Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Dodging the Issue: The Biden Administration Report on Israel’s Use of US Weapons


It truly is pushing the envelope of lunacy to assume that this latest revelation was revelatory.  US weapons, the wonks in Washington find, are being used by the Israeli Defense Forces to kill their opponents, many of them Palestinians, and most of them civilians.  These are detailed in a report ordered by the White House pursuant to National Security Memorandum 20, also known as “National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability With Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services”.

NSM-20 requires the Secretary of State to obtain credible and reliable assurances within 45 days from any country engaged in armed conflict in which US defence articles are used.  The NSM-20 report, in addition to Israel, considers Colombia, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Ukraine.  But Israel, by far, is the most significant, given that it is the most prominent recipient of US weapons.  As John Ramming Chappell notes for Just Security, these include reported transfers of “bombs, artillery shells, precision guidance kits (which are attached to bombs for targeting purposes), tank ammunition, guided missiles, firearms, drones, various types of ammunition, and other weapons”.

The Israeli entry starts off with various qualifying conditions about the horror of the Gaza conflict.  Hamas is blamed for embedding “itself deliberately within and underneath the civilian population to use civilians as human shields.”  The scene is set.

In a pitiful dodge, the report claims it is “difficult to determine facts on the ground in an active war zone”, a state of mind that is bound to lend itself to justifications.  “The nature of the conflict in Gaza and the compressed review period in this initial report amplify those challenges.”

The report acknowledges various “reported incidents to raise serious concerns” that US weaponry is being used in a manner not in conformity with international law.  While it was “difficult to assess or reach conclusive findings on individual incidents,” it was “reasonable to assess that defense articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with IHL [International Humanitarian Law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm”.

The discussion is filled with softening qualifiers.  Israel had “the knowledge, experience, and tools to implement best practices for mitigating civilian harm in its military operations” but “results on the ground, including high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial questions as to whether the IDF is using them effectively in all cases.”

Despite concerns about IHL violations, the report accepts that in Israel, there are “a number of ongoing, active criminal investigations pending and there are hundreds of cases under administrative review.”  Surely this would be a troubling, rather than assuring fact.

The report goes on to reveal the view of the US Intelligence Community (IC) that, while Israel had “inflicted harm on civilians in military and security operations, potentially using US-provided equipment”, it had “no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians.”  It could, however, “do more to avoid civilian harm.”  How high a body count does one need before the intention to kill is evinced?

Mindful of the image of an ally, the report is seemingly less concerned by the staggering civilian death toll than “the impact of Israel’s military operations on humanitarian actors.”  Despite the intervention of the US government and engagement between humanitarian organisations with Israeli officials regarding deconfliction and coordination procedures, “the IDF has struck humanitarian workers and facilities.”

Inexplicably, Israel gets a clean bill of health in terms of section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars military aid to a state that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United states humanitarian assistance.”  This, despite the acceptance that Israeli actions had “delayed or had a negative impact in the delivery of aid to Gaza”. Current levels of aid reaching Palestinian civilians “while improved” remained “insufficient”.

The assessment of Israel’s use of US weapons, all in all, is paltry.  It glaringly omits making any specific adverse findings regarding breaches of international law.  This proved to be a satisfactory state of affairs for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who agreed with the “assessment that Israel has not violated International Humanitarian Law and that military assistance to support Israel’s security remains in the US interest and should continue.”

Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen begged to differ, noting the report’s failure “to do the hard work of making an assessment and ducks the ultimate questions that the report was designed to determine.”

In a fuller statement, Van Hollen identifies the “continuation of a disturbing pattern where the expertise and analyses of those working most closely on these issues at the State Department and at USAID have been swept aside to facilitate a predetermined policy outcome based on political convenience.”

While the Biden administration recently paused the transfer of a weapons shipment to Israel comprising 1,800 2000-pound bombs, and 1,700 500-pound bombs, Congressional sentiment is seemingly in favour of the status quo.  Despite the grumbling of some lawmakers, the general view is that the business of supplying the IDF is a sound one.  The killing of Palestinian civilians can, in all its ghoulishness and cruelty, continue.


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.

 

Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

The Prehistory and History of Fascist Mythology Part I

Orientation

Purpose of this article

Almost 2 years ago I wrote an article called Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age based on the work of Robert Ellwood (The Politics of Myth). In it Ellwood showed the conservative nature of popular mythologists Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. My purpose was to show how the naïve New Age movement took these mythologists to be liberal in spite of their conservative and even proto-fascist leanings. All three mythologists were writing from the early to the middle part of the 20th century. In this article I want to trace the history of right-wing mythology back 200 years. For this task I will be relying on two great books. One is Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson; the other is Theorizing Myth by Bruce Lincoln.

In search for the Indo-Europeans

Why explore a lost culture with little evidence to go on? From the early 19th  century to the end of World War II historians, linguists, folklorists and archeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture, a people older than the Sumerians. Those scholars who have maintained that this culture existed and have called them “Indo-Europeans;” “Proto-Indo Europeans”, “Aryans” or  “Japhetites”. It was in 1813 that Thomas Young coined the term “Indo-European”.

In Part I of this article I explore those theories that searched for the Indo-Europeans by dissecting language-based on the theories of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. Both these theorists suspected that India was the home of the Indo Europeans. Further on, in the hands of the Grimm Brothers, the search for the Indo-Europeans takes a nationalist turn. Finally, neo-traditional religion supports the vitality of chthonic earth gods. Lastly, I discuss the impact of racial anthropology in which the search for Indo-Europeans is now based on the climate of the area, the skin color and brain size of people in these cultures.

Part II continues this rightward turn in Indo European studies with explicitly fascist direction. Following Arvidsson, I contrast the difference between the “order” theorists and the more “barbarophilism” as they affect the rise of Hitler. India falls out of favor as the home of the Indo-Europeans and is replaced by Germany.

But later, following Bruce Lincoln we find a French fascism smuggled into the work of the great French comparative mythologist, Georges Dumezil. I close with a brief presentation of the fascist work of Roger Pearson in his efforts to carry Indo-European studies right into second half of the 19th century. By way of conclusion, I present comparative mythologist Bruce Lincoln’s ten methodological steps to be sure that the political use of mythology does not interfere with the science of comparative mythology.

Who were the Indo-European scholars and what were their methodological problems?

Interestingly, supporters for the discovery of IE culture were a multidisciplinary lot. They consisted of historians of religions like Mircea Eliade, Jan de Vries, Jacob Grimm, Frederic Max Muller; historians such as Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff; anthropologists such as Claude Levi Strauss and Marshall Sahlins; archeologists like Gordon Childe; sociologists like Georges Dumezil. Others included Franz Bopp, Ernest Renan and Emile Benveniste.

The problem for these scholars was that Indo-Europeans have not left behind any texts and no objects that can definably be tied to them. Given these problems, why did these scholars not give up and turn their attention to other excavations? Why did they persist under these difficult conditions? The answer Stefan Arvidsson gives is that most of these scholars did so for religious and political/ideological reasons.

I The Ideological Origins of the Search for Indo-Europeans 

Anthropology typically examines the similarities and differences between cultures. Yet anthropologists are affected by the political climate of their countries. In European colonial times of the late 18th century, there was little to gain by elites for pursuing the Enlightenment dream of finding a universality of all cultures. Instead, religious and political zealots look for differences to justify the subjugation of these countries. The ancient history of the supposed Indo-Europeans became the proof that one branch of humanity was destined to exploit and rule the others. Mythology became an ideology to justify conquest. As Arvidsson pointed out, romantics like Chateaubriand, and Joseph de Maistre stressed importance of Laws of Manu found in India as a justification for a tripart conservative ideology as we will see later.

Indo-European “Aryan” studies were appropriated at an early stage by racial science. British archeologist Colin Renfrew has concluded from his own research that the research in IE is itself a modern myth. They included those who want to rekindle the old pre-Christian IE or Aryan paganism. Even as late as 1940-44 the most important dividing line among Europe’s inhabitants were between Aryans and Semites. After the fall of Germany in World War II “Aryan” was replaced by “Indo European” because post-war scholarship was dominated by Dumezil who never spoke about “Aryan religion”. Today the term is only used by Neo-Nazis.

Why was it so important for Germany to search for a culture of its origins? Unlike Britain, France or Spain there was no Germany until the end of the 18th century. The usual process of nation-building involved a reference to an ancient geographical homeland as well as an ancient religion. In this climate of imperial ambitions, Germany had neither, so it set out to discover one.

 II Discovery of Sanskrit

Sir William Jones

The Romantic use of language interpreted by various peoples who spoke IE languages made them have an organic unity and had a common fate. They claimed that all people who spoke IE had also inherited a common belief system. IE scholars like Bryant and Jones attempted to find similarities in the myths and god figures and found traces of these beliefs in at least four places: Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns and Norse saga literature. 

Bruce Lincoln, in his great book Theorizing Myth says Sir William Jones (1746-1794), established himself as one of the world’s foremost linguists with a grasp of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Turkish along with a knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He was a scholar, poet and translator sympathetic to the most liberal causes of his day. By a series of occupational happenstances, this led him to study Sanskrit.

In 1785 he gave a lecture in which he proposed the common origin of the languages (Sanskrit) to which others would later derive and give the name “Aryan”. Jones discovered the similarities between Latin and Greek European languages and the Sanskrit and Persian languages which were termed “linguistic families”. The Bhagavad Gita was translated by Jones along with The Laws of Manu. India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group.

Jones focused on four specific domains of culture a) language and letters b) philosophy and religion c) architecture and sculpture d) science and arts. In his discussion of an evaluation basing his judgments on what he took to be levels of accomplishment, he considered India first among the nations and evaluated it most favorably. He connected the peoples of India and Iran on the basis of their linguistic, religious and artistic similarities.

Romanticism and India

Interest in Sanskrit exploded. Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. He thought it was one of the most important steps in the development of the human race. Raymond Schwab referred to the period around 1800 as an “Oriental Renaissance”. Schlegel’s book in 1808 made the case for India as the Aryan homeland. In the translation of the Laws of Manu, the word “Aryan” means noble. The plot thickens.

For romantics the idealization of India served both as a protest against and an escape from the contemporary world that seemed like a confident march of progress. Threatened by rationalism, mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, anti-aristocratic politics and watered down theology Romantics made India a mystical unity that did away with interdisciplinary European conflicts. While the Enlightenment advocated a contractual right of man, German Romantics argued that human races are an organic part of the natural world with India as its model. Poets such as Shelley, Lord Byron and Schopenhauer attempted to synthesize India with European thinking.

Paris was the Mecca of Orientalism during the 1830s-1840s and it was hoped that studying Sanskrit would liberate scholars from their preoccupation with Greece and Rome. For some time, ancient India became the imagined home of Indo-Europeans. The attractive power of this world grew in 1819 through the writings of Frederic Schlegel, who attempted to build a comparative linguistics (1767-1845) along with von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Like many to come, Herder believed that Asia was the original home of human unity.

The discovery of IE language transformed India, Persia and Central Asia as a kind of European Orient. Thomas Trautmann writes that Jones’ work is nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Interest in India was popularized by the historian of religion, Max Muller. What we are interested in is the relationship of that discovery to political interests of colonial British rule in the late 18th and 19th centuries. 

Language mediates how nature grows in culture

For Romantics, language was the most basic expression of the soul of a people and is the foundation for musical and artistic traditions as well as social laws. The study of the origin of language (philology) was the cornerstone in the 19th century of research in the search for Indo-Europeans. Language became the vehicle through which nature grows through people.

 For Hamann and Herder, the ancient vernacular of languages and literature — poetry and myth – was a prime basis of national identity. Each language embodied the history of the people who spoke it. Each language had a basis in poetry and music far deeper than the degraded prose of modernity. For Herder, the formation of culture consisted of 4 parts:

  • A variety of climates — heat and cold have an impact on the disposition of customs and bodies. Climate first produces change at the body’s most superficial level. Over long periods of time the effects penetrate deeper to transform skeletal structure and even the shape of the skull and nose
  • The landscape – the features of individuals in a culture are brought into line with the features of the landscape.
  • Language impacts thought and social relations.Language impacts thought and social relations.
  • The arts through music and dance.

III Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Religion

Comparative religion as rooted in linguistics

As a philologist, Max Muller believed that religion is tightly linked to linguistic groups. Muller thought the only scientific way of classifying religion was by language. He raised the question that if the belief in God arises naturally, why are there such different religious types? In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology.

Primitive religion was monotheist and rooted in sun-worship

Which natural phenomenon had been the most prominent in catalyzing the mythopoetic imagination? Was it thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanos or the sun and dawn? Muller suspected that primitive religion was monothetic and this divine creator had originated from humanity’s encounter with forces of nature. However, it was not the wildest and most unpredictable events but it was the ones which were the most persistent and reliable. He thought the light of the sun fit the bill. Muller hoped to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. He believed that the origin of monotheism was India. In the hopes of finding the monotheistic roots of India, he translated the Rigveda.

Use and abuse of myth: history of myth

According to Bruce Lincoln, the word “myth” has been used in many ways depending on the historical period. Myth had been used originally in early Greek times to mean a primordial truth or a sacred story. It gradually became discredited with the rise of the Pre-Socrates and dismissed by the Romans as a “fable”. Christianity saw myth as a lie and set them in dualistic opposition to the non-mythic bible. With the rise of science myth was seen as either a sign of ignorance, the result of poetic revelry or a children’s story. Resurrected by the romantics in the 19th century, it became politicized and used to assist in the building of nation-states. In the 20th century it helped to build support for the wave of fascism in the 20th century.

Muller sees myth as degenerative

Muller was a modernist Protestant. He was not a romantic when it came to myths. He found myth irrational and immoral. Muller agreed the IE mythology was a poetic explanation of nature.  But if Vedic India was equal to the West, what kept India economically and politically backward? Unlike Nietzsche and other romantics, Muller saw myth not as a foundation of all religion but as a source of religious degeneration. Like Hamann and Herder, he took poetry to be present from human origins and to reflect an innate religious awareness. Myth was a later development, a disease of language. The Jews, Muslims and Christians as staunch monotheists, were less disposed to the seductions of myth.

Muller and British colonialism

Muller hoped to influence a change in British colonial politics. He wanted to make the British colonists understand that their Indian subjects were Aryan brothers. During a long degeneration, Indian religion withered while Europeans grew and matured into monotheism.  Muller hoped that the people of India would leave behind worship of idols if they received knowledge about the old Aryan Vedic religion.

IV Romantics Champion Myth and Folklore to Build Nationalism

At the end of the 18th century romanticism turned its back on the Enlightenment, especially its more deterministic tendencies. Myth was given a new lease on life. People such as Jones saw myth symbolically as veiled wisdom which simply needed to be first interpreted and then explained. Interest in the vernaculars (local language) displaced the international languages of church and court while myths and, to a lesser extent, folk songs were constitutive as an authentic primordial voice of the volk.

The use of myth at the end of the 18th century was also used by nationalists in their search for a language and set of stories on which the emergence of the nation-state could be founded. In the hands of the Brothers Grimm and others this is exactly what happened. The Grimm’s monumental research shows a Herderian interest in language and myth. They devoted themselves to the first encyclopedic compendium of German myths of 4 volumes. The Grimms argued that it was the conversion to Christianity that shattered the nexus of land-myth and folk. Myth then became entangled with attempts to contrast Aryans and Semites, as we shall see.

Grimm stirs the use of folklore to build nationalism

For the brothers Grimm, prehistory was not a period of dark barbarism but a high cultural golden age. The recovery of ancient texts during the Renaissance included Tacitus’ Germania, first published in 1457.  It dealt with the German sense of honor and integrity, their physical prowess, their courage and sense of  beauty. They were received with enthusiasm by the people of Northern Europe, in part because Tacitus broke the Mediterranean monopoly on antiquity by giving the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Anglo Saxons their first sense of the prestige derived from a deep and noble past.

Grimm (1785 – 1863) gathered folktales from German peasants in order to recreate a strong German culture. He wanted to find rich German stories that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions  He hoped that within the surface of folktales searchers  he could find traces of a German mythopoetic prehistory. Theorists of Northern origins challenged the Bible, for orthodox religion looked to Israel as the cradle of language. Grimm’s work spread and scholars began to record tales and customs of their society. Nationalist motives were always in the search for myths whether they were folktales or rituals.

 V From Modernist to Neo-Traditional Religion: Fall of Nature Mythology of Max Muller

Modernist theories of religion see the modernization process, including science, as part of the evolution of religion. The focus of religious experience is the individual. Modernist theories of religion look for a common core in all religion and its practices involve ethics and prayer. Modernists understand animism and polytheism as late degenerate forms of primitive monotheist tendency. To study non-modern cultures it focuses the language, and it studies myth. Max Muller was a modernist.

Capitalist class rejects modernist religious interpretations

Bruce Lincoln points out that when the bourgeois class at the end of the 19th  century became the ruling class, it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons was that more radical modernists, social democrats, communists, anarchists and union members became interested in these subjects. Events that shook bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism were the real threat of socialism as seen in the Paris Commune. Between 1880-1920, the bourgeois class became a dominating class whose interest in social change decreased, and the relationship between a civilized bourgeoisie and a barbaric working-class now became more important than the relationship between the bourgeois class and a reactionary aristocracy and priesthood which the bourgeoisie had defeated. In reaction, the bourgeois became conservative, nostalgic and nationalistic.  Correspondingly, the image of IE as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neo-traditionalist. But what does neo-traditionalist mean?

What is neo-traditional religion?

Neo-traditional ideals of religion want to recreate a vitalized traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to modernization (Muller). Von Schroder, a Baltic German Indologist, wants to renew folk-national, heathen rituals. Scholars like Lang, Von Schroeder, Harrison, Mauss and Eliade think that modernization has been chocked full of what is most vital in religion which was its magical, communitarian and collective rituals. What makes religion vital is what makes religion locally dispersed. Rather than ethics and prayer, what makes religion juicy is its altered states. Animism and polytheism are not only prior to monotheism, but once monotheism comes to power the part of religion that speaks to most people is chocked off. Further, evolutionary anthropologists claimed as Muller’s theories were no more than Christian crypto-apologetics. Frazer’s theories of ancient religion were an attempt to replace Muller’s philological paradigm with an evolutionist and folkloristic theory.

Jane Harrison and the chthonic roots of Olympian Greece religion

Beyond anthropology, the importance of ritual as opposed to myth was embraced by classicists like Jane Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Cornford (1874-1943) and the Cambridge ritualists. Jane Harrison argued chthonic religion had been the true religion of Greece up to the 7th  century BCE. With the Olympians’ victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction and clarity triumph over pulsing life. She held that myth arose as an attempt to explain well-entrenched and no longer understood rites.

 VI Aryan Studies Turn Rightward at the End of the 19th Century

Aryan liberal romanticism, which began with Jones, had weakened substantially by 1870. Yet the search for the Aryans grew, with input from Michelet, Fichte, Lasson and Hubert on the left and Renan, Schlegel and Wagner on the right.

Right-wing transitions to Aryanism

On the right, Renan idealized the polytheism of the IE. He constructed a long-lived opposition between IE and Semitic people. He connected the Biblical Shem’s line with monotheistic intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals along with lack of feeling for art and nature. For conservatives, the Jews promoted modernism. From 1870 on IE became connected with anti-Semitism.

Schlegel questions whether the French Revolution really was, along with its cosmopolitan and humanistic optimism, about progress. Becoming a Catholic, he came to embrace a nationalistic, reactionary and pessimistic world view.  In circles close to Schlegel people began for the first time to value the Middle Agesmore highly.

Wagner

Wagner greatly admired Grimm for all his work on folktales. He sought to connect the Volk through art rather than scholarship. According to Wagner, a total work of art would integrate music, poetry, dance, theatrical spectacle, the plastic arts and architecture. This integration of all the arts would undermine the shallowness of modernism, and rejuvenate an appreciation of folk, where the arts and rituals were once one.

Wagner worked on his materials over the next thirty years into the four dramas of The Ring Circle. This was intended as a ritual celebration, not a theatrical performance. He claimed that both the science and art of today are specialization of activities that were once unified. He believed this appreciation of the beauty of nature could arise only out of polytheism. That Wagner traced the origins of the German Volk to India shows that he understood them as part of the Aryan Diaspora.

The place and misplace of Nietzsche in Aryan politics

For Nietzsche, myth was a necessary foundation for all religion. In his earlier writings on myth, he took Wagner’s theories as his point of departure, especially in his book Birth of Tragedy. But in his later life Nietzsche disliked the vulgar antisemitism and German nationalism of Wagner. Nietzsche threw in the towel with Wagner after The Ring premiere at Bayreuth. Nevertheless Nietzsche’s training was in classical philology and he was well-versed with research in Indo-European linguistics and myth and undertook his own studies. He was not dependent on Wagner for this.

Nietzsche has been mistakenly categorized as antisemitic, especially in liberal and socialist circles. But as Walter Kaufman pointed out many years ago in his great biography of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s work was taken over by his sister who had fascist connections so that his work was pulverized to make it fit with Nazi ideology.

Bruce Lincoln gives us at least four reasons why Nietzsche was not antisemitic or a proponent of fascism:

  • Nietzsche’s “blond beast” is not a special race but a category that encompasses multiple races, including Greeks and Japanese. However, he gave them further consideration. His detailed discussion was all devoted to the Greeks and the Germans.
  • Soon after Nietzsche wrote Genealogy of Morals he came upon the Laws of Manu, an ancient Indian text on the ethics, law and social structure of India. Nietzsche admired the original religion and culture in India. While all the world’s people originated in India, he thought those of the West-Egyptians and Europeans came from the higher castes and it was for them that was reserved the title “Indo-Europeans”. While Nietzsche showed racial bias it was towards Europeans and Egyptians, not Germans.
  • Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ancient and modern Germans. Ancient Germans (based on the work of Tacitus) had freedom and energy, but modern Germans did not, having become ever less Aryan and ever less barbaricTherefore, Nietzsche saw nothing in the Germans of his time that was noteworthy.
  • The Nazis were antisemitic – Nietzsche was anti-Christian. His early antipathy toward the Jews and Judaism was gradually attenuated and balanced by a growing, occasionally grudging, respect. Instead he become mercilessly more critical of Christianity. Everything wrong in Judaism was amplified and exacerbated in Christianity. The criticism he had of the Jews was that they were the first weak Christians, not that they had any of the other characteristics that fascists attributed to them. His most acidic systematic criticisms, his theory of resentment was leveled at Christianity not Judaism. Christianity is treated as the extreme form of all that is sickeningly present in Judaism.

VII) Racial Anthropology

As we’ve seen, the first Indo-European studies were grounded in linguistic observations. Max Muller equated linguistic affinity with ethnic affinity as opposed to physical appearance. In retrospect, he rightfully saw language, religion and nationality as independent of blood, skull or hair color. Jones also did not think skin color was important. However, both scholars’ contention was increasingly isolated and drowned out. The issue was how to measure being Indo-European.  Did one belong with those who spoke related languages and are considered to have a similar culture, or with those who looked similar?

During the 19th century racial anthropologists began to discuss IE, threatening the proprietorship of linguists. Instead of the study of religion, language and folklore to find the origins of Indo-Europeans, the new school focused on differences between people in material and physical characteristics and their geographical location. Racial anthropologists argued that people’s physical appearance could directly explain their degree of civilization. They debated which race was the original one and whether other races were the result of evolution or degeneration. They thought pure races were more fit than mixed ones. Racial anthropology became a study of signs where the internal moral and cultural states could be interpreted from external physical signs.

Climate, skin color and physique

According to Tacitus, the German climate is harsh and damper in the North and West, windier in the South and East. The cold and damp character of the Northern environment impressed itself on the bodies of those who live there. Bruce Lincoln says the whiteness of the cold must have scorched the Indo-Europeans and produced their red color. From mid-19th century, the empirical methods of racial anthropologists were improved to measurement of skin color and the size of skulls and noses. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) argued that Aryans could be identified by their long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. In his more extreme moments, Carus associated blond hair with the color of the sun and blue eyes with that of the sky, which identified Aryans as day people in contrast to the darker, lesser races.

The changing meaning of “barbarians”

Bourgeois humanists before 1870 looked down on barbarians for having had destroyed classical Rome. But as romanticism gained hold of bourgeois ideology, barbarian invasions were seen in a more positive light. As European romantics grew more cynical of the benefits of civilization and they studied the decline of other world civilizations and tumultuous migrations, the violence of the barbarians seemed to be necessary steps in a process of revitalization. Over a period of time from 1870, the barbarian origin of Europe changed from having been a source of guilt and shame to being something honorable.

The right turn against India

A racial anthropology of India begins in 1840s. It was discovered that not all Indian languages were Sanskrit.  South Indians had Dravidian language roots. From this, John Stevenson developed the racial theory of Indian civilization. According to him Indian races were divided into Aryans and Dravidians. It was thought the caste society was developed as a protective mechanism against racial mixing. In other words, violence was justified as a means of maintaining racial purity. This theoretical framework served to legitimatize British colonialization. The relations of the British as a new invader into India was  only the latest version of a hierarchical order that had existed thousands of years before. These vital colonizers had no use for romanticizing India.

Arthur de Gobineau and Germany as the proposed new home of Indo-Europeans

Scholars like Gobineau, Chamberlain and Paul Broca described Indo-Europeans as blond, blue-eyed and tall with straight noses, a straight profile and long narrow skulls. In their hands, Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke IE languages but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteristics.

According to Gobineau, what happened in India was that white Aryans became brown and their culture and religion had degenerated into Hinduism. This racist historiography was also backed up by philological interpretations of India’s oldest source, the text the Rigveda as an interpretation of the description of the Aryan Dravidian conflict. Gobineau’s moral of history claimed that when whites racially mix their superior civilization degenerates Indo-Europeans were  looking  less and less like Indians and Iranians and more and more like Germans. Led by Renan, the culture that was Indo-European was no longer to be discovered in West Asia but ultimately in Germany. Wagner was friends with Gobineau and tried to make de Gobineau’s theories less pessimistic and more antisemitic. Wagner’s son-in-law was Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927) whose book in 1899 was the foundation text for the development of Nazi ideology.

Please see my table which compares the framework for the changing meaning of Indo-Europeans.

Changing Meaning of Indo-European –19th-20th Centuries

Second-Half of 19th centuryTime periodEarly 20th century
Rising bourgeoisieSituation of the bourgeoisieDeclining Attempted imperialism
Liberal values and humanistic ideals of sciencePolitical viewsNeo-traditionalist ideas
No Anti-Semitic and sometimes anti-Christian but not connected to a racial ideologyIs there a racial ideology?Yes. Connected to racial ideology John Stephenson on racial anthropology in India: Aryans vs Dravidians
 Muller, JonesTheoreticiansRenan, Stephenson (India)
They were heroic, idealistic free thinking and rational humanists who fought against despotic power and antiquated customsThe stories told of Indo-EuropeansStories of how Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered dark primitive original population (Stephenson)
Civilized India, IranWhere Indo-Europeans came fromBarbarian Germanic, Nordic
Comparative linguisticsWhat was used to measure differences?Physical criteria – long, narrow skull, blond hair blue eyes Gobineau
Extraordinary language and cultureWhy were Indo-Europeans successful?(Violence) No racial mixing

(Gobineau)

Fought against backward superstitionWhat did the Indo-Europeans do?They were a regeneration and revitalizing growth movement
Originally monotheists Animism and polytheism is degenerateReligious originOriginally animists and polytheists Monotheists degenerative
Shameful for barbarians having destroyed ancient RomeAttitude towards the barbariansNecessary for clearing out the rot of modern life
Humble monotheists Proud pagans who don’t bend their knees

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.




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The Arsenal of Genocide: the U.S. Weapons That Are Destroying Gaza

Protesters block the entrance to the BAE factory in Kent, UK. (Photo credit: Reuters)

On May 8, 2024, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, President Biden announced that he had “paused” a delivery of 1,700 500-pound and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, and threatened to withhold more shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of Rafah.

The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and, of course, Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A Deluge of American Bombs

During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns. Israel also used its Apaches to kill and incinerate a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7, 2023—a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a false pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law and of the Genocide Convention.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to Members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily-armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Gaza Encampments Take On the Merchants of Death

The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.

The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of IraqRead other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
Laughing, chatting, singing, GPT-4o is AI close to human, but watch out: it’s really not human


It is responsive enough to obscure the fact that it is not a sentient being. It comes with biases; it is a corporate product. Remember that

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 14 May 2024 

Artificial intelligence is changing things at dizzying speed. About 18 months ago, the tech company OpenAI unleashed its AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Within a couple of months, 100 million users were regularly using the tool, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history. While tech bubbles are always easy to slip into, many people argue the world can be divided into a pre- and post-ChatGPT world.

That interest wasn’t a blip. This week, the web traffic analysts Similarweb announced ChatGPT’s website hit new record highs of interest, with 83.5m visits on a single day in May. The premise and title of my book released last week, How AI Ate the World, appears to be true. AI is now basically inescapable.

Yet touring the country to talk about it, I still meet holdouts; people who don’t want to be part of the AI revolution, or haven’t yet seen the need to interact with a text-based chatbot. An announcement on Monday by OpenAI of a new model, GPT-4o, may change that.

For the technically minded, GPT-4o is a significant change. But for the general public, the important difference is how easy it is to interact with. Prior to GPT-4o, the primary way of interacting with ChatGPT was to type text-based questions and wait for text-based responses. A voice interface was available, but was clunky and slow. I have tried, in recent months, to get ChatGPT to help teach me German – to better interact with my partner’s Austrian family – but the agonising delays between me asking questions, and ChatGPT formulating a response and then synthetically vocalising German words, often in incomprehensible and unaccented American English, made it next to useless.

The tech demos shown by OpenAI earlier this week change that. In one section of the launch event, ChatGPT acted as a real-time interpreter for a conversation between English and Italian. In another, it laughed in response to a “top-tier dad joke”. And in another, it switched from a rote reading of a bedtime story to a dramatic reading that even Brian Blessed would blanch at, before concluding with a song.

According to OpenAI, this is the new normal: an AI model that can “reason across audio, vision and text in real time”. It appears, at first glance, to be another significant step towards turning science fiction into science fact. The always-helpful, always-on, human-like robot butler that we’ve seen and read about for decades is getting closer, OpenAI would suggest. And the impressive smoothness of the interaction might shunt a few naysaying holdouts towards being AI adopters. Making it free, as OpenAI has done, will also help.

However, it’s worth remembering AI’s original sin, dating back to 1956: its naming. “Artificial intelligence” is certainly artificial, but it’s not yet intelligent – and arguably never will be. The more that ChatGPT and other tools like it mimic human interaction, learning to act as witty, wisecracking raconteurs that can croon and swoon, the more likely we are to forget the “artificial” bit of the term.

The smooth interactivity that OpenAI has laboured hard to enable does well to paper over the cracks of the underlying technology. When ChatGPT first elbowed its way noisily into our lives in November 2022, those who had been following the technology for decades pointed out that AI in its current form was little more than snazzy pattern-matching technology – but they were drowned out by the excited masses. The next step towards human-like interaction is only going to amplify the din.

The media industry is dying – but I can still get paid to train AI to replace me


That’s great news for OpenAI, a company already valued at more than $80bn, and with investment from the likes of Microsoft. Its CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted last week that GPT-4o “feels like magic to me”. It’s also good news for others in the AI space, who are capitalising on the ubiquity of the technology and layering it into every aspect of our lives. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint now come with generative AI tools folded into them. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is putting its AI chatbot assistant into its apps in many countries, much to some users’ chagrin.

But it’s less good for ordinary users. Less friction between asking an AI system to do something and it actually completing the task is good for ease of use, but it also helps us forget that we’re not interacting with sentient beings. We need to remember that, because AI is not infallible; it comes with biases and environmental issues, and reflects the interests of its makers. These pressing issues are explored in my book, and the experts I spoke to tell me they represent significant concerns for the future.

So try ChatGPT by all means, and play about with its voice and video interactions. But bear in mind its limitations, and that this thing isn’t intelligent, but it certainly is artificial, no matter how much it pretends not to be.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of How AI Ate the World, which was published earlier this month