Unjust Wars and a Just Peace

BY WALDEN BELLOFacebook

TwitterRedditEmail

APRIL 3, 2024

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The three major wars or conflicts that are ongoing today demonstrate the volatility of the intersection between the local and the global.

In the Hamas-Israeli conflict, we see how the maintenance of the Israeli settler-colonial state is intertwined with the preservation of the global hegemony of the United States.

In the war in Ukraine, a bloody war of attrition between two countries was provoked by Washington’s push to expand NATO to a country of the former Soviet Union.

In the South China Sea, we are witnessing how disputes over territory and natural resources have been elevated to a global conflict by the U.S. effort to maintain its global hegemony against China, to which it is losing the geoeconomic competition but over which it continues to enjoy absolute military superiority.

In short, the main cause of global instability today lies in the fusion of the local and the global, geopolitics and geoeconomics, empire and capitalism.

Balance of Power, Balance of Terror

What makes current conflicts especially volatile is that they are occurring amidst the absence of any effective multilateral coercive authority to impose a peaceful settlement. In Ukraine, it is the balance of military might that will determine the outcome of the war, and here Russia seems to be prevailing over the Ukraine-NATO-U.S. axis.

In the Middle East, there is no effective coercive power to oppose the Israeli-U.S. military behemoth—which makes it all the more remarkable that despite a genocidal campaign that has been going on for nearly four months now, Israel has not achieved its principal war aim of destroying Hamas.

In the South China Sea, what determines the course of events is the balance of power between China and the United States. There are no “rules of the game,” so that there is always a possibility  that American and Chinese ships playing “chicken”–or heading for each other, then swerving at the last minute–can accidentally collide, and this collision can escalate to a higher form of conflict such as a conventional war.

Without effective coercive constraints imposed by a multilateral organization on the hegemon and its allies, the latter can easily descend into genocide and mass murder. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Genocide, have been shown to be mere pieces of paper.

The Right of Self Defense

Given the absence of a multilateral referee that can impose its will, it is only the development of political, diplomatic, and military counterpower that can restrain the hegemon. This is the lesson that national liberation wars in Algeria and Vietnam taught the world. This is the lesson that the Palestinian resistance today teaches us.

This is why even as we condemn wars of empire waged by the hegemon, we must defend the right of people to resort to armed self-defense.

This does not mean that efforts at peacemaking by global civil society have no role to play. They do. I still remember how shortly before the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times came out with an article on February 17, 2003, in response to massive mobilizations against the planned invasion of Iraq, that said that there were only two superpowers left in the world, and they were the United States and global public opinion, and that then President George W. Bush ignored this outpouring of global resistance at his peril.

Global civil society did contribute to the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by eroding the legitimacy of those wars among the U.S. public, making them so unpopular that even Donald Trump denounced them–in retrospect that is–as did many personalities that had voted for war in the U.S. Congress.

The recent decision of the International Court of Justice that has ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza is likely to have a similar impact as global civil society’s resistance to Bush, Jr’s, invasion of Iraq. The ICJ decision may not have an immediate impact on the ongoing war, but it will erode the legitimacy of the project of settler colonialism and apartheid in the long run, deepening the isolation of Israel in the long run.

A Just Peace

We often see peace as an ideal state. But the peace of the graveyard is not peace. A peace bought at the price of fascist repression not only is not desirable but it will not last.

Oppressed peoples like the Palestinians will refuse peace at any price, peace that is obtained at the price of humiliation. As they have shown in the 76 years since the Nakba, their massive expulsion from their lands and homes, the Palestinians will not settle for anything less than peace with justice, one that enables them to recover their lands seized by Israelis, establish a sovereign state “from the river to the sea,” and allow them to hold their heads up in pride.

The rest of the world owes them its wholehearted support to realize such a just peace through all possible means, even as we work to oppose wars of empire waged by hegemons in other parts of the world.

Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus,  is the author or co-author of 19 books, the latest of which are Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013) and State of Fragmentation: the Philippines in Transition (Quezon City: Focus on the Global South and FES, 2014).

The Sanctum of Self-Identity

by William Manson / April 2nd, 2024

In early 6th century Athens (BCE), it was all the rage.  Introduced by Thespis, play-acting quickly attained widespread popularity among the Athenians who, like most people, were looking for diverting forms of entertainment to fill the evening hours. On one such evening the aged patriarch Solon, celebrated lawmaker and civic founder, was persuaded to attend a performance. His reaction: indignation and an angry rebuke to Thespis, who blithely responded that such “play” was harmless, merely a novel pastime.  “No!”  Solon angrily retorted (here freely paraphrasing Plutarch’s account), “It is dangerous.  Such a tolerance for pretense and deception will end up infecting all our commerce and civic life.”¹  But Thespis merely shrugged–and now, some 2500 years later, we find ourselves enmeshed in a media-sphere of garrulous, deceitful “actors,” all clamoring for our attention as they exhibit their base arts of “persuasion.”² 

Consulting Bureau of Labor Statistics data, one finds that in the U.S. at present there are some 70,000 “professional actors” (compared to, for instance, 3000 sociologists). Quite obviously, the requisite job skills require playing different roles, displaying (simulated) emotions, and “sincerely” persuading us to buy sundry products, “lifestyles,” or political candidates.  With their omnipresence in all performing media, actors have by now become absurdly over-valued as role-models in everyday life.  They may even be elected to high political office (cf. Lou Cannon’s book, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime; other examples include Arnold Schwarznegger, Al Franken, Donald Trump, etc.).  Indeed, Hitler once boastingly called himself “the greatest actor in Europe.”³

Writing back in the 1940s, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was already alarmed by the  rise of a new American character-type: the “marketing-personality,” whose looks, smiles and banter would be selling-points, not only in politics but infiltrating all aspects of social engagement.  In short, not the real person and his values (if any), but a simulacrum or image fashioned to display pleasing, if insincere, demeanor, attitudes and opinions.⁴  Sociologist Erving Goffman would later go so far as to argue that social interaction is in itself inherently “dramaturgic,” and that those most skillful in “impression management”–no matter how deceptive or incompetent–would be hired, elected, even “loved.”⁵  But Goffman conspicuously neglected the crucial context of power-relations–i.e., how those consigned to subordinate roles, especially in employment, are forced to exhibit compliant, cheerfully inauthentic behaviors.  Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott more accurately recognized that such violations of core-personality in interpersonal relations may reinforce the subjective sense of a “false self,” such realization producing depressed affect.⁶

As early as 1902, sociologist Charles Cooley had already promulgated his influential theory of the looking-glass self, wherein the “self” is an entirely reactive, subjective state shaped by the responses and judgments of others (cf. also, the symbolic-interactionist theories of social psychologist George Herbert Mead).⁷  If self-identity itself was merely a nebulous configuration of perceived responses from others, stigmatizing and negative labeling would invariably lead to low self-regard (“negative self-image,” etc.).  Cooley’s concept may have gained plausibility in a conformist culture which–despite its purported individualism–was, according to Alexis de Tocqueville’s early observations in Democracy in America (1830), a nation of persons afraid to disagree with the “tyranny of the majority.”

But now, in the 21st century, we are surrounded by “social media,” an insidiously normalized, omnipresent Panopticon.  “Only connect!” exhorted the depressed novelist Virginia Woolf, who met a tragic end a century ago.  But now, the more urgent question has become: “Why connect?”  Some fifty years ago, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote brilliantly of the adolescent identity-crisis, wherein a young person painfully separates from the authority of her parents and just as painstakingly seeks to forge a genuine identity comprised of well-thought-out values and intrinsic predispositions.  The end-goal: genuine individuation–not the transient popularity gained by presenting a meticulously marketed “self” on Facebook or Instagram, to the anonymous thousands of “insignificant others.”

To be liked and admired–very human longings, but not the end-goal of maturing, authentic selfhood.  Yet if young persons increasingly perceive themselves as commodities to be refashioned and play-acted to gain “views” and “likes,”  they become far more vulnerable to depressing disapproval and feelings of insufficient self-worth.⁸   Solon had indeed presciently predicted a penultimate outcome: artfully contrived self-presentations–whether in employment or on-line dating or just promoting a pleasing persona to potentially millions of anonymous, “followers”–would in time come to substitute image for sincerity, self-display for authentic integrity.

But where then can the individual find a sanctuary to preserve and cultivate his true self-identity?  To a considerable degree, in solitude– wherein one actively chooses limited yet meaningful social exchanges, and finds the necessary time and space for self-reflection and for developing critical thinking and rational values.  Notwithstanding the enduring contributions of object-relations theorists, the humanistic (post-Adlerian) psychologist Abraham Maslow even declared: “Far from needing other people, growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by them.”⁹

Indeed, those who question prevailing cultural norms and often-corrupt, hypocritical practices will most likely feel alienated from the unthinking, mass conformity all around them.  As philosopher Walter Kaufmann observed:

It is those who are easily satisfied that we should worry about, and it is grounds

for melancholy that most people cease so soon to find the world strange and questionable.  [A]s perception increases, any sensitive person will feel a deep

sense of estrangement.  Seeing how society is riddled with dishonesty, stupidity, and brutality, he will feel estranged from society, and seeing how most of one’s

fellow men are not deeply troubled by this, he will feel estranged from them.¹⁰

In the 21st century, daily “life” has become a constant stream of stimulus-response reactivity.  Even so, one’s self-identity can be secured and protected, not only by subtle forms of refusal and non-compliance, but by resolutely evading any unacceptable socio-political demand that would compromise one’s core-values (and which is not enforced by severe sanctions).  Freedom to: think one’s own thoughts (without constant interruptions), select what to read and listen to, which communications media to allow into one’s mental space, what gadgets (if any) to use, which persons to associate with or avoid–and so forth.  And, freedom from: inordinate demands for “performance” or “needing-to-achieve” (social status), and, above all, the relentless marketing of a persona rather than the preservation and growth of one’s true self-identity.

 END NOTES

1.  Plutarch, Life of Solon. In: Greek Lives, Oxford World Classics, 2009.
2. In his On Rhetoric, Aristotle sharply contrasted two types: “the noble,” which encourages critical thinking and self-awareness (as in the Socrates of Plato’s Apology), and “the base,” which deceives in order to manipulate and control.
3. Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, Vintage, 2017.
4. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, Holt Rinehart, 1947.
5. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday, 1959.
6. Donald Winnicott, Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In: The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment.  International Universities Press, 1960; pps. 140-157.
7. Charles Cooley, Human Nature and Social Order, Scribners, 1902; pps. 183-184.
8. Cf. Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect. Spiegel & Grau, 2016.  Also, as to the harmful effect of Cooley’s concept on children, see: Susan Harter, “The Perceived Directionality of the Link Between Approval and Self-Worth: The Liabilities of a Looking-Glass Self-Orientation Among Young Adolescents.”  Journal of Research on Adolescence (3):285-308, July 1996.
9. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, second edition.  Van Nostrand, 1962, p. 34.  See also:  Anthony Storr, Solitude: Return to the Self, Free Press, 1988.
10.  Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy.  Peter Wyden Inc., 1973; p. 146.

Intellectual historian and psychoanalytic anthropologist, William Manson (Ph.D., Columbia) has published numerous scholarly books and papers, and is a longtime contributor to Dissident Voice. Read other articles by William.

 

Carbon Capture, too Little too Late?

by Robert Hunziker / March 29th, 2024

Will carbon capture technology bail society out of the latest version of greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 suddenly doubling its rate of increase when compared to the past decade, in breathtaking fashion, thus overheating the ocean and the Arctic and Antarctica and hammering Greenland?

The relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and carbon capture technology is best seen as a metaphor of athletes in the Olympic games: Team Emissions is setting world records in the 100-meter dash; Team Carbon Capture is still training for the 10,000-meter marathon.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) fall far short of meeting timelines as global emissions are outrunning all timelines, increasing two-fold within only one year, see: “CO2 Bursting into the Atmosphere” (3-22-2024). CO2 is on a rampage like never before and heating things up. Brazil’s heat index hit 144°F recently.

According to MIT, to stay “even-with-the-board on CO2 annually,” nearly 20 billion tons needs to be captured each year. It’s overwhelming. Meanwhile, Earth soaks up half of the 37 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions per annum.  With all of that, it still leaves too much CO2 already in the atmosphere to take the heat off global warming.

Since 1850, approximately 1,000 gigatons of human-generated CO2 is hanging out in the atmosphere, which is 1,000 billion metric tons out of a total of 2,400 billion metric tons emitted (the planet absorbing more than one-half). A large amount needs to be removed to lower atmospheric CO2 ideally to at least 350 ppm from 426 ppm. All-in, CO2 removal is a multi-billion-ton job. It’s generational work kinda like building Notre Dame Cathedral, started in 1163, finished in 1345.

Total CO2 captured by current Direct Air Capture (DAC): “To date, 130 DAC plants are under development worldwide, with 27 commissioned and 18 completed (according to the International Energy Agency.) All of these are small-scale facilities with a current collective CO2 removal capacity of about 11,000 metric tons annually” (“”U.S. Unveils Plans for Large Facilities to Capture Carbon Directly from Air”, Science, August 11, 2023.)

“Every second about 1,079 metric tons of CO2 are released worldwide due to burning fossil fuels.” (NASA) Meaning, current capacity removes 11 seconds worth per year.

The IRA Biden plan aims to create four DAC hubs over the next 10 years, each capable of removing and storing at least 1 million tons of CO₂ each year. As part of the program’s rollout, DOE officials also announced funding for an additional 19 conceptual and engineering studies of potential future DAC plants. (“U.S. Unveils Plans for Large Facilities to Capture Carbon Directly from Air”, Science, August 11, 2023.).

In strong opposition to DAC, Mark Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University says DAC is a waste of funds. His book “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything describes a 100% renewable energy economy. Nevertheless, there’s still a problem of too much CO2 already in the atmosphere, which is already upending the climate system; 100% renewables will not remove it. There are no easy answers.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry claims it can continue to produce as much oil and gas as it wants to because Carbon Capture and Sequester -CCS- will effectively neutralize CO2 emissions. No, it will not.

According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis: “Even if realized at its full potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

The real issue is not whether carbon can be captured; it can be captured; however, in the big picture, the real world, carbon emissions are hardened over centuries; carbon capture is a fledgling, mostly in a testing phase.

According to the International Energy Agency, 40 commercial facilities are already in operation applying Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS). Since January 2022 developers have announced plans for 50 more operations capturing around 125 Mt CO2 per year. “Nevertheless, even at such a level, CCUS deployment would remain substantially below (about 1/3rd) the 1.2 Gt CO2 per year that is required in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) scenario.” (“Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage”, IEA50.)

To seriously make a big dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide or CO2, which is 76% of all greenhouse gas emissions, technology is going to have to accelerate considerably, in fact, beyond considerably.

On a hopeful note, some R&D looks promising, even though still likely falling into the too little, too late category. For example, Klaus Lackner, founding director, Center for Negative Emissions, has designed a prototype Mechanical Tree, on display at the Our Future Planet exhibition at the Science Museum, London from May 2021 until September 2022. The tree is constructed of sorbent tiles which cyclically extend into the air and then retract for regeneration, passively soaking up CO2 from the air using Passive Direct Air Capture (PDAC), supposedly 1,000 times more efficient than natural trees that use photosynthesis. The captured CO2 can be sequestered in underground geological formations or sold for industrial use.

MIT on carbon removal: “… a nearly impossible task”, says Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering who has studied both natural and technological ways to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere. “Removing CO₂ is one of the hardest and most expensive ways we could address climate change—far more difficult than simply emitting less carbon in the first place.” (“How Much Carbon Dioxide Would We Have to Remove from The Air to Counteract Climate Change?” Climate Portal, MIT October 26, 2023.)

“In fact”, says Harvey, “the energy demands of direct air capture are so great that ‘canceling out’ humanity’s emissions this way would take more energy than we’re getting from burning fossil fuels in the first place.” (Ibid.)

“Today’s approaches can capture only a tiny fraction of what’s needed: around 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to one recent study.” (Smith, S.M, et al, “The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal”, 1st Edition, 2023.)

“To ‘turn back the clock’ on climate change, we would need to capture today’s emissions plus this enormous backlog. To reach 350 parts per million, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1988, humans would need to remove more than 500 billion tons. To get the atmosphere back to where it was before humans began to burn fossil fuels en masse would mean catching and storing more than 900 billion tons.” (MIT Climate Portal.)

Based upon a reasonably comprehensive study, it appears that carbon capture technology is/will be too little too late. Global warming is not waiting around.

Nevertheless, R&D is in a fluid state, hopefully (fingers crossed) it meets the challenge (big question mark) because global warming has morphed into global heat way ahead of schedule, and climate change has become a regular on nightly national news programs, featuring (1) entire boreal forests burning like a furnace (2) floods demolishing thousands of homes in China and Pakistan, killing thousands (3) droughts impeding commercial barge traffic on Europe’s famous rivers (4) as nuclear power plants (France) power-down because of low river water flow (5) and thirsty Europeans standing in line for bottled water in France and Italy in the summer of ’22.

Meanwhile, March 2024 news items of interest: 7,200 miles away from Europe, similar issues: “Persistent Drought is Drying Out Chile’s Drinking Water”, Reuters News, March 20, 2024. And on another continent, Johannesburg (pop. 5.6M) CBS News headlines March 21, 2024: “South Africa Water Crisis Sees Taps Run Dry across Johannesburg”.

That’s just for starters as UN analysts claim 75% of Spain is subject to desertification.

Climate change is literally changing the face of the world.

And that’s not even mentioning one of the biggest concerns of the Northern Hemisphere. Greenland’s northern-most glaciers are very tipsy way too early. The icy island is on the ropes; surprisingly, it rained at Greenland’s summit (10,500 feet) for the first time ever as the entire ice infrastructure goes off-the-charts with a summertime melt rate of 30,000,000 tons per hour or 720,000,000 tons per day, 20-25% more than previously thought, according to recent studies.

And don’t even think about West Antarctica or Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. According to NASA: “The rainforest doesn’t react like it used to. It does not have enough time between droughts to heal itself and regrow. Throughout all recorded history, this has never been witnessed.”

What to do?

Everybody’s hopeful that human ingenuity; i.e., technology, will bail us out. Will it?

Meantime: “Every major global climate record was broken last year and 2024 could be worse.” (Celeste Saulo, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organization.)Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

Haroon Siddiqui’s My Name is NOT Harry

Memoir of a Toronto icon

by Eric Walberg / March 29th, 2024

Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it means to be a Canadian. A whirlwind tour of the 20th-21st centuries, as if by a latter day Muslim Christopher Columbus, one meant to try to undo the five centuries of imperialist horror that Columbus unleashed.

He relishes slaying the dragons of bigotry he encounters, starting with

*Winston Churchill, the racist. He who had labelled Indians ‘a barbarous people’, ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’, ‘the beastliest people in the world next to Germans’. Who exacerbated the 1943 Bengal famine that had killed millions by insisting that Indian rice exports for the allied war effort not be interrupted. He who had called Gandhi ‘a naked fakir’ whom he wanted ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant with a new viceroy seated on its back.’

*Even the Toronto Star‘s iconic Gordon Sinclair, who won fame in the 1930s with his dispatches form India – ‘the pagan peninsula’ with its ‘wild and woolly Hindus’, Brahmins, the supreme high hooper-doopers of this impossible land’, ‘scrawny, underfed untouchables’, impossible-looking beggars’ and ‘yowling idiots’. In tune with those times, [the Star] still going ga-ga over Sinclair well into my own time.

*On Iran, the only Muslim ‘experts’ and commentators on TV and in print were anti-revolution or anti-Khomeini, authenticating the worst of western prejudices. Anything different, such as mine, must have been a welcome novelty, brought to them by Canada’s largest newspaper.

*On 9//11, Rushdie see below.

One of those should-haves of his life as dragonslayer was at the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa, where he hosted Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. When they were walking to dinner, Kaplan started waxing eloquently about his love for India and yoga but his dislike of Muslims! He assumed that being from India I could only be a Hindu. What a testament to power the Zionist Jewish mindset had/has over even a proud Muslim like Siddiqui. But bravo, Harry (sorry, Haroon) for owning up. That’s the great thing about him. He lives his multiculturalism, which means meeting the other on his/her grounds, looking for the middle ground, not stoking enmity.

Iranian Ayatollahs, Afghan communists

He shines on the thorniest issue, one of which confronted him soon after arriving at the Star, when he was sent off to Iran in 1979. Speaking Urdu (close to Persian) and fully versed in Sunni and Shia Islam, he was able to make sense of the chaos, making his way to Qom to visit Ayatollah Madari, Khomeini’s rival, who lived just down the maze of alleys from Khomeini, who was already commanding the revolution from his modest home there, rather than Tehran.

He was told it was impossible to meet with Madari, even for a Canadian Muslim, but when he revealed that he’d just come from Tabriz, where Madari’s People’s Republican Party followers had risen up against Khomeini, rejecting the Islamic state constitution, Madari relented. Madari wanted a secular state and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ not a person. He answered every question patiently for nearly two hours. That was his only interview in the wake of the revolt. It would be his last. He was placed under house arrest until his death six years later.

He also met with Morteza Pasandideh, 82, Khomeini’s older brother, who was quite jovial. Siddiqui admired them all for their stress-free lives, their inner peace all, living productive lives into their 80s or 90s. Qom is famous for sohan halwa (sweet sweet) made with pistachios, almonds and butter. Back in Toronto, he asked John Ralston Saul to taste and guess which enemy country it was from. Whatever it is, it could only have been made by a great civilization.

He toured the now-occupied US embassy and chatted amiably (sympathetically?) with the students about how they had pulled off the siege, overpowering the bulky Marines. They said their resolve got strengthened after seeing a large-size picture of Khomeini on a dartboard and several crude cartoons of Khomeini from American and British newspapers in the embassy. At Christmas they made cookies for their captives. An American priest who had come to perform the Christmas Mass said: We should be grateful that we are in a Muslim country and there are not drunk guards. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor told him: There are no anti-Canadian feelings here. No one has indicated any inclination to leave Tehran. There’s no panic. When he met Taylor later, he said: Mr Taylor, you’re a great liar. Taylor: That’s what I got paid for.

After an exhausting year in Tehran, the Soviets invaded (came to the assistance of) secular revolutionary Kabul and he was ordered to get there asap. But first he flew to the Iranian border and crossed into Afghanistan to meet a local tribal chieftain, who told him, ‘We’ll kick the bastards out.’ How to get there legitimately? Pakistan? Better India, which had good relations with the communists in Moscow and Kabul, so off to New Delhi and the Afghan embassy. Indira Gandhi never condemned the Soviet invasion. (How wise in retrospect.) In Kabul he was told not to go anywhere and only communicate through an official guide. Ha, ha! He snuck out the back door of his hotel, spoke to a soldier in Urdu, said ‘Canada’ and quickly found a local driver.

He credits Canada’s reputation for peaceful relations, a well-known eye clinic in Kabul. Off to (Shia) Herat where he heard Long live Islam, Long live Iran! He bought a Russian fur cap but was told never to wear it in public or he might be shot. He left via Pushtunistan to Jalalabad, Pakistan, where he met the legendary 91-year-old frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who like the Siddiquis had protested the division of India. He was ailing but contemptuous of Soviet attempts to appease religious Afghans. Everything in Afghanistan is done in the name of religion. But this is a political religion, not the religion of Islam and Allah and Muhammad. Communism has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the stomach. The Russians knew this and tried to convince the Afghans that they could keep their religion, but it was too little, too late. The Russians refused to try to treat their Gandhi, fearing if he died, they would be accused of killing him.

He pressed on to the Khyber Pass, the route for a stream of invaders – Cyrus, Darius, Genghis Khan, Alexander, the Mughals. Tribal chief Mohammed Gul told him: if the Iranians can knock off the Shah and the Americans, we certainly can kick out the Russians. He saw that resistance was beginning to jell within weeks of the Soviet occupation. It took a decade for the Soviets to depart, the US and allies, including Canada, taking double the time to conclude that Afghans have both the courage and patience to bleed any occupier dry.

This being the days before internet, getting copy out required ingenuity. Siddiqui would go to the airport on the days Indian Airlines came to Kabul, meet the crew and cajole/tip them into taking copy and dropping it off at the Reuters news agency in Delhi for forwarding to Toronto. He also went on the day Pakistan International Airlines came just in case. Later he was told everything came, sometimes twice. He met Brzezinski in Peshawar (!) but he wouldn’t give Siddiqui the time of day.

Following the Iraq-Iran war, he was disgusted that western media ignored the poison gas supplied to Iraq by American, German, French, Dutch, Swiss and Belgian companies. On the Iranian front line he hid from Iraqi snipers and marveled at how soldiers dying from gassing were rushed from the front to Tehran hospitals. He was appalled by Khomeini’s hitman, a sadistic prosecutor Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the hanging judge. Later in Paris, he met Bani Sadr, the first president, who had been impeached and fled the country disguised as a woman in a chador, in an Iran Air Force jet piloted by a sympathizer. He laments that US hostility prompted Khomeini to restart the nuclear program begun under the Shah, after ending it as unIslamic.

Siddiqui’s credo

I must admit, I’ve become jaded about multiculturalism. Toronto is now mostly first or second generation immigrants. Our culture feels shallow and American now. I find the turban-wearing Uber electric scooters grazing me unawares on bike paths frightening, and pointless, as they ferry onion rings to lazy people with too much money. I bemoan the lack of interest in Canadian history, our struggle to define an identity that’s not American. Most immigrants really would prefer big, rich, warm America to Canada and would have no problem if the US decided to invade. What has happened to Canadian culture?

But then I’ve become equally jaded about our heroic history. We are all immigrants, in the case of the paleface, mostly riff-raff, having decimated our poor brown natives. The post-WWII immigrants from brown countries like Siddiqui’s India/ Pakistan are mostly university-educated, the elites of their countries, so they really are a step up from my Irish-English-Swedish peasant ancestors.

But then, I find that equally disturbing. We stole the land from the real Canadians. Now we steal the intellectual wealth from poor countries. Sure we’re richer; the imperialist ‘centre’ is always richer. Our Canadianism was and is still a fraud. So, white flag, hello multiculturalism, for better or worse. But one that should give first place to our natives as the real owners, spiritually, of the land. And no more stealing, whether it be minds from ‘over there’, or land here or ‘over there’. That means Israel, our ‘best friend’, according to PM Harper in 2013 and PM Trudeau in 2015.

Siddiqui is unapologetically for mass immigration and has no time for the ecological problems that mass migration entails. He boasts having visited India 50 times in 40 years, not to mention his other peregrinations. That grates. Yes, brown/black is just as good as white, but what’s holding us together anymore? I don’t know, but I’m happy for Siddiqui, who at least has helped Canada transform from a country of bigotry and chauvinism to … a nice, tame, bland cosmopolis.

His journey through the swinging ’60s into the terrible ’20s is an upbeat panorama of not only Canada at its peak of popularity and feel-goodness, but, reading between the lines, also the decline of Canada, its loss of feel-good innocence transformation into an unapologetic toady of US empire. He took pride in being Canadian when Ambassador Taylor helped US hostages escape Tehran in 1980, when Chretien refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it’s been downhill since then, with Harper’s disastrous commitment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan, his open Islamo- and Russophobia, his worship of Israel. While Trudeau has welcomed Syrian refugees (and now Afghans, fall out from Harper’s war), he did not fulfill his pledge to renew relations with Iran, despite the Iranian exile community’s pleas. His Russophobia is pathetic. Multiculturalism is looking mighty threadbare.

Yes, following Trudeau senior, Siddiqui’s credo is that all cultural communities have ‘the right to preserve and develop their own cultures within Canadian society’, which he notes is the ethos of India, best articulated by Indian novelist Shivaram Karanth: There’s no such thing as Indian culture. Indian culture is so varied as to be called cultures. But what has happened to India’s multiculturalism under arch-Hindu nationalist Modi?

Star Foreign Editor Jimmy Atkins (R) with Star chair John Honderich, South African President Nelson Mandela & first lady Graca Machel, Star editorial board editor Haroon Siddiqui.

Free trade, Sikhs, Laïcité

Siddiqui gets along with everyone, doesn’t drink or smoke (anymore), a model Muslim in the House of War.¹ He traces his ancestors to the first caliph Abu-bakr Siddiq, and second caliph Umar al-Khattab al-Faruq. A worthy disciple of the Prophet Muhammad, the multiculturalist par excellence.² The fearsome Bee (Star editor-in-chief Beland Honderich) famously got along with Haroon. Siddiqui started from scratch in Brandon (no halal, no yogurt in 1968), then the Star, rising quickly through the ranks to foreign correspondent, front page editor, editorial page editor, and finally columnist, all the time the only Muslim in mainstream Canadian media.

He and the Star were against Mulroney’s ‘free’ trade pact with the yankee devil, realizing it was only good for fat cats. He has acted as a public spokesman explaining the problems of all immigrants and BIPOC,³ an acronym he promotes. He highlights the racism which feeds on the changing demographics from white to nonwhite, recountiing a Tanzanian immigrant pushed onto Toronto’s subway tracks, crippling him, and the existence of a KKK chapter operating openly in Toronto.

The case of Sikhs is thorny. Sikh Canadians were mostly quietist, but when Sikh separatists were ejected from the Golden Temple by Indira Gandhi in 1984, she was assassinated, and Sikh separatists blew up an Indian Airlines plane full of Hindu Canadians in 1985. This still ranks as Canada’s worst such tragedy, but was downplayed by the Canadian government with the investigation bungled by the RCMP, as anti-Sikh/ Hindu racism grew. And it continues, the latest being a hit job on a (Sikh separatist) Canadian, openly, by India’s militant Hindu nationalist government. Multiculturalism is easily abused and hard to defend.

To their credit, the Sikhs in Canada have bounced back, entering politics (Justin Trudeau boasted more Sikhs in his cabinet than Modi), joining the RCMP, police, army, working hard, being good citizens. The bad apples didn’t spoil the whole barrel, though Sikhs have no use for India, and they really did capture the lackluster leadership convention of the NDP out of nowhere in 2017. The unlikely NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been earnest, if not inspiring.

How does this multiculturalism pan out? Quebec separatists don’t like immigrants much, as they are not interested in living in a parochial, xenophobic province, and have enough trouble learning passable English, let alone Quebecois. They voted en masse against independence, and the pesky Muslim women want to wear hijab or worse, niqab. Vive la laïcité. Quebec has chosen to copy France’s punitive banning hijab and other restrictions. Still, English and French get along.

Tribalism, French vs English, Sikhs vs Hindus, Buddhists remains strong. That contrasts with Muslims, who quickly drop their ethnic identity for universal Islam and Canadianism (84% cite being Muslim and 81% cite being Canadian as their primary identity),⁴ as I’ve noticed at Muslim conferences, where a truly united nations reigns. That brings us to Jewish Canadians vs Muslim Canadians, the most tragic stand-off of the past century. Siddiqui doesn’t go to this forbidding territory. On the contrary, (wisely) he has spoken to Bnai Brith and Canadian Jewish Congress gatherings and kept a low profile as a Muslim Canadian. As the sole prominent Muslim journalist here, he was operating in enemy territory, as his encounter with Kaplan confirmed.

Enlightening Canadians on things Islamic

More important, he wrote engagingly about Muslims in Toronto, which hosts the largest Iranian emigre community after the US, mostly in ‘Tehronto’, a mix of pro- and anti-Khomeini, but able to live peacefully, all agreeing that the Canadian government nonrecognition of Iran and boycott is bad politics for everyone. His appreciation for this ‘great civilization’ contrasts with the negative press that Iran uniformly gets here.

Siddiqui realized quickly that Canadian media coverage and commentary ‘smelled of American propaganda’ and the US and allies were inflicting too many horrors on Muslims and Muslims lands. In 1988, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner killing 290, prompting Bush I to boast: I will never apologize for the US. I don’t care what the facts are. Instead, Washington awarded medals to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. Did any other mainstream journalist note this then or now? He refused to blacken Islam after 9/11. Now a columnist he wrote his third post-9/11 column ‘It’s the US foreign policy, stupid,’ causing a storm of letters to the editor, a majority ‘thank you for saying it’.

Ismailis came in 1972, expelled by Idi Amin of Uganda, joined later by Ismailis from Kenya and Tanzania. Self-reliant, educated, entrepreneurial, they inspired the Aga Khan to build a museum of Islamic culture in Toronto in 2014, the only such museum in the West. Ironically it was officially opened by arch-Islamophobe PM Harper. We celebrate today not only the harmonious meeting of green gardens and glass galleries. We rejoice above all in the special spirit which fills this place and gives it its soul. But then, to Islamophobe Harper, Ismailis are Islam-lite, not considered real Muslims by most.

There are two chapters dealing with the ummah: Cultural Warfare on Muslims, and Harper and Muslims (In his ugliness, he was well ahead of Trump – and more effective). Some particularly painful episodes he covered:

*Harper invited (till then terrorist) Modi to Canada in 2014 when first elected, accompanying him to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver,

*He established an office of religious freedom, which he unveiled at a Mississauga Coptic church. He announced the position of a new ambassador of religious freedom at the Ahmadiyya mosque in Vaughan, defending Christian and other minorities in Muslim nations, doing nothing for Uighurs, Rohingyas, Shia in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

I could go on – I haven’t even got to the Rushdie circus – but I urge all Muslim Canadians, no, all Canadians, to read for yourselves. Siddiqui provides an excellent survey of all the post-9/11 Islamophobic nonsense, especially in Euroland.

The West has discredited democracy by allowing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse to be one of our last acceptable forms of racism and bigotry. It’s in this milieu that Rushdie and the Rushdie affair have thrived. Has Rushdie been exploiting western prejudices or has the West been using him as a shield for its own prejudices? Or is this a case of mutual convenience?

Having rid ourselves of Harper, how quickly we forget the pain when it stops. As it has under Trudeau Jr. For all his silliness and US-Israel fawning, Justin Trudeau is true to his father’s legacy, and undid much of Harper’s bigotry, especially relating to Muslims.

We should be wary of letting the unrepentant Conservatives take back Parliament Hill. However, I don’t think it’s possible to relaunch the Harper take-no-hostages Crusade. 9/11 (whoever did it) is what motivated me and many more to become a Muslim, and October 7 is now rapidly expanding the Muslim ummah, especially in the West, the heart of the beast. The trouble for the Harpers is that the more Islam and Muslims are reviled, the more Muslims (re)turn to their religion. But then that’s the way of imperialism, creating its enemies, stoking them, as Israel did with Hamas, thinking they can then pick off the ‘terrorists’, ‘mow the grass’.

Siddiqui draws from his experience surviving partition in India, adhering to Shaykh Madani’s view that ‘there is too much diversity within Islam for democracy to work, that an Islamic state would inevitably be authoritarian.’ Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran are the leading examples. The best protection for peoples of faith was a democratic state that stayed neutral between faiths and advanced mutual respect.⁵

The Harpers accuse Muslims of being unwilling to integrate. Canada, Britain and the US are shining examples of the opposite.

*In the 2021 federal election 12 Muslims won seats. Two hold senior Cabinet portfolios: Omar Alghabra and Ahmed Hussen.

*In Britain, in 2019, 19 were elected. Sadiq Khan has been mayor of London since 2016.

*Humza Yousaf became first minister in Scotland in 2023, the first Muslim to lead a western nation. When Khan was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council at Bukhingham Palace in 2009, it was discovered there was no Quran in the palace, so he brought his own and left it as a present to the Queen.

*In the US 57 Muslims were elected in 2020. Keith Ellison, the first member of the House was sworn in on a copy of the Quran owned by President Jefferson, who had bought an English translation out of the ‘desire to understand Islam on its own terms.’

*Arab and Muslim entertainers, stand-up comedians, writers, actors, Little Mosque on the Prairie …

*To welcome Syrian refugees arriving in Canada, Ottawa French public schools joined to sing Talaʽ al-Badru ʽAlaynā,⁶ which went viral on YouTube.

Siddiqui’s openmindedness and lack of prejudice are his not-so-secret weapon, able to find common humanity where western propaganda serves up bile. To no small degree, thanks to Haroon and other new (brown) Canadians, Marshall McLuhan’s global village is a reality at home, the most successful heterogeneous experiment in human history.

ENDNOTES

• 1
  Dar al-harb vs Dar al-Salam, House of Peace, referring to the Muslim world.
• 2
  Quran16:13 And all the [beauty of] many hues-which He has created for you on earth: in this, behold, there is a message for people who [are willing to] take it to heart.
• 3
  Black, indigenous, people of colour.
• 4
  Half of Muslim Canadians consider their ethnic identity as very important. Statistics Canada, ‘The Canadian Census: A rich portrait of the country’s religious and ethnocultural diversity,’ 2022.
• 5
  Siddiqui, My name is not Harry: A memoir, 392.
• 6
  (طلع البدر) nasheed that the Ansar sang for the Islamic prophet Muhammad upon his arrival at Medina from the (non)battle of Tabuk.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

 

The Hidden Genocide in Ethiopia

by Graham Peebles / March 29th, 2024

The Ethiopia of Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party, is a dark and frightening place,  where anyone challenging the government are at risk of violence and arrest.

People from the Amhara ethnic group are particularly targeted; killing of Amhara men, women and children is a daily occurrence in what constitutes a genocidal campaign of hate

Uniformed thugs, federal and regional, as well as Oromo militia (Oromo Liberation Army or Shene), carry out the killings. Drones hover in the skies; faceless messengers of death used to slaughter Amhara civilians in the streets as they go about their daily lives.

A suffocating shadow of fear hangs heavy over Amhara people, in villages, towns and cities. Fear of being identified as Amhara, fear of imprisonment for being Amhara or speaking out about the Amhara genocide. Fear that family members and friends will be murdered, their wives or sisters raped, their homes taken from them or ransacked.

Stop killing Amhara civilians is the desperate cry of rational peace loving Ethiopians throughout the country and abroad; end the discrimination, the persecution and unlawful arrests, the spying and monitoring. Stop the Amhara genocide, Abiy Ahmed.

Homeless and scared

In the five years since Abiy and Co. came to power tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed and millions displaced from Oromia, the largest region in the country; their land, property and cattle stolen by Oromo extremists.

And now these people, many of whom have either been the victim of violence or witnessed the killing of family members and friends, are the subjects of a forced relocation programme. Pushed to return to the very places they were evicted from. Towns and villages that are unsafe, where the armed gangs that attacked them are still at large, and where no alternative accommodation is being offered.

At best this is a chaotic plan by an inept regime attempting to present a fiction of regional safety, at worst it is a deliberate act by a brutal dictator to force people back into harm’s way.

In addition to murder and forced displacement, a mass programme of unlawful arrests  of Amhara people as well as Oromo opposition supporters is in place. Hundreds of thousands of Amhara have been arrested, with many inmates being executed. The prisons are full to overflowing, leading to detainees being located in unknown semi-industrial units, where there are reports of captives being injected with highly contagious fatal diseases and left to die.

Ethnic profiling by government bodies is widespread and highlights the fact that individuals are targeted based on ethnicity, beliefs, and opposition to the Amhara genocide.

Internet access is closely monitored, social media accounts are scrutinised; arbitrary stop and search operations are in force; mobile phones are searched, and as The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) found, any images discovered of historical Amhara figures or national flags bereft of stars arouses suspicion and potential arrest.

Leave them defenceless

After being subjected to ethnic based violence for years, in April 2023 the federal government announced unconstitutional plans to disband the only force protecting Amhara communities, the Amhara Special Forces (ASF). This triggered huge protests throughout the region. Abiy sent in the Federal Army (ENDF) and fighting erupted between the ENDF and Fano, a regional militia made up of poorly armed, but determined volunteers, together with ex members of the ASF.

Indiscriminate killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF forces exploded. In a recent report, Amnesty International (AI) documented serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) by the ENDF, which they say, “may amount to war crimes.” Amnesty highlight examples of extrajudicial killing of Amhara civilians by ENDF troops in Abune Hara, Lideta and Sebatamit, and acknowledges that these are but the tip of an iceberg of death and intimidation.

Unable to overcome the Fano and unwilling to withdraw and reinstate the ASF, a State of Emergency (SoE) was imposed in the Amhara region on 5 August 2023.

The shadowy declaration gives the government far reaching powers to arrest/imprison people without due process, impose curfews, ban the right to assembly, and search property without a warrant. Draconian powers that the government has employed widely and indiscriminately. Violence and unlawful arrests against Amhara people have increased exponentially.

In its six monthly report the Amhara Association of America (AAA) document “1606 deaths, and injuries to 824 Amhara civilians (August 2023  – February 2024); 37 drone attacks, resulting in 333 civilians killed; rape of at least 210 young girls and women; mass arrest of over 10,000 ethnic Amharas……with detainees facing physical and psychological torture”. These numbers according to AAA, shocking as they are, represent a small fraction of the total killed, raped and arrested.

Despite overwhelming evidence of killings, mass arrests and executions, on 6 February PM Abiy Ahmed told parliament that, “since we think along democratic lines, it is hard for us to even arrest anyone, let alone execute them.” A sick joke perhaps? Either Abiy is completely deluded and actually believes his own propaganda, or he is an habitual liar — probably both.

Hope killed

Swept along by a belief that change could come about, in 2018 when Abiy and his cohorts took office there was tremendous optimism in the country. That hope soon evaporated as it became clear that the new regime was no different to the previous mob – the EPRDF; in fact, many believe they are worse.

The ruling Prosperity Party is a dictatorship led, as they all seem to be, by a narcissist under the guise of a democratically elected coalition government. Contrary to his liberal eulogising and pre-election pledges to respond to historical grievances and ethnic discrimination, Abiy has emboldened extremists and fuelled division and hatred.

Not only is the county fractured as never before, as a result of Abiy’s arrogance and misjudgments, Ethiopia is increasingly isolated within the Horn of Africa and the wider region.

Among the international community and mainstream media, there is little or no interest in the fractured state of the country. For almost thirty years western nations turned a blind eye to EPRDF suppression and violence, and now, despite the human rights reports, the UN warnings and calls for action, despite the suffering and pain of millions of people, the pattern of  neglect and apathy continues.

Why are these people ignored? They are poor, black and African.  This, many suspect, is the reason for global indifference.

Imagine for a moment that such atrocities were taking place in Europe, say, or the US. There would rightly be outrage and immediate action. And there should be the same response to the Amhara genocide taking place in Ethiopia. Action that impacts Abiy and his government directly; targeted sanctions applied by the US and allies, as well as international institutions to directly hurt the men in power.

Dictators like Abiy, and the world is littered with such monsters, do not suddenly curb their behavior and embrace justice and democracy. They must be forced to do so.

Graham Peebles is an independent writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Ethiopia where he lived for two years working with street children, under 18 commercial sex workers, and conducting teacher training programmes. He lives and works in London. Read other articles by Graham, or visit Graham's website.