRGC, which was responsible for Fakhizadeh’s security, failed once again and is trying to excuse themselves by claiming that they were faced with an overwhelming force that nobody could have resisted. The IRGC’s reputation for competence had already been damaged in January this year when an IRGC crew manning an anti-aircraft missile battery shot down a Ukrainian aircraft over Tehran, killing 176 passengers and crew.

This disastrous mistake came in the wake of the assassination of general Qassem Soleimani, the IRGC head of covert operations in much of the Middle East, by a US drone at Baghdad airport on January 3, another sign that state-sponsored assassinations are becoming an acceptable international practice.

How will this all play out in terms of future US relations with Iran? The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, was his chief diplomatic achievement. Withdrawing from it in 2018 and seeking to extract better terms from Iran through sanctions amounting to an economic siege was the most important initiative by Trump in the Middle East.

Economic warfare like this did a lot of damage to Iran but it did not succeed in forcing it to negotiate and it was never likely to do so since Trump’s strategy, if anything so incoherent deserves that name, was to force surrender or regime change on Iran.

Biden says he wants to return to the JCPOA, but only if Iran is compliant, too. There is plenty of room here for disagreement about what exactly compliance entails and a return to the old agreement will be resisted by Israel, Saudi Arabia and its anti-Iranian Arab allies, and much of the foreign policy establishment in Washington.

Iranian enthusiasm for the 2015 agreement has also ebbed since they discovered that it did not in practice end economic sanctions. They have since found that these can to some degree be circumvented by secretly selling oil at a discounted price.

All recent US administrations have come into office hoping — and sometimes declaring publicly — that they would not allow themselves to be sucked into crises and messy wars in the Middle East. Invariably they have failed because the region is where the political tectonic plates of the world meet and grind together. It is the arena where outside powers confront each other directly or through their proxies.

‘Targeted killings’ on an individual or mass basis may appear to be a way of tipping the balance towards whatever country has decided to go into the assassination business. The killing of Yitzhak Rabin did matter for the future of the Israelis and the Palestinians, but this was the act of a single fanatic and not of a government. Few other assassinations in the Middle East have had much long-term impact, contrary to the cinematic view of a world where Mr Bigs, like Goldfinger or Dr No, are evil masterminds whose elimination will make a difference. In the real world, figures like Fakhrizadeh and Soleimani can always be replaced.

Generals and politicians once imagined that campaigns to kill the local leaders of insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq would open the door to victory. But they found that ‘night raids’ enraged local communities and dead leaders were swiftly replaced by angrier and more aggressive substitutes. One such campaign in Iraq led to a sharp jump in attacks on American forces. State-sponsored assassinations employ the methods of gangsterism and discredit and delegitimise those who use them.


CounterPunch.org December 8. 

Patrick Cockburn is author of War in the Age of Trump

The collective suicide of the liberal class
No one can, or should, take them seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing, writes Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges | Published: 00:00, Dec 09,2020



— Scheer Post/Mr Fish


LIBERALS who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labour unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.


The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Antony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as secretary of state? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to ‘offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional US coastlines to offshore oil drilling’ as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the ‘climate portfolio’ at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House’s economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Centre for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?

The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programmes, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control — wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world’s largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalised.

The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by US marshals of the Antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.

Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse’s killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.

We stand on the cusp of a frightening authoritarianism. Social unrest, given a continuation of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, the siphoning off of diminishing resources to the bloated war machine, political stagnation and the failure to contain the pandemic and its economic fallout, is almost certain. Absent a left-wing populism, a disenfranchised working class will line up, as it did with Trump, behind its counterfeit, a right-wing populism. The liberal elites will, if history is any guide, justify state repression as a response to social chaos in the name of law and order. That they, too, are on the Christian Right and the corporate state’s long list of groups to be neutralised will become evident to them when it is too late.

It was Friedrich Ebert and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, siding with the conservatives and nationalists, that created the Freikorps, private paramilitary groups composed of demobilised soldiers and malcontents. The Freikorps ruthlessly crushed left-wing uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle, Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia and the Ruhr. When the Freikorps was not gunning down left-wing populists in the streets and carrying out hundreds of political assassinations, including the murder of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, it was terrorising civilians, looting and pillaging. The Freikorps became the antecedent of the Nazi Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm, a former Freikorps commander.

All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarised Christianised fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.

Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the anti-Semitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonised as human embodiments of evil.

This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. The German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher in the 1930s said that fascism ‘is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings’ and succeeds by ‘mobilising human stupidity.’ This mobilised stupidity, accompanied by what Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘the evil effluvium from the human swamp,’ is being amplified and intensified in the siloed media chambers of the right. This hate-filled rhetoric eschews reality to cater to the desperate desire for emotional catharsis, for renewed glory and prosperity and for acts of savage vengeance against the phantom enemies blamed for our national debacle.

The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora’s box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, ‘once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target.’

This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.


ScheerPost.com  December 7

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who had been a foreign correspondent for 15 years for the New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper.