After the storm, bald eagles ‘Nick’ and ‘Nora’ left desperately searching for their eaglets

Ed Lavandera, CNN
Sun, June 2, 2024 

The squawking cries from a pair of bald eagles pierce the treetops of an urban jungle on the edge of a popular lake in Dallas.

The beloved eagles are perched 75 feet high over their nest, damaged by a violent storm system that ripped through North Texas on Tuesday. Inside the nest were the bald eagle’s two 9-week-old eaglets, thrown from their sanctuary by hurricane-strength winds.

The mother and father have spent the days since the storm circling and searching for their offspring on the ground below. The scene has been heartbreaking to watch for Chris Giblin, an amateur photographer who has spent three years documenting the eagles.

“It hurts,” said Giblin. “It hurts to see them hurting. Nothing is promised when these storms come through.”

This bald eagle family has developed a legion of followers and admirers since they made this spot around White Rock Lake in East Dallas their home nearly three years ago. They came to be known as “Nick” and “Nora” after the husband-and-wife detective characters in the 1930s film “The Thin Man.”

Their every move has been documented in neighborhood Facebook groups and by a devoted and highly protective contingent of photographers. The eagles have so intensely captured the imagination of the neighbors below them that residents speak of these raptors in mystical terms and their presence as “divine intervention.”

The eagle’s nest sits in a sycamore tree at the end of Krista de la Harpe’s street. She describes the relationship between the birds and the neighborhood as a “three-year love story.”

As the storm hit the city, she could only think about the eagles and their babies surviving the fierce winds and falling trees.

“I was in my closet all through the storm, just praying for them,” de la Harpe said as she watched the eagles sitting in the trees this week. “It’s so heartbreaking.”
‘I found one’

After the storm passed, neighbors raced out to check on the nest and the eagles. Water was rushing over the banks of the creek below the nest. The fierce winds toppled a mix of large oak, cedar and American elm trees, and the eaglets were nowhere to be seen.

Brett Johnson, an urban biologist and conservation manager for the City of Dallas, raced to the park after the storm. He saw half the nest was gone and that the two eaglets were missing.

Later that morning, Bryna Thomson searched the creek area with neighbors when she heard her friend shouting, “I found one. I found one. I found one.”

The video she captured shows an eaglet shivering and soaked in rain but seemingly not severely injured, even eating a fish it had caught in the floodwaters.

“They were healthy babies,” Thomson said.

The neighbor called in to report what they had found. Johnson says he collaborated with state game wardens and US Fish and Wildlife Services to get permission to handle the federally protected bird and move it to a rehabilitation facility that specializes in treating bald eagles. The facility did not respond to CNN’s request for an interview.

Sunday morning, specialists with the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center brought the surviving eaglet back to its nesting area around White Rock Lake in hopes it will quickly reunite with its parents. Nick and Nora were seen flying around the area and specialists say they hope the parents will hear the eaglet squawking and return to care for it.

The second eaglet has not been found and officials say it’s likely the bird did not survive. Downed trees have made it impossible for searchers to safely access the spots where the eaglet might have fallen. The area is also home to bald eagle predators like coyotes and bobcats.

The raptor specialists brought the recovered eaglet to the wooded area in a large crate. The bird’s face was covered in a hood to keep it from seeing and experiencing this confusing environment.

Officials with the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center carry a crate holding the surviving eaglet on June 2, 2024. - Courtesy Chris Gilbin

Hailey Lebaron, a rehab specialist with the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center, secured the eagle and carried it up the stairs and placed it in a makeshift nest that was made just for this moment.

Lebaron removed the hood from the eagle’s head and the bird immediately extended its wings and rustled around the nest. It reacted just the way the specialists wanted it to when the bird realized there was a strange creature – a human – so close to it.

“Luckily, it was not happy,” Lebaron said. “The feathers raised up, which is their, ‘Look at how scary I am.’ It’s a great sign for us.”

After the eaglet was recovered Tuesday, rehab specialists gave the raptor a full exam which included x-rays and blood work. The bird was deemed healthy enough to return to the wild after it was monitored for several days.

By Friday afternoon, the rehab team knew it was racing against the clock. After a week of separation, it’s more likely the parent eagles would abandon their offspring.

“We had to jump into action,” Lebaron said. “It’s really, really time sensitive if we wanted it to work. Otherwise, the baby would be rejected by the parents.”

Rehab facility volunteers will now work in two-hour shifts until Monday evening to monitor the eaglet from about 100 yards away. If the parents do not return to the eaglet by then, officials say the bird will likely be brought back to the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center.

If that happens, facility officials say they will then protect the bird until it can properly fly and learn how to hunt and take care of itself. At that point, the bald eagle would be released into the wild but in a different location, away from its territorial parents.

Earlier in the week, Scott Meril, a retired medical doctor, came to the nesting area to capture photographs of the mourning eagle parents. The images show one of the eagles squawking into the sky with its head tilted back in a pose that seemed to capture the bird’s desperation.

Meril said he was struck by the eagle’s majestic and powerful stare as they scanned the urban landscape looking for the eaglets.

“To see them in Texas, it’s wild,” Meril said.

The White Rock Lake bald eagles 'Nick' and 'Nora' care for their two young eaglets in East Dallas. The eaglets were born around March 20 and were just a week or two away from being able to fly on their own. - Courtesy Chris Giblin

‘You can’t fight this stupid Texas weather’

This isn’t the first time tragedy has struck Nick and Nora’s quest to bring a successful clutch of eggs into the world.

In February 2022, the mating bald eagles built a nest in the same area near White Rock Lake. Residents came from across the city to catch a glimpse of the new stars of the neighborhood, waiting for the babies to hatch. But a severe storm with fierce winds ripped the nest and the tree branches apart. The eggs fell to the ground.

“They have been through a lot,” said Johnson.

In 2023, Nick and Nora built a second nest around White Rock Lake but abandoned it and never laid eggs. Johnson says the nest was built in an area that was probably too close to the crowds of people who use the lake for recreation.

This year, residents thought the eagles had finally succeeded. The eaglets were just a week or two away from being able to fly on their own. At that point, Nick and Nora would teach them how to hunt for their own food.

The day before the storm Giblin captured stunning images of the small birds “branching” out of their nests – the first attempts to jump from their nests onto nearby tree branches.

The cycle of natural life seemed so close to becoming complete, but again nature intervened in a tragic way.

“They just can’t catch a break,” Thomson said. “They were good parents, and it’s just that you can’t fight this stupid Texas weather.”

Yellowstone comes to Dallas

While bald eagles can often be found near large cities, it remains rare for eagles to nest and mate in busy urban areas. This is why Giblin and a group of photographers have spent countless hours documenting the couple.

Giblin, who works for a merchandising company, estimates he has snapped more than 20,000 pictures of the eagles since they started appearing regularly here three years ago. He’s so dedicated, he once spent 7 hours waiting to capture a single shot of the eagles flying from their nest. He equates the bald eagles’ presence in Dallas to having Yellowstone National Park in the city

“In this metropolis, they chose to nest right here. It’s absolutely crazy,” Giblin said.
“That’s why I’m down here every weekend. I don’t take it for granted.”

Thomson, a middle school science teacher, says the bald eagles have brought her neighborhood closer together. She often sets up a spotting scope connected to an iPad, which she calls “Eagle TV,” so children can watch the eagles up-close.

“They’re the coolest birds ever,” Thomson said. “I’m not really a bird person, but apparently I am. Because I sure do like the bald eagle.”

These Dallas eagle lovers worry years of disappointment might convince Nick and Nora to abandon their lives around their neighborhood lake and look to build a nest elsewhere. The majestic birds don’t realize they’re the main characters in a love story their neighbors don’t want to end.

Egyptian casualty along Gaza border puts strain on the landmark Israel-Egypt peace accord

Nabih Bulos
Wed, May 29, 2024 

Egyptian trucks carrying humanitarian aid bound for the Gaza Strip queue outside the Rafah border crossing on the Egyptian side March 23. (Khaled Desouki / AFP/Getty Images)


It was another close call. When a clash between Egyptian and Israeli soldiers near Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip left one Egyptian dead, it raised the specter — yet again — of a spark that would set off a conflagration across the Middle East.

Both countries moved swiftly to contain the fallout, a sign of the durability of their decades-long diplomatic ties. Egypt’s military spokesman talked about a “shooting incident” but did not mention Israel, while the Israeli military said “dialog was taking place with the Egyptian side.”

But Monday’s skirmish was the latest in a string of events underscoring the region’s volatility since Oct. 7, and the risk that the Israel-Hamas war will rattle long-standing peace agreements — nurtured by Washington for decades — between Israel and its neighbors.

Relations between Egypt and Israel have been strained for months, with Cairo intent on stopping any Israeli effort to drive Gaza residents onto Egyptian territory.

Tensions only worsened after Israel pushed into the south Gazan city of Rafah this month — where an estimated 1.4 million of Gaza’s residents had taken refuge — and seized the Palestinian side of the crossing and the Philadelphi Corridor, an almost 9-mile-long and 300-foot-wide path along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Read more: Israeli army says it used small munitions in Rafah airstrike, and fire was caused by secondary blast

In response, Egypt shut down humanitarian deliveries via Rafah, insisting administration of the crossing return to Palestinian control and that Israel was violating decades-old security arrangements that limited the number of soldiers and equipment on either side of the border.

But Monday’s shooting, the first deadly clash between Egyptian and Israeli forces since the war began, illustrates the risks of spillover in the fighting as Israel presses its offensive into Rafah and operates in close proximity to Egyptian units, not to mention Egyptian civilians living close to the border.

“This will happen again,” said Samir Ragheb, an Egyptian analyst and chairman of the Cairo-based Arab Foundation for Development and Strategic Studies.

“Committees [are] investigating the incident and [there’s] dialogue between the two sides,” he said. “All that’s fine. But there’s no guarantee for what comes later. ... This is dealing with the symptom not the disease: which is that Israel is in Rafah and on the border where it shouldn’t be.”

Israel says the crossing and the corridor must remain in its hands if it is to choke off arms supplies to Hamas through the Sinai, whether through the crossing or the cross-border tunnel network Hamas operates.

Read more: Is Zionism patriotism or racism? Big disagreements over a word in use for 125 years

On Tuesday, in response to questions about tanks appearing on the streets of Rafah for the first time in the war, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said troops had “detected tunnels running along the Philadelphi Corridor ... going to Sinai.”

Egyptian officials have repeatedly dismissed Israeli accusations of allowing smuggling as “groundless,” adding that it has destroyed thousands of tunnels, created a buffer zone and built a barrier to prevent weapons transfers.

Details of exactly how the clash occurred remain murky. Initial Israeli reports said the Egyptian side was the first to open fire, while Egyptian state-affiliated Al Qahera News said preliminary investigations indicated a skirmish had started between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, with shots fired in multiple directions. That led an Egyptian security team member to take protective measures and “deal with the source of fire,” the news agency said.

“This is what Egypt has warned against for months,” an unnamed Egyptian security official told Al Qahera on Monday. “The Israeli attack on the Philadelphi Corridor creates field and psychological conditions that are difficult to control and liable to escalate.”

The killing of the soldier has ratcheted up anti-Israel sentiment in a country that has never managed more than a so-called cold peace with its neighbor, despite being the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

“There are 115 million Egyptians who are not happy with what’s happening in Gaza,” Ragheb said. “They’re watching it every day on television screens. The Egyptian soldier stationed at the border is seeing massacres in real time before his very eyes. So this will be a provocation.”

Some of that anger could be seen on Tuesday, when dozens gathered in the central Egyptian village of Agameyin for the burial of the slain soldier, 22-year-old Abdullah Ramadan. Thousands left comments on his Facebook page, calling him a martyr and a hero, and excoriating the government for tamping down the matter.

Though the Egyptian government says it aims to preserve the peace treaty, popular rage against Israel may force it into taking measures it would rather not take.

Read more: 'Are you a Zionist?' Checkpoints at UCLA encampment provoked fear, debate among Jews

“The problem for Egypt is that public opinion is already at a boiling point because of what’s happening in Gaza,” said Mouin Rabbani, an analyst and nonresident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. “If you now add dead Egyptians to the mix, that makes it all the more combustible. Should government officials get to a point where they have to do something to defuse discontent, then they may feel Israel’s conduct has created such public pressure on them that they have no choice but to do something more significant.”

A wider Israeli assault on Rafah could very well be that tipping point. On Sunday, hours before the shooting, Israeli warplanes attacked what they said were Hamas high-level targets in Rafah, killing 45 people in the process, Palestinian authorities say, and spurring a tsunami of international anger.

The wider destruction, meanwhile, has reached unprecedented proportions, aid groups say, with more than 36,000 people killed in Gaza, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, including many women and children. In the three weeks since Israel began what it called a limited operation in Rafah, around 1 million people have had to flee, many of them displaced before by the violence, according to the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

“This happened with nowhere safe to go and amidst bombardments, lack of food and water, piles of waste and unsuitable living conditions,” UNRWA said on X on Monday. “Day after day, providing assistance and protection becomes nearly impossible.”

The war was sparked after Hamas operatives killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, and saw 250 others taken hostage. About 100 hostages remain in Gaza, along with the bodies of more than 30 others.

Few believe the Israel-Egypt peace treaty — a mainstay of Egypt’s foreign policy that brings in roughly $1.3 billion every year in military assistance from the U.S. — is at serious risk. But there’s little doubt the situation is affecting coordination between the two nations, said Rami Dajani, project director of Israel and Palestine with the International Crisis Group.

“The cumulative effects of these events impact how these agreements are functioning and the practical, real-life channels of communication on intelligence and security,” he said.

Read more: Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognize a Palestinian state as EU rift with Israel widens

It also raises questions about how both sides will manage the border area in the future.

“For both sides, it’s not a question of walking away from the treaty,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Arab-Israeli negotiator.

But with Israel seeking greater control over Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor while Egypt insists it won’t reopen the crossing without Palestinians in control, matters are likely to be fraught for a long time.

Said Miller: “All of this poses an enormous amount of problems for the proverbial day after.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Here's why you're seeing the 'All eyes on Rafah' image shared across social media

Over the weekend, Israel launched airstrikes into Rafah, killing over 60 people.

Katie Mather
·Internet Culture Reporter
Wed, May 29, 2024

A Palestinian flag beside a sign saying "All eyes on Rafah!" in Warsaw, Poland.
(Neil Milton/SOPA Images/LightRocket)

Following the recent Israeli attacks on Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, millions of social media users have shared an image with the message “All eyes on Rafah” across various platforms.

The image, primarily shared on Instagram Stories, highlights how crucial social media is to how people consume and understand news stories — despite the platform’s attempts to limit the amount of political content its users are exposed to.
🗣️ Where did the phrase come from?

In February, Richard “Rik” Peeperkorn, director of the World Health Organization’s Office of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said, “All eyes are on Rafah” after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Rafah’s 1.4 million residents to evacuate ahead of planned attacks.
🌎 What to know about Rafah

As Israel started launching attacks, starting from the northernmost part of the Gaza Strip, citizens began moving south to Rafah, which is by the Egyptian border. By February, more than half of Gaza’s population had been displaced to Rafah.

On May 24, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop any attacks on Rafah. Two days later, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 45 people in western Rafah, which had previously been declared a safe zone. Then, on Tuesday, another attack killed an additional 21 people in Rafah.

Netanyahu called the Rafah airstrikes a “tragic mistake.”

Read more about the conditions in Rafah from the Associated Press.

📱 Why is the phrase picking up steam on social media right now?

Peeperkorn’s phrase started going viral on social media following the recent attacks. The viral image accompanying the phrase appears to be generated by artificial intelligence, and shows an encampment with tents that spell out “All eyes on Rafah.”

Support groups like Save the Children, Americans for Justice in Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have helped circulate the image and message on social media. NBC reported that the image has been shared over 37 million times on Instagram in less than 24 hours — predominantly on people’s Instagram Stories, which expire after 24 hours.

👀 Social media users are noting which celebrities have shared it

Celebrities like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Bridgerton actress Nicola Coughlan, Mark Ruffalo, Jenna Ortega, Rosie O’Donnell, Dua Lipa, Priyanka Chopra and Aaron Paul have all shared the image.

Their participation comes in the aftermath of the #Blockout movement, a campaign encouraging social media users to block celebrities and creators who have not spoken out against the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

🇺🇸 Are political figures getting involved?

President Biden told CNN in early May that the U.S. will withhold military assistance if Israel launches an attack on Rafah.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah,” Biden said.

However, on Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing that while the U.S. is not going to turn a “blind eye” to Israel’s attack on Rafah, the Biden administration did not believe the recent attacks violated Biden’s warning.

Nikki Haley is one of the political figures who criticized the Biden administration for temporarily withholding weapons from Israel in an attempt to prevent any attacks on Rafah. The former South Carolina governor visited Israel over Memorial Day and was photographed writing “Finish Them!” on an artillery shell.

❓ Is there a countercampaign that’s going viral?

There is another image circulating in response to “All eyes on Rafah” that says, “If your eyes are on Rafah, help us find our hostages.” An estimated 121 hostages remain missing after being kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

 

Fascism: What’s in a Word?

by Greg Godels / June 1st, 2024

The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist.

Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.

Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….

Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval– a kind of expletive.

A problem arises when the claimant– the person using the word– has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world.

The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.

In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.

Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.

Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.

On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.

Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism– one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.

As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism.

Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” — a form of illiberal liberalism– that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.

In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is eminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article “This Isn’t Fascism,” posted on Consortium News, that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”

Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.

But more consequentially, the charge of fascism — invoked irresponsibly — has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party — bereft of an appealing program — charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.

Again, invoking Lawrence:

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history — dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.

Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.

Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!

The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people– reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues.

Lawrence makes a similar point:

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly… I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?

Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.

Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).

Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains:

Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).

Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.

Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:

Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).

Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.

These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.

Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately.

There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right — the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc. — do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.

For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability.

Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.

In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe.

We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people.Facebook

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Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

Michael Bakunin and the First International


ANARCHISM BY GEORGE WOODCOCK
Socialism from Below: A History of Anarchism | libcom.org


THE GROWTH OF libertarian thought in the nineteenth century cannot be attributed to any one man, but although the influences of Godwin, Proudhon and many lesser figures were important, it was with the rise of Michael Bakunin that revolutionary anarchism emerged as a social doctrine and that an anarchist movement grew in Europe and became the vanguard of revolutionary endeavour.

Bakunin was a Russian nobleman by birth, but his whole life and work were characterised by great intolerance of injustice and coercion and a passionate devotion to personal freedom and integrity. Gigantic and commanding in stature, before his years of imprisonment and suffering Apollonian in physical handsomeness, by nature simpleminded, eloquent, courageous and generous to a fault, Bakunin had all the attributes that might have made him a successful man of the world, a commanding statesman or the hero of a national revolution, like his friend Garibaldi. Yet he sacrificed all prospect of a prosperous or distinguished future for the suffering and poverty, the misrepresentation, obloquy and apparent failure that fall to the lot of the social revolutionary. He had neither the scientific, methodical mind of a Kropotkin nor the talented cunning of a Marx, but for the devotion and personal heroism by which he built the libertarian movement in Europe, he remains probably the greatest and certainly the most dynamic revolutionary figure of modern times.

Bakunin’s father was an ex-diplomat who held an estate of five hundred serfs in the Russian province of Tver, and who had planned for Michael, his eldest son, a respectable and patriotic career in the Tsar’s army. It was in the family that Michael first attacked authority, and his early years were filled with stormy incidents in which he incited the Bakunin children to rebel against the parental will.

Michael himself was sent to the St. Petersburg Artillery School, where he showed little zeal for military studies. Although he gained a commission in the Artillery, he left the service of the Tsar at the first opportunity. He decided to devote himself to academic studies, and became a keen student of philosophy and a disciple of Hegel, then the fashionable sage of intellectual Europe. Soon he became restive in the frustrated atmosphere of Russian society, and in 1840, when he was 26, he left Russia to study the Hegelian philosophy in its own German environment.

He departed a loyal subject of the Tsar, but in Berlin he soon fell, like Marx, under the subversive influence of the young Hegelians and began to move towards a revolutionary outlook. He studied the early socialist and communist movements that flourished in France, and first manifested himself as a revolutionary in 1842, when he published in Arnold Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbücher an article entitled ‘Reaction in Germany’. This article contained the famous phrase ‘The desire to destroy is also a creative desire’, which has been used by many of the more unscrupulous opponents of anarchism to misrepresent Bakunin as a monster who desired violence above all and for its own sake. In fact, Bakunin meant merely that the old form of society must be ended before the new can be built. That he should have been devoted to violence for sadistic motives is contrary to all we know of his character. Indeed, he said on more than one occasion that violent revolution was at best an unpleasant and unsatisfactory necessity. “Bloody revolutions are often necessary, thanks to human stupidity; yet they are always an evil, a monstrous evil and a great disaster, not only with regard to the victims, but also for the sake of the purity and the perfection of the purpose in whose name they take place.”
In 1843 Bakunin was in touch with Weitling, whose authoritarian communism he eventually rejected, and when Weitling was arrested in Switzerland; Bakunin’s name was found among his papers. The Swiss police informed the Russian authorities, and in due course Bakunin was summoned home. He refused to obey, and in his absence was condemned to deprivation of his title of nobility and his inheritance, and also hard labour in Siberia. For his defiance the Russian government became thenceforward his most implacable enemy.
In the same year he met Proudhon and Marx in Paris. He was impressed by the two men, and in the following years his ideas, as they grew slowly through much effort and experience, were influenced by both of them. From Marx he learned that economics were more important that politics and religion, a fact which Marx revealed in his scientific analysis of society and forgot when he came to formulate revolutionary methods. From Proudhon he acquired the main bases of his future anarchism, the opposition to government and the doctrine of social decentralisation.

The following years saw Bakunin attempting to intervene wherever revolution appeared in Europe. At first he supported the Poles, until he was discredited in their eyes by a rumour spread by the Russian secret service that he was one of their own spies - a slander which followed him for many years and was afterwards revived by the Marxists to serve their own particular ends.

Then in February 1848, he hastened to Paris for the revolution against the regime of the Citizen King. He assisted enthusiastically at the barricades, but when he began to preach the anarchist ideas that were already beginning to appear in his mind, the Jacobins found him an embarrassment, and one of them remarked of him, “What a man! What a man! The first day of the revolution, he is a perfect treasure, but on the next day he should be shot!” The new ‘revolutionary’ authorities did their best to get rid of him, and when Bakunin realised the reactionary nature of the state that arose from the Parisian revolution, he decided to return to his efforts to foment the Polish insurrection.

He went to Breslau, near the Polish border, but again he found that the Poles distrusted him, and he went on to Prague. Here he was involved in another rising and fought on the barricades with the Czech students, but the insurrection was soon defeated, and he fled back to Germany, where he found a temporary refuge in Anhalt, a tiny liberal principality islanded in Prussian territory. He still intrigued with his friends in Bohemia, and in 1849 went illegally to Dresden in order to maintain closer contact with them. Here he was again overtaken by revolution and, although he had no sympathy with the German liberals, who were rising to maintain their constitutional democracy, he offered his services with a remarkably disinterested willingness and, when most of the leaders fled, remained at the barricades and assumed control of the revolution. He conducted himself so well that even Marx and Engels praised his ability and coolheadedness and, according to Bernard Shaw, Wagner, who fought beside him, was so impressed by his heroism that he used him as the model for Siegfried.

The Dresden revolution was defeated and suppressed with great brutality by Prussian troops sent to assist the Saxon king, and the surviving rebels - the majority had either been shot or thrown into the Elbe - fled to Chemnitz, where most of them, including Bakunin, were arrested during the night. Wagner was one of the few who escaped.

For Bakunin capture meant the beginning of an imprisonment which was to last eight years, in the most terrible prisons of four countries, and to be followed by years of exile in the spiritual desert of Siberia. First he was kept in prison for more than a year by the Saxon authorities, then sentenced to death, taken out to execution, and reprieved at the zero minute. Then he was handed on to the Austrian government, who desired their revenge for his part in the Prague rising. Nearly another year passed in Austrian prisons, first the citadel of Prague and then, when a rescue was feared, in the castle of Olmütz, where he was chained to a wall for three months. Again he was tried and condemned to death, and again reprieved and extradited to the next country that desired to torture this formidable rebel.

This last country was his own land, from which, as he had already been sentenced, he could not even hope for the mockery of a trial. What he expected was an execution, this time stayed by no reprieve. Instead, he was condemned to the exquisite psychological torture of solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul fortress and the even more rigorous prison of Schüsselburg, where the enemies of the Tsar lived and died in solitary confinement for many generations of revolutionaries. He remained in these prisons some six years, during which he suffered terribly from his privations and became toothless and prematurely aged from the ravages of scurvy. He began to lose all hope of ever leaving his prison to rejoin the struggle for human liberty, which, even in his greatest despair remained always in his thoughts. In 1857, however he was released from his cell and sent to Siberia for a life’s exile. He stayed there for four years, and then staged a sensational escape and returned, via Japan and the United States, to London, where his friends Ogarev and Herzen were living. Bakunin returned to freedom with a spirit, unlike his body, preserved in all its integrity and enthusiasm throughout the years of his long suffering.

Life on Paddington Green and the editing of a liberal paper with Herzen soon tired him, and he wished to resume the revolutionary struggle, which had been torn from his hands in Dresden twelve years before. When the Polish insurrection started in 1863 he endeavoured to assist the insurgents, but again the Polish leaders would have nothing to do with him, this time because his dream of a great federation of liberated Slavs ran counter to their own imperialist aspirations and his idea of a peasant uprising was diametrically opposed to their plan of an aristocratic class government. Bakunin would not accept their rebuffs, and went to Stockholm to join an expedition of Poles who planned to land in Lithuania. The project never matured, and Bakunin’s experiences with the Poles finally taught him that the social revolution could not be achieved through nationalist movements. Thenceforward he moved rapidly towards the idea of an international revolutionary movement based on the working class.

During the ensuing years he lived mostly in Italy, where he gained a number of followers, and founded his first organisation dedicated to the achievement of an anarchist revolution, the secret International Brotherhood. This was followed by his joining the League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation of liberals with a vaguely pacifistic policy which held its first congress at Geneva in that year and which Bakunin hoped to influence with his revolutionary ideas.

Bakunin’s attendance at the conference was the first public appearance of this now famous conspirator and revolutionary, and the aura attached to his name, as the hero of so many revolutions, of so many prisons, and of the sensational escape from Siberia, combined with his gigantic presence to rouse the greatest enthusiasm. One of those present wrote “As he walked up the steps to the platform... a great cry of ‘Bakunin’ went up. Garibaldi, who was in the chair, arose and went forward to embrace him. Many opponents of Bakunin’s were present, but it seemed as if the applause would never end.”

At first Bakunin had high hopes of the League for Peace and Freedom. He was elected to the Central Committee of the League, and gained a small following therein including the brothers Elisée and Elie Reclus, who were later to become famous in the anarchist movement. But very soon he realised the essentially bourgeois nature of the League as a whole and, although he attempted some kind of fusion between it and the International, which he joined in 1868, he found that the membership of the League could not keep pace with his own development. He had now come into the open as a declared enemy of capitalism, and demanded the expropriation of the land and means of production, which would be worked collectively by workers’ associations. At the Second Congress of the League he put forward proposals for the expropriation of wealth and the establishment of a classless society. When, as he had expected, these proposals were rejected, he left the League with his few followers, and turned to the International as the instrument of his revolutionary activity.

While he was still a member of the League for Peace and Freedom, Bakunin had founded his International Alliance of Social Democracy, whose nucleus was the membership of the old secret International Brotherhood and which grew to a strength of some thousands among the revolutionaries of Italy and Spain, and the Russian exiles in Switzerland. Bakunin sought for the admission of the Alliance as a whole into the International, but the General Council, led by Marx who was already regarding Bakunin as a menace to his own authority, rejected this proposal, and Bakunin had to dissolve the Alliance and allow its various sections to enter the International as separate branches.

Through the entry of Bakunin the International grew numerically, for he gained many members in Italy and Spain, where its influence had previously been negligible. But to Marx his value as an ally was more than counter-balanced by his danger as a potential rival. For Bakunin entered the International not as a member of the rank and file, but as the representative and mouthpiece of a large section of libertarian opinion. Not only did he retain his influence over the Italian and Spanish members, but he also gained the adherence of the internationalists in French Switzerland and also of many workers in France, notably in the Jura, Lyons and the Midi, and in Belgium.

The struggle between Bakunin and Marx did not, however, lie entirely or even primarily in the matter of personal influence or in the incompatibility of their widely differing personalities. There was also a deep and fundamental cleavage between their doctrines on the vital question of authority and the state. Bakunin expressed this difference clearly when he said:




“I am not a Communist because Communism unites all the forces of society in the state and becomes absorbed in it, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of all property in the hands of the state, while I seek the abolition of the state - the complete elimination of the principle of authority and governmental guardianship, which, under the pretence of making men moral and civilising them, has up to now always enslaved, oppressed, exploited and ruined them.”

The prophetic truth of these words is borne out by a consideration of the achievements of Marxist Communism as they exist in Russia today.

The first open battle between the Marxists and the Bakuninists took place at the Basle conference of 1869, which Bakunin attended in person, Marx only by proxy. Bakunin submitted a proposal for the abolition of the right of inheritance. This was opposed by the Marxists and defeated by a narrow margin. A counter proposal by the Marxists for a programme of increased death duties was also rejected by a narrow majority. The situation was somewhat ridiculous, but the fact that a resolution of the Marx-controlled General Council had been defeated for the first time, showed that the influence of Marx was at last challenged. Marx’s chief lieutenant, the German tailor Eccarius, went away exclaiming “Marx will be very displeased!”
During the period immediately following the Basle conference both groups manoeuvred for influence and position. Marx and his followers, particularly the malicious Utin, who later made his peace with the Tsar, spread as many calumnies as they could invent regarding Bakunin. But these failed to influence any of the supporters of Bakunin and in the eyes of neutrals tended to discredit the Marxists themselves rather than their opponents.

The struggle was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war and the revolution in France that deposed Napoleon III. Bakunin, scenting revolution from his retreat in Locarno, set off to Lyons where his followers were numerous, and late in September the anarchists of this city set up a Committee for the Salvation of France, which immediately declared the abolition of the State. There was a bloodless rising in Lyons, and for a short time the city was in the hands of the insurrectionaries. Preparations, however, had been inadequate, and certain members of the Committee turned out to be police, or Bonapartist agents. A body of the National Guard soon put an end to this very minor revolution, and Bakunin was captured and imprisoned. He was, however, rescued by his followers, and, after remaining in hiding for a time, escaped from France, without his beard and disguised in blue spectacles.

The struggle within the International continued in minor skirmishes until 1872, when Marx, alarmed at the progressive increase of Bakunin’s influence and embarrassed by discontent among his English followers, decided to precipitate a showdown. In September of that year he called a conference of the International at The Hague. The Bakuninists protested that Switzerland would be a better locale, as most of their delegates had to travel from Mediterranean countries and some, including Bakunin, would be unable to reach The Hague in time as they could not enter the intervening countries. The General Council, however, refused to alter its proclamation, and the Italian anarchists then took the unfortunate step of boycotting the conference and thus reducing considerably the anarchist forces.

At the conference itself, the General Council admitted the falseness of its own position by refusing to allow voting on the basis of numerical strength. Marx had made his plans carefully, and the meeting was packed with his supporters, returned by fictitious branches of the International and by sections specially formed for the purpose of returning delegates.

Marx first surprised the Conference by demanding a transference of the General Council from London to New York, and sweeping extensions of its powers. This he realised would weaken the International, but he felt a move of such a nature would release it from the European Scylla and Charybdis of anarchism on the one side and English trade unionism on the other. The motions were carried by a narrow margin, after an extremely acrimonious debate. At this point the French Blanquist delegates resigned in a body.

In the political debate that followed, the anarchist programme was defeated and the General Council’s proposal for a programme of political action was accepted. The remaining item on the agenda was the expulsion of Bakunin and his associate Guillaume on the ground that they had attempted to maintain a separate organisation within the International. The decision for expulsion was only obtained after Marx had appealed to the fundamentally bourgeois standards of the delegates by raking up Netchaieff’s blackmailing letter to Lioubavine in connection with Bakunin’s translation of Das Kapital into Russian. There was no real evidence that Bakunin had any hand in this letter, but Marx succeeded in so misrepresenting the case that the conference decided to expel Bakunin and Guillaume.

The anarchists refused to recognise the decisions at The Hague and the federations of the Latin countries seceded and held a congress at St. Imier, in the Jura, where they agreed on an anarchist programme. The anarchist section of the International continued until 1878, by which time the increasing reaction in the Latin Countries made it difficult for open mass movements to continue. The Marxist rump, split by dissensions in its new home in America, had already expired in 1874, killed by its leader’s megalomaniac desire for complete domination of the working class movement.

The years following the break-up of the International were, for Bakunin, dominated by misfortune and disillusion with the results of his efforts. His health began to break, and he was forced to live in poverty and often almost in starvation. He quarrelled with most of his friends and disciples, who could not understand his natural profligacy with money whenever it came into his hands and the way in which he would spend the money of others as if it were his own.

In 1873 the Spanish Revolution occurred, and Bakunin, in spite of his illness, desired to go there to fight what he felt must be his last struggle at the barricades. But he was penniless, and his friend Cafiero, who had been subsidising him, refused to find the money for his venture.

The following year, 1874, a rising in Bologna was planned by the Italian anarchists, and Bakunin decided to take part in it. His health had now completely broken down, he had just quarrelled with his closest friends and disciples, Guillaume, Sazhin and Cafiero, and he had little faith in the prospects of the rising. But he realised his death was near, and wished to end fighting in the streets as he had fought in Dresden a quarter of a century ago. He wrote a farewell letter to his friends in Switzerland, which ended on the note of resignation. “And now, my friends, it only remains for me to die. Adieu!”

The Bologna rising however was completely abortive and Bakunin had to return to Switzerland, this time disguised as an aged priest. It was the last of his revolutionary efforts and the remaining two years of his life were spent in abject poverty and declining strength. He despaired of the revolution taking place until the masses were impregnated with revolutionary feeling, and realised that the growing reaction in Europe made that more and more difficult. But he saw intuitively the shape of the future when he wrote to Elisée Reclus, “There remains another hope, the world war. Sooner or later these enormous military states will have to destroy and devour each other. But what an outlook!” He died on July 1st, 1876, in the hospital at Berne, and was buried quietly in that city.

Bakunin was essentially a revolutionary of the deed, a fighter at the barricades, an eloquent and inspiring orator. As a hearer said of him on one occasion, “The man was a born speaker, made for the revolution. The revolution was his natural being. His speech made a tremendous impression.”

Perhaps it was because he was so much the-man for action, for the impulsive deed, the impromptu appeal to the feelings of Men, that his best expositions of ideas are found in documents of such immediate importance as articles, speeches and memoranda to conferences, rather than in his fragmentary theoretical works.
Bakunin’s teachings differed from those of his early master, Proudhon, on two principle points. Firstly, he realised that with the development of large-scale industry, Proudhon’s idea of a society of small proprietors owning their own means of production and exchanging their products through exchange banks, was not longer practicable. He therefore envisaged what he called collective production under which the means of production would be owned and worked collectively by co-operative associations of workers.

The means of production were thus owned in common, but Bakunin did not reach the later stage of common ownership of the products of labour, advocated by Kropotkin a few years later, and in his theory the producer would be entitled to the value of the product of his individual labour.

The second point on which he differed from Proudhon was that he believed the State could not be abolished by reformist methods or by the power of example, and therefore proclaimed the necessity of revolution for “the destruction of all institutions of inequality, and the establishment of social and economic equality”. He did not, however, advocate the political revolution of Jacobins and Marxists, carried out by organised and disciplined parties. “Revolutions are never made,” he declared, “either by individuals or by secret societies. They come automatically, in a measure; the power of things, the current of events and facts, produces them. They are long preparing in the depth of the obscure consciousness of the masses - then they break out suddenly, not seldom on apparently slight occasion.” He spoke as an expert in revolution.

Giuseppe Garibaldi Was a Proud Internationalist

On this day in 1882, Giuseppe Garibaldi died after a lifetime fighting for a united Italy. He combined his patriotism with a proud internationalism — and a thirst for freedom that inspired working-class struggles throughout the twentieth century.

Giuseppe Garibaldi poses for a portrait in 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)

BYJACOPO CUSTODI

06.02.2024

JACOBIN

June 2 marks the anniversary of the Italian Republic. That day in 1946, a year after the overthrow of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, an institutional referendum was held together with the vote for the Constituent Assembly. It was also the first time that women voted in a national election, as Paola Cortellesi’s recent film C’è ancora domani reminded us. Most Italians voted for the republic, leading to King Umberto II’s exile to Portugal, then ruled by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. For the first time since national unification, Italy became a republic.

But June 2 is also another anniversary in Italian history: it is the day on which Giuseppe Garibaldi died, in 1882. He had ardently dreamt of this republic, but in vain, in his later years having to settle for Italian unification under the monarchy.

Almost 150 years later, the name “Garibaldi” is still familiar to millions. His name pops up across Italy: there is no city that does not have at least one street dedicated to him, in addition to several hundred statues throughout the country. But it’s not just in Italy: squares, streets, statues, stations, and plaques dedicated to him can be found in countless cities all over the world, from Montevideo to Taganrog, from New York to Havana. Cuba has even dedicated a commemorative coin to Garibaldi, el héroe de dos mundos.

But who was Giuseppe Garibaldi, really? Here, things get more difficult. Few today would know much beyond the bland definition of Garibaldi as a key figure in Italian unification. As US sociologist and scholar of collective memory Jeffrey K. Olick recently said, half jokingly, the best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.


So let us try to “demonumentalize” Garibaldi with some facts about his life. Trained as a sailor, Garibaldi spent many years as a young man working at sea, but he was also a language teacher in Istanbul, a spaghetti trader in Brazil, a corsair in the South Atlantic (attacking merchant ships and freeing black slaves on the ships), a math teacher in Uruguay, and a factory worker in New York. Garibaldi fought in seven different official armies: the Republic of the Rio Grande, Uruguay, the Lombard Provisional Government, the Roman Republic, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Italy, and France. He was arrested, and in some cases tortured, by the Russian police, but also by the French, the Argentine army, the Uruguayan police, the Kingdom of Sardinia (which also sentenced him to death), and then several times by the Italian police after national unification. He was also a member of parliament in five different states.

Here we will not delve into all the complexity of an immense and picturesque biography that can hardly be summarized in one article. But these facts immediately show us a crucial point: we would be mistaken if we confined Garibaldi exclusively to the role of Italian patriot.

Patriot and Internationalist

Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in fact in Latin America. He had fled there after the death sentence hanging over his head in Piedmont due to a failed insurrectionary attempt against the Savoy monarchy. But his first encounter with politics was even earlier: his intellectual “thunderbolt” came at age twenty-six, when the ship on which he worked was boarded by Saint-Simonian exiles (followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, the French libertarian socialist) who deeply fascinated Garibaldi. As he recalls in his memoirs, he learned from them that “the man who, becoming cosmopolitan, adopts humanity as his homeland and goes to offer sword and blood to every people fighting against tyranny, is more than a soldier: he is a hero.” This was the underlying ideal that drove him to join the Latin American rebellions.The best way to forget someone or something is to turn them into a monument.

Garibaldi would only return to Italy in 1848, to join the popular uprisings that were breaking out that year throughout the Italian peninsula. Andres Aguyar, a former black slave who had fought with Garibaldi in Uruguay and who decided to follow him to continue the revolutionary fight for freedom in Italy as well, left with him. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as “Anita,” Garibaldi’s Brazilian partner and comrade in arms during the Farroupilha Revolution, in which they had both participated, had also left shortly before.

Both Aguyar and Anita were to die in the tumultuous events of the Roman Republic of 1849, which hoisted the tricolor in Rome for the first time and which in its few months of existence distinguished itself for its radical features in both democratic and social terms (Valerio Evangelisti has written a fine historical novel on this event). Garibaldi and Aguyar defended the Republic militarily, but the latter was killed by a grenade from the French army that rushed to restore the pope to power. (As a black-skinned man, Aguyar is the only great Risorgimento patriot to whom Italy has not dedicated a statue on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, although it seems that it will finally be put up this year.) During the dramatic escape following the fall of the Roman Republic, Anita also died. Although she was ill, she wanted to stay with the revolutionaries to the last, until, while they were being hunted in a lagoon near Ravenna, she lost consciousness and then her life. She was only twenty-eight years old.

A Revolutionary With No Love for Revolution

The international dimension of Garibaldi’s figure is also confirmed by numerous events that intersect with the history of the democratic, workers’, and socialist movements. In 1860, Garibaldi organized the famous Expedition of the Thousand, in which he and a thousand volunteers rushed to support the popular uprising against the Bourbons in Sicily. At that time, Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism and later a friend of Garibaldi’s, was exiled in Siberia. In his memoirs he recounts:

I was in the capital of eastern Siberia, in Irkutsk, at the time of Garibaldi’s memorable campaign in Sicily and Naples. Well, I can say that all the people of Irkutsk passionately [took] the side of the liberator against the King of the Two Sicilies, a faithful ally of the Tsar! . . . In the years 1860–63, when the Russian rural world was in deep turmoil, the peasants of Great and Lesser Russia awaited the arrival of Garibaldov, and if they were asked who he was, they replied “He is a great leader, the friend of the poor people, and he will come to liberate us.”

At the same time in Glasgow, Scotland, the workers decided to work extra shifts to buy and ship ammunition and medical packs to Garibaldi’s forces

A year later, in 1861, US president Abraham Lincoln proposed to Garibaldi to join the American Civil War, publicly asking “the hero of liberty to lend the power of his name, his genius and his sword to the cause of the North.” After a moment’s consideration, however, Garibaldi refused because of the North’s hesitancy in focusing the war on the abolition of slavery. He demanded the immediate and total abolition of slavery as a precondition for his participation.Garibaldi’s first revolutionary ventures were in Latin America.

But let us turn to the more socialist aspects of Garibaldi, those that have been largely obscured by a celebratory Italian historiography. Garibaldi publicly sided with the First International; it was he who gave it the name “the sun of the future,” which in Italy soon became one of the most famous slogans of the workers’ and socialist movement. Garibaldi also supported the Paris Commune, which even elected him as its military leader, a role that the general could not accept as he had just returned to Caprera after fighting in France in the Franco-Prussian war and was now old and ill. On the barricades of the Paris Commune, however, there were many Garibaldians, dressed in the ever-present red shirt. They distinguished themselves during its defense as they were among the few “professional” revolutionaries with military training.

In spite of everything, Garibaldi was not an extremist. We could even say that he was a revolutionary who had no great love for revolutionary turmoil. In fact, his adherence to socialism and his convinced support for the nascent workers’ movement were accompanied by a distrust of the more radical fringes, which Garibaldi repeatedly criticized as harmful to the workers’ cause. Moreover, in the political conjuncture of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi repeatedly showed a pragmatic stance. Famous examples are his acceptance of monarchical rule at the Teano meeting of 1860, in which Garibaldi, as a convinced republican, handed over power in the liberated south of Italy to the Savoy monarch; and the “I obey” telegram of 1866, in which, on the king’s orders, he agreed to halt his advance toward Trento, and thus the fight against Austrian occupation.

Marx, Engels, and Garibaldi

Garibaldi’s political pragmatism, combined with a lively idealism not always imbued with theoretical depth, led Karl Marx to sometimes make derogatory comments toward Garibaldi, considering him, in some private letters, to be naive and an “ass.” But it would be a mistake to conclude that Marx and Friedrich Engels opposed the general. Not only because both of them, as scholars of military tactics, were captivated by Garibaldi’s extraordinary military capabilities (they both followed the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand with daily interest and much esteem). But above all because their correspondence often also contains very positive political judgements, especially on the part of Engels, who applauded Garibaldi’s support for the International, describing it as “of infinite value.” He increasingly forged contacts and ties with Garibaldi’s followers, starting with Garibaldi’s son, Ricciotti, whom they invited to Marx’s house in 1871.Garibaldi defined the proletariat as ‘the class to which I am honored to belong.’

Garibaldi’s name also recurred frequently in the polemics between Marxists and anarchists within the nascent Italian socialist movement (which in turn emerged largely from Garibaldi’s circles). In these early polemics, the general was often “drawn on” and claimed by each of the two currents. Hence Bakunin praised Garibaldi, identifying him with his own side — he wrote enthusiastically that “Garibaldi is increasingly being dragged along by that youth that bears his name, but goes, indeed, runs infinitely further than him.” But Engels expressed his delight that Garibaldi, while maintaining friendly relations with the Italian anarchists, considered mistaken their radical rejection of any principle of authority. Thus Engels concluded:

The old freedom fighter, who did more in the year 1860 alone than all the anarchists can attempt to do in their lifetime, appreciates discipline, all the more so since he had to constantly discipline his armed forces; and he did so not like official military circles, through military discipline and the constant threat of firing squad, but rather by standing in front of the enemy.

In the preface to volume III of Capital, Engels even went so far as to describe Garibaldi as a character of “unequalled classic perfection.”

Garibaldi after Garibaldi

While postunification Italy celebrated Garibaldi as one of the great heroes who had united the country, it also tried in every way to defuse his revolutionary charge. It sought to marginalize him, putting the brakes on any further subversive aspirations he might have had. Not only was Garibaldi repeatedly isolated in unofficial confinement on the island of Caprera, where he had retired to work as a farmer, never having wanted to earn anything from his military exploits, but he was also arrested by the Italian army. On the famous “Day of Aspromonte” in 1862, it even went so far as to shoot him, leaving him wounded.

A sterile, depoliticized, and institutionalized image of Garibaldi was thus upheld by various Italian governments after his death. This created a national pantheon that equated, and distorted, profoundly different political figures and sometimes even sworn enemies from the unification period, such as the count of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Garibaldi.

Instead, it was on the Left, in the popular and workers’ organizations scattered across Italy, that the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi, linked to the proletariat (which he defined as “the class to which I am honored to belong”), long endured. It was in memory of the patriot, internationalist, and socialist Garibaldi that the anti-fascist Italians who fought in Spain in 1936–39 chose the name “Battalón Garibaldi,” that the communist partisans during the Italian Resistance of 1943–45 called themselves “Garibaldi Brigades,” and that the Italians in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav liberation army took the title “Garibaldi Division.”

Again in 1948, in the republic’s first parliamentary elections, the socialists and communists united in an electoral front whose symbol was Garibaldi’s face on a star, all in the colors of the Italian flag.

Today, 142 years after Garibaldi’s death, it is important for the Left, and not just in Italy, to keep the image of the revolutionary Garibaldi alive. This means preserving him from an institutional narrative that reduces him to a statue with no political value. But it also means defending him from some recent attempts to discredit him, dusting off 150-year-old royalist propaganda portraying him as a mercenary or a conqueror. We owe this not only to him, but also to all those in the last century who, inspired by Garibaldi, gave their lives for freedom and socialism.

CONTRIBUTOR
Jacopo Custodi is a political scientist at the Scuola Normale Superiore and a comparative politics professor at Georgetown University. His books include Un’idea di Paese. La nazione nel pensiero di sinistra (Castelvecchi, 2023) and Radical Left Parties and National Identity in Spain, Italy and Portugal (Palgrave, 2022)

How Palestine Led My Coworkers and Me to Unionize

When my coworkers and I were disciplined for wearing pro-Palestine buttons to work, we realized that our supposedly progressive management wasn’t enough to protect our basic rights and freedoms on the job. We needed a union.

Customers visit a Philz Coffee in San Francisco, California, on July 23, 2009.

 (Photo By Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

BYTAYLOR VALCI

06.02.2024

JACOBIN

After October 7, 2023, like many other queer, leftist baristas around the country, I began wearing a “Free Palestine” pin to work. It was a small gesture of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, but what other kind of gesture was there for an average person like me to make?

I wasn’t the only one seeking such gestures. As the horrors of Israel’s assault on Gaza became clear, throngs of new customers flooded my location of Philz Coffee and its nearly eighty other stores, mostly in California, as they responded to the call for a Starbucks boycott for its lawsuit against its own pro-Palestine union. Philz Coffee was started by Phil Jaber, who immigrated from Palestine and contributed to the third-wave coffee movement with his pour-over techniques before stepping down from leadership in 2021.

Since its founding in 2003, Philz has fostered a culture of acceptance and advocacy, often displaying LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter flags in stores. I specifically applied to work at my local Philz because I believed I would be safe and accepted as transgender in my workplace. Still, like any other barista, I was underpaid and overworked.

While experiencing a big rush of customers at work, at least one of my coworkers would usually get a few laughs by suggesting we should unionize. We all knew we were being exploited and pushed beyond our limits, but this seemed to be the expected state of things. While I had held several research and organizing positions for unions in my own professional and academic history, I had little hope that we could make tangible change to our working conditions by organizing.

After my coworker reached out to human resources at Philz Coffee asking for a public statement condemning the genocide in Gaza, not only were they dismissed, but Philz Coffee revealed itself to be an adversary rather than ally of the cause of justice for Palestine. That rejection would eventually lead to an unexpected development: unionization at Philz.

Take Off the Pin or Go Home

On December 21, 2023, I walked into my 6:30 a.m. shift and was immediately pulled aside by my manager. He told me to take off my “Free Palestine” pin for my own safety. I asked if there was any written rule that could justify this demand. He replied no, but said that I either had to take off the pin or go home. I was clocked in for fourteen minutes before I was sent home.

I was enraged as I left work. But as the hours went on, I received calls and texts from my coworkers who put on their own “Free Palestine” pins at work. Of the nine people scheduled to work that day, five of us wore Free Palestine pins, were instructed to take them off, refused, and were sent home.

In the months prior, I had been attending the Berkeley City Council meetings with some coworkers in an effort to support a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, which resulted in us being looped into a group chat on Signal of enthusiastic organizers in Berkeley. My coworkers and I immediately told our story to the other organizers on this group chat, who in turn shared it on their social media platforms. Before noon, some of the most dedicated activists in the Berkeley community had rallied to our cause — including a California State Senate candidate, Jovanka Beckles, who posted about our story that very day. Community members left bad reviews on Yelp, made phone calls, and even showed up in person at our store seeking to show support.

Most stunningly, all of my coworkers expressed only love and support for the difficult decision we each faced that day. Those of us who wore pins empathized with our coworkers who could not take the financial risk of losing expected wages, and those who stayed gave us hugs and encouragement as we were sent away, despite the chaos of the understaffed shop we were leaving them. No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.

Over the next month, nine different baristas would be sent home across twelve different shifts, accumulating over thirty-five hours of lost wages due to an unwritten rule prohibiting “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace. We started group chats, shared our story with customers, spoke to news outlets, and defended each other to corporate. A community-led GoFundMe account raised over a thousand dollars to compensate for our lost wages. At the end of January, Philz corporate finally compromised with us and decided we were allowed to wear pins that displayed the Palestinian flag but did not contain the words “Free Palestine.” We relented, many of us having lost more hours than we could afford. But none of us were ready to give up.No matter what choice each of us made, we were all enraged at Philz Coffee for putting any of us in that terrible position.

One evening in early February, almost the entire staff of our shop, about twelve of us, gathered in my small living room to discuss our response to the events of the previous month. I took all of the lessons I had learned from studying labor history in school and working for unions and shared them with my coworkers. We considered filing charges claiming wage theft for management’s unjust sending us home and had even been approached by lawyers willing to support us. Yet we didn’t feel this would satisfy the frustration felt by the entire staff, not just those who were sent home, and ultimately would not remedy the company’s abuse of power. We wondered: Could our energies be better directed toward collective organizing?

We imagined not only a workplace that allowed us to openly support a free Palestine, but also one that paid us a livable wage, provided reasonable benefits, properly staffed each shift, and safeguarded us in criticizing corporate leadership. We wanted to unionize, and we wanted to do it independently.

The entire staff of Philz Coffee in Berkeley is particularly young, the oldest of us being twenty-six. We researched what affiliating with an established union would look like compared to an independent effort. We understood the benefits of resources and legal representation that could come with an established union, but we also saw a bureaucratic institution that sparked skepticism in our shared youthful, leftist anger. We had received tremendous community support through our conflicts at work and felt confident in our united motivation to make this a member-led effort. That night, every person in attendance signed a pledge card in agreement to be represented by the independent union, Philz Coffee United.

On February 20, 2024, we officially filed with the National Labor Relations Board, turning in authorization cards showing 83 percent support for the union. But in the coming weeks, chaos ensued at our store at the hands of management — as it does for so many workers after announcing their intention to unionize.

The Boss Pushback

Our manager pulled people into one-on-one meetings, illegally threatening that the company would withhold the upcoming mandatory $20 minimum wage increase for fast food restaurants in California. Posters were pinned to our news board displaying coercive and false information about unions and our upcoming election. A barrage of corporate employees, including the CEO, showed up at our store, attempting to manipulate our votes. An email was even sent out just six days before our election to each employee at our store, stating that the company had not decided whether or not to renew its lease at our location, and they just wanted to let us know.All eligible employees showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted ‘yes.’

We were understaffed and overworked every day. Yet none of this fazed us. We held weekly meetings, formed committees, developed a social media presence, and even held bake sales outside our store to share our story and raise funds. We struggled to keep our union-related conversations at work to a minimum and relied heavily on texts, group chats, calls, and FaceTimes to discuss each detail of our organizing.

On March 19, 100 percent of eligible employees — sixteen of us — at Philz Coffee in Berkeley showed up to vote for the in-person NLRB election, and every single one voted “yes.”

This victory was beautiful. However, soon after our election, the storm of finals season crashed into our staff, over half of whom were students, including myself. The time and energy available to us for this effort shrunk, and without legal representation or dedicated resources for negotiation efforts, we ended up stalling our own union’s progress. We are now being forced to reckon with our decision to unionize independently, which many encouraged us to do, given our shop and company size and glowing community support. The members of our union have diverse skills and experiences, but we are still just early-twenty-somethings trying to find our place in this world. Between school, work, rent, food, health care, and pleasure, our priorities and capacities are splintered, and truthfully, I am not sure what the future holds for Philz Coffee United.

From Palestine to a Union

Still, we pulled off a successful unionization, which begs several questions: Why would baristas in Berkeley, California, risk their financial security to support those being oppressed on the other side of the world? How did the same passion that fostered a global call for a cease-fire in Gaza produced a successful coffee shop unionization? How does the prohibition of wearing “Free Palestine” pins in the workplace and the exploitation of employees exhibit the same system of power that is actively devastating Palestinians in Gaza?

I can hold the truth that I am incredibly privileged as a white American living in California while Palestinians are massacred in Gaza and still recognize that my own suffering is linked to the suffering of Gazans through capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. These are the terms that echoed in each conversation I had with my coworkers during those months.

This solidarity allows us to hold the complicated truths of hierarchical levels of suffering and privilege while still recognizing and naming its common source. But it is ultimately liberation that is the magnetic force drawing all members of oppressed communities together. We see one another’s pain. We see one another’s fight.

I am unsure if history will deem the efforts of Philz Coffee United successful, given the struggles we have faced in rallying ourselves toward negotiations. Perhaps the members of Philz Coffee United will come back together with an even greater force, conduct fierce negotiations, and rally other stores to join. Alternatively, it is possible that, as early-twenty-somethings, this effort will dissolve as we all work toward different life goals.

Regardless, this experience transformed each of us into activists and organizers with concrete understandings of labor rights and the unionizing process. While I deeply long to see Philz Coffee United succeed, I understand that the larger labor movement is a marathon, not a sprint. We have each gained skills and knowledge that we will bring with us into our future work environments. And our commitment to achieving a free Palestine is as strong as ever.

CONTRIBUTOR
Taylor Valci is a union organizer and barista at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, California.