Chomsky and UN Forewarnings Revisited

by Robert Hunziker / June 14th, 2024

I recently attended a family affair in Upstate NY and was informed that climate change articles, like this one, are too negative, causing close relatives to shutdown and going so far as to ignore articles, too gloomy, too negative, do something more positive. My response: Analyzing the planet’s climate system by studying peer-reviewed scientific publications for over a decade, every year has gotten worse and worse, no letups, more negatives every year… there’s nothing positive about climate change to write about. And people need to know the truth about anthropogenic-led crashing of ecosystems.

Furthermore, one of the key reasons why many Americans don’t accept climate change as an existential issue is because they have been shielded from the most impactful events of climate change, from the truth as experienced by the rest of the world; e.g., Europe’s five-year average temperature has been running 2.3°C above pre-industrial, a danger zone according t0 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries agreed to limit global warming to no more than 2.0° Celsius by 2100 to avoid significant and potentially catastrophic changes to the planet. Hmm. Ipso facto, 75% of Spain is at risk of desertification, according to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

The USA, uniquely. happens to be located in a “global sweet spot” ideally within latitudes and longitudes that first attracted Europeans to a Garden of Eden setting, For example, during the mid-17th century in the words of William Wood of Boston, circa 1634 (Source: “Boston’s Flora and Fauna in the 1630s”, Boston Public Library):

For the Country it is as well watered as any land under the Sun, every family, or every two families having a spring of sweet waters betwixt them, which is far different from the waters of England being not so, but of a fatter substance, and of a more jetty colour; it is thought there can be so better water in the world.

The next commodity the land affords, is good store of Woods, & that not only such as may be needful for fuel, but likewise for the building of Ships, and houses, & Mils, and all manner of water-work about which Wood is necessary. The Timber of the Country grows straight and tall, some trees being twenty, some thirty-foot high, before they spread forth their branches…. Of these swamps, some be ten, some twenty, some thirty miles long, being preserved by the wetness of the soils wherein they grow.

Today, people in Asia and Europe and Central America do not complain about negtive climate articles, rather, they embrace it, believing that more exposure is necessary so people know how to bitch and moan and groan about the failure of political leaders to take heed of top-notch scientists’ warnings for decades that global warming, primarily caused by fossil fuels like CO2, eventually leads to ecosystem collapse and dangerous heatwaves and destructive droughts. Today, unrelenting heatwaves are rampant for all to see but could be only the beginning.

Regarding the Chomsky and UN warnings, it was June 2022 when the UN issued GAR2022, UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction shortly thereafter followed by Noam Chomsky as keynote speaker for the American Solar Energy Society 51st annual conference at the University of New Mexico.

The UN report, for the first time, brought into focus the challenge: “Escalating synergies of climate disasters, economic vulnerability, and ecosystem failures increasingly headed for a juggernaut of collapse.”

On the heels of the UN report about an impending “juggernaut of collapse,” Chomsky’s opening statement at the American Solar Energy Society echoed the UN’s statement:

We are at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that must be made right now will determine the course of future history if there is to be any human history, which is very much in doubt. There is a narrow window in which we must implement measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment.

Today, there is compelling evidence that both the UN and Chomsky were dead-on correct. But Chomsky’s call for implementing measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment have been mostly ignored. Now, two short years later. killer heat is consuming the lifeblood of megacities in some regions of the planet.

“Water sources are depleted around the world,” according to Victoria Beard, professor of city and regional planning, Cornell University: “Every year, more cities will face ‘Day Zero,’ with no water in their piped systems.” (Source: “This Mega-City is Running Out of Water: What Will 22 Million People do When the Taps Run Dry?” Phys.org, March 26, 2024.)

For example: Mexico City (22M pop.) could run dry this summer. Bogotá (8M pop.) recently started water rationing. Residents of Johannesburg (6M pop.) line up for municipal truck deliveries. South Delhi (2.7M pop.) announced a rationing plan on May 29th. Several cities of southern Europe have rationing plans on the table. In March 2024 China announced its first-ever National-Level Regulations on Water Conservation, a disguised version of water rationing. Global warming is the key problem as severe droughts clobber reservoirs. And global warming is a product of energy creation from fossil fuel emissions such s CO2.

According to Chomsky, the “Energy System” is the provocateur of global warming, and it has enormous institutional breadth, including fossil fuel companies, banks, and other financial institutions and a large part of the legal community. Accordingly, the Energy System’s political base is the Republican Party, and it is the main driving force for global warming which, in turn, threatens megacities with “Day Zero” or dry reservoirs. This is becoming prevalent around the globe.

The fact that the UN Global Assessment Report GAR2022 received little, or no media attention, explains how and why we are in deep trouble; the issue is simply ignored. Yet, it is the first-ever UN flagship global report with findings that current global policies are “accelerating the collapse of human civilization.” It should have been front page news. Importantly, the report does not suggest that collapse is a “done deal.” Rather, without radical change, it’s where the world is headed.

Alas, where is the “radical change” that the UN report said is necessary to prevent collapse? Answer: There is no radical change ongoing, planned, or discussed. Radical change has never been mentioned by any world-recognized authorities.

Celebrated weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, recently commented on global warming’s impact: “Thousands of records are being brutalized all over Asia, which is by far the most extreme event in world climatic history.” (Source: “Summer Heat Hits Asia Early, Killing Dozens as one Expert Calls it the ‘Most Extreme Event’ in Climate History”, CBS News, May 2, 2024.)

“The most extreme event in world climatic history” is a very strong characterization of the impact of climate change and global warming. Dangerous heat waves are sweeping the world like a scythe harvesting wheat and more people are being killed than reported by authorities, especially in India. There’ll never be accurate counts of the dead for public release. Some megacities are currently at knife’s edge of loss of drinking water for millions of residents. They’re not prepared. Water is trucked for firefighting in some megacities and to neighborhoods where residents are parched. This could have been prevented, but it wasn’t.

Of even more immediate concern, an Environmental Emergency has been declared for Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands by Mato Grosso do Sul, the Brazilian state containing most of Pantanal. The emergency has been declared as the number of fires surged by 980%, as of June 5th, well ahead of wildfire season which starts in July/August. This is one of the world’s largest wetlands (10 times Florida’s everglades) which has partially dried out due to ongoing severe drought. (Source: “Fires in Brazilian Wetlands Surge 980%, Extreme Drought Expected”, Reuters, June 7, 2024.)

The Pantanal is the world’s largest freshwater wetland stretching over parts of Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia offering unseen gifts to a vast swath of South America by regulating the water cycle upon which life depends. Its countless swamps, lagoons and tributaries purify water and help prevent floods and droughts. It stores untold amounts of carbon, helping to stabilize the world’s climate. It is one of the wonders of the world, but large areas are blazing afire because of severe drought; it’s global warming at work.

What to do? There are experienced capable people, such as Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, who believe that the failure of world leaders to listen to scientists for decades necessitates a changing of the guard. He’s organizing a worldwide movement.

In summation, the United Nations claims “radical change” is needed, and as stated by Noam Chomsky: “There is a narrow window in which we must implement measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment.” But nobody is doing this on a radical change basis.

Meantime, if megacities run dry, what will millions of city residents do? The risks have never been more pronounced. 

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

 

We are All Nicaragua: The Sexual Diversity Community

by Becca Mohally Renk / June 14th, 2024

The Story of Julia Chinamo

“I realized when I was nine years old that I liked boys,” Julio Sanchez tells me. Julio is also known by the nickname “Julia Chinamo” and socially as “Nahomy Campbell.”

“My father was a military man, a macho man. My aunt told him, ‘Look at Julito, he’s queer.’ I didn’t like boys’ things: no marbles, no tops, no cars for me. I loved dolls, I loved fixing their hair, I loved to wear my grandmother’s heels, my grandmother’s apron. I loved all the women’s stuff, that was my thing,” Julio laughs out loud.

In his early thirties, Julio has a dazzling smile. Founder of the Nicaraguan Association of Diverse Communities (ANCD), Julio visits ANCD’s 3,000 members spread around the country and he often talks about his own life. But as he continues telling me his story, Julio’s mile-a-minute talking slows.

“When I was 12, my math teacher found a note where I had written love poems to another boy.” Julio’s brown eyes fill with pain as he recounts how proud he was that his father got a day pass to go to the school to pick up his report card. When the teacher asked to speak to his father alone, young Julio was sent away to the snack bar for a treat of soda and quesillo. “I was happy because I didn’t fail a single class. I was a very dedicated student.”

When they got home, his father took Julio into his room. “He said, ‘Look, I need to talk to you about something.’ I said, ‘What is it, Dad?’ ‘Listen to me you son of a big so-and-so’ – he called me a terrible word – he said, ‘’Are you a man or are you a pussy?’ Boom. I was like, ‘Dad, no, I’m a man, I like women,’” Julio pauses.

“I viscerally remember that moment in my life because it was so, so painful for me,” he shakes his head. “My dad then hit me, not with a belt, but he hit me with a hose and when the hose split open on my back, he hit me with the electrical cord from the iron…I received so many blows that my right eye swelled shut and my lip was split open and then my dad threw me out into the street with all my clothes. For me, it felt like that day was the last day of my life.”

Neoliberal Nicaragua: “There was no dignity”

Even two decades later, when Julio talks about what happened after he was kicked out of his house, he unconsciously slips into the third person, as if needing to distance himself from that time.

“After his dad threw Julio out on the street,” he says, “Julio took drugs, and did many things; he was a sex worker on the street. He would sleep on the streets and in the parks because he didn’t belong anywhere.”

Julio’s story is a common one worldwide for members of the LGBTQ+ community – when adolescents wind up homeless, they often turn to sex work to survive and to drugs and alcohol to cope. Most are unable to finish high school. Unfortunately for Julio, he was kicked out of his home in the 1990s, under neoliberal rule in Nicaragua. During the earlier popular Sandinista Revolution in the 1980s, neither homosexuality nor sex work had been illegal. But after Violeta Chamorro came into power in 1990, her neoliberal government passed a 1992 law that criminalized homosexuality.

“We couldn’t hold hands as men because we would go to jail,” remembers Julio. “We couldn’t kiss each other on the cheek because that was ‘promoting homosexuality,’ and they would throw you in jail. Before 2007, our diverse community wasn’t allowed to exist in society. We were clandestine, we had no freedoms or human rights. There was no dignity.”

Sandinista return to power, restoration of rights

In 2008, following the Sandinista party’s return to power, a law was passed overturning the penalization of homosexuality and making it illegal to discriminate against someone based on sexual orientation. Since then, the Sandinista government has also passed laws specifically guaranteeing equal rights and opportunities for the LGBTQ+ community. Additionally, public institutions have administrative regulations in place to ensure that no one faces discrimination for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“If I compare Nicaragua with other countries in the world,” explains Julio, “we have regulations, public policy, legal framework, and laws that support us. Here you cannot violate the rights of a trans woman because she is a trans woman – you cannot deprive her of her life, her freedom. I consider that Nicaragua is an example for the whole Central American region and for all of Latin America.”

Julio explains that in his experience, the LGBTQ community – in Nicaragua called the sexual diversity community – has a network of support and a clear path for recourse through the police and the national special ombudsman for sexual diversity, a part of the attorney general’s office.

“If I feel safe and I feel that this security will transcend to…be able to support the new generations. This government has vindicated the rights of sexual diversity, it is a government that has been advancing hand in hand and including our diversity in all governmental plans.”

Focus on family support

In 2023, the Nicaraguan government released a primer on sexual diversity called “Diversity with Dignity: The Right to Choose and the Duty to Respect.” The primer is written for families and its aim is to decrease discrimination within families.

The primer was initially presented around the country in community meetings with a special focus to include church leadership. Since then, it has been used to start conversations during routine home visits by the special ombudsman’s office, police, and other government entities such as the Ministry of the Family, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Women.

“[The primer] establishes that diversity in sexual or gender identity is not a disease,” explained Minister of the Family Johana Flores at the presentation of the primer in Granada last year. “That is why we have to respect the partner, the companion, the whole diverse community.”

For Julio, the primer represents explicit support of the sexually diverse community by the Nicaraguan government, and has provided an opportunity to start conversations and improve communication within families.

“The primer has been accepted by of thousands and thousands of parents of Nicaraguan families throughout the national territory,” explains Julio. “I think it is very important to call the parents to tolerance, reflection, to family unity; to encourage them to have an active communication with their children…To grow up with the family is beautiful.”

Supporting education

For many in the sexual diversity community, education is key to building a different future for themselves. Julio credits a former teacher with helping him succeed.

“In my last year of high school, I had a teacher who I will never forget, Marta Martinez. I did sex work on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; and on Sundays I went to a high school for non-traditional students. I would show up at dawn on Sunday and fall asleep at the teacher’s desk,” Julio remembers. “She knew what my life was like, she understood me, she supported me a lot and I managed to pass the grade.”

Julio went on to university and graduated with a degree in communication, and after four years decided to go back to school.

“I’m now studying law at the best university in the country, UNAN Managua,” he says proudly.

Julio has been integrally involved in organizing the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education’s Community High School Diploma Program for Sexual Diversity. This is a free accelerated Saturday school program by and for the sexually diverse community – all students and teachers are from the LGBTQ+ community. Students receive a high school diploma in two years by attending school on Saturdays.

“We saw the great need because trans, lesbian and gay community members had not finished their studies due to discrimination. We met with the Minister of Education to work on the proposal and we opened the community high school…But we also saw the need for our teachers to be from our community: the English teacher is gay, the math teacher is a lesbian, the literature teacher is gay, the physics and chemistry teacher is a trans woman.”

Through this program, the Ministry of Education has to date graduated three classes, with 110 members of the sexual diversity community receiving high school diplomas.

Growing together as families

“It wasn’t until I was 25 years old that my father asked for my forgiveness,” Julio says.  “I was a college student on a scholarship and he said, ‘Forgive me for everything I did, for all the psychological, physical, mental damage.’ And I forgave him.”

Julio has a younger brother on his father’s side who is gay and a trans sibling on his mother’s side. He’s proud of the fact that his struggles have paved the way for his siblings’ acceptance by the family.

“Because of me, my dad accepted my brother and loves and respects him and his partner very much,” Julio shares. “I forgave him because in the end he is my father and I believe that parents want what’s best for you, but I also believe that we have the right to choose our paths and they have the duty to respect us.”

Julio is an activist, and his personal struggles and triumphs are intrinsically linked with those of his larger community and his country.

“Today I have become an openly gay man, defender of the rights of the LGBTQ+ community that has marked the history of this country and I am determined to continue supporting, accompanying and leading my sexual diversity community in Nicaragua. I feel very sure of who I am, of who I want to be. But I also feel secure because there is a legal framework in Nicaragua that protects people; you feel safe when you can walk through the streets and you won’t be discriminated against because of your sexual orientation. We are all Nicaragua. 

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Becca Mohally Renk has lived in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, for more than 20 years, working in sustainable development with the Jubilee House Community and the project, the Center for Development in Central America. Becca coordinates the Casa Benjamin Linder solidarity project. Read other articles by Becca.

 

Timely Lessons About Tyranny from the Father of the U$ Constitution

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 14th, 2024

It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.

— James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,  1785

James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.

How right he was.

Although Madison initially felt that the inclusion of a bill of rights in the originally ratified Constitution was unnecessary to its success, Thomas Jefferson persuaded him that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.”

The Bill of Rights drafted by Madison—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—was a document so revolutionary at the time that it would come to be viewed as the epitome of American liberty. The rights of the people reflected in those ten amendments encapsulated much of Madison’s views about government, the corrupting influence of power, and the need for safeguards against tyranny.

Madison’s writings speak volumes to the present constitutional crisis in the country.

Read them and weep.

“The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 47 (30 January 1788) Federalist (Dawson)/46 Full text at Wikisource

“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 49 (2 February 1788)

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison, Speech, Constitutional Convention (29 June 1787), from Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. I [1] (1911), p. 465

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” — James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788), as quoted in James Madison: The Writings, 1787-1790 Vol. 5 (1904)]

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822, Writings 9:103-p-9

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”— James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788 in: History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, vol. 1, p. 130 (H.B. Grigsby ed. 1890).

In the years since the founders laid their lives on the line to pursue the dream of individual freedom and self-government, big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.

However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis of our freedoms.

The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.

First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.

The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. The purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant.

The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution.

Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered an offense to every principle for which the Framers took their revolutionary stand.

Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. The Framers did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”

Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government.

Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government.

These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.

Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.

The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: get un-brainwashed.

Learn your rights.

Stand up for the founding principles.

Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.

Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.

Most of all, do these things today.

If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.

John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

 

This Day in Anarchist History: The Vinegar Revolt

by subMedia / June 15th, 2024

On June 13th 2013in anarchist history, we remember The Vinegar Revolt, a series of protests turned into riots across the lands occupied by Brazil.

On June 13th 2013 ongoing demonstrations over a transit fair hike In São Paulo, Brazil erupted into a national uprising after police cracked down hard, arresting 60 people for simply possessing vinegar to protect themselves against the use of teargas.

Soon the demonstrations spread to many other cities and became one of the first documented use of the Black Bloc tactic in the country.

The violent and disruptive tactics of The Vinegar Revolt highlighted the wide gulf between the radical and institutional left and has even led to progressives conflating anarchists with the far-right.

 

Unbecoming American: Judgement at Normandy

by T.P. Wilkinson / June 15th, 2024

Those who learned or vaguely remember what they were taught in school in those deliberately boring hours devoted to the subject called “history” may be forgiven for their confusion at the progressive transformation of core myths from the mid-20^th century. Among those are the bundle of fabrications that constitute the history of the “good war”. The 20th century can be called the American Century not only because of US aspirations to global dominion after 1945 but because it was the US propaganda ministry — in privatized USA aka known as “Hollywood”—which has successfully written the history of the two world wars and propagated it like the Bible, also in foreign parts. During the recent commemorations of the June 1944 “Normandy landings”, executed by an amphibious force comprising mainly members of the Anglo-American armed forces, the constellation of honoured guests was instructive in ways that no textbook could be.

Decades of make-believe have persuaded those susceptible to Western mass media that the Second World War, a designation these hostilities acquired after the capitulations of 1945, was fought by the Anglo-American Empire, the Allies, for democracy and freedom against fascism in Germany and Italy (and as an afterthought in Japan). It has also persuaded millions that this war, in which the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP regime in Germany and the older government of British agent Benito Mussolini’s Partido Nazionale Fascista (the origin of the generic term) were subdued, was ultimately won by the heroic efforts of the largest amphibious assault action in history, the so-called Normandy landings. Never mind for the moment that since the 1960s the purpose of the war has been utterly redefined as the defence of some segment of European Jewry.

To illustrate how this propaganda has expanded with each year further from the events themselves, there were posters hanging in Porto this year advertising an exhibition to commemorate military action in which Portugal was in no way involved. (How the regime of the Bourbon-Anjou pretender, successors to the Caudillo de Espana por la gracio de Dios and usurper of republican government in Madrid, remember 1944 may be worth comment, too. Veterans of the 250th “Azul” division were most unlikely in attendance.) The head of the Portuguese government of that day, Dr Antonio Salazar Oliveira, carefully avoided any overt participation in the international aggression. Instead he exported grain to feed the Wehrmacht instead of his own compatriots and under pressure of his liege lords in London, leased airfields and harbours in the Azores to the Americans. Perhaps Dr Salazar also understood that the Atlantic Charter also protected him from the ultimate enemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Each year since the demise of the Soviet Union the government of the Russian Federation, for some twenty years led by President Vladimir Putin, has politely requested, then objected that the commemoration reflect the facts of the 1944 and not the political preferences of those in attendance. If the Normandy commemoration serves to recall the efforts of the forces invading France to defeat the German NSDAP regime, then the French government itself could not claim honours there any more than the representatives of Germany who soon became regular guests. After all half of France was willingly occupied by Germany while the other half, governed from Vichy collaborated. In other words, if taken at their word, the celebrants before the altars on Omaha Beach, could insist that Paris be treated just like Russia would have Kiev treated today. If the war was against fascism in Europe, as the propagandists in the West have proclaimed for decades, then Germany and France both constituted fascist states whose leaders at such a mass must – at the least—repeat acts of contrition, if not ritual surrender. That at least would be consistent with the anniversary memorials. It would be consistent with the “living history” model of historical re-enactment so beloved in Anglo-American “Disney-culture”. In fact, in a generous interpretation of the Second World War it was a great battle against truculent fascism. Obsequious fascists like those in Madrid or Lisbon were conspicuously spared. Then in 1949 both were lovingly absorbed into NATO, a precedent that should not be overlooked.

Instead not only is France celebrated as an Anglo-American ally—which it was not during that great war (assuming for the purposes of argument the official rationale)—but the ostensible main enemy, evil Germany has been elevated to the status of ally as if it had waged war against itself. In fact, that would conform to the perverse logic by which Koreans invaded Korea in 1950 and Vietnamese invaded Vietnam, while Chinese are poised today to invade China. Already the absurdity and patent insincerity of the commemoration becomes evident. With further interpretative generosity, the Normandy exhibition is a demonstration by its producers that the thousands who died there constitute multiple Christ figures whose “sacrifice” vicariously saved the fascists of France and Germany from damnation. Given the fanaticism with which Latin hypocrisy is practiced in the West, both in and out of church, there are no doubt Faithful to adhere to such a construction. After all the Latin Church has innumerable monuments to its “martyrs” who died fighting communism.

No Red Army units crossed the Manche to wade onto the coast of cows and Calvados. Confining the celebrations to the memory of battles actually fought by those who actually bore arms there (and their descendants) could legitimately be limited to British and American imperial forces and perhaps the few exile French allowed along for the ride. However the Normandy prostrations, especially after 1989, became a stage for historical revisionism. The Russian Federation rightly objects to this deliberate distortion of the war record and its mass medial – hysterical propagation.

This year the Russian government complained that after years of ignoring the primary role of the Soviet Union and Red Army in defeating the NSDAP regime, the western allies added insult to injury by receiving the tee shirt-clad Führer in Kiev, whose party and regime openly celebrate Nazi paramilitary and regular armed forces as national heroes. The harbinger of this affront was the ovation given to a Ukrainian Waffen SS veteran in the Canadian House of Commons last year. He was honoured in the House as a courageous legacy fighter against Russia.

Joseph Stalin insisted that the French (de Gaulle’s French and by implication the French Communists who constituted the bulk of the Résistance) share in acceptance of the capitulation in Karlshorst (Berlin) in May 1945. (Only enormous diplomatic pressure prevented Dwight Eisenhower’s anti-communist armies from accepting a separate surrender by the German High Command a few months earlier.) Then the Soviet Union sincerely or pragmatically lent its Western allies the benefit of a doubt, presuming perhaps that there was still enough of a Left in the West to keep Britain and the US within civilized boundaries.  Since 1989, despite the havoc wreaked upon the dissolving Soviet Union by Western powers, the Russian government has diplomatically avoided stating the obvious in the real revision. Politely speaking the Western “allies” could be accused of foreign policy narcissism as rabid as the narcissism of their popular culture. Having fed on decades of their own mythology they suffer political obesity and hence are incapable of seeing that their story of the Second World War is sociopathic vanity. Hollywood has so permeated their consciousness that they genuinely believe they won the war. The late Ronald Reagan, B-grade film actor that he was, once actually claimed in an interview to have been among US troops that liberated concentration camps in Poland. Aside from the fact that he had never served in combat, the arch anti-communist neither knew nor cared that the Red Army and not the US Army liberated the camps in Poland. His errors (like those of his successors) were dismissed like so many other senile remarks from American gerontocrats, without a wall on which to stand.

Far more plausible and consistent is another explanation. It is also far more obvious and less tortuous to recognize. Namely after 80 years, the Anglo-American Empire has openly repudiated its own mythology. Finally after nearly a century, the West is admitting that the Second World War was the war of the London-New York- Rome – Tokyo – Paris Axis against the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The true allies were the Soviet Union and the nascent People’s Republic. At Normandy this year the successors to Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis—properly the Anti-Comintern Pact powers—and the children of the collaborators in industrial-strength mass murder from the Rhine to the Dnieper join those high commissioners of banks and hedge funds who have sponsored them since 1917 in the comprehensive war against communism and any other form of national and popular development at odds with the British, American and French Empires—and the caste who own them all.

As they celebrated on the beaches their invasion of France—a last ditch effort to stop the Red Army from reaching the Rhine—they prepare for the next great war against Russia and China, against humanity itself.FacebookTwitter

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Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..

In Our Make-believe Politics, the Strings Pulled by the Super-rich are all too Visible

Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars

by Jonathan Cook / June 15th, 2024

We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

 

We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.Facebook

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.