Lessons From Legalization: The Problem Isn’t Cannabis, It’s Capitalism

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 MARCH 19, 2024

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The United States government is likely to end the designation of marijuana as a dangerous narcotic sometime this year, potentially marking one of the biggest federal decisions on the classification of the drug in decades. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that marijuana is less harmful than, say, opioids and other substances, prompting the Biden administration to announce it would “reschedule” cannabis from a Schedule I—which is what the most dangerous drugs are classified as—to a Schedule III drug, commensurate with anabolic steroids and ketamine.

The move is long overdue, especially in light of the disproportionate criminalization of Black and Brown users and sellers of the drug. According to the ACLU, “Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.” While there have been many benefits stemming from legalization, there has been one negative impact: the enrichment of those who were privileged to begin with, rather than those who were most impacted. This is less the result of legalization than of ongoing inaction on righting racial inequities in our justice, legal, and economic systems.

There are steps that the government could take to remedy such inequities—if it wanted to. The trouble is that those in power have instead sought to demonize marijuana, its users, and its impacts, resisting the dissemination of justice at every step.

When California voters approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2016, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency under then-President Barack Obama denied a petition to reschedule marijuana at the federal level, saying the drug “lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision.” Still, states were already responding to a seachange in public opinion and were slowly legalizing cannabis.

But naysayers, seeing the writing on the wall, made unfounded fear-basedclaims akin to a modern-day version of “reefer madness,” drawing deceptive parallels to already legal but harmful substances such as tobacco and alcohol. It isn’t surprising that such scare tactics can be traced back to racist beliefs.

With 40 states and the District of Columbia having legalized cannabis use, in a trend that seemed unthinkable a decade or so ago, the panic-driven predictions about the drug’s dire impacts on individual health and behavior have proven to be false. It wasn’t cannabis that ruined people’s lives. It was the criminalization of cannabis that did so.

Now, many of those who were arrested and convicted of marijuana-related state-level offenses are slowly seeing their records being expunged as states enact laws in line with legalization. The Last Prisoner Projectreports that “24 states have enacted cannabis-specific record clearance laws, and 10 states have enacted cannabis-specific resentencing laws.” In California, a majority of those impacted have seen their records cleared.

Cannabis taxes are also boosting state revenues. But that hasn’t stopped the naysayers from casting a negative light on legalization. While California now rakes in about $1 billion per year from marijuana sales, headlines about falling revenues resulting from lower prices and reduced use are increasingly common. In other words, there were initially fears that too many people would start using marijuana if it were legalized. And now there are worries that too few are using it.

Colorado, the first state in the nation to have legalized marijuana for recreational use, is seeing a similar sort of disappointment such as this local CBS story headlined, “Shortfall in marijuana sales tax revenue in Colorado will impact Aurora homeless”—as if cannabis taxes were responsible for creating and sustaining a homelessness crisis rather than predatory capitalism. (According to the Common Sense Institute, there is increased homelessness in Aurora because “[h]ousing affordability in Colorado has plummeted, overall price levels are at record highs due to inflation, and the state’s housing inventory is dangerously low.”)

What is critical to examine in terms of a disappointing result of legalization is the disproportionate enrichment of the privileged few, instead of those who were historically harmed by prohibition. The vast majority of cannabis sellers are white—the same demographic that was spared the worst impacts of cannabis criminalization.

This is unsurprising given the persistence of a racist criminal justice system and racial wealth gap in the U.S. Without intentional intervention to ensure that those most harmed by prohibition would benefit the most from legalization, the chips fell where they always do when it comes to American capitalism—in the laps of the already privileged.

Even in states like Illinois, where legalization was enacted with an eye toward righting racial wrongs, cannabis sales have not substantially helped to erase the racial wealth gap. According to Jocelyn Martínez-Rosales writing in the South Side Weekly, “legalization… has not led to substantial gains for the Black and Brown communities most affected by its criminalization.”

Just as homelessness in Colorado is the result of predatory capitalism and an unwillingness by elected officials to financially intervene in order to house people, the financial benefits of cannabis legalization can, and will, remain inequitable without concerted intervention.

One model for effective intervention is the Illinois city of Evanston, famous for being the first in the nation to enact a program of reparations for its Black residents in the form of cash for homeownership, and eventually for the development of Black-led businesses.

Those reparations, introduced by then-Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmonsin 2019, were specifically aimed at undoing historical harm. Rue Simmons said, “We all know that the road to repair and justice in the Black community is going to be a generation of work. It’s going to be many programs and initiatives, and more funding.” Evanston’s reparations are funded in large part by marijuana sales taxes, because, according to the city council, “[T]here is no more appropriate place to use the sales tax from that industry.”

When cannabis tax revenues weren’t enough to fully fund Evanston’s intended reparations, instead of throwing their hands up in the air and accepting this as inevitable, city officials simply added a second dispensary’s tax revenues to make up the shortfall.

Imagine if we applied such an approach to all social ills. For example, Aurora, Colorado could simply decide not to tolerate the fact that so many people remain unhoused and find other sources of revenue to make up for the shortfall in cannabis taxes.

Taking that approach to its logical conclusion, local, state, and federal officials could intervene wherever predatory capitalism and racist criminal justice systems devastate communities of color and others.

There are many lessons to be learned from our collective evolution on the issue of marijuana, the most important being that social and economic inequities are not hard to tackle if there is political will. The problem is not (and never was) marijuana. It is (and always was) racial capitalism. That’s something the Biden administration would do well to keep in mind as it takes the next step toward easing federal restrictions on marijuana.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

 

In Navalny and Guaido, Washington Saw Useful Pawns, Not Political Paragons

by Andy Corbley Posted onMarch 18, 2024

Following the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, outrage and eulogies echoed out in equal measure from the halls of power in Washington, amplified one-hundredfold by the US and UK press, and gave the sense that a champion of democracy had been assassinated by a dictator.

In 2019, following the presidential elections in Venezuela, the US channeled a chorus of Western outrage over alleged election rigging, and created a coalition made up of dozens of the most powerful nations, including the UK, Brazil, France, and Germany, to determine that Juan Guaido, the one-term leader of the Venezuelan parliament and head of an obscure right-wing party, was the legitimate head of state in the country—a man who got 2% of the national vote, and who 81% of Venezuelans had never even heard of.

What do these two men, Juan Guaido, and Alexei Navalny, have in common? On the surface, very little. Coming from different continents, Guaido was the leader of Popular Will, a fringe political faction known for street fights, when he won the leadership of the National Assembly at age 35, while Navalny cut his teeth in the political sphere as an investigative journalist and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation which investigated the personal finances of members of the Russian government.

On the surface of corporate media outlets, both men appear as champions of democracy. Bloomberg News editorial board applauded Guaido for seeking “restoration of democracy” and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic leader”. The Guardian editorial board called Navalny “a hero of our time,” and the New York Times described the man as “known for his innovative tactics in… promoting democracy”.

But there’s a reason that Guaido was called “more popular outside Venezuela than inside,” and there’s a reason that Navalny’s murderous immigration policy proposals and support for the annexation of Crimea don’t make it into these headlines. That’s because in the eyes of Washington D.C., and the West more broadly, these political figures offered in-roads into nations where Washington’s will was unwelcome.

Navalny: lionized champion and unpopular xenophobe

The five largest corporate media outlets in America ran a total of 731 articles or segments that discussed or mentioned Navalny’s death the week following its announcement, the investigative outlet Mintpress reports.

The four outlets mentioned above were quoted here because the descriptions of the two men were presented somewhat on behalf of the outlets themselves. A search for what heads of state, or other senior politicians in the EU and North America thought of the Navalny death, which officially was blamed on a blood clot, shows that as a body they didn’t spare a word for modesty or temperance.

Nearly all statements across Europe and North America imply that Putin was directly responsible for Navalny’s death, that Navalny himself was a hero, or that assassination is the cost of standing up to Putin.

“His support in Russia has been greatly exaggerated by the Western press,” explains Katya Kazbek, a Krasnodar-born New Yorker who’s editor-in-chief of Supamodu, in the aftermath of Navalny’s 2021 poisoning, according to The Grayzone. “He is not Nazi enough for the ultra-right, too right-wing for leftists, spooks some liberals with his pro-gun stance and uncertain position on Crime”.

“He seems to only find full support in those who want to switch from Putin’s government by any means necessary and don’t really care about views or policies,” she says, adding that in a Muscovite popularity poll, Navalny as a political figure was chosen as the most trustworthy by just 2% of those surveyed.

Journalist Ted Snider has a similarly broad view of Navalny’s character. His reporting shows that the man isn’t quite a champion of democracy, or at least any American alive today, if sharing the democratic system with Mr. Navalny, wouldn’t want him anywhere near the levers of power.

“Navalny began his political career as a member of the social liberal Yabloko Party. But, in 2007, they expelled him for ‘causing political damage to the party; in particular, for nationalist activities.’ Those ‘nationalist activities’ included posting a video that called immigrants ‘cockroaches’ who were infesting Russia and advocated that the solution was shooting them,” Snider writes, adding Navalny developed a slogan “stop feeding the Caucasus” in reference to the Islamic areas like Chechnya.

“[I]t is fitting to remember that it was Navalny’s policy that Crimea not be returned to Ukraine,” Snider continues. “It is also fitting to remember that Navalny supported Russia’s military involvement in Georgia in 2008“.

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the past called Navalny ‘a voice of millions and millions of Russians,’” Snider concludes. “But by the 2018 elections, ‘barely a thousand turned up in Moscow,’ University of Kent Russia scholar Richard Sakwa reports, ‘in response to his call for a ‘voters’ strike’”.

By then, his polling support was in the single digits.

Groomed for regime change

Another opposition figure closely associated with single-digit polling, Venezuelan Juan Guaido was exposed rapidly by investigative journalists as a Washington insider, and that the sudden chorus of support for his candidacy couldn’t be explained any other way.

For starters, following the 2018 presidential elections in Venezuela, major international and national election monitors reported that despite a low voter turnout, the country’s elections were transparent and conducted in a way that all parties expressed confidence in. This same was true for the following midterms.

Despite this, 46 countries were conned into believing the re-election of Chavista President Nicolas Maduro was illegitimate, a fact which Juan Guiado tried to express when he unilaterally declared himself the interim-president. However, nothing in the constitution permitted him to do so, and he never once made a constitutional case for his self-nomination.

Instead, Venezuela Analysis and other sites pegged the attempt to seize power by Guaido as a US-sponsored coup d’etat, and The Grayzone dug through the Stratfor leaks published by Julian Assange to demonstrate that Guaido and almost all his party allies were groomed by D.C.-funded, right-wing, NGOs to be a man on the inside.

From 2007 to 2009, groups like Guaido’s Popular Will were implicated in radical acts of destabilizing the electricity gird and conductive violent street marches, all while receiving upwards of $50 million from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and other groups. Then following Guaido’s street putsch attempt in April 2019, Latin American senators and the Neoconservative arm of the Trump Administration in Washington did everything they could to assist Guaido, including allowing the embassy in Washington D.C. to be taken over by Guaido appointees, and making the lives of Venezuelans as miserable as possible by imposing heavy sanctions.

Guaido proved to be a failed investment for the goal of regime change, however. As difficult as it was to find details of his nature in corporate media during the unrest he created following the 2018 elections and the 2019 coup attempt, for Venezuelans it was painfully obvious—their nation had already been overthrown by Washington in 2002.

Maduro is up for re-election this year, and a close ally of Guaido (who has long-since lost his seat at the National Assembly and left the country) seems to be taking over where he left off. Maria Corina Machado was implicated in an assassination attempt against Maduro in 2015, and was banned from seeking political office. Founder of the NED-funded group, Sumate, Machado was the liaison in Washington for the opposition from 2005 to 2010 that included Guaido when he was just fledging.

Now, Machado seems to be planning to run against Maduro, and bring more NED money with her into the country. The NED also funded Navalny’s activist group Democratic Alternative, the State Department Cables from Wikileaks revealed.

In both cases, Guaido in 2019, and Navalny in 2024, investigative journalist Alan Macleod referenced the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky which stated that media will cover international events like elections, massacres, and assassinations, as far as it damages the reputation of America’s enemies and hides the potential reputational damage of its allies. The academics compared media coverage in Latin American countries like Guatemala and Nicaragua, while Macleod takes the same approach for Colombia and Venezuela.

These figures: Navalny, Guaido, and perhaps Machado to come, appear like rogue waves out of the blue to soak 24-hour news cycles. The reason is because they are point men (and women) for a hostile foreign power. When they emerge, they deserve the harshest skepticism.

Navalny was indeed heroic in the sense that his anti-corruption activities were uniquely successful in the short history of the Russian Federation, but with NED money backing him, and mainstream media lionizing him, his motives for seeking power should have been considered devious until proven righteous.

Andrew Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show. Reprinted with permission from World at Large.

 

History Will Record that Israel Committed a Holocaust

by Susan Abulhawa / March 18th, 2024

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages

It’s 8 pm in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.

I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.

Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatising.

I kept in touch with friends who reported on their situations in the north, middle and south of Gaza – each area suffering in different ways. I stayed current on the latest statistics, the latest political, military and economic maneuverings of Israel, the US and the rest of the world.

I thought I understood the situation on the ground. But I didn’t.

Nothing can truly prepare you for this dystopia. What reaches the rest of the world is a fraction of what I’ve seen so far, which is only a fraction of this horror’s totality.

Gaza is hell. It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.

But even the air here is scorched. Every breath scratches and sticks to the throat and lungs.

What was once vibrant, colourful, full of beauty, potential and hope against all odds, is draped in gray-coloured misery and grime.

Barely any trees

Journalists and politicians call it war. The informed and honest call it genocide.

What I see is a holocaust – the incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.

Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, where Israel crammed 1.4 million people into a space the size of London’s Heathrow Airport.

Water, food, electricity, fuel and supplies are scarce. Children are without school – their classrooms having been turned into makeshift shelters for tens of thousands of families.

Nearly every inch of previously empty space is now occupied by a flimsy tent sheltering a family.

There are barely any trees left, as people have been forced to cut them down for firewood.

I didn’t register the absence of greenery until I happened upon a red bougainvillea. Its flowers were dusty and alone in a deflowered world, but still alive.

The incongruity struck me and I stopped the car to photograph it.

Now I look for greenery and flowers wherever I go – so far in the southern and middle areas (though the middle increasingly became more difficult to enter). But there are only small patches of grass here and there and an occasional tree waiting to be burned to bake bread for a family subsisting on UN rations of canned beans, canned meat and canned cheese.

A proud people with rich culinary traditions and habits of fresh foods have been reduced and accustomed to a handful of pastes and mush that have been sitting on shelves for so long that all you can taste is the metallic rancidity of the cans.

It’s worse in the north.

My friend Ahmad (not his real name) is one of a handful of people who have internet. It’s sporadic and weak, but we can still message each other.

He sent me a photo of himself that looked to me like a shadow of the young man I knew. He has lost over 25 kg.

People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses.

Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.

Flour is scarce and more valuable than gold.

I heard a story about a man in the north who managed to get his hands on a bag of flour recently (normally costing $8) and was offered jewellry, electronics and cash worth $2,500 for it. He refused.

Feeling small

People in Rafah feel privileged to have flour and rice reaching them. They will tell you this and you will feel humbled because they offer to share what little they have.

And you will feel ashamed because you know you can leave Gaza and eat whatever you want. You will feel small here because you are unable to make a real dent to assuage the catastrophic need and loss and because you will understand that they are better than you are, as they have somehow remained generous and hospitable in a world that has been most ungenerous and inhospitable to them for so very long.

I brought as much as I could, paying for extra luggage and weight for six pieces of luggage and filling 12 more in Egypt. What I brought for myself fit into the backpack I carried.

I had the foresight to bring five big bags of coffee, which turned out to be the most popular gift for my friends here. Making and serving coffee to the staff where I’m staying is my favourite thing to do, for the sheer joy each sip seems to bring.

But that will soon run out too.

Hard to breathe

I hired a driver to deliver seven heavy suitcases of supplies to Nuseirat, which he ferried down a few flights of stairs. He told me that carrying those bags made him feel human again because it was the first time in four months that he had been up and down stairs.

It reminded him of living in a home instead of the tent where he now resides.

It is hard to breathe here, literally and metaphorically. An immovable haze of dust, decay and desperation coat the air.

The destruction is so massive and persistent that the fine particles of pulverised life don’t have time to settle. The lack of petrol made people resort to filling their cars with stearate – used cooking oil that burns dirty.

It emits a peculiar foul smell and film that stick to the air, the hair, clothes, throat and lungs. It took me a while to figure out the source of that pervasive odour, but it’s easy to discern others.

The scarcity of running or clean water degrades the best of us. Everyone does their best with themselves and their children, but at some point, you stop caring.

At some point, the indignity of filth is inescapable. At some point, you just wait for death, even as you also wait for a ceasefire.

But people don’t know what they will do after a ceasefire.

They’ve seen pictures of their neighbourhoods. When new images are posted from the northern region, people will gather to try to figure out which neighbourhood it is, or whose house that mound of rubble used to be. Often those videos come from Israeli soldiers occupying or blowing up their homes.

Erasure

I’ve spoken to many survivors pulled from the rubble of their homes. They recount what happened to them with a deadpan countenance, as if it didn’t happen to them; as if it was someone else’s family buried alive; as if their own torn bodies belong to others.

Psychologists say it’s a defence mechanism, a kind of numbing of the mind for the sake of survival. The reckoning will come later – if they survive.

But how does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world – your home, family, friends, health, whole neighbourhood and country?

No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate.

Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure.

Of histories. Of memories, books and culture.

Erasure of potential in a land. Erasure of hope in and for a place.

Erasure is the impetus for destroying homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, recreational centers and universities.

Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity. It is the reduction of a proud, educated, high-functioning ancient society into penniless objects of charity, forced to eat the unspeakable to survive; to live in filth and disease with nothing to hope for except an end to bombs and bullets raining on and through their bodies, their lives, their histories and futures.

No one can think or hope for what might come after a ceasefire. The ceiling of their hope at this hour is for the bombing to stop.

It is a minimal ask. A minimal recognition of Palestinian humanity.

Despite Israel cutting power and internet, Palestinians have managed to livestream a picture of their own genocide to a world that allows it to continue.

But history will not lie. It will record that Israel perpetrated a holocaust in the 21st century.

• Republished from the Electronic Intifada, March 6, 2024

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American writer and human rights activist. She is the author of several books and the founder of a non-governmental organisation, Playgrounds for Palestine. Read other articles by Susan, or visit Susan's website.

 

The World As It Was

A Masterly Documentary Film

by Edward Curtin / March 18th, 2024

Here’s a film about the 1950s – The World As It Was – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism.  In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today.  Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare.  Chapter One of the documentary series, Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, appropriately subtitled: “To see where we are, look where we’ve been,” does that brilliantly.

The series opened four months ago with “The Prologue” (see review) wherein the lives, importance, and assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are explored; how the government and media buried the truth of who assassinated them and why; and why it matters today.  Season One will unfold over the next year with chapters covering their lives and assassinations in greater detail.  Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Chapter One – “The World As It Was” – is about the 1950s, the rise of the Cold War with its propaganda, McCarthyism, the development of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, betrayals, blacklists, the abrogation of civil rights, censorship, and the ever present fear of nuclear war and the promotion of fallout shelters that set the stage for the killing fields of the 1960s and the CIA’s ruthless machinations.

One could say that the 1950s were the Foundation of Fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and that now we are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

The film opens with President Eisenhower delivering his famous Farewell Address, warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.  It is a short and powerful speech, concealing not a smidgen of hypocrisy since it must not have been Eisenhower who presided for eight years from 1953-19661 as this complex grew and grew and he poured 2 billion dollars in weapons and aid and a thousand military advisers to the ruthless and corrupt Vietnamese dictator Ngô Dinh Diêm, while saying he was “an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom.”  His speech, while still good, reminds me of all those who spend their careers quiet as church mice as the wars and assassinations rage on only to find their voices in opposition once they retire and collect their pensions.

In response to Eisenhower’s speech, some of which we hear, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – one of a hundred interviews done for this series over six years –  says that Eisenhower’s speech “is probably today in retrospect the most important speech in American history.”  While that is debatable (I would pick JFK’s American University speech), he rightly emphasizes the importance of Ike’s speech and the fact that his uncle, President Kennedy, fought against the military-industrial complex handed him by Eisenhower.  This is important, for although JFK did get elected emphasizing the Cold War rhetoric of a non-existent missile gap between the U.S. A. and the Soviet Union, he very quickly changed, having been betrayed by Allen Dulles and the CIA regarding the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam, Laos, etc.  The military brass quickly came to hate Kennedy, a naval war hero from World War II.  His three year transformation into a great peacemaker – and therefore his assassination by the CIA and its friends – is a story many still would like to squelch.  This documentary series will prevent that.

Those who control our present and wish to control our future are hard at work today trying to control our past and they will therefore hate this truthful film that is a powerful antidote to their attempted amnesia.  In thirty-nine sobering and entertaining minutes (with emphasis on both words), “The World As It Was” illuminates a period in U.S. history that is often dismissed as the staid and boring 1950s but was, in fact, when the infrastructure for today’s censorship, chaos, and fear were laid.  It was not the era, as a baseball movie about Jimmy Piersall and his depression from 1957 put it, when “Fear Strikes Out,” but the time when fear burrowed very deep into the American psyche and anxiety became a weapon of state.  Is it any wonder that today could be called “the age of depression, fear, anxiety, and pill popping”?

It is interesting to note that Eisenhower’s warning also contained an admonition to beware the growth of unchecked science, technology, and a future when computers would replace blackboards.  If he were still alive, he would no doubt not recognize the country controlled by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).  This vast computer-networked monster makes all the warnings about the 1950s snooping, informing, and controlling activities of government agencies seem like child’s play.  They can’t open snail mail now when few send any, but reading computer messages barely necessitates a finger’s movement, or, as Edward Snowden continues to warn, the entire electronic phone system is open sesame for government controllers. Cell phones acting as cells. Blackboards are gone but so is privacy.  The 1950s’ government snooping is pure nostalgia now.  We are through the looking glass.

As then, so today.  Oliver Stone talks about how in those days the constant refrain was “the Russians are coming” and how his father, a Republican stockbroker, told him that “the Russians are inside the country.”  Fear was everywhere, all induced by anti-communist propaganda aimed at controlling the American people.  Stone is still fighting against the Russia bogeyman stories, while today we are told again and again that the Russians are still coming.  We can only assume they are very slow.

Aside from RFK, Jr. and Oliver Stone, in this episode we hear from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the screenwriter Zachary Sklar, et al.  Because the film is so ingeniously crafted, many of the most powerful voices – for and against the government repression and fear mongering – are those from newsreels and television shows that are artfully spliced between the commentaries of the aforementioned people. For example, to see and hear FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rant about communists under every bed and to juxtapose that with the calm words of the filmmaker Dalton Trumbo, blackballed as one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, is an exercise in distinguishing sanity from insanity.

To this is added music, advertisements, movie clips, and jingles from the 1950s culture that place the viewer back in time to feel and absorb the “vibes,” as it were, of those days.  Like any era, it was complicated, but the overriding message from the fifties was not about mom making tuna noodle casserole but was that there were commie traitors everywhere throughout society and that every citizen’s obligation was to turn them in, even if that meant turning yourself or your parents in.  Children were taught to get under their desks when the sirens sounded, for they were safe places when the Commie Nukes start coming in.  Civil Defense drills screeched this fear into your every fiber.  In April 1957 the Army Air Defense Command announced that new Nike Hercules missiles with atomic warheads would shortly be installed around New York City, Boston, Providence, etc. to replace conventional warheads.  A spokesman added that these nuclear warheads posed no danger and that if the missiles were used, fallout would be “negligible.”  Of course.

Let me use an anecdote from pop culture that I think sums this up this sick game of fear and distrust – paranoia. My parents were on a game show in the fall of 1957 called “Do You Trust Your Wife?” hosted by Johnny Carson. By the summer of 1958 the show’s title was changed to “Who Do you Trust?” I used to joke that Hoover or Senator Joseph McCarthy was behind the change and their English grammar was atrocious, but I realize it was probably some fearful lackeys in the television industry.

Professor Miller, an expert in propaganda, narrates quite a bit of “The World As It Was” and does so admirably.  He correctly points out that to describe the 1950s as the era of McCarthyism is a misnomer, for doing so “let’s the whole system off the hook.”  It was the entire government apparatus that promoted a vast repression based on fear whose aim was to create meek, deferential, and obedient people afraid of their own shadows.

He points out that the basis for all this was established by President Truman in 1947 with his Executive Order 9835 that required loyalty oaths to root out communists in the federal government.  Six months later the CIA was founded and the country was off to the Cold War races with its anti-communist hysteria and the institutionalization of a militarized society.

The Red Menace, nuclear extinction, and the need to root out those traitors who were conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force were pounded into people’s minds.  Not only were these traitors in the government, but in the schools and colleges, the labor and racial equality movements – more or less everywhere.  Whom could you trust?  No one, not even yourself.  While McCarthy was eventually censored for going too far when Joseph Welch accused him of having no decency during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, he accomplished the goal of injecting his paranoic poison into the social bloodstream where it remains today, part of the political structure shared by both major parties.

But hope arose, as the film concludes, when JFK was elected in 1960 and in his first week in office went to the theater to see the blackballed screenwriter’s Dalton Trumble’s adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Spartacus, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome.  Fast was also blacklisted and wrote the novel secretly.  As RFK, Jr. says, this was a symbolic turning point when this was reported on the front page of The New York Times.

“It [the film Spartacus] is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times,” wrote the great journalist John Pilger in We Are Spartacus shortly before his death. “There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one.”

Yes, today we are told that the Russians are still coming.  The bad old days are back.  But so also is the slaves’ rebellion.

Four Died Trying is a documentary series that is part of this rebellion.  Chapter One, “The World As It Was” shines a very bright light on disturbing U.S. history.  It shows where we have been in order to help us see where we are.  Don’t miss it.

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

 

Complicity in Gaza: Holding US Foreign Policy Legally Accountable

by Binoy Kampmark / March 18th, 2024

On March 15, the next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken.  It all stems from a lawsuit filed last November in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a number of Palestinian human rights organisations including Palestinians in Gaza and the United States.

The lawsuit sought an order from the court “requiring that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense adhere to their duty to prevent, and not further, the unfolding genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.”  The relevant duty arose by virtue of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, which made obligations under it “judicially enforceable as a peremptory norm of customary international law.”

The complaint further alleged that the genocidal conditions in Gaza had “so far been made possible because of unconditional support given [to Israel] by the named official-capacity defendants in this case,” namely, President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Such legal challenges can face challenges.  Can the foreign policy of a state, which is the purview of the executive, fall within the scope of judicial review?  In some countries, this has been shown to be the case – consider the Dutch appeals court decision compelling the government of the Netherlands to halt the transfer of F-35 parts to Israel for fear it would fall foul of the Genocide Convention.  “The Netherlands,” the court found, “is obligated to prohibit the export of military goods if there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

In the US, the separation of powers walls off judicial interference in matters of foreign policy.  Jeffrey S. White, in dismissing the case at first instance, admitted it was the “most difficult” of his career, conceding that the factual grounds asserted by the plaintiffs seemed largely “uncontroverted”.  He also acknowledged the legal noise and interest caused by South Africa’s action in the International Court of Justice against Israel, one contending that Israel’s conduct against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip satisfied the elements of genocide.

While the ICJ is unlikely to reach a conclusion on the matter any time soon, it issued an interim order of provisional measures explicitly putting Israel on notice to comply with the Genocide Convention, punish those responsible for directly and publicly inciting genocide, permit basic humanitarian assistance and essential services to the Gaza Strip, preserve relevant evidence pertaining to potential genocidal acts and report to the ICJ on its compliance within a month.

In White’s words, “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”  But to compel the US government to cease aid to Israel of a financial and military matter were matters “intimately related to foreign policy and national security”. The judiciary was, reasoned White, “not equipped with the intelligence or the acumen necessary to make foreign policy decisions on behalf of the government.”

On March 8, an appeal was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel Van Der Hout LLP in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit arguing that aiding and abetting genocide can never be seen as a legitimate, unquestioned policy decision. The federal judiciary was duty bound to uphold the Genocide Convention, one that had taken on “an urgent, even existential dimension when the legal violation at issue is facilitating and even accelerating the destruction of an entirpeople.”

Within a matter of days, eight amicus briefs were submitted supporting the Palestinian plaintiffs.   In one brief, eleven constitutional, federal courts and international law scholars submit in severe fashion that “affirming the district court’s decision would create serious mischief and uncertainty by contradicting this Court’s and the US Supreme Court’s political question jurisprudence and degrading the essential judicial role in interpreting and applying the law, including norms of international law, treaties, and their implementing statutes.”

While Justice White had noted the obvious proposition that foreign policy remained a matter for the political branches of government, with disputes on the subject being nonjusticiable, “that principle was not actually at issue in this case.”  The Supreme Court had recognised that “legal disputes that touch on foreign affairs are not automatically policy disputes or political questions.” In this instance, the district court had “eschewed its responsibility to closely analyze the actual issues presented in favor of abstraction, generality, and already rejected misconceptions about what is and is not a political question.”

Another brief from seventeen former diplomats, service members and intelligence officers argues that “courts may decide whether an act violates a law, and that a finding that they cannot would harm US foreign policy.”  The authors accepted “for present purposes that the district court’s factual finding, that the Israeli military’s conduct may plausibly constitute genocide, accurately reflects the record and controls at this juncture.” Again, White was taken to task for not appreciating the distinction between the “wisdom” of foreign policy – a nonjusticiable issue – and “cases that question the legality of foreign policy, because applying the law to determine the legality of government action is the judiciary’s responsibility.”

Most impressive for the plaintiffs was the filing by 139 human rights organisations, bar associations and social justice movement lawyers reiterating the point that “allegations of the United States’ violations of the duties to prevent genocide and avoid complicity in its commission are clearly justiciable.”  International law, by virtue of its “decentralized” nature, placed reliance upon States “to enforce the obligations to which they have consented, imposing a primary duty to the domestic courts of each State to ensure the compliance of their executive and legislative bodies with international law.”

Oral arguments will be heard in San Francisco in June 2024.  By that time, the killing, starving and displacement of the Palestinian populace in Gaza will have further crystallised in its horror, leaving the legal fraternity dragging their feet.  But over the cadaverous nature of this conflict, litigants in the US may be clearer about whether courts can hold the government to account for aiding and abetting the commission of alleged acts of genocide.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.