A Memoir of Transitioning

Ben Terrall

 November 4, 2024
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Image by Katie Rainbow.

The best writers are worth reading, no matter their subject matter. The wildly talented, idiosyncratic, and erudite Lucy Sante is a case in point. Sante is a versatile wordsmith who has appeared in the New York Review of Books for decades, been the film critic for Interview, the book critic for New York, the photography critic for The New Republic, and has been published in countless “little magazines” including The Threepenny Review. She even won a Grammy for some of her liner notes. I’ve been a fan since reading Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, her deeply researched history of crime and the hard lives of the poor in lower Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, shortly after it came out in 1991.

Sante’s latest work, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of transitioning from Luc, the male name under which she functioned until her mid-sixties, to Lucy. Par for the course with Sante, the writing is sublime, filled with artful turns of phrase and droll asides. Though Sante’s The Factory of Facts (1998) was also a memoir of sorts, that earlier work played its cards close to the vest on the personal front. It includes the memorable line, “I had no illusions about genealogy, a pathetic hobby that combined the bold passion of stamp collecting with the modest sobriety of medieval reenactments,” but large chunks of the book dig into the history of the author’s rural Belgian forebears with a level of family tree forensics which seems at least partly a convenient avoidance of self-disclosure. It provides no hint of the gender dysphoria that Sante now recalls being a lifelong struggle.

I Heard Her Call My Name, on the other hand, delves deep into the gender confusion that Sante describes actively suppressing well into her sixties. Chapters on the period leading up to and including her gender transition alternate with sections on earlier parts of her life, from childhood in Belgium and New Jersey through wild times in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.

Sante participated in the first-wave NYC punk and renegade arts scenes, running around with artistically inclined movers and shakers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and Darryl Pinkney. Her descriptions of the cash-strapped but creatively fecund milieus in and around what became known as Alphabet City are alone worth the book’s cover price. One choice passage: “All of us were performing all the time. It was what we had come to New York City to do. Every single person under forty walking down Saint Mark’s Place between Second and Third was acting in a movie only they could see. Band of Outsiders, Expresso Bongo, Ashes and Diamonds, Cruel Story of Youth, Baby Doll, Shock Corridor, Lonesome Cowboys, Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes you could just about call out the name of the picture when you saw them walk by.” (Her stellar collections of essays and experimental pieces, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be The Times, are packed with great stuff on Sante’s friends, inspirations, and obsessions from that era.)

As the Eighties slogged on, the ascendance of finance, insurance, and real estate profiteers squeezed out bohemians from their formerly cheap digs, decimating the world that helped shape Sante’s esthetic orientation. In that progressively more gloomy decade, Sante writes, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture” and “we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel.”

Despite displaying a slothful work ethic at her early ’80s New York Review of Books mailroom job, Sante was snagged by the highly-esteemed Review editor Barbara Epstein to be her assistant. Epstein must have noticed how well-read Sante was; her new employee was a lifelong autodidact who had immersed herself in broad reading of classic European and other literature. Sante closely studied Epstein’s sharply-honed editorial skills. Having Epstein school her in revising and improving essays helped Sante find her own distinctive voice. The New York Review of Books accepted the first piece Sante submitted to them, on Albert Goldman’s trashy biography of Elvis Presley. She took on a wide range of topics for paid writing assignments, including portraits of individual writers, artists, and musicians, cultural tendencies, and such offbeat history as the heyday of “spirit photography,” which purported to catch images of ghosts.

Sante describes an old romantic partner as having “a keen sense of the quackeries of language.” That fabulous compliment also applies to Sante, whose work embraces the esoteric and the eccentric, recovering and relishing forgotten slang and colloquialisms from previous eras and subcultures; Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, aptly described her as “one of the handful of living masters of the American language.”

To Sante’s credit, she avoids misty-eyed sentimentality when drawing from the past: in her book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (2009), she describes nostalgia as “the term Americans use for the bargain they strike between ignorance of the past and discomfort with the present.”

Affection and identification with women runs throughout I Heard Her Call My Name. A bohemian aesthete, very much drawn to fashion, Sante writes that as she eased into her identity as a newly-emerging woman in 2021, “I felt fortunate to have my friends: tough, stylish, independent-minded women, some of whom I’d known for over forty years and had seen evolve, who now weren’t kids anymore but were not in any way backing down. I modeled my attitude on theirs, and studied their style.” Sante exults over female role models in the wider world as well, listing a wonderfully eclectic mix which includes Eartha Kitt, Poly Styrene, Thelma Ritter, Emma Goldman, Anna Mae Wong, Memphis Minnie, Gloria Grahame, Dorothy Day, Helen Levitt, and Billie Holiday. Just to balance things out, “I inhabited Angie Dickinson as Police Woman.”

I Heard Her Call My Name clearly depicts the daunting process of transitioning to a freer, more fully realized life as Lucy, and coming out to family, friends, and acquaintances. Clocking in at 226 pages, a manageable length for even the most internet-damaged attention spans, the book includes a generous selection of photographs from Sante’s life. These include Sante head shots treated with the gender swapping feature of something called Face-App, which transformed old photos into images of the writer’s truer female self.

In describing the emotional terrain and practical realities of emerging as a woman, Sante’s honesty and attention to particulars keep her narrative free of strident polemics or grandstanding. Sante describes herself as a trans writer, rather than a trans writer. She writes, “I’m allergic to theory and even more to the kind of shibboleth retoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much — though by no means all — of trans writing. […] I don’t wish to be a spokesperson, although I accept that by writing this book I will have become just that.”

In this age of billionaire-backed fascists using weaponized transphobia to divide and conquer, I Heard Her Call My Name could hardly be timelier. The book inspires empathy and solidarity through its nuanced, powerful, and accessible account of Sante’s transformation from Luc to Lucy. Sante concludes, “I certainly hope that my story will be read by people who need to see that gender dysphoria, expressed in childhood or adolescence, is not a passing fancy that will evaporate when the social climate changes.” So do I.

Ben Terrall is a writer living in the Bay Area. He can be reached at: bterrall@gmail.com

The Republicans Are Attacking Trans People.

 Why Aren’t the Democrats Talking About It?

In this election, Republicans are attacking trans people while Democrats have backed away from the issue.

Sybil Davis November 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE USA



“Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports” the disembodied voice in the Trump ad says, oozing contempt. The voice goes on, driving toward the central slogan: “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for you.” Anti-trans ads are blanketing the country: in October roughly 41 percent of pro-Trump ads were anti-trans ads. This number shouldn’t be surprising — after all, the new Republican Party is built in large part on anti-trans politics. Outside of Trump, over 100 Republican candidates are running on an anti-trans platform. This is coming after a multi-year offensive against trans rights from Republicans at the state level which has left trans rights severely limited in over half the country. Trump has long made anti-trans attacks part of his campaign and is making them a central part of his closing message to voters. At his horrific Madison Square Garden Rally, Trump declared that “We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.” His rally speeches frequently feature the bizarre lie that young people are getting gender affirming surgeries in school — how exactly that would work is unclear, do the schools all have a secret surgical bay?

To put it bluntly, as a trans woman, it’s a scary time. The level of demagoguery that has been employed against trans people — especially trans women and trans youth — has reached a fever pitch over the last few years making things even more unsafe for trans people, especially trans women of color.

But one of the things that makes this all scarier is the way the national Democratic Party has backed away from defending trans people. And, despite what the Trump campaign wants you to believe, that definitely includes Kamala Harris.

Harris has been largely quiet about trans issues throughout the campaign. When she has spoken about them, it’s been worryingly non-committal: she will “follow the law” when it comes to things like gender affirming care for minors and gender affirming surgeries for incarcerated people. Out of context, this may not sound so bad. But within context, it’s horrifying. There are anti-trans laws in more than half the country that restrict the bodily autonomy of trans youth and, in some states, of trans adults as well. There are laws that ban discussion of queer issues in schools and force teachers to out students to their parents. There are book bans on queer and trans books alongside books addressing Black struggle. There are laws that ban trans people from using the correct bathroom — one city in Texas even went so far as to set a $10,000 bounty on trans people using the bathroom. Laws that ban trans people from updating their legal documents to match their gender and name.

These are the laws that Harris will follow? She’s not going to try to fight them? She’s not even denouncing them? This is a huge adaptation to the anti-trans offensive. It is equivalent to her saying she would “follow the law” on abortion. Trans rights vary hugely from state to state and in many states there are laws that absolutely should not be followed.

This adaptation to anti-trans politics is not new or isolated to Harris. In fact, it’s part of the Democrats’ larger shift away from trans issues. They didn’t have a trans speaker at the Democratic National Convention — for the first time since 2016 — and trans issues were only mentioned (briefly) by two speakers at the DNC, neither of whom had primetime speaking slots. Colin Allred, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, responded to anti-trans attacks by the Ted Cruz campaign by releasing an ad where he calls himself a Christian and proclaiming “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.”

The national Democratic Party has been trying to downplay trans issues for essentially the entirety of the current anti-trans offensive. They didn’t make it a major part of their case for democratic rights in the 2022 midterms, focusing instead purely on abortion. In 2023, Biden sent out guidance on, effectively, how to ban trans kids from sports and only mentioned trans rights for nine seconds in his State of the Union to offer vague support for trans youth. Now those nine seconds look positively progressive compared to the way that Harris is avoiding the issue all together and adapting herself to the anti-trans laws on the books.

This shift from the Democratic Party is part of a larger shift within liberalism and the center that has occurred during the anti-trans offensive. This shift has a lot to do with the increase in people coming out as trans and doing so at a younger age. This has thrown many members of the middle class into a crisis because, though they might support trans rights in the abstract, they don’t want their kids to be trans.

A clear example of how this kind of middle class hysteria can build is the anti-trans community that developed on Mumsnet, a parenting website in the UK. These parenting message boards became the launching ground for a whole pseudo-movement against trans rights in the UK which took up pieces of anti-trans feminism and combined it with more conservative thought about the centrality of the family. This merging, not limited to Mumsnet, became known as the “Gender Critical” movement and it has become quite influential in the UK — JK Rowling is a prominent “gender critical” advocate — and began to spread over into the United States.

A suspicious eye towards transness from the bourgeois media in the U.S. is not a particularly new phenomenon but it took on an increased visibility when, in the midst of anti-trans offensive’s harshest phases, the New York Times began to publish several articles which cast doubt on trans youth’s identities. These articles were directed towards the Times’ readership — which is to say, largely, middle-class liberal readers — and sought to give them a “scientific” or “rational” basis for their “gender skepticism.”

This spoke to a shift in the Democratic Party base against trans issues, especially among middle-class parents in the suburbs who the Democrats definitely didn’t want to push away. So, rather than defend trans rights, the Democrats largely dropped it for more popular issues like abortion. Now, as the Republicans make hay out of painting Harris and the Democrats as big supporters of trans people, the Democratic response can basically be summed up in Harris’s comments: they’ll follow (anti-trans) laws.

As all this has been happening, the major LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — who are linked to the Democrats — have largely been sitting on their hands. A demonstration may be organized on the local level but there have been essentially no moves to build a national movement for trans rights during the offensive. Rather, they fostered illusions that the courts would protect us and that we should continue supporting the Democrats. Relying on the courts is a dangerous strategy because we’ve seen time and time again, especially with the current hard-right Supreme Court, that these institutions will not protect us. History shows that we win our rights through class struggle. As we wait for the Supreme Court to hear a case on the legality of banning gender affirming care for minors, we should be clear that we cannot put any faith in them. We need to build a movement to defend our rights in the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools.

Unions, especially those representing education and healthcare workers, need to stand up and take part in this fight for our rights. These attacks, in addition to attacking a community with strong links to both of these sectors, limit the ability of education and healthcare workers to actually do their jobs. The tremendous power that these unions hold need to be turned against these laws and we must fight with all the methods of the working class — work protests, sickouts, and walkouts — to overturn these reactionary, draconian laws. In this, we also need to start building student and worker unity so that student organizations like Gay-Straight Alliances fight alongside teachers and their union. Further, these unions can play a vital role in helping shift the discourse around trans rights. Education unions could host spaces where parents could come and learn about trans issues. Healthcare unions could hold meetings on how best to care for your trans child, and what to expect from medical transition in all its diversity. Workers and the trans community must lock arms and fight this struggle together.

It would be disingenuous to say or imply that Harris and Trump are equals on trans issues — clearly, Trump is far worse. But we should expect more from our representatives than the promise to not make things worse. The situation for trans people in much of the U.S. is dire, and the way to reverse that is through a concerted civil rights movement on the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools that demands the repeal of all anti-trans laws and free gender affirming care for all who want it. We won’t win this from Harris or the Democrats, we’ll win it with our united power.



Sybil Davis
Sybil is a trans activist, artist, and education worker in New York City.

 

Israel Is Hitting A Wall In Lebanon. 

What Is Its Endgame?

Israel’s military campaign in southern Lebanon is failing. As Israel runs out of options, the U.S. is scrambling for a way out of the Lebanese quagmire — including by reviving hopes for a Gaza ceasefire.

By Qassam Muaddi

November 4, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss

People carry their luggage as they cross on foot into Syria through a crater caused by an Israeli air strike to cut the road between the Lebanese and the Syrian checkpoints, at the Masnaa crossing, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, October 4, 2024

“Not every objective can be achieved through military means.” Those were the words of Israeli war minister Yoav Gallant on October 28, commenting on Israel’s war on Lebanon. “Painful compromises will have to be made,” he said.

Gallant’s comments came amid Israeli reports of a possible deal to end the war in Lebanon drafted by U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein. However, on Wednesday, the newly elected Secretary General of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, said in his inauguration speech that talks about a potential deal were “noise without results.” Qassem insisted that Hezbollah’s position is to have a ceasefire first, and then negotiate the details of a lasting agreement.

Nearly a month ago, Gallant’s rhetoric was different. The war minister took pride that Israel had, in his words, “destroyed most of Hezbollah’s infrastructure,” pledging not to stop the war until the Lebanese resistance group’s “full destruction.”

At the time, Israel had assassinated several top-ranking military and political leaders in Hezbollah, including its iconic Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah, in the wake of the exploding pager and electronics attacks in mid-September. Israel was at the height of its euphoria, which gave it the confidence to escalate its attacks and launch a ground invasion. Even ten days ago, Gallant was saying that Israel had moved from “the phase of defeating Hezbollah to the phase of destroying it.” But Gallant’s tone would shift in a matter of days.

What happened in the interim was that Hezbollah regrouped and redoubled its military efforts in repelling the Israeli onslaught. Instead of collapsing after the assassination of its entire top military echelon, rocket fire from Lebanon increased in intensity and destructive capacity, challenging Israeli claims that the majority of Hezbollah’s arsenal had been destroyed or disabled. Haifa came under fire, as well as Akka and the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence in Caesarea was also struck by a drone while he was absent from his house.

Israel started its ground invasion of Lebanon in the first week of October, officially aiming to clear southern Lebanon of Hezbollah’s presence and create a buffer zone that might extend up to the Litani River. Weeks passed with combat barely advancing past those same areas, mostly centering around the villages of Idaiseh and Kufr Kila in the south’s eastern block, the villages of Yaroun, Rmeish, and Aita al-Sha’ab in the central block, and the villages of Ramia, Marwahin, Deheira, and Naqoura in the western block. It was in the western block where Israeli forces first tried to take cover from Hezbollah’s fire behind the international peace-keeping forces and later opened fire at them.

Although Israel carpet-bombed several Lebanese border villages and towns and even reached several military tunnels near the border, its soldiers continued to come under fire and sustain heavy losses on both sides of the blue line. Earlier this week, the Israeli army admitted to the death of 15 soldiers, including officers, and the wounding of 60 others within 48 hours. Hezbollah, for its part, claims that its guerrillas have killed no less than 90 Israeli soldiers and officers while wounding over 600 since the beginning of Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

Into the quagmire

What Israeli military officials have begun to understand, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, is that the operations in Lebanon have exhausted their objectives. Prolonging them will only result in more casualties.

In the face of this seemingly immobile situation, some voices in the Israeli military have begun pressure to reach a “political agreement” to avoid ending the Lebanon offensive with nothing to show for it — a repeat of the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

This is the crucial context within which to understand U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein’s comments on Thursday. The former Israeli soldier-turned-U.S. diplomat told the Lebanese state that it shouldn’t allow Hezbollah to tie Lebanon’s fate to “other conflicts in the region” — referencing Hezbollah’s insistence on maintaining a “support front” for Gaza until Israel halts its genocidal war. 

Right before Hochstein’s arrival, Israel had given the U.S. a document stating its conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon. It included allowing Israel to operate freely in Lebanese territory and airspace at any point in the future. 

The Lebanese government, represented by Prime Minister Najib Miqati and the Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri (who Hezbollah delegated to negotiate in its name), rejected the proposal.

Ahead of Hochstein’s current visit to the region, Israeli media reported on the potential deal that would lead to the cessation of hostilities. According to Axios, the proposal was based on an amended version of UN Resolution 1701, which ended Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon. The proposal, according to Axios, stipulated that there would be a ceasefire announcement followed by 60 days of a halt in fighting. During that time, Hezbollah would pull back heavy parts of its weaponry north of the Litani, while Israel would gradually withdraw its troops behind the blue line. This would be followed by the deployment of 8,000 troops from the Lebanese army along the border.

The Axios report indicates that the U.S. believes Hezbollah, after being dealt a crippling blow following the assassination of its top leaders, might be persuaded to end its operations against Israel and give up on its support of Gaza. 

This seems to be a general belief among Western allies of Israel. A week ago, Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said during a visit to Beirut that she believed that Israel had “succeeded in significantly weakening” Hezbollah. A few days before visiting Beirut, Baerbock had publicly justified Israel’s bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon “to defend itself.”

Amid this conflicting rhetoric, including the Israeli military’s own admission of its incapability in achieving Israel’s goals through military means, diplomatic moves continue to scramble for a way out of the Lebanese quagmire — including by reviving hopes for a Gaza ceasefire. 

On Sunday, Israel’s Mossad chief arrived in Qatar to meet with the chief of the CIA and the foreign minister of Qatar to discuss the revival of a ceasefire in Gaza. On Wednesday, the spokesperson of Qatar’s foreign ministry, Majed al-Ansari, said that “progress was made” towards a ceasefire in Gaza. Axios reported that CIA’s William Burns was drafting a proposal that would include a month-long ceasefire and the release of eight Israeli captives by Hamas in exchange for Israel’s release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners.

The reported proposal doesn’t address the key issues that led to the failure of previous ceasefire talks, namely Israel’s refusal to leave the occupied Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors and its refusal to definitively end the war. However, the attempt to revive the talks indicates a need to reach an agreement, which would make a permanent agreement with Hezbollah possible.

Responding to Netanyahu’s race against time

Meanwhile, Naim Qassem reaffirmed on Thursday that the movement had rebuilt its command and control structure and that its fighting capacities were intact, repudiating Hochstein’s expectations that Hezbollah is prepared to fold. Hezbollah’s position also increases the difficulty of Netanyahu’s race against time.

For one, the Israeli Prime Minister realizes that his bet to break the Lebanese resistance has failed, and his army is telling him that the time has come for political solutions. In addition, he knows that the upcoming vote in the U.S., regardless of who wins, will free the incoming U.S. administration from electoral calculations to push harder to end the war on both fronts — in Lebanon and in Gaza.

This might explain Gallant’s instructions to Israeli troops in Gaza on Wednesday to exercise “as much military pressure as possible in order to free the hostages.” These instructions have coincided with Israel’s ongoing brutal assault on northern Gaza, as Israeli forces rush to complete the destruction of all foundations of life in Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun, with the aim of expelling as many Palestinians as possible.

A month after Israel began its offensive on Lebanon, Netanyahu stood before the UN and claimed to be bringing about “a new Middle East.” The prospects of ending the war and the year-long Israeli onslaught across the region may result in a new Middle East, but it will look very similar to the old one. The only difference will be over 43,000 dead bodies, piles of ruins, and the collapse of the “rules-based international order.”

How Devaluing Palestinian Lives Became a Western Obsession

Openly racist attitudes to the Palestinian people are pervasive in the Euro-American political mainstream, from the liberal center to the far right. This form of bigotry is a gateway through which old-fashioned colonial racism can gain new legitimacy.

By Daniel Finn

November 4, 2024

Source: Jacobin
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Some of at least 40,000 Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks.



In 2021, Peter Beinart wrote an article for Jewish Currents that noted that the term “anti-Palestinian” never featured in US political debate. As Beinart pointed out, this was “not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous . . . if the concept existed, almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it, except for a tiny minority of renegade progressives who are regularly denounced as antisemites.”

The events of the last year have shown us how right Beinart was. If anything, he greatly understated the extent of the problem. Not only is anti-Palestinian racism ubiquitous — it is the most virulent and pervasive form of racism to be found in the Euro-American political mainstream, the one that can be expressed most blatantly, with the least stigma attached to it. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Viktor Orbán can all shelter under the same capacious umbrella, united by the belief that Palestinian lives are worth less than those of Israelis or the citizens of Western countries.

At first glance, the depth and breadth of such prejudice seems hard to explain. We are not talking about a relatively large and visible immigrant community, like Mexicans and their descendants in the United States, or Turks and their descendants in Germany. Nor is it a straightforward legacy of empire: Britain is the only Western country to have ruled over the Palestinians directly in modern times, and even there, the Mandate period has not left the same imprint on popular memory as the experience of colonizing Algeria has left in France, for example.

Hostility to Palestinians is clearly the flip side of a strong attachment to Israel on the part of Euro-American power elites. That attachment is not simply a question of hardheaded strategic calculations about the value of Israel as a Western ally in one of the world’s most important regions. It also reflects the ideological utility of Israel as the source of an immensely powerful discursive weapon, one that allows those who wield it to present racism as anti-racism and vice versa.

By drawing up a clearer picture of anti-Palestinian bigotry — what it is and how it works — we can develop a better understanding of some of the most harmful tendencies in global politics today.
Westernity

Soon after Israel began its onslaught against the people of Gaza, with thousands of civilians already dead, the Israeli tech firm Wix sacked a woman who was employed in its Irish office. Courtney Carey had described Israel in a social media post as a “terrorist state” that was engaged in “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza. The company subsequently had to pay Carey €35,000 in compensation for unfair dismissal.

It soon became clear that Wix had no objection as such to political advocacy from its employees. In fact, managers had specifically encouraged Wix staff to “support Israel’s narrative” on social media. The internal memo explained how important it was to “show Westernity” and exploit the fact that “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans and Americans.” This was all the more vital since “the number of deaths and bombings in Gaza will be significantly higher” than those suffered by Israelis on October 7.

The term “Westernity” is one of the keys to anti-Palestinian racism, which is part of a much wider antipathy toward people from the postcolonial Global South. We can see this form of prejudice on display in every rancorous debate about strengthening borders to keep out immigrants, whether the border in question runs along the Rio Grande or through the Mediterranean. The subtitle of Niall Ferguson’s triumphalist potboiler Civilization divided the world into two categories, “the West and the Rest,” and the champions of “Westernity” are determined to keep that line of demarcation in place.

This prejudice certainly overlaps with the idea of white supremacy, but it is not identical to it. The cause of Western geopolitical chauvinism will happily accept non-white champions, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Suella Braverman, the former British home secretary who incited a mob of fascists to attack those demonstrating against the carnage in Gaza. What matters is their commitment to uphold the present-day inequalities of the world system.

The alternative to blaming the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for their own poverty and slamming the door aggressively in their faces is a clear-sighted acknowledgment of the West’s malign impact upon the Rest. This story does not end with the legacies of slavery and colonialism. It carries on through countless forms of interference during and after the Cold War, from the organization of coups to full-scale invasions, not to mention the imposition of structural adjustment programs by Western-dominated bodies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Today the carbon emissions that the West has been generating for the past two centuries are transforming the Earth’s climate, with the heaviest burdens falling upon the countries of the Global South. Naturally, those who have benefited most from this shameful history — descendants of slaveowners, arms companies, fossil fuel giants — are determined to avoid any reckoning, whether that means atoning for the past or transforming the world system to prevent future injustices.

Blaming the victims is far more appealing to them, especially at a time when there is constant pressure for social retrenchment, even in the richest economies of the West. After all, it is much easier for Western politicians to tell their citizens how lucky they are not to live in other parts of the world — while promising new measures to keep out those less fortunate — than it is to promise and deliver tangible improvements in their lives.

“Westernism” is the ideological expression of this preference. Although it comes decked out in cultural garb, it is ultimately a question of political and economic power. If we define the West as a culture or civilization, Mexico is obviously closer to that civilization than Japan, as a predominantly Catholic state where the main language of communication is a European tongue. But Japan qualifies for the US visa waiver program, while Mexico doesn’t, because of their respective places in the global pecking order.
The Spirit of ’92

The poisonous rhetoric that US conservatives direct toward immigrants from Central America shows that Christian heritage is no safeguard against demonization. However, anti-Palestinian racism certainly derives extra strength from the prevalence of Islamophobia and Orientalism in Western public culture. There are two main forms of politicized Islamophobia: a crude version peddled by the ultranationalist right, and a more sophisticated version that reaches much further into the liberal center.

The crude version promotes the idea of a trans-historic clash between the West and its Islamic adversary, both of which it presents as solid, unchanging cultural blocks. This, we are told, is a clash between good and evil, civilization and barbarism, modernity and backwardness. Its form may have altered since the century after the death of Muhammad, but its content remains fundamentally the same.

If you think nobody could actually believe something so flagrantly unhistorical, just consider the remark made by Viktor Orbán in 2015 as he rejected a proposal to admit refugees from the Middle East: “When it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.”

Orbán was referring to the period of Ottoman rule in Hungary. He sees (or claims to see) no meaningful difference between an early-modern invasion force and Muslim immigrants living in European cities today. In similar vein, the French far-right politician Éric Zemmour called his party “Reconquest,” in reference to the wars waged by Christian armies in medieval Spain to roll back, and eventually destroy, the Muslim-ruled area known as Al-Andalus.

This impressionistic line of argument relies upon a sleight-of-hand trick. It exalts supposed “Western values” like democracy, secularism, or the rights of women that clearly had no purchase in the time of Charles Martel or Ferdinand and Isabella, as if they were somehow always part of the Western cultural inheritance.

In reality, of course, these “values” only became hegemonic in Europe and North America (insofar as they are hegemonic at all) over the last couple of centuries, after long, bitter, and still incomplete struggles against the political ancestors of men like Orbán and Zemmour. Accepting the reality that the most important clashes are those that take place within rather than between civilizations would sink the crude version of Islamophobia below the waterline, so its advocates prefer to falsify the historical record.

The term “Judeo-Christian civilization,” another catchphrase of the Euro-American right, also relies upon ignorance of (or indifference to) history on the part of its intended audience. Needless to say, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the centuries has been anything but harmonious, and self-satisfied talk of “Judeo-Christian civilization” glosses over the long record of European antisemitism.

Israeli politicians seem to be very keen to apply this coat of whitewash to their political brethren in the West. When Spain announced its recognition of Palestinian statehood in May 2024, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz launched a bilious attack on Yolanda Díaz, the deputy prime minister in Madrid: “If this ignorant, hate-filled individual wants to understand what radical Islam truly seeks, she should study the 700 years of Islamic rule in Al-Andalus.”

As anyone familiar with Iberian history could tell you, Spanish Jews enjoyed much greater toleration under Muslim rule, and the Catholic monarchs celebrated the final destruction of Al-Andalus in 1492 by ordering the expulsion of Jews from the country. Some of the refugees went to Salonika, which still had a large Jewish population speaking an archaic form of Spanish in the early twentieth century, before another product of Western civilization invaded Greece and began sending them to its death camps.

There is only one way of interpreting the comments made by Katz — he considers 1492 to have been a moment of liberation for the people of Spain. The trauma suffered by Spanish Jews who were forced from their homes at the point of a sword does not concern him in the slightest. This is a message that will go down very well with the right-wing forces in Spain and other Western countries that Katz understandably considers to be his natural allies.
Imperial Evasions

Crude Islamophobia feeds off the more sophisticated version that is standard currency among centrist political forces in Europe and the United States. Adherents of this school of thought will usually deny that they are hostile to Muslims. We can often hear them insisting that Islam is a “religion of peace” and stressing that they only have a problem with “violent extremists.” But they categorically refuse to discuss the destructive record of Western intervention in Muslim-majority states, especially those of the Middle East.

The most concise expression of this viewpoint came in a notorious tweet from David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush, which claimed that the US-led invasion “offered Iraq a better future” before its ungrateful people ruined this high-minded enterprise: “Sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Frum is no doubt well aware that the US occupation forces organized sectarian death squads responsible for gruesome atrocities, but he will carry on blaming Iraqis for the horrors they endured after 2003 until he draws his last breath.

More recently, Hillary Clinton used an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to accuse students protesting against Israel’s genocidal rampage of knowing nothing about history. She specifically reproached the students for not pointing the finger of blame at Yasir Arafat, claiming that her husband Bill would have long since delivered a Palestinian state were it not for Arafat’s unreasonable obstruction during the Camp David talks in 2000.

Robert Malley was part of the US team at Camp David and later served as Barack Obama’s chief negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. A 2001 essay on the failure of the talks by Malley and the Palestinian academic Hussein Agha might as well have been addressed to Clinton and her fatuous claim to superior understanding:


For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit — Arafat — rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.

This denial of Western culpability makes it impossible to explain the rise of political actors generally referred to as “Islamists” or “Islamic fundamentalists” (terms that can obscure as much as they illuminate) in the contemporary Middle East. If we take the case of Iran as an example, the United States and its allies have their fingerprints all over the course of Iranian history since the 1950s, when an Anglo-American coup ousted the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh was a secular nationalist, flanked by the communist Tudeh Party. By the time the US-backed dictatorship of the Shah was overthrown in 1978–79, there was a new force in the Iranian opposition grouped around the leadership of Ruhollah Khomeini that wanted to establish a system based on their interpretation of Shia Islam. Although left-wing and liberal currents were also very much present during the Iranian revolution, it was Khomeini’s faction that was able to take power and suppress its rivals.

We can find variations on this story everywhere from Lebanon to Oman. Western states and their local allies have waged war on secular nationalist and left-wing forces, creating a vacuum that was subsequently filled by varieties of political Islam. In the case of Palestine, as late as the first intifada of the 1980s, the main challenge to Fatah’s leadership of the national movement came from left-wing organizations rather than Hamas, which was only founded in 1987. It was the enervating co-option of Fatah through the Oslo agreements and the marginalization of the Left after the fall of the Soviet Union that made it possible for Hamas to become a serious rival to Fatah.

While these facts are well known to anyone who has studied the history of the Middle East, figures like Hillary Clinton must ignore them because they cannot accept the systematically harmful nature of Western intervention in the region. This means they cannot provide a response to the arguments of crude Islamophobia, which lumps together all forms of political Islam, from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda and ISIS, before presenting them as the true face of Islam.

Tony Blair’s trajectory since 9/11 is a revealing study of liberal Islamophobia steadily losing ground to the cruder version, in this case within Blair’s own head. An academic who was enlisted to give Blair a crash course on Iraqi history before the invasion found him to be “someone with a very shallow mind, who’s not interested in issues other than the personalities of the top people.” As he grappled with the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq, Blair needed an explanation for the problems of the Middle East that would fit comfortably into his puddle of a mind, ideally one that could be summarized in a single word. Since there was no place in his worldview for the term “imperialism,” Islam would have to do instead.

Obama’s understanding of the region, set out at length in his conversations with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic, is more refined in its mode of expression, but ultimately just as superficial and self-serving. At one point, Obama told Goldberg that young people from the Middle East could learn a thing or two from their counterparts in Southeast Asia, who were “not thinking about how to kill Americans.” The fact that the occupation of Vietnam ended when Obama was still a child, while the occupation of Iraq was still ongoing during his presidency, did not feature in his analysis — nor could it have done so, if he wanted to perform his role as manager of the US foreign policy apparatus.
Redefining Antisemitism

Anti-Palestinian racism thus falls within these wider circles of prejudice, but it also has a life and a logic of its own that makes it especially potent. To make sense of this, we have to discuss the concept of the “new antisemitism” that Israel and its supporters have promoted so tirelessly since the beginning of the century. This shift in the focus of pro-Israel advocacy came at a time when Israeli government officials were abandoning the pretense that they would ever allow the formation of a Palestinian state, making it vital to change the terms of discussion.

According to the “new antisemitism” theory, hostility to Jews in the modern world predominantly expresses itself through attitudes toward Israel. It is impossible to respond to this line of argument without being presented with concrete examples of what is supposed to be unacceptable. Nobody is reckless enough to claim that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, so there must be a point at which such criticism becomes illegitimate. The Israeli state and the groups that support it in the West claim the exclusive right to determine where we should draw the line.

Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League in the United States can articulate this theory in the language of modern social justice activism, talking about the right of ethnic minorities to define their own oppression. However, their true goal is to deny one particular group the ability to discuss their own oppression, let alone define it. The history of the Palestinian people for the last century has been inseparable from the history of Israel and Zionism, so every statement about Israel is also a statement about the Palestinians, even (or especially) if it does not mention them at all.

This is one of the key distinguishing features of anti-Palestinian racism. It can certainly take the form of hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and support for the mass killing of Palestinians in the name of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Yet it can also reveal itself through rhetorical jiu-jitsu exercises, branding people as antisemites because they accurately describe what Israel and its Western backers are doing.

The cynical misuse of antisemitism charges to smear Palestinians and those who defend their rights is well known and well documented, so we will limit our survey to a couple of recent instances. On October 6, the Observer, a British liberal newspaper, published a column by the novelist Howard Jacobson. Jacobson claimed that it was a “blood libel” to state that Israeli soldiers were deliberately killing children in Gaza, on a par with the fables used to justify medieval pogroms. In a follow-up interview, Jacobson made it clear that he had no intention of engaging with the evidence — so far as he was concerned, it was inherently antisemitic to accuse Israel of trying to kill children, so the conversation could stop there.

The Observer’s sister paper, the Guardian, published a very different kind of article on October 24. Based on careful reporting rather than reckless innuendo, it showed that the University of Michigan had enlisted the state’s attorney-general, Dana Nessel, to bring criminal charges against Gaza solidarity protesters when local prosecutors were reluctant to do so. As the Guardian’s Tom Perkins explained:


The revelations raise new questions about potential conflicts of interest. Six of eight [university] regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign, and she has personal relationships with some regents. Meanwhile, Nessel received significant campaign donations from pro-Israel state politicians, organizations and university donors who over the last year have vocally criticized Gaza protests, records show.

Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, had previously criticized Nessel, accusing her of singling out the campus protesters for unusually harsh treatment: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.” Tlaib was right, of course, although she erred on the side of generosity by presenting Nessel as a gullible dupe. This no doubt explains why Nessel decided to launch a cynical diversionary campaign, ably assisted by CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, slandering Tlaib as an antisemite.
Return of the Repressed

Jacobson and Nessel did not invent this debating tactic, they merely borrowed it, and we could cite any number of similar outbursts, delivered from the commanding heights of the Western public sphere. The redefinition of antisemitism by Israel and its supporters has created an upside-down world where staunch opponents of racism can be depicted as genocidal bigots while obnoxious demagogues pose as champions of the oppressed. This inversion has proved to be immensely valuable for the two blocs of right-wing and centrist forces that together dominate the political terrain in Europe and North America.

For the Right, the attraction of this mode of discourse is clear. It allows them to revive the crudest forms of bigotry that have been progressively delegitimized by the success of movements against racism and colonialism since the early twentieth century. Before those advances, it was considered perfectly respectable to deride the very notion of human equality.

Just consider a remark made by Winston Churchill about the Palestinian people in 1937 that has become deservedly notorious:


I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.

Churchill deemed it entirely natural for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to supplant those he viewed as inferior beings. This is a more blatant and unvarnished expression of racial prejudice than you will hear from modern-day politicians like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, but Churchill would not have thought twice about delivering it.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a gateway through which old-fashioned Churchillian bigotry can enter the mainstream once again. Right-wing politicians and media commentators show all the signs of exhilaration at being able to use the standard tropes of colonial racism against the Palestinians, depicting them as primitive savages against whom Israel must wage a ruthless war in defense of Western civilization. The British pundit Douglas Murray, smirking and gloating his way through a genocide while publishing lachrymose tributes to the moral integrity of the Waffen SS, is a representative figure.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is another morbid symptom of this regressive tendency. As Adrian Daub has pointed out, it would be quite wrong to speak about German backing for Israel in terms of misplaced historical guilt, when there is far more evidence of glee: “For all the apocalyptic rhetoric, this has been a moment of liberation rather than repression for many German writers and politicians.” Few people have been more gleeful than von der Leyen over the past year. Her stance harmonizes neatly with the growing rapprochement between Europe’s Christian Democratic parties and the far right.

The Euro-American right combines support for mass murder in Gaza with hostility to democratic rights at home. Murray’s champion Suella Braverman and her Tory colleagues have demanded a police clampdown on British protests against the slaughter, which they cynically defame as antisemitic “hate marches.”

In reality, they see the protesters as the most visible manifestation of a treacherous fifth column, comprised of those who consider all human lives to be of equal value. The right-wing effort to present solidarity with Gaza as an exclusively Muslim cause, in Britain and other countries, is a threadbare exercise in projection, designed to conceal their own chauvinism.

The Anti-Palestinian Front

The right-wing bloc would not have the same impact without the complicity of the political center, from the Democratic Party in the United States to the German Greens. The motivation of the centrists is a little more complex than that of their right-wing counterparts. These political actors have made a strictly circumscribed, representational form of anti-racism into part of their brand, regularly deployed at election time to heighten the contrast with their right-wing opponents. At the same time, they are staunchly committed to maintaining the alliances of their respective states with Israel.

With the fig-leaf of notional progress toward a “two-state solution” no longer available to them, amidst the total collapse of Labor Zionism into the arms of its Likudnik rivals, it was becoming increasingly difficult for avowed liberals and social democrats to rationalize their support for Israel without coming clean about their contempt for Palestinians. In this context, the “new antisemitism” discourse came as a blessing to them, and they were delighted to embrace it, since it allowed them to express an objectively racist position with the verbal trappings of anti-racism.

This rhetorical maneuver, which presents meaningful solidarity with the Palestinians as a sinister threat to Jews, also proved to be extremely useful in the fight between centrists and their left-wing challengers. We have seen it deployed again and again over the last decade — against Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and Rashida Tlaib and other left-wing Democrats in the United States. It is much easier to demonize politicians like Corbyn, Mélenchon, and Tlaib with false allegations of antisemitism than it is to openly state the grounds on which centrists deem them unacceptable: namely, their support for popular redistributive policies that would previously have been the common coin of social democracy.

The attacks on the Left and the Palestine solidarity movement would be much less effective if they only came from the Right. Centrist politicians and their media outriders, from CNN to the Guardian, play a crucial role in legitimizing anti-Palestinian racism and punishing those who take a stand against it.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) might have shelled out nearly $30 million to unseat Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, but it would still have been a waste of money if the group could only put MAGA Republicans in the ring against them. Without politicians like Bowman’s challenger George Latimer offering their services, the anti-Palestinian front would be a strong yet minoritarian presence in the United States and other Western countries. In turn, the centrist political establishment is very happy to accept support from the Israel lobby, whether that means campaign donations or a steady supply of bogus talking points with which to condemn the Left.

The idea, recently expressed in the Atlantic, that the Western left suffers from an unhealthy and disproportionate “obsession with Israel” turns reality on its head. It is the forces of the center that have become increasingly obsessed with demonstrating fealty to Israel so they can denounce their left-wing rivals. This has been one of the defining themes for Starmer’s leadership of the British Labour Party.

In France, it was center-left figurehead Raphaël Glucksmann who broke up an alliance with La France Insoumise (LFI) last autumn because he didn’t like Mélenchon’s views on Palestine. The Nouveau Front Populaire that bested the far right in this summer’s French parliamentary election had to be cobbled together at short notice because of Glucksmann’s divisive, sectarian gambit — one that he would dearly like to repeat in the near future.
Knocking on the Doors

As with the two varieties of Islamophobia, the centrist version of anti-Palestinian racism has a built-in tendency to drift further and further to the right, growing ever shriller in its stigmatization of those who will not accept that Palestinian lives don’t matter. This puts centrist politicians out of step with their electoral base.

In the United States, Democratic voters are much less sympathetic to Israel than their Republican counterparts, and the same distinction holds true for Labour and Conservative supporters in Britain. The Biden administration has sought to conceal its ongoing support for mass killing in Gaza behind a Potemkin facade of cease-fire talks, but there is a limit to how long you can maintain such deceptions. Under these circumstances, Western power elites are more likely to escalate repression than they are to respond to pressure from below.

Punitive measures against Palestine solidarity have coincided with a wider crackdown on climate activism. Right-wing political actors and their centrist enablers despise those involved in such work for much the same reason that the apartheid regime in South Africa detested and harassed white members of the African National Congress. They are affirming the basic humanism that most people in the West still subscribe to, judging by the polls that show how limited support for Israel’s genocidal massacre actually is, once we get beyond the stifling conformism of political and media elites.

The Colombian president Gustavo Petro has repeatedly noted the connection between slaughter in Gaza and the worsening climate crisis. At last December’s COP28 summit, Petro reminded his listeners that maintaining or expanding the current level of carbon emissions would inevitably lead to climate breakdown, forcing millions or even billions of refugees to flee the worst affected regions:


This immense exodus will evoke a response in the North. We can already see it in the anti-immigration policies of rich countries and the rise of the extreme right within them. Hitler is knocking on the doors of European and American middle-class homes, and many of them have already let him come in. The exodus will be responded to with tremendous violence and with the same barbarism we are seeing in Gaza, which is the rehearsal of the future.

Petro’s nightmare is Benjamin Netanyahu’s dream. Over the last year, opponents of Netanyahu’s butchery have repeatedly invoked the judgement of history, telling his accomplices and apologists that they will be remembered in the same light as those who once carried water for apartheid. Netanyahu is making a very different calculation: he clearly hopes that the global egalitarian tide is going out, having reached its high point with the liberation of South Africa, giving way to a new era in which the unequal valuation of human life can be defended without any euphemisms, just as it was during the heyday of European imperialism.

From the current standpoint, it would be foolhardy to predict which of these two scenarios is more likely to be realized. There was a time when it seemed like apartheid in South Africa would never end; there was a time when it seemed like apartheid in the West Bank would never last for as long as it now has, with no apparent end in sight. But we should be absolutely clear about what is at stake, and how disastrous it will be for humanity if Netanyahu’s vision comes to pass.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

Vote to End the Nuclear Threat

By Leah Yananton

November 4, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Much of significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.

This is what nightmares are made of – between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, and turn North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana into apocalyptic targets, but they put all life on earth in danger.

ICBMs are not viable for national defense. They are a relic of a bygone era, having been invented by Nazi Germany, and their presence only escalates the risk of nuclear accidents or conflicts. A single launch could lead to a nuclear exchange that would annihilate cities, contaminate the environment, and cause irreversible harm to our planet’s ecosystem. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled. I don’t want a nuclear strike or accident to happen. We can change course now, and our first step is to decommission the ICBM program also because it is a staggering financial burden to maintain.

The U.S. plans to spend over $1.2 trillion on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years, which means new, larger nuclear bombs and new, larger ICBMs called Sentinels that will need to be tested. This massive investment in outdated technology diverts critical funds away from humanitarian needs like healthcare, education, and healing climate change— issues that directly impact our quality of life, and our children’s future.

I teach 4th and 5th graders Creative Writing. I adore children’s imaginations, but when my students were given the assignment to write about something important to them, they wrote lines that broke my heart. This is a wake-up call for us adults to face the reality we have made for our children.

“Such a shame, a perfectly good planet, trashed.” Claire, age 9.

“What would you think about no nature in the world? No trees, no butterflies, no birds or bunnies at all! Most important of all, no people. There would be no technology, no schools, no history, no entertainment; everything we have worked for would be wasted. What would you think about a beautiful world that basically had nothing? I think I would absolutely hate it,” Brynn, age 9.

Other than destruction caused by industrial global warming and by war, which the children are all-too aware of, this child does not know what actually could turn nature and civilization to nothing in a matter of minutes; she doesn’t know about “nuclear winter” or how vulnerable we are to a nuclear accident. Most people don’t.

The claim is that nuclear weapons are deterrents, but it is diplomacy that creates alliances and peace. Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.

As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted. By decommissioning ICBMs, the U.S. could lead the world in reducing the nuclear threat and encourage other nations to do the same. For the sake of our health, environment, and the safety of future generations, it’s time to scrap the ICBM program. We owe it to our children to invest in a future that prioritizes peace and sustainability over destruction.

As it is we the people who possess the right of self-determination, we must confront the material reality of our homeland and face what it will take to protect it. Do we have the courage to change our country for the better and ensure our futures? If so, now is the time to take action.

“Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress,” said Daniel Ellsberg, U.S. military analyst, economist, and author of “The Doomsday Machine.”

For more on this explosive issue, and to get involved, visit the Defuse Nuclear War site.

May we cancel this nightmare weapons program for once and for all and give our children the security that they deserve.


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Leah Yananton is a teacher, and a filmmaker and writer, with attention on biosphere dynamics, human connection, indigenous stewardship, nuclear disarmament, and the peace economy.