SASKATCHEWAN

MOE'S MISOGYNIST MURDERER PAL
'Disgraceful, reprehensible': Readers react to Colin Thatcher's throne speech invite

Opinion by Reader Letters -  Leader Post

Former Saskatchewan politician Colin Thatcher who was convicted for the murder of his ex-wife, JoAnn Wilson, speaks to the media after exiting the house chambers after the Throne Speech inside the Saskatchewan Legislative Building on Wednesday, October 26, 2022 in Regina.© 

This is disgraceful and tone deaf behaviour that is perpetrated by both Lyle Stewart and Scott Moe. Mr. Stewart inviting a convicted murderer to the Chamber and then defending his decisions, by saying he is a friend, a constituent and has had a tough life, is reprehensible . And Mr. Moe for allowing this to go ahead while blindly and sadly (and ironically) stating the Sask. Party cares about the protection and safety of Saskatchewan residents.

Colin Thatcher sitting in the Saskatchewan legislature as an invited guest is not only disgusting and shameful, it is also triggering for thousands of women who are victims of domestic violence. It also opens painful wounds of families grieving over their murdered loved ones.

Like JoAnn Wilson.
Susan Thiele, Regina

We both lived in Saskatchewan when the murder of Colin Thatcher’s ex-wife occurred. It was difficult to believe this would take place in peaceful Saskatchewan.

He was convicted, justly so, the court did their job but now the politicians have welcomed Colin back into the legislative circle. Shame on them!

Domestic violence is skyrocketing everywhere especially when looking at the stats in Saskatchewan.

As previous citizens of that lovely province, we can say shame, shame. The standards we hold our elected officials to definitively comes into scrutiny.

Fred and Sandra Turetski, Cranbrook, B.C.

 

Who is Colin Thatcher? Here's what you need to know about his 1984 murder conviction

Caitlin Brezinski
CTVNewsRegina.ca Digital Content Producer
Published Oct. 29, 2022 

Colin Thatcher was back in the news this week after appearing as an invited guest at the Government of Saskatchewan’s throne speech on Wednesday.

While his appearance sparked heated discussions surrounding domestic violence, some may be wondering who he is exactly and why his appearance shocked so many.

The former Saskatchewan cabinet minister was convicted of first-degree murder in 1984 for the 1983 death of his ex-wife, JoAnn Wilson, following a 15-month investigation into a case that gripped the province.

Thatcher was born in 1938 in Toronto, Ont. to Ross Thatcher, a former MP and Premier of Saskatchewan from 1964 to 1971.

RELATED STORIES

Inviting convicted killer Colin Thatcher to throne speech 'an error in judgment,' Sask. MLA says

Convicted wife killer Colin Thatcher at tough-on-crime Saskatchewan throne speech

He entered into politics in 1975 as a Liberal MLA then later served as Saskatchewan’s Minister of Energy from 1982 to 1983. He resigned on Jan. 17, 1983, citing family and financial reasons.

THE MURDER AND TRIAL

A 1987 appeal document from the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan provided details and background on Thatcher’s 1984 murder trial.

On May 7, 1984, Thatcher was arrested and charged with first-degree murder following the lengthy investigation. The trial began in the fall of 1984 and lasted 14 days.

Thatcher and Wilson married in 1962 then divorced in 1980. They engaged in a custody battle over their youngest of three children in the years following, according to the background provided in the appeal document.

Wilson was found beaten and shot to death in the garage of her Regina home in 1983.

“At about 6 p.m. on the evening of Jan. 21, 1983, JoAnn Wilson came home, drove into the garage of her home, and was ferociously beaten and then shot to death. 27 wounds were inflicted on her head, neck, hands, and lower legs. The injuries included a broken arm, a fracture of the wrist and a severed little left finger. A single bullet entered her skull, causing death,” the document read.

The Crown’s position was that Thatcher had murdered Wilson or he got someone else to do it. The trial judge explained to the jury that Thatcher would be considered guilty in either instance.

“If you do not find that he did the act of murder himself, he is equally guilty if you find and are satisfied that he either aided or abetted another or others in its commission,” the judge said.

In court, Mr. Craig Dotson testified that he found Wilson’s body after leaving work at the legislative building. He claimed he saw Wilson driving a green car, which turned into the garage at her house. He said he continued walking for about a block then heard loud screams behind him.

“He turned back to investigate. He heard a single loud sharp noise and then silence. As he approached a lane near the Wilson garage, he saw a man emerge from the garage. He did not pay any particular attention. It was dark. He was 30 to 40 feet from the individual. He walked a little further and saw a body in a pool of blood on the floor of the garage,” read the document.

Dotson testified that the composite sketch prepared by the police with his help did not fit Colin Thatcher.

Thatcher denied any involvement in the killing and the defence’s witnesses backed up his whereabouts at the time of the crime.

At the trial, the case for the Crown rested upon direct and circumstantial evidence, including apparent surveillance of the house by a man in a blue car for three afternoons prior to the killing, phone conversations, and the murder weapon.

Lynn Mendell, a former girlfriend of Thatcher, was called to the stand and detailed conversations the two had in 1980 and early 1981, in which she described the bitterness Thatcher constantly expressed about Wilson, and how he said many times that he wanted to kill her or arrange with someone to do it for him.

“According to Ms. Mendell, Thatcher told her he had met with someone in Saskatchewan whom he wanted to hire to kill JoAnn Wilson. He eventually told her the plan fell through but that he would have to go about it one way or another,” the court documents read.

Mendell also testified that she received two phone calls from Thatcher on the day of the killing.

She recalled what Thatcher said during the first call.

“Well, I'm going out now. This might be the night, stick around,” read the testimony.

During the later call he said, “Oh, my God, I've just been called... Apparently JoAnn has been shot in her home and has been killed,” Mendell said in her testimony.

There were several more testimonies given at the trial which all pointed to Thatcher being involved in the crime.

According to police testimony, Wilson was likely shot in the head with a .38 Special of .357 Magnum Ruger revolver. The owner of a gun shop in Palm Strings, Cali., testified that he sold Thatcher a .357 calibre Ruger revolver on Jan. 19, 1982.

The murder weapon was never found, according to the court documents.

Saskatchewan MLA Colin Thatcher is escourted by police into the Regina Provincial Courthouse June 25, 1984 for the preliminary hearing for the murder charge he faces. Thatcher was arrested May 7 for the murder of his ex-wife Joanne Wilson in 1983. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lorne McClinton

The jury deliberated from Nov. 2 to Nov. 6, 1984 and found Thatcher guilty of first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, which he served in-part at an Edmonton maximum security prison until 1988, then at the Ferndale minimum-security facility near Mission, B.C.

Thatcher, now 84, maintained his innocence all throughout that time and fought to gain early release from prison. He won the right to apply for early parole in 2003 and was released in 2006.

He wrote two books, “A Man’s Grief: Death of a Spouse,” which was released in 2001, and “Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame,” which was released in 2009 and outlined his stance that he was framed for the crime.

Thatcher represented himself in 2010 in a fight for profits from his 2009 book, which were ultimately turned over to the Ministry of Justice.

Several books were also written about Thatcher and his case, including “A Canadian Tragedy: JoAnn and Colin Thatcher,” and “Deny, Deny, Deny, The Rise and Fall of Colin Thatcher.”

05:42
CTV News Archive: 2010 interview with Colin Thatcher

02:16
Colin Thatcher invitation 'error in judgment': MLA

02:46
Colin Thatcher spotted at throne speech

Dear American Church, You’re Dying

People are rightly walking away, because they refuse to tolerate something that so regularly yields hatred while claiming to be made of love.

October 29, 2022 by John Pavlovitz 


Dear American Church,

I have some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is—you’re slowly dying.

If you’re paying attention, you probably realize that.

Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to.
Play Video

There are many complicated and interconnected reasons for this, but here are a few broad strokes:

You’re dying because of your hypocrisy.

People see the ever-widening chasm between who you say you are and what they regularly experience in your presence.
They see the great disparity between the expansive hospitality of Jesus and the narrow prejudice you are so often marked by.
They see Christ’s deep affection for the poor, hurting, and marginalized—and either your quiet indifference or your open hostility toward them.
They’ve listened to you preach incessantly about the immorality of the world, the dangers of greed, the corrupt nature of power, the poison of untruth, the evils of sexual perversion—and watched you willingly align with politicians embodying all of these.
They see that you are so often the very kind of malevolent ugliness that you forever warned was coming to assail the world.

You’re dying because of your willful ignorance.

People are tired of your war on Science.
They are sick of your arguing with Biology.
They are exhausted by your attacks on women.
They are horrified by your justifications of racism.
They despise your posturing nationalism.
They know the earth is round.
They know it is billions, not thousands of years old.
They know dinosaurs walked it.
They know that it is warming rapidly.
They know people here don’t choose their sexuality.
They know whoever and whatever God is—doesn’t appoint Presidents or hand out weapons or attack people with tornadoes.

You’re dying because of your devotion to cruelty.

People watch you dig in your heels against others because of their gender identity and sexual orientation; the way you continually exact violence upon them, the way you try and blame God and the Bible for your fearful bigotry and your predatory behavior.
They’ve seen your intolerance to other religious traditions: how you vilify anyone who finds spirituality and meaning outside of your precise expression of Christianity, how you so easily disregard the faith stories of those who don’t reflect your own.
They’ve watched you so revel in being the bully to those you were originally called to protect.

You’re dying because of your complicity in violence.

Good people have seen you so often be a safe haven for misogynists, domestic abusers, sexual predators, and white supremacists—who all receive protection in your antiquated words, in your personality cults, and in your enabling culture.
They’ve heard your explicit silence in the face of a brutal and rising flood of anti-Semitism, of open racism, of hostility toward immigrants, of attacks on Asian people and Muslims.
They see your pastors and leaders misuse their positions and leverage their influence to victimize the most vulnerable and to serve as scapegoats for discrimination.
They’ve watched you be the last, hateful holdout in matters of gender equality, racial diversity, sexuality, and theological difference; lagging behind almost everyone in the world in the kind of goodness you say you aspire to.

Because of these things and many more, American Church, people are rightly walking (some running) away, because they refuse to tolerate something that so regularly yields hatred while claiming to be made of love. They are unburdened by habit or obligation to participate in something that feels increasingly incongruent with their values.

They are conscientious objectors in your unending holy wars, choosing to step away from you in order to create loving spiritual communities, grow deeper in personal faith, escape tribal partisan politics, craft a healthier planet, reflect the character of Jesus, and hold onto their souls.

Yes, American Church, the bad news is—you’re slowly but surely dying as you are now.

The good news is that in your passing, something else is being born.

Rising in these days, is a sprawling community of disparate people not bound by geography or denomination or tradition, who want to create something redemptive and life-giving here, who don’t care what it’s called and who gets the credit and what building it happens in. From the outside it may bear some resemblance to who you have been, but it will likely look quite different.

Yes, the bloated, mean-spirited version of religion that has characterized so much of you is slowly and most surely passing away: the hypocrisy and the enmity, all the coercion and posturing—these things are correctly being seen as irrelevant by a watching world who will no longer abide them or participate in them.

These newly-emancipated sojourners are creating something of compassion and generosity and hospitality—a radically-inclusive faith that opens the table, a spirituality that welcomes the world, a religion that does no harm: a working theology of love.

Church, though part of you is dying, the best of you gets to be resurrected differently now.

You get to live on in the lives of open-hearted human beings who want to unearth the beauty buried beneath heavy layers of rigid dogma, ornamental religion, and institutionalized discrimination.

These people are excavating your religion and releasing love from its man-made prison, and in this way—the best, truest parts of you will live on.

You get to be born again in the image of something that does not seek power or bed down with politics or thrive on exclusion, something resembling the Jesus who birthed you.

The bad news, American Church—is that you are dying.

And it’s the very good news, too.

Previously published on johnpavlovitz.com

51ST STATE

US backs up gas deal with Israeli security and economic guarantees

Biden pledged to support Israel's security and economic rights that were established in the deal.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
Published: OCTOBER 29, 2022
Jerusalem Post

Lapid welcomed US President Joe Biden to Israel in July.
(photo credit: KOBI GIDEON/GPO)


US President Joe Biden pledged to provide Israel with security and economic guarantees, in a letter he is expected to give Prime Minister Yair Lapid in the coming days, in light of the historic maritime agreement the Jewish state reached with Lebanon, according to a diplomatic source.

In the letter, the US reiterates its commitment to support the IDF in defending Israel. This is about strengthening the capacity of the IDF to protect the Jewish state, including against threats against Israeli vessels and energy assets.

The text of the letter was agreed upon Friday and will be signed in the coming days, according to a diplomatic source, who briefed reporters on the content of the document which has not been made public.

Biden clarified in the letter that the US recognizes the maritime boundary set by the agreement as the "status quo" and will oppose any attempt to modify that boundary unless both Israel and Lebanon agree to that change.

Should the agreement be violated, the US would stand with Israel to prevent any such attempt to undermine the deal, Biden promised Lapid in the letter.


PRIME MINISTER Yair Lapid, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Energy Minister Karin Elharrar hold a press conference on the maritime border deal with Lebanon, at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, on Wednesday. (credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)

The letter mentioned in specific the US determination to prevent Hezbollah from profiting from the deal, which sets a boundary line between two abutting gas fields — Karish and Kana — so that both countries can peacefully produce natural gas.

What was agreed in the deal?

Under the terms of the maritime agreement signed on Thursday, Israel will receive 17% of the revenues from the Sidon-Kana field. The US will support Israel's receipt of those revenues, the letter explains.

Overall the document exceeds policy statements already made by the US with respect to the agreement as it pledged to back up Israel's security and economic rights.

The letter which is likely to be signed prior to Tuesday's election acknowledges Lapid's role in helping achieve the deal which it explains is a first step to promoting stability between Israel and Lebanon.

Biden in the letter also reaffirms the importance of strong US-Israel relations as defined by the Jerusalem Declaration which both he and Lapid signed in July when the US President visited Israel
.

TURTLE ISLAND

Landless in her own land
In 1954, the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act removed federal recognition of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and the tribe spent the next three decades fighting to restore it. Cheryle A. Kennedy, the tribe’s chairwoman, shares her personal experience, as told to Underscore News' Karina Brown, of losing federal status and her support for the Chinook Indian Nation

UNDERSCORE NEWS
1 HOUR AGO

Grand Ronde Tribal Chairwoman Cheryle A. Kennedy stands near Willamette Falls in Oregon. (Photo courtesy of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde)

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series that illuminates the historical context of tribal law in the Pacific Northwest and examines cases where tribes and tribal members have used federal courts to expand their rights under federal law. The series also explores the growing authority of tribal courts and their role in exercising the inherent rights of sovereign Indigenous nations, as well as the way federal and state laws restrict tribal courts’ operation.

This series is supported by the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

Cheryle Kennedy
Underscore News

I was terminated in 1954 as an individual member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. I was always an Indian person, my parents, my grandparents, all of us. When we knew that there was the attempt, my father, my mother and others in our family got together. I was a child but I knew this was very serious business that was going on with our tribe. All I knew was that they were saying, "This is bad. They are going to do away with us." As a child, I was thinking, "What does this mean?"

Grand Ronde had a reservation with health and governmental services here and all that was taken away. It was gone. There was no longer the reservation here and many of the homes were lost, because they became taxable. The homes and the land was lost, everything was stripped away and there was no compensation for any of the taking. And they said we were no longer Indian as well. I thought, "How can they do that? What do they mean?" Of course their process was through tribal enrollment and that’s what they meant.

Related:
— Part 1: Sovereign justice
— Part 2: On an ancient road, tribal elders wage an invisible battle

My father was an engineer and we lived at Warm Springs. But even being full Indian, we couldn’t access any of our services there. We couldn’t go to the clinic, we weren’t eligible for any of the educational opportunities, we were not considered Indian by the federal government and therefore we were not able to receive federal services.


China seeks to loot Apache sacred place for China’s own uses


8 Things You Should Know About Two Spirit People


'Dances With Wolves' 25 Years Later: Has Hollywood Improved on Its Portrayal of Indians?

Being landless in your own country is a horrible thing. There’s no place to really call your home. Our people were buried in our cemeteries. But there was no place to do the ceremonies I grew up with. Subsistence hunting and fishing was gone. Normally, we would travel to the Willamette Falls and gather our eels. We would fish and we would hunt and all of that was gone. So it was a very, very traumatic time for anyone not being recognized as being Indian or having a tribe.

It shakes you to the core, because according to all the sociological norms, to be healthy, identity is critical to your core of who you are and when you experience that — that the U.S. of A, the greatest nation on earth, doesn’t see you, doesn’t recognize who you are — then you aren’t who you are. So that causes a lot of trauma and part of it is your health conditions are worse and you may not achieve all that you could have possibly been because you don’t have a forum to achieve your academic pursuits.

That was a horrible, horrible thing.

Once we knew that there were efforts at restoration and I had been involved in helping my cousins who were the spearheaders of the restoration act, it was with all enthusiasm that we threw in whatever we had. There were no funds — we used our own funds — to travel, to gather together, to put together a little newsletter. Our cemetery was really a focal point that kept us together. We had a big event where we would be able to see all our relatives, because everyone moved away. There was no place to live here. There was a core of people who managed to stay in the area, but it was the cemetery — our ancestors — who really kept us together, and we kept coming back year by year and saying we’re going to do this. This wrong that has been done to us, we will fight it. And in the end, restoration was achieved in 1983.

Even though it’s been 39 years, we are still working at restoration of our culture. Because the language piece, we have people now who have relearned the language and are teaching our young children the ceremonies we had, like giving thanks when you shot your first deer or elk or fish. So now we are returning to those kinds of ceremonies.

You’re talking about your soul has been damaged and now for us it’s been put back together again, and so that is our prayer and our hope for the Chinook tribal people: that this will be a thing of the past as well and they will soon be talking about, "This is what we are doing today and how we are getting well.


Underscore is a nonprofit collaborative reporting team in Portland focused on investigative reporting and Indian Country coverage. We are supported by foundations, corporate sponsors and donor contributions. Follow Underscore on Facebook and Twitter.

OREGONCONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE

AMERIKA
Young Black voters could be essential in future elections, analysis of theGrio/KFF survey shows

In the new Survey of Black Voters from theGrio and KFF, Black voters ages 18-29 are particularly disdainful of President Joe Biden seeking a second term.

Dana Amihere 
Oct 29, 2022

Political candidates are making concerted efforts to appeal to young voters and address social and economic issues that directly affect their generation most. And, with good reason. There’s a generational gap between voters: the diverse youth and aging white adults, the so-called “brown and gray.” Moreover, young people of color are an increasingly important voting bloc.

“What you now have is a brown, a more diverse and a younger voting base,” explained LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, in a statement to theGrio. They’re shaping public policy now, and they’re the new up-and-coming vote that will shape public policy going forward, said Brown.

Most Black youth voters say “no” to Joe Biden for 2024. In the new Survey of Black Voters from theGrio and KFF, Black voters ages 18-29 are particularly disdainful of President Biden seeking a second term: 71% said they want the Democratic Party to nominate someone else in the next election. That’s compared to four in 10 Black voters overall who said they think the Democratic Party should renominate Joe Biden in 2024, and 58% of Black voters who think someone else should be nominated.
Do you think the Democratic Party should renominate Joe Biden as the party’s candidate for President in 2024, or do you think the party should nominate a different candidate for President in 2024?

Read full TheGrio/KFF Survey of Black Voters

Eight in ten Black voters ages 18-29 support Congress passing protections for same-sex marriage, and they’re the only age group with more than half (56%) in support of allowing transgender student-athletes to compete on sports teams in alignment with their gender identities.



“I think the Black vote has consistently been a progressive vote. It has been the vote that has always leaned more towards progressive policies,” said Brown.

According to an October report on a survey of Americans ages 18-29 conducted by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm, young Americans want to see “bold policy action” taken by Congress to codify abortion rights, strengthen gun laws to curb violence and address climate change. And, they’re willing to band together to make their voices heard loud and clear.

Also Read:
Black voters solidly approve of Biden and Harris, less firm on the president’s reelection in TheGrio/KFF survey

“From the Sunrise Movement to March for Our Lives, young people are already leading movements to push for progressive change. By a +48-point margin, young Americans across party lines support the use of protests to advance causes that they support,” says the report.

Young voters aren’t just vocal, they show up. They aren’t the largest group in the electorate, said the executive director of elections and surveys for CBS News, Anthony Salvanto. But if they show up, it could be a “turnout for the ages,” he said in an Oct. 19 interview on CBS Mornings

.

Demonstrators from Baltimore march in the March for Our Lives rally March 24, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

A 2021 study from the nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University estimates that half of voters ages 18-29 cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Compared to 2016, turnout increased 39%, “likely one of the highest rates of youth electoral participation since the voting age was lowered to 18” in 1971.

Those looking to woo youth voters, especially young voters of color, are taking note: Bold moves from the White House and movements driven by social justice hone in on the interests of this essential demographic.

It may be the midterms, but President Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the next election, is using the opportunity to get a jump on 2024 and cast Democrats who are facing off in November in an admirable light.

“In politics, you’ve got to get the work done, but you’ve also got to let people know that you’re getting the work done,” North Carolina state Representative Terry Brown told Bloomberg in an October report. Brown, a Charlotte Democrat, said Biden’s recent pardon for federal marijuana possession charges and student loan forgiveness program are “tangible steps” that voters can appreciate because they see the effects of them more clearly than broader legislation from Biden. “Sometimes it takes these big splashy announcements to get people’s attention,” he said.

LaTosha Brown’s Black Voters Matter engages HBCU students as part of its Get Out The Vote bus tour. The year’s “We Won’t Black Down” campaign kickoff coincided with National Black Voters Day on Sept. 16 and will continue with stops in key states in the lead-up to Election Day. “Black voters and Black people have always stood [as] a vanguard. I think, once again, we are needed to stand [as a] vanguard, that we will make the difference because I do think that we are the leverage vote.”

Co-founder Black Voters Matter LaTosha Brown speaks as other voting rights activists listen during a “Rally for D.C. Statehood,” the last stop of BVM’s “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights” bus tour, at the National Mall June 26, 2021 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

HBCUs have long been a critical conduit to reach Black students and engage Black young people. Senate Democrats held their annual issues conference at Howard University in March. Biden gave the commencement speech at South Carolina State University last year (albeit amid controversy over a spending bill that proposed $10 billion for HBCUs that eventually passed).

Vice President Kamala Harris made visited to SC State and Claflin University in September.

Black voters’ mood ahead of midterms tempered by age, economy and racism, TheGrio/KFF survey finds

“She came down, and she came to socialize with us. She came to take pictures with [us]. She came to speak with us, to know our names,” SC State student Lataye Walker told CBS-affiliate WLTX. HBCUs are increasingly being recognized as more than a prop and more as a stakeholder to engage and work alongside. Harris, a proud Howard grad and member of the historically Black Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., continues outreach to her Divine Nine sisters on voting and abortion rights. After all, “one of [their] own” is in the White House now.

An August episode of MSNBC’s Into America podcast, “The Gen Z Midterm Test,” brought together three Atlanta HBCU students together in conversation with host Trymaine Lee.

William Morris, from Morehouse, emphasized the importance of HBCU students’ vote—especially in a swing state like Georgia. “I think people often know that the road to election goes through the Atlanta University Center,” a hub of HBCUs Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University.

(Photo: Spelman College)

Spelman political science student Monique Vaz said, “I think that a lot of the people in the Democratic Party are playing very moderate because of how Trump polarized the nation into ‘You’re either this or that.’ But, I think that, personally, we need more liberal solutions to fix” what’s happening in this country, said Vaz.

Despite the far-reaching impacts of student debt relief and drug pardons, many critics say that it’s a good start, but these efforts don’t push far enough.

Fifty-eight percent of students receiving federal Pell grants are Black, and 94% come from families that have incomes less than $60,000 per year. A 2021 Urban Institute study analyzes the outcomes of several different student loan forgiveness program variations. A “Pell-based approach would target borrowers from lower-income backgrounds” and “disproportionately benefit Black borrowers.”

Researchers posited that the cost of forgiving the cumulative amount of Pell dollars received by a student while in college is roughly the same as forgiving up to $10,000 for all borrowers. Under Biden’s plan, Pell recipients have $20,000 in student loans forgiven and low- to middle-income borrowers have $10,000 forgiven.

But, does this plan, which Biden’s Administration said will “help narrow the racial wealth gap,” actually work toward that end in a meaningful way?

Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than their white counterparts. And, more than 50% of Black student borrowers report their net worth is less than what they owe in student loan debt. Ten thousand dollars, even $20,000 in loan forgiveness, covers only a small fraction of what some Black borrowers owe

.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks on the student debt relief plan as Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona (R) listens in the South Court Auditorium at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on October 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. President Biden gave an update on the student debt relief portal beta test. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A May report prepared for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, chair of a congressional economic growth subcommittee, said $50,000 in student loan debt forgiveness was optimal from a fiscal and racial equity perspective. Thirty million people, 76% of borrowers, would have the debt zeroed out. The number of poorest borrowers would shrink from 15% to 2%. According to the report, Biden’s $10,000 cancellation plan still leaves 83% of Black borrowers in debt. Under the alternative $50,000 cancellation plan, 33% of Black borrowers would remain in debt, a 50% difference.

Biden’s executive pardon for all prior offenses of “simple possession” of marijuana is also viewed as problematic by some. For one, the change only applies to federal possession charges, which impact about 6,500 people. And, most of these people are also serving time for more serious offenses like trafficking or drug distribution.

Black voters surveyed by theGrio/KFF want Biden to address inflation; only 12% named student debt as top economic issue

Pardons for state charges would open doors for many more people (likely with lesser charges), allowing them to better access housing, employment and other opportunities post-conviction. And, the pardon doesn’t address marijuana’s drug classification. Biden did tap the attorney general to begin the review process to reschedule marijuana, currently classified as a Schedule I drug in the same group as heroin and ecstasy. But, Biden’s past reluctance toward decriminalization, which a record-high 68% of Americans support, may be a factor in youth voters’ perceptions of his willingness to support their progressive agenda.

Black voters, youth especially, want Democrats to move from the safety of being moderate and centrist to more liberal, progressive policies to ameliorate the country’s sociopolitical division.

Vaz, the Spelman student, thinks certain Democrats are trying to “push the envelope” toward change while others are content being quiet and complacent. “I think that they ran on these platforms, so they need to really be acting on them. If not, they will see what happens in November,” she said.

About the Survey

The Survey of Black Voters is the first partnership survey between theGrio and KFF, a nonprofit organization focused on research and analysis of health and other national issues. Teams from KFF and theGrio worked together to develop the questionnaire and analyze the data, and both organizations contributed financing for the survey. Each organization is solely responsible for its content.

The survey was conducted Aug. 24–Sept. 5 with a nationally representative, probability-based sample of 1,000 adults who identify as Black or African American and are registered to vote. The sample includes all voters who identify as Black or African American, including those who also identify as Hispanic or multi-racial. The sampling design includes Black registered voters reached online through the SSRS Opinion Panel and the Ipsos KnowledgePanel; to reach Black voters who do not use the internet, additional interviews were conducted by calling back respondents who previously participated in an SSRS Omnibus poll and identified as Black and said they did not use the internet. The combined telephone and panel samples were weighted to match the sample’s demographics to the national U.S. population of Black voters using data from the Census Bureau’s 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplement. Sampling, data collection, weighting and tabulation were managed by SSRS of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, in close collaboration with KFF researchers.

The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for results based on the full sample of Black voters. The full methodology and question-wording are available here.

 

Dana Amihere is a data journalist, designer and developer. She is the founder/executive director of AfroLA, a new nonprofit newsroom that covers greater Los Angeles through the lens of the Black community.

Russia Suspends Deal That Allowed Safe Passage of Ukraine Grain Exports

The ministry cited an alleged Ukrainian drone attack against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ships moored off the coast of occupied Crimea, which Russia says took place in early Saturday, as the reason for the move

By Andrew Meldrum • AP 

Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, a Turkish Polarnet cargo ship is loading Ukrainian grain in a port in Odesa region, Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022.


Russia announced Saturday that it will move to suspend its implementation of a U.N.-brokered grain deal that has seen more than 9 million tons of grain exported from Ukraine during the war and has brought down soaring global food prices.

The Russian Defense Ministry cited an alleged Ukrainian drone attack against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet ships moored off the coast of occupied Crimea, which Russia says took place early Saturday, as the reason for the move. Ukraine has denied the attack, saying that the Russians mishandled their own weapons.

The Russian declaration came one day after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres urged Russia and Ukraine to renew the grain export deal. Guterres also urged other countries, mainly in the West, to expedite the removal of obstacles blocking Russian grain and fertilizer exports.

The U.N. chief said the grain deal — brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July and which expires on Nov. 19 — helps "to cushion the suffering that this global cost-of-living crisis is inflicting on billions of people,” his spokesman said.

A Guterres spokesman said U.N. officials were in touch with Russian authorities over the announced suspension.

“It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which is a critical humanitarian effort that is clearly having a positive impact on access to food for millions of people,” said the spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.

Russia's Foreign Ministry on Saturday accused British specialists of being involved in the alleged attack by drones on Russian ships in Crimea.

“In connection with the actions of Ukrainian armed forces, led by British specialists, directed, among other things, against Russian ships that ensure the functioning of the humanitarian corridor in question (which cannot be qualified otherwise than as a terrorist attack), the Russian side cannot guarantee the safety of civilian dry cargo ships participating in the Black Sea initiative, and suspends its implementation from today for an indefinite period,'' the Russian statement said.

Britain's Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, accused Russia of playing “hunger games” by imperiling global food shipments.

“We warned about Russia’s plans to destroy the (grain agreement). Now, under false pretenses, Moscow is blocking the grain corridor that ensures food security for millions of people,” he tweeted Saturday.

The head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, denounced the suspension as “primitive blackmail.”

Turkish officials said they haven't received any official notice of the deal's suspension.

Russia's agriculture minister said Moscow stands ready to “fully replace Ukrainian grain and deliver supplies at affordable prices to all interested countries.” In remarks carried by the state Rossiya 24 TV channel, Dmitry Patrushev said Moscow was prepared to “supply up to 500,000 tons of grain to the poorest countries free of charge in the next four months,” with the help of Turkey.

Patrushev also reiterated the Kremlin’s earlier allegations that a disproportionate volume of grain exported from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports was bound for European destinations.

Earlier Saturday, Ukraine and Russia offered differing versions on the Crimea drone attack in which at least one Russian ship suffered damage in the port on the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

The Russian Defense Ministry said a minesweeper had “minor damage” during an alleged pre-dawn Ukrainian attack on navy and civilian vessels docked in Sevastopol, which hosts the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The ministry claimed Russian forces had “repelled” 16 attacking drones.

The governor of the Sevastopol region, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said the port saw “probably the most massive attack” by air and sea drones. He provided no evidence, saying all video from the area would be held back for security reasons.

But an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry claimed that “careless handling of explosives” had caused blasts on four warships in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Anton Gerashchenko wrote on Telegram that the vessels included a frigate, a landing ship and a ship that carried cruise missiles used in a deadly July attack on a western Ukrainian city.

In other developments on Saturday, Russian troops moved large numbers of sick and wounded comrades from hospitals in Ukraine's southern Kherson region and stripped the facilities of medical equipment, Ukrainian officials said as their forces fought to retake the province.

Countries that relied on Ukraine for crops like wheat and beets are seeing shortages after months of war. Egypt and other nations on the African continent are going to see food costs "skyrocket" as a result. Donor nations should step up to provide relief, says Lester Munson, principal international and trade consultant at BGR Group.

Kremlin-installed authorities in the mostly Russian-occupied region had previously urged civilians to leave the city of Kherson, the region's capital — and reportedly joined the tens of thousands who fled to other Russia-held areas.

“The so-called evacuation of invaders from the temporarily occupied territory of the Kherson region, including from medical institutions, continues," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russians were “dismantling the entire health care system” in Kherson and other occupied areas.

“The occupiers have decided to close medical institutions in the cities, take away equipment, ambulances. just everything," Zelenskyy said.

Kherson is one of four regions in Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last month and where he subsequently declared martial law. The others are Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.

As Kyiv's forces sought gains in the south, Russia kept up its shelling and missile attacks in the country's east, Ukrainian authorities said Saturday. Three more civilians died and eight more were wounded in the Donetsk region, which has again become a front-line hotspot as Russian soldiers try to capture the city of Bakhmut, an important target in Russia's stalled eastern offensive.

Russian shelling also an industrial building in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region. Around a quarter of the region — including its capital, also called Zaporizhzhia — remains under Ukrainian military control.

In the latest prisoner exchange, 52 Ukrainians, including two former defenders of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, were released Saturday as part of a swap with Russia, according to Yermak. The steelworks in that bombed-out port city now symbolize Ukrainian resistance.

Also released, he said, was a sailor who defended Ukraine’s Snake Island, a strategic Black Sea outpost seized by Russia in the opening hours of the war. Others coming home were Ukrainian soldiers captured by Moscow near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant — the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986 — which Russian forces briefly occupied from February to March.
Copyright AP - Associated Press

PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

Jobs and Saudi arms sales: The real story

BY MIRIAM PEMBERTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/29/22 
THE HILL

In this Jan. 18, 2016 file photo, an oil pump works at sunset, in the desert oil fields of Sakhir, Bahrain. The global energy transition is perhaps nowhere more perplexing than in the Arabian Peninsula. The political stability of the six Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — is rooted in profits from fossil fuels. They are privately and publicly advocating for carbon capture technologies rather than a rapid phasing out of burning fossil fuels. 

(AP Photo/Hasan Jamali)

Since World War II, U.S. dependence on oil has led every American president to cut quiet deals with one of our major sources, Saudi Arabia, to keep the flow coming. The key deal sweetener has been arms sales, billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated U.S. weapons to the kingdom year after year. Periodically these deals erupt into public consciousness and become controversial. But never more so than now.

In recent years, American consciences have had to contend with stories of the Saudis killing innocent civilians in Yemen with American-made precision strike weapons. In 2018, for example, a Lockheed Martin-made bomb hit a Yemeni school bus, dealing death to 40 children. Such stories have sometimes made it to the front pages. Stories about the millions more suffering from the war’s ongoing famine usually don’t.

But now the linkage of oil and war is hitting home. The Saudis’ (and OPEC’s) decision to cut production is not good news for Americans heading to the gas pump. It is good news for Russia in its struggle to finance its war in Ukraine and weaken the resolve of Ukraine’s supporters.

In response, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), announced that he was putting a hold on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. While his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives him a great deal of power to do this, making it stick will almost certainly require presidential approval.

So far, it isn’t coming. The Biden administration’s near-term response is focusing on using the U.S. strategic oil reserve to make up some of the difference. And its longer-term response involves trying to make up for lost time in creating an economy running on clean domestic energy sources rather than oil from the likes of Saudi Arabia.

A NPR reporter put her finger on one reason the administration hasn’t yet embraced cutting the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia: “[T]hose [sales] represent a lot of American jobs.”

So here we are, with our foreign policy choices hamstrung by our failure to cut that tie between oil and arms sales.

The cutting task requires putting the connection between arms sales and jobs in perspective. It is true that U.S. weapons, including those going to foreign markets, sustain a lot of jobs, but the number is often overstated. The Trump administration got in the habit of inflating the number of jobs tied to Saudi arms sales by a factor of 10 or 20 times.

Beyond Trump’s wanton habits of exaggeration, arms sales job estimates often ignore the side deals that frequently accompany them: requirements that the recipient country manufacture parts of the system or secure offsetting U.S. investments in that country’s economy.

Moreover studies have repeatedly shown that far more jobs would be created from federal investment in things other than weaponry: 40 percent more from spending on infrastructure or clean energy, for example, and nearly 100 percent more from education spending.Is the ‘secret majority’ about to make a powerful statement on Nov. 8?How to win Latino voters: protect health care and lower health costs

In my visits to defense-dependent locations around the country for my new book, I frequently found that economic dependency on weapons manufacturing was a far less reliable strategy for community prosperity than we’ve been led to expect. For example, while Forbes magazine routinely puts Los Alamos County, home of a key piece of our nuclear weapons complex, on its top ten list for per-capita income, the adjoining county, Rio Arriba, hovers near the bottom of the income scale nationwide. Beyond such anecdotal evidence, I compared the top 60 most defense-dependent locations in the country with their poverty rates. My finding: Nearly half of the communities awash in military money had poverty rates at or above the national average.

For too long our foreign policy has been under the thumb of the Saudis’ oil and their wars. Getting out from under will require putting inflated claims about jobs and arms sales in their place.

Miriam Pemberton is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her new book is “Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies” (Routledge, 2022).

Fascism Was a Violent Counterrevolution

A century since the March on Rome, it is important to remember the horrors of Benito Mussolini’s regime. Fascism was morally repugnant — but also a movement based on violent counterrevolution.

Benito Mussolini reviews blackshirt militia in Rome in 1936.

 (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)


BY STEFANIE PREZIOSO
 10.29.2022
 Jacobin

A century since the March on Rome, the “return” of Italy’s fascist past has never seemed closer. This month, the Senate elected as its new president Ignazio La Russa, cofounder of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, just weeks after he declared that “we are all heirs of the Duce.”

In such a context, bringing out a novel about Benito Mussolini — as Antonio Scurati has with his M. trilogy — is a huge responsibility. More than any historical writing, Scurati’s work has become a bestseller, translated into several languages. The responsibility is even greater because Scurati seeks to “bring fascism down to earth, giving real knowledge of it as only literature knows how, when it delves into the details of material life.” M. is thus a “documentary novel”; it deliberately plays on the blurred boundary between history and fiction, on the “intertwining” of the two genres in an era which, Scurati tells us, invites “cooperation between the rigor of historical scholarship and the art of fictional storytelling.”

Does historical writing not imitate fiction, when it fills in the blanks with intelligent narrative, with imagination, with sympathy? Does grasping the past “as it really was” not demand the historian’s ability to immerse himself in other worlds, to make them his own and pass them on to others? Professional historians often prove incapable of speaking to a wider audience, and clumsy when trying to use literary art, which is even more needed with biography or collective biography. From this point of view, Scurati’s three M. books are a masterpiece.

Scurati constructs a cutting, gripping narrative drawing on firsthand sources. He is not afraid to confront the enduring myth of Italiani brava gente (Italians, the good people) — a myth which diminishes Italians’ responsibility for war crimes in World War II. Particularly noteworthy is his description of fascism’s genocidal policy in Libya, to which the second volume dedicates many pages and which still remains an overlooked part of Italian history.

Scurati wanted to “give voice to the thoughts of those who, through their actions, contributed to writing that history.” To do this, he claims that it was necessary to operate without “ideological prejudices.” This is a significant statement in a country where, for decades, historiographical revisionism has found its strength precisely in the claim to produce a “de-ideologized” and “serene” history “without prejudices,” far removed from the “great political passions” of the short twentieth century. Scurati is no exception: he claims that the “anti-fascist prejudice” blocks the ability to analyze fascism, producing a “form of blindness.”

This implies that we ought to overlook the hundreds of studies produced in the heat of the anti-fascist struggle — still today essential to approaching the phenomenon — such as Angelo Tasca’s Rise of Italian Fascism, published on the eve of World War II, from which Scurati nevertheless draws extensively. This is all the more surprising in that the author of M., who describes himself as “democratic, libertarian and progressive,” sees his novel as his “greatest contribution to the re-foundation of anti-fascism,” an anti-fascism that can stand up to new times.
Culturally Produced Ignorance

Awritten work is, like everything else, part of the era in which it was born, the sociohistorical context in which it developed and left its mark. What interest would a work of art have in being stripped out of the world in which it was conceived? Did the French historian Marc Bloch, shot by the Nazis in 1944, not argue that it is impossible to understand the past without looking at the present? The release of Scurati’s work coincides with the centenary of fascism’s arrival in power — a past that seems not to want to pass, in a country where the memory of Mussolini still looms like a threatening shadow, a “ghost.”

The novel also comes out at a time when the return of fascism is on everyone’s lips. The publication of the first volume had coincided with Lega leader Matteo Salvini’s rise to high office (at the time he was Interior Minister), with aggressive policies and open links with neofascist groups, alarming national and international public opinion. The third and last volume — M. Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa — came out a few days before the election victory, this September 25, of Giorgia’Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia; a party in whose arteries fascism still circulates and whose logo proudly displays the tricolore flame, representing the still-living spirit of fascism. The noxious atmosphere in which the book appeared was evidenced by the intimidating September 25 article by Alessandro Sallusti, editor of the newspaper Libero, entitled “the prince of the haters,” in reference to the author.

In this context, talking about the “return of fascism” in Italy may seem absurd, as the historian Emilio Gentile said, since fascism never seems to have disappeared. Among other things, Scurati openly takes on the role of revealing the present by evoking certain “surprising and chilling analogies with the modern-day.”

The past as illuminated by the present is part of any literary-creative process of a historical nature — one attentive, as G. W. F. Hegel wrote, to “historical truth” and at the same time “to the customs and intellectual culture of its time.” Scurati insists that “no person, event, speech or sentence narrated in the book is arbitrarily invented,” paying special attention to sources, in the manner of a historian. This is only strengthened by the impression of realism that comes from the inclusion of extracts from archival documents at the end of each chapter. Yet their often-truncated exposition cannot go beyond an illusion of the materiality of the past.

Scurati’s novel, he says, “complements, perhaps, the analytical work of historical research with the synthetic force of narrative” and does not attempt to replace it. From this point of view, M. plays the role of a narrative synthesis of the analyses produced by historians. However — and this will be even more the case when the film based on his novel is released — what Scurati calls the fictual (a mixture of fictional and factual) elaborates a new form of historical thought that breaks away from scholarly history, largely unknown to most people. This new historical thought is called upon to replace it.This is a country where it is still possible to hear that ‘Mussolini did good things, too’; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace.

It is difficult to ignore the cultural, social, and political environment in which this work emerged. This is a country where it is still possible to hear that “Mussolini did good things, too”; a country where ignorance of the past is commonplace, either because its population is not aware of it or because it does not want to know. An ignorance in the strongest sense, tinged with indifference, has been culturally produced since World War II through the mainstream press and especially television, an extraordinary vehicle of identity and memory. Italy is a country in which, over the last thirty years of the cultural hegemony of the plural right, anti-fascism has been portrayed as sinister, due to its supposedly anti-democratic character and the alleged cruelty of communist violence.

This is not at all a matter of pointing out all the novel’s errors from the impregnable ivory tower of “professional” historians, and reserving the production of historical knowledge to the latter. It is, rather, a matter of questioning M.’s interpretation in the present, of interrogating the relationship between the forms of narrative production that his author favors and the self-consciousness of Italian society. “The future of the past” is at stake, not only its present.

Fascism “From the Inside”

In the first volume, entitled M. Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati decides to relate the rise of fascism from Mussolini’s own perspective. This narrative choice has raised many questions and criticisms — some of them unjustified — of “closeness” to his “character” or of a latent “rehabilitation” of Mussolini. Scurati’s aim, by adopting the fascist leader’s viewpoint, is to tell this story from the inside. In doing so, Scurati draws on the historians Renzo de Felice, George L. Mosse, Zeev Sternhell, and Emilio Gentile, who defended the need for an analysis of fascism “from the inside,” taking its language and myths seriously.

Scurati argues that the fact that he belongs to a generation “born just after the end of all this and just before the beginning of all the rest” allows him to “re-appropriate the explosive twentieth-century narrative material, on the basis of [his own] non-belonging to it.” Born in 1969, he would thus be one incarnation of what he calls the “literature of inexperience,” as represented in this “post-historical novel.” The author would thus finally be freed from any ideological dogmatism with respect to the generation that preceded him, free to find the truth or at least to elaborate a truth: “The equidistance (certainly not the equivalence) of the post-historical author,” he writes, “with respect to the point of view of victims and executioners, therefore his free choice in narrative focus, directly descends from the transcendental of inexperience.”

Scurati’s approach to the literature of inexperience seems characteristic of what Eric Hobsbawm had called “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations,” effectively freeing the younger generation from the categorical imperative of remembering the vanquished, i.e. taking their defeats on board in order to transform them into a “revolutionary” force in the present. The admittedly important distinction that the author makes between “equidistance” and “equivalence” cannot, however, alone resolve the question of his relationship with his characters, the reader to whom he addresses himself, and what his text “postulates” to them.

The reader of M., exposed without mediation to Mussolini’s tale in volume one, is led to experience fascism’s rise from within the belly of the beast. The undeniable strength of Scurati’s writing lies in the description “from below” of the years following World War I; a particularly intense period that must be analyzed hour by hour, region by region, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood in the attempt to “get to grips with” fascism through its “developments.” The narrative is undoubtedly effective. Using the aesthetics of “horror,” Scurati elicits repentance, not responsibility. He succeeds in captivating a wide readership by immersing them in the everyday life of fascism. However, the narrative of fascism’s rise to power leaves little room for the perspective needed to understand a complex and vivid phenomenon in the collective memory of Italy, Europe, and the world.What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character.

Its everyday developments, seen through the necessarily myopic prism of a “fascination with catastrophe,” attach the definition of fascism to the contingent and ephemeral plane of circumstance and to the reciprocal effects of violence and fear. What is fascism? The answer, according to Scurati, is to be found in its moral and psychological character, which cannot be separated from the “moods” of the slums. Fascists are constantly attached to their plebeian social origins — Roberto Farinacci, “son of the railwayman,” and Mussolini, “son of the blacksmith,” stubbornly repeated, as if these indications were the best way to grasp the phenomenon. The plebeian nature of the “fascists” reinforces the idea of a “revolutionary” fascism: “the revolution will not be made by the communists, it will be made by the owners of two rooms and a kitchen in a suburban apartment block.” A point of view from the inside that is never questioned in Scurati’s three volumes.

From a Crocean perspective, fascism is also seen as a degenerative moral disease. The second volume, which opens with a Mussolini bent in two by the pain of blood and shit, is the most typical example. The image of the virus appears many times, a virus that “infects thousands of postal employees ready to set fire to the labor halls.” The terror that this people armed with sticks inspires is therefore not only related to the violence it produces, but to what it represents in terms of physical and psychic pathology located in the depths of society, in its underbelly, in its basest instincts.

The fear of the “crowd” that “instinctively advances” is coupled with the image of a Benito Mussolini presented as a “superman generated from the belly of the people and not from a privileged caste.” A Mussolini who “despises and fears his own squadrists [an attitude] which is largely reciprocated.” A Mussolini who portrays his troops as “enriched beggars, stormtroopers turned officials” and Italians as “cowards and weaklings.” A Mussolini who hesitates to turn back (“but by now the circle of hatred is tightening on all sides. Perhaps, if he could, he would turn back. But it is too late.” A Mussolini who “is protected from the demeaning spectacle of human misery by a strange kind of hypermetropia: he does not see his peer, his neighbor, the little people, or, if he does see them, they appear blurred, indistinct, insignificant.” A Mussolini who supposedly regretted the death of a man like Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist MP murdered by Blackshirts 1924.

A man alone in the face of the madness he set in motion: “he should tell of a head of state, idolized by the crowds, who slips day after day into the unenviable fate of the most radical distrust of anyone and into the even more chilling condemnation of having to cultivate an ever greater, absolute, abnormal trust in himself.” A man whose stature has shrunk as much as the distance between his index finger and thumb (hence the stylized lowercase m in the title of volume three) in approaching Hitler and who is “afraid.” The same fear that “twenty years earlier, when deftly orchestrated, had hoisted him to power” was turning against him, driving him to violence and to “throw the Italian people into the carnage of a new world conflict.”

In the third volume, which covers the period from the Racial Laws of 1938 to Italy’s entry into World War II, Scurati’s point of view becomes increasingly clear. He presents a Mussolini in “ecstasy,” fascinated by fear, the “most powerful of political passions,” instilled in him by a “bloodthirsty” Hitler, the “Nazi demon” and his court made up of a “plebeian, upstart, ill-mannered rabble” — yet a Mussolini at the same time a succubus; an aging, fattened, restless leader anxious for the “fate” of “his” people. Scurati here leans toward that reading that makes excuses for Italian fascism, caught up in the orbit of Nazi Germany, an old cliché that casts the alliance with Hitler as accidental, a “fatal error” made on the grounds that it is “better” that Hitler be “with us than against us.”

Meanwhile the racial laws are presented as a “diplomatic instrument,” a pledge given to this alliance, a “reassurance” of the steadfastness of a lasting agreement. This revisionist reading is reinforced by the fact that Scurati’s reconstruction of the course of fascism leaves aside six years (from 1932 to 1938), thus missing out the colonization of Ethiopia — an important transition between colonial racism and the antisemitism at home conceived as an instrument for the “regeneration” of Italians.In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis.

The basic criticism of fascism thus appears abstractly moral because almost only violence and fear dominate. In the narrative of fascism’s rise to power, as in that of the consolidation of its regime, Scurati gives little space to the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions that provided its basis, its political program and ideology, and the regime it established. Historian Giulia Albanese is right to point out that “the pages on the march on Rome show that the event was reversible.” Scurati rightly suggests that fascism was a possible but hardly automatic outcome of contemporary social conflict, and that therefore the convergence between the ruling class and the counterrevolution — essential for fascism’s arrival in power — could not be taken as inevitable.

Yet the object of the author’s attention is not, in the words of the historian Charles S. Maier, “crisis capitalism armed with a truncheon,” but rather, and only at times, the inadequacy of the traditional ruling class, “people from a museum,” composed of an “Italian bourgeoisie that is the spiritual enemy of fascism” in the face of the new situation that opened up in March 1919. The description of the king as a “prisoner of war” and of liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti’s “partial, laborious, contradictory attempt to transform an ancient and archaic country into a modern democracy” seem to exonerate the liberal state, at least in part.

The Absent Oppressed

Scurati has in numerous interviews maintained that “the novel generates a precise and firm historical, moral and civil judgement condemning fascism. And it does so precisely because it does not start from an ideological prejudice.” The whole question this poses is the definition of anti-fascism that results from the novelist’s “third-party” but not “neutral” exposition. What does Scurati want to tell us about anti-fascism in the past and, perhaps more importantly for him, about its adaptation to new times?

The question brings us back to the political role of the “historical” novel. In the mid-1930s, György Lukács devoted some illuminating pages to the anti-fascist novel, a literature that, he said, marked the “break between the writer and the life of the people.” He wrote that “It is above all prejudice that lives in the people, in the masses, the principle of irrationality, of what is purely instinctive, against reason. With such a conception of the people, humanism destroys its best anti-fascist weapons.” The Hungarian philosopher then called for the “unmasking of fascism’s hostility” toward the oppressed in order to “protect the creative forces of the people” because “the great ideas and actions that humanity has produced so far originated in popular life.”

After reading M.’s three volumes, there are no doubts as to its moral condemnation of fascism — despite the limitations and neglected elements highlighted above. But for Scurati, the anti-fascist battle is essentially a struggle between reason and brutal and barbaric irrationality: “Today we are at a crossroads: we must choose between culture, democracy and progress, or throw ourselves into the arms of despotism, blindness and obedience.”

By reducing the anti-fascist battle, this struggle for eternity (as Carlo Rosselli called it), to a struggle between progress and reaction, between democracy (but which one?) and despotism, Scurati leaves no concrete space for the creative force of the oppressed. Clearly, anti-plebeian class prejudices color Scurati’s fresco: the landless peasants are described as “idiotic grey oxen”; the “crowd” is seen as “docile, primitive”; the people seem to be guided by their instincts, their stomachs, their “humors,” of which Mussolini is said to have a “formidable intelligence”; a people at best absent, at worst consenting out of laziness. “Yes, the majority of Italians,” Scurati writes, to account for the atmosphere following the assassination of socialist leader Matteotti, “horrified by the crime, would like the fall of the regime to reclaim their ghost-infested homes. But, then, around dinnertime, the demands of life prevail. Morality is not one of them. The country is opaque, its sense of justice is sluggish, blurred.”

In this fresco, the anti-fascists from below appear almost exclusively in their role as victims, killed, beaten, humiliated, like the “two poor people” condemned for insulting the Duce, who are presented as “meek and harmless animals.” The antifascist émigré circles in Nice in which Gino Lucetti — who tried to kill Mussolini — developed are presented as: “a court of miracles of poor emigrants, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries, outcasts, the beaten, the expelled, men who cheated hunger in front of the tables of lowly taverns, among inverts, thieves and whores, in a laudable and, at the same time, sublime mixture of drunkenness, vain hopes of redemption, desperate idealisms and chronic, ferocious, destitution.”

Even more significant in this regard is the fact that anti-fascism disappears in the third volume, with Scurati deciding to leave aside the most important moment of the anti-fascist struggle abroad. The 1930s proved to be a decisive test for antifascism. Ten years of the “academy of exile” in Paris had made only one alternative possible: death or “redemption.” Scurati deals with the end of the parable, the republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War, summed up as an “internecine war between republicans and Francoists.” Again, the anti-fascists are those immediately executed on Mussolini’s orders but not those who fought with weapons in hand, “today in Spain and tomorrow in Italy”; those who called for a preemptive war and an anti-fascist revolution; those who needed Spain more than Spain needed them, as Emilio Lussu wrote.How can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension?

Everything is as if the oppressed could not play any active role in the fight against a movement and a regime built precisely in opposition to their struggles. Scurati ignores the oppressed, perhaps as a function of this double fear: the people who are afraid, but also the fears spurred by this “formless, stupid and apathetic mass.” Yet how is it possible to contemplate the anti-fascist struggle while ignoring the subaltern, and vice versa, how can one understand fascism without considering its profoundly counterrevolutionary dimension? Because fascism did indeed wage war against the subaltern.

Under Scurati’s pen, the emancipatory struggles of the biennio rosso (the “two Red Years” of strikes and occupations in 1919 and 1920) appear as “revolutionary delusions” that ruined Italy through a “fury of strikes,” suggesting that the “revolutionary” outrages of the labor movement somehow set off the powder keg. Scurati has Mussolini say that “[Communists] did not start this civil war but they will finish it. It is a question of making violence ever more intelligent, of inventing surgical violence.”

Hope guided the steps of those who took part in the strike waves in the immediate interwar period, demanding not only wage increases, shorter working hours, and an end to food shortages, but also to change the fate of the world, to break the chains. Everything seemed possible when in Russia, the first socialist revolution finally seemed to open new vistas. Scurati does not speak of this enthusiasm but dwells at length on the “millions of Italians [who] had stopped hoping for change and began to feel threatened by it. The chanting of the squares choked into a chorus. A shout that no longer begged the future to finally redeem the present, but implored it to remain uncreated. Not a prayer but an exorcism.”

At times Scurati even equates (pre)revolutionary violence and counterrevolution; his ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps: “Demonstrations, devastation, fires are everywhere. On all sides. The escalation culminated on a tram in Rome where, on September 12, policeman Giovanni Corvi murdered fascist trade unionist Armando Casalini with three revolver shots while the child’s eyes were still open.” Leading Communist Nicola Bombacci serves this purpose perfectly. The man the author describes as “the man from Moscow,” Lenin’s “Italian confidant” (it is unclear on what basis), who was later to become one of Mussolini’s ardent supporters, serves as a link between the two violent sides of the same “European civil war” — about which, however, Scurati says nothing.

For counterrevolution was not only organized in Italy but everywhere after the Russian October Revolution. Anti-communism not only targeted the newborn Soviet state, on which all manner of fantasies were focused, but was also expressed in hostility toward the dominated and an elitist conception of democracy, the result of what Peter Gay would call the culture of hatred. The European democracies that emerged from World War I supported reactionary solutions to deal with a communism, which was seen as the much greater danger.The author’s ahistorical and abstractly ethical critique of violence allows him to confuse the opposing camps.

As for the anti-fascist parties, in M. all that can be discerned is the “blindness” of their leaders: “The factional hatreds, the slavery to formulas, the ideological blindness, the language that turns time and again to formal issues, to pure logic, the eternal wheel of personal rivalries, the deafness to the din of the world, to the promises of the dawn.” The twenty-first century Scurati forgets to portray anti-fascism from the inside, day by day, as a concrete movement anchored in its time, with its mistakes but also its strengths. This severely hems in the complexity of the situation, even at a particularly intense phase of the political struggle.

Certainly, the anti-fascist opposition proved incapable of adapting its struggle to the new political configuration. This was an inadequacy linked at worst to a radical misunderstanding, and at best to a narrow conception of fascism as a phenomenon. Italian socialism undoubtedly proved disastrously inadequate faced with the post–World War I situation in Italy. But dismissing the foundation of the Communist Party in 1921 — the result of serious reflection, careful elaboration and intense political and social action — as a “demented split” or reducing the history of the Italian workers’ movement on the eve of Mussolini’s rise to “factional hatreds” hardly allows one to go beyond value judgements, of little use for a refoundation or consolidation of anti-fascism.

The blindness denounced by Scurati does not help us understand what should have been done, or rather, what should be done (the famous unveiling of the present) in such a situation. Unless we consider that only the sacrifice of a few individual heroes (Matteotti is the only totally positive figure in history) can redeem all Italy.

Under Scurati’s pen, the subalterns turn from bearers of emancipation into willing “victims” or sacrificial heroes. From this perspective, despite its declared objective, M. cannot be a basis for refounding anti-fascism. Its “victimizing” reading of the opposition of those times cannot serve the collective remembrance and redemption of the victims of past struggles. By ignoring the properly revolutionary dimension of antifascism (and the counterrevolutionary dimension of fascism), M. cannot fulfil the revolutionary critique of the present, which is the only one capable of confronting the new fascism. M. strives to chase after the world that was, without understanding the world that really is.


Stefanie Prezioso is associate professor at Lausanne University and author of numerous works on European anti-fascism.