It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
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.
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.
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 muchlesssympathetic 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 pollsthat showhow limitedsupport 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.
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.
Prison Abolitionists Could Score Wins on Election Day, Despite Electoral Ambivalence
Prison abolition itself won’t be on the ballot, but organizers are pushing demands that could change the lives of thousands if adopted by referendum voters or victorious candidates.
Policing and prison abolition policy questions have been minimized in the lead-up to the 2024 November election, despite their significance in the last election cycle. Yet these ideas have finally pierced into mainstream debate, and committed prison abolitionists are tirelessly organizing to free incarcerated people, improve conditions within the prison system, and close or prevent the opening of new correctional facilities. Rattling the Bars looks back on the past year of discussions with abolitionists on the stakes and political lessons leading up to November’s presidential election.
Transcript
Mansa Musa: On Tuesday, this country will be holding elections for the presidency as well as other national, state, and local elections. Nationwide the cry is that the election for presidency is the most important election this nation will be having.
Rattling the Bars and The Real News have been focusing on the impact the elections will have on the prison-industrial complex. More importantly, how does the abolition movement look at the electoral system? What role does it play in the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex? You can hear the views of abolitionists from previously recorded interviews.
Back in May, we covered the Free Her March, where formerly incarcerated women were calling for clemency for 100 women:
Mansa Musa: Okay. We got the Bronx with us today. Why are you here today?
Star: Because we’re here to petition the President, and everybody else on his team, to grant clemency to Michelle West and all the other women who deserve it.
Speaker 8: He told us when we was here four years ago that he was going to free 100 women within 100 days of him being in office. And he has not done any of what he said he was going to do. So we’re here today asking for him to free our women, and free them now.
Star: We are tired of giving the Democrats what they want, and they don’t give us what we need.
Speaker 3: So what do we want?
Star: We want freedom for all women and girls. We want rehabilitation, and alternatives to incarceration.
Speaker 9: We want Michelle West Free!
Miquelle West: I’m Miquelle West, Michelle West’s daughter. My mom was incarcerated when I was ten years old for a drug conspiracy case. She’s serving two life sentences and 15 years.
Speaker 9: I represent the women that want to be free. Let our women be free. Let our women out of [inaudible].
Group: Cut it down!
Speaker 10: [Inaudible].
Group: Cut it down!
Speaker 10: [Inaudible]
Speaker 11: Stop criminalizing us for poverty, stop criminalizing us for how we cope from this trauma that has been put on us historically and continues into this present day. Free my sisters.
Speaker 12: The women get treated badly. The women get raped in jail. All kinds of things. I served federal time, and I know what it’s like to be in there. And I say free women today.
Andrea James: We told them to free those women, and they didn’t do it. They’re sending them to other prisons that, guess what, also are raping our sisters inside of the federal system. So we’ve got a lot of work to do, people.
Laura Whitehorn: The response is to move all the women at once, all of a sudden to just throw them out into places all over the country with no preparation, no bathroom facilities. They’re being, as one of them said, the men who raped them, should, and are, going to prison. And the women are being punished now because they’re saying that the BOP, which can’t control their own staff, has to close the prison because they can’t manage it. And they take the women.
I’ve been walking with different friends of mine who were in Dublin with me. It was not a low-security place at that point. And we’re all having flashbacks of what it was to be transferred in that way, where you’re treated like a sack of laundry, except that you’re chained up. You’re chained at the waist. You can’t use the bathroom for hours, you get no food. They sat on a bus for five hours in the parking lot of the prison.
And then at the end of five hours, they were taken back into the prison. They said, oh, we don’t know where to take you. So the way that they’re being treated and then their families… Some people have children and their families are in the Bay Area. So the children were able to visit their moms in the prison, and now the moms have been sent across the country.
Mansa Musa: All this is the remedy for their abusive behavior. The remedy for their abusive behavior becomes more abusive.
Mansa Musa: Hear Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for incarcerated Women and Girls and Families for Justice as Healing:
Andrea James: We were incarcerated in the federal system. We were in prison with sisters who are never coming home unless their sentences are commuted. So it’s kind of different when you determine what space you’re going to work out of when you haven’t had the full experience of what we’re talking about here.
But if you were like us, if you were women that were incarcerated in the federal system, who were mothers, who were wives, who were aunties, and grandmothers, and sisters, and moms in particular, we have been separated from our children. But some of us had the opportunity to go to prison and come home. So we’re fighting for sisters that, unless we get clemency for them, they’ll never come home.
And we’ve got to really understand that. We’re talking about the liberation of our people, and we want to bring attention to the intentionality of incarceration of our people and the policies that led up to that.
Now, we started our work after, we started organizing in the federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut, in 2010, and brought the work-out with us starting in 2011. And then other sisters inside Justine Moore, Virginia Douglas, Big Shay, they started to come home. So it wasn’t rocket science for us, but in the federal prison, you would see this from all over the country, sometimes from different Black communities around the world. And so it wasn’t rocket science for us to stop this work.
But we started in the prison realizing not really totally clear about what clemency was as a tool. But after coming home in 2011, that became crystal clear to us. We met Amy Povah at CAN-DO Clemency. She taught us a lot about clemency as a tool.
And then of course, President Obama, who we got in front of and who centered women and brought us to the White House. But also we should not be going backwards from what President Obama did with clemency.
Mansa Musa: Okay, let’s pick up on right there because… Now, for the benefit of our audience, clemency is a federal mandate, and it’s top heavy in its bureaucracy. Honest you know —
Andrea James: It’s a tool, it’s a privilege bestowed upon. It’s not a mandate, it’s a tool. It’s bestowed upon the president of the United States to grant relief to people from their sentences. And that takes many forms. It could be freedom, immediate freedom, commuting your sentence, meaning it only stops the sentence that you are serving from within a carceral place, a prison.
We decided at some point you can only go so far with what’s happening in Congress right now, who’s controlling Congress, what they’re paying attention to. We fought so hard against the passage of the First Step Act, the way it was presented, because it’s been a big smoke screen.
And we knew when Congress passed First Step that it really wasn’t what we needed. It didn’t address the people who needed to get out. It called out the very people that needed the most relief, and so how could we ever support a bill like that? And we never crossed over in support of it, even though we fought valiantly to try and add retroactivity and other things to the first step.
And then it was put into the hands of the most vile regime, a think tank called the Heritage Foundation, also responsible now for Project 2025, to implement the First Step Act.
And it’s just, we are one of the few, I don’t know if any other organizations have done it, but our legal division, led by our senior council, Catherine Sevcenko, has followed the implementation of the First Step Act. And it’s been just a sham. It’s been a [inaudible], but the PR on it would make anybody think that everybody who’s come, like 30,000 people got released because of the First Step Act. That’s not true. But I digress.
So when we talk about the FIX [Clemency] Act, at some point, yes, we have to weigh in. We need legislators who are directly affected, like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, to carry these bills forward for us and to at least put them into existence, knowing that we got a big struggle to get them to go anywhere because the members of Congress were satisfied with the First Step Act.
As abysmal as it is, they weren’t going to center criminal justice reform in any significant way following that for years, we knew that. That’s the path of how things go. We haven’t heard a peep about criminal justice reform other than Trump wanting to bring the death penalty back for drug dealers. We haven’t even heard. It’s not even on the current candidates’ platforms.
And so we had to shift our energy to, and it’s not really a shift, it’s just, what are we picking up now to be present and to make sure that the concept of liberation of our people isn’t left to hope somebody’s going to keep it at the forefront? That’s our job. Nobody’s coming to save us. If nobody gives a shit about our issue, if you’re going to do this work, you have to be consistent in finding ways of staying in the public eye, of showing up, of taking up space, of getting in the street.
And so that’s what we did with the 10th anniversary. We did this 10 years ago in 2014, and that’s how we got the attention, because of the work of Civil Rights lawyer Nkechi Taifa, who brought the National Council and the sisterhood to the attention of President Obama and Valerie Jarrett to say, yo, Prez, we see you. We see you equating. We see you connecting clemency to racial justice. That clemency is racial justice. We see you going into the federal prisons. How could it be that he was the first president of the United States to go to visit a federal prison? How could that be?
Mansa Musa: In August, The Real News’s editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez and I talked to David Schultz, a criminal reform and social justice advocate, about how poor and working-class voters navigate an electoral system that doesn’t serve them:
Maximillian Alvarez: So I wanted to ask, as two guys on the front lines of that struggle, what do you think the pundit class covering the elections in mainstream media should learn about the conversations that y’all are having and that folks in these communities are having about the election right now?
David Schultz: Okay, yeah. So I’ll start with that one. So I would say it’s important for individuals. I think being in Washington DC obviously puts us in a unique position because we’re obviously a very political city. I guess it’s different when I go to different areas, different cities. I was just traveling recently, I was in Chicago, and of course it was very political there because we’re getting ready to have the Democratic and national convention. But usually it’s not.
So that puts us in a unique perspective to see how politics really affect our everyday lives. I think you’re a hundred percent correct. I think that individuals that are from smaller, more rural areas really want to see and are more concerned with that direct impact. And so elections for them seem like this far away thing. It’s like they drop something in a box, and if they’re the person they like personality wise really, or who agrees with them on more things than the other, then that’s who they go for.
But they don’t really do their research on the candidates as well as they should to see, really, are they living up to what they’re saying? Are they voting this way even though they’re saying they might be voting this way?
And so I think that it’s important for the pundits, so to speak, to really listen to grassroots individuals because we are the ones that matter. We are the people that they say in the Constitution. We are the ones that make everything one. We’re the working class. So at the end of the day, our vote matters, and they want our vote. So I think it’s imperative that they listen to what our needs and specific asks are.
Mansa Musa: I think on the grassroots, when you’re dealing with a grassroots level, it’s imperative that we educate the people that’s affected because, like you say, people want jobs. People want quality education. People want a safe living environment. People want food quality, cheap food, as far as food prices being so high. People want rent control. They don’t want to be living in squalor and then paying astronomical fees to live there.
So it’s important that we educate… When you’re dealing with the grassroots, it’s important that you educate the population to understand that you have to find a candidate that’s going to represent your interest.
When the Black Panther Party bring Bobby Seale for mayor, they wasn’t running Bobby Seale for mayor to try to get Bobby Seale to be the mayor. They was educating people about how, like Dave said earlier, where the monies come from, how the monies are allocated, and how you can have a voice in monies being allocated to your neighborhood, to clean up your neighborhood, to have the trash collected. How monies could be allocated towards medical or universal healthcare for everyone.
So when I look at it from the grassroots level, I’m always in my mind… My mind is always in this area, educating the people about the electoral process, educating the people about, okay, if you get involved with this process, then make sure you have a candidate that’s going to represent your interest because the candidate is going to come and say what they think you want to hear. They’re going to put on all kinds of activities to motivate your interest.
But when it does settle and they leave, trash hasn’t been collected. It’s high unemployment rate in your neighborhood, housing, you live in squalor. You’re not safe, and your children being targeted because you’re not safe.
So when I look at it from the perspective, I look at it from a perspective that it is incoming from me and people that’s in that space to educate the people on the budget, educate the people on the electoral process, educate the people on how to go about vetting accounts.
Like you say, candidates have listening sessions. So when a candidate have a listening session, then it’s coming from people like myself and Dave to get people to come down there and educate the electorate, ask questions about, OK. Because if you don’t do what we say you supposed to do, same way we elected you in, we can get the recall and get you out.
David Schultz: Can I just add one quick thing? Can I just say, from a grassroots level, to answer your other question is what the individuals are saying is the basic needs is what they’re struggling with when it comes to housing and especially affordable housing, it doesn’t matter if you’re a returning citizen, if you’re just a working-class individual, that basic need is a struggle that, basically, grassroots individuals are really looking to have fixed this election cycle, and the basic necessity of being able to keep food on their table and be able to feed their kids.
So I know it sounds basic, but that’s what I’ve been hearing a lot of in the community and what they are really focusing on this election cycle.
Mansa Musa: And we recently sat down with Jeronimo Aguilar and John Cannon to talk about Prop. 6 initiative to have removed from California State Constitution its version of the 13th Amendment legalizing slavery:
Mansa Musa: I want you to give us a history lesson on how the code that came to exist that’s legalized slavery in California. Because you made an interesting observation before, and we was talking about it again, how we got this perception of California as being the big Hollywood, Rolls Royce.
Jeronimo Aguilar: Yeah, thank you, Mansa. Yeah, no, you’re right, man. We got this idea of what California is. Not only the palm trees and the Rolls Royce, and it’s always sunny, but also that we’re soft on crime, and that criminals are out able to just do whatever they want out here, and there’s no law and order, and all that kind of stuff.
The reality is, the prison-industrial complex out here is as crooked and oppressive as it is in any state of the union. And so, when you talk about especially this exception clause, and specifically here in California, it’s the exception to involuntary servitude. But like we say, as you can see on my background there, one of our main messaging points is that involuntary servitude is slavery.
Mansa Musa: That’s right.
Jeronimo Aguilar: So, they try to lessen it or give it a fancy name, but the reality is the practice is the same thing, of subjugating human beings to work against their will.
So, when you talk about involuntary servitude in California, the history, like you mentioned, it goes all the way back to when California became a state. So, back in 1849. Remember, this territory here was territory of Mexico up until then. You had the expansionist, I wouldn’t even really call it a war, but an assault on Mexico in 1848, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
That treaty was not honored. Or like most of the treaties that the US [inaudible] with folks of Indigenous ancestry, them treaties were nothing but opportunities for the forked tongue, as they say, to get what they want.
And so, what happened is the land was taken, and Indigenous folks, Indigenous mixed with Spanish folks, became immigrants overnight. And with that said, what you started seeing was the first Constitution of California in 1849 has that exception clause that we see today. It says that involuntary servitude is prohibited except for punishment for a crime. It’s not that exact wording, but it’s the same exact practice.
And so, that set things up. That set the stage for 1850, you started seeing this. So, this is the year right after it became a state and the constitution was introduced. You see the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.
And again, the forked tongue. The way that they named the act, you would think, oh, they’re protecting Indians, when in fact, it was a vagrancy law that they used to criminalize Indigenous people, and subsequently enslave them under the exceptions to involuntary servitude.
And so, I want to add to that. Indigenous peoples were already being enslaved by the Spanish colonial powers. We’ll talk about the mission system. So, the Southwest and California, a lot of it was already built by the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.
When you talk about colonization, and once the Spanish came and that era of terror, and then Mexico getting its independence, and you’ve seen Mexico actually outlaw slavery for a period of time while that practice of servitude was brought back once the US took the land from Mexico.
And so, like I said, from 1849 on, up until now, you’ve seen the consistent criminalization of Indigenous, Brown folks, later, obviously, our African brothers and sisters that were enslaved and brought to this continent, and also that ended up migrating, trying to find free states, trying to find places where they can actually be free from the subjugation of slavery, only to find the same kind of practices happening over here in the Southwest.
And so, following that 1850 Act of Government and Protection of Indians, which actually turned what’s now the LA Federal Courthouse, was a vibrant slave auction. Based on that law, you saw acts like the Greaser Act, which passed in 1855. It’s another vagrancy law. If you look at the actual statute, the statute reads, “Dealing with the issue of those of Spanish and Indian blood.” And so really, you’re talking about folks like me. Chicanos, Mexicans, those that are of Spanish or Latino and Indigenous ancestry.
And I think the point, and the benefit for our audience, I think you well represented the case to how they codified laws —
Jeronimo Aguilar: That’s right.
Mansa Musa: …To make sure that this exception clause could be enacted under any and all circumstances.
John, so now we’re at a place where in terms of y’all organized around the abolishment of slavery, the legal form of slavery as we know it now. Talk about y’all Proposition 6, John.
John Cannon: So, Proposition 6 would actually be reversing Article 1, Section 6 of the California Constitution, which is basically just like the 13th Amendment of the United States.
So, Proposition 6, what it would do right now is give a person autonomy over their own body, give a person choice whether they want to work or not. Because as it is now, you have no choice whether to work or not. So, Proposition 6, it would prioritize rehabilitation over forced labor.
So, what that will look like is, right now as it stands, if you’re inside and you’re working, they assign you a job automatically. And whether you want to do college courses or rehabilitative courses or anything else, you’re not able to, because you’re assigned a job. You don’t get to pick the job. You don’t get to choose if you want a job. If you’re assigned the job, you have to do it.
So, if you did want to, say, take an anger management course, or seek anything to rehabilitate yourself, and that aligns at the same time as your job, you’ll have to go to that job or you’ll be punished for refusing to work.
Whether you have a death in the family, you have to go to work, or you’ll be punished for refusing. And all these cases happened to me while I was incarcerated, and you’re getting punished for refusing to work. You’re losing days off your sentence, you’re losing phone time, you’re losing all type of things if you refuse to work. So, Prop 6 would actually give a person their own choice over their own body, over their own rehabilitation.
Mansa Musa: how do y’all address, or how will y’all address… We know Proposition 6 coming to effect, but we also know that prison has become privatized on multiple levels. The privatization of prison is the food service is private, the commissary is private, the industry is private, the way the clothes is being made. Everybody has got involved in terms of putting themselves in a space where they become a private entity.
How will Proposition 6 address that? Because what’s going to ultimately happen, the slave master ain’t going to give up the slave freely. They’re going to create some type of narrative or create some kind of forceful situation where, oh, if you don’t work, you ain’t going to get no days, and you can come over here and work, and… You see where I’m going there with this?
Jeronimo Aguilar: Yep. Yep.
Mansa Musa: So, did y’all see that? Do y’all see it as a problem? Or have y’all looked at that and be prepared to address it?
Jeronimo Aguilar: No, no doubt, Mansa. I think that this is really the first step for us, because it’s going to be a long road. And those of us that have been incarcerated or have fought against the carceral system, you know that every time you do something, they’re going to figure out a way to retaliate, and to find a way to try to circumvent it, they’re going to try to find a way to basically make whatever you’re doing obsolete so they can continue their practice.
And so on our end, it was a really long and tedious process with the language, but we wanted to make sure was that we weren’t just passing something that was symbolic, that ended up just being, oh, okay. We’re removing some words out of the constitution, we all feel better about ourselves, and people that are incarcerated are going through the same conditions.
Mansa Musa: Yeah. Status quo. Go ahead.
Jeronimo Aguilar: Status quo. Exactly. So, the language in Proposition 6, and what was ACA 8 when we passed it in the legislature to get it on the ballot, actually says that any person that’s incarcerated cannot be punished for refusing a work assignment. Cannot be [crosstalk].
So what that does is, it’s not going to stop CDCR from definitely trying to circumvent things. But what it does is it gives folks a pretty strong legal stance. So, if they do continue to be forced to work and disciplined for refusing to work, they can go to court. And we feel, with the language that we now have in the constitution, which is supposed to be the highest letter of the law, they’re going to have a pretty strong legal stance to stand on when they get to court.
The GOP Playbook for Sabotaging Environmental Regulations
As climate disasters intensify, conservative politicians are systematically undermining the agencies meant to protect us — slashing budgets, firing experts, blocking climate data from informing policy, and weakening enforcement against corporate polluters.
Source: Jacobin Activists call out DC's Public Service Commission for its complicity in climate chaos | Photo by Extinction Rebellion DC
The devastation throughout the southeastern United States in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton has laid bare the importance of strong climate policy, including adaptation and mitigation measures. This is especially true because the sheer extent of the damage in states like North Carolina was preventable, exacerbated knowingly by business-friendly conservative politicians.
As investigative reporting from the Lever revealed, North Carolina regulators put forth a Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan in 2020 that emphasized the threat of climate change, but Republican lawmakers instead passed a bill to remove home sheathing requirements, which could have protected thousands of homes from destruction.
The investigation follows how state Republicans, starting in 2010, stonewalled climate mitigation legislation and weakened the environmental regulations that had made North Carolina a climate leader among Southern states during the 2000s. This phenomenon is not unique to North Carolina, of course. Nor is it new. Across the country and in DC, lawmakers (and Supreme Court justices) in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and other corporate interests have stood in the way of commonsense environmental policy for decades.
The strategy for undermining environmental protections has become predictable: gut agency budgets, push out scientific experts, hobble enforcement teams, and ignore climate data when making policy. The result is exactly what corporate polluters want — free rein to operate while regular people pay the price of worsening climate disasters. An Inside Job
One of the more insidious tactics used by powerful climate denialists is to sabotage the proper function of environmental regulators by depriving them of funds and/or personnel. For example, in North Carolina, one of the first moves of a Republican-led legislature was to slash the budget of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. In the following years, lawmakers would refuse to incorporate the state’s own data and findings in planning decisions.
On the federal level, this approach has plagued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at various points since its inception in 1970. In 1981, Ronald Reagan named Anne Gorsuch (mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as administrator of the EPA despite her having no expertise in environmental affairs. Her role was as a deregulator, along with many of Reagan’s other cabinet appointees, and during her tenure she severely downsized the agency and weakened federal air and water quality standards.
Notably, Gorsuch’s EPA saw a stark decline in enforcement actions against polluters, which reflected her perspective that the enemies were those within her own agency fighting to protect the environment rather than the corporations responsible for polluting it. She eventually was forced to resign in April 1983 after being held in contempt of Congress amid corruption allegations related to mismanagement of the Superfund program, which is responsible for cleaning up abandoned toxic waste sites.
Gorsuch’s tenure as EPA administrator had an ignominious end, but Republican operatives have still emulated her approach — namely, attempting to destroy from within. Donald Trump’s EPA was initially led by one of the agency’s fiercest enemies, Scott Pruitt, who sued it several times as Oklahoma attorney general. It follows that the EPA under Trump explicitly favored industry leaders over scientists and experts, relaxed dozens of key environmental rules, and dramatically underenforced federal environmental laws. Coincidentally, Pruitt also resigned following allegations of ethics violations.
These subversive appointments pose a serious problem. But even greater damage comes from the methodical dismantling of environmental protections that follows — a strategy that Republicans are already planning to escalate in the future. Death By a Thousand Cuts
A second Trump term would almost certainly follow the standard Republican blueprint for shrinking and defanging the EPA. Project 2025 contains an expansive chapter on the EPA, declaring that the EPA under the Biden administration has pursued an “expansive, costly, and economy-destroying agenda” and decrying “activism” and “vendetta-driven enforcement.” The chapter’s nearly thirty pages go into specifics on how to roll back regulations in a range of areas, from air quality to hydrofluorocarbons to radiation. Its author also calls for climate policy to be the domain of individual states, rather than that of the federal regulator.
The concept of minimum federal standards is a bedrock of US climate policy dating back to the foundational environmental laws of the twentieth century, such as the Clean Air Act (1963) and the Clean Water Act (1972). At their core, these laws enable the EPA to enact and enforce regulations across a range of environmental indicators. The EPA also provides guidance to state and tribal authorities that may wish to develop their own standards, as long as they meet the baseline federal criteria.
Given this foundation, the insinuation of conservative ideologues that states should create environmental standards “from the ground up” is a radical departure from decades of norms and legal precedent. It should go without saying that these federal minimum standards are not incredibly restrictive, which is why states elect to create their own environmental regulations. But it is still important that the EPA maintain its baseline standards as well as a watchful eye for violators. When state regulators are vulnerable to elite capture, as the previous example of North Carolina in the 2010s demonstrates, minimum federal standards ensure that polluting industries do not have free rein.
While Republicans lead the charge in undermining environmental protections, corporate influence crosses party lines. Democratic lawmakers have also at times sided with polluting industries — particularly in energy-producing states — by supporting weaker emissions standards or backing fossil fuel projects. Still, it’s Republicans who have led the charge to tear down regulatory power, as we can see clearly in the stark differences between how Trump and Joe Biden have run the EPA.
Past examples of Republican-led sabotage of both state and federal environmental regulators make clear that the goal is not just to weaken or roll back the rules and regulations, but also to reduce the regulators’ enforcement capacity. By cutting budgets and reducing personnel under the guise of bringing wasteful government spending under control, the conservative agenda wishes to render these agencies toothless, unable if not unwilling to investigate and enforce against corporate wrongdoers.
This systematic gutting of our climate policy infrastructure also includes getting rid of scientists who are responsible for the research that informs our environmental standards, whom those on the Right would malign as political activists. The case of North Carolina also demonstrates, however, that even when climate experts share their findings and indicators, policymakers can choose to enact laws specifically excluding those findings from new requirements.
It is clear that Trump and his allies are uninterested in meaningfully addressing climate change and are more inclined to pursue policies that enrich themselves and their corporate cronies. Even the stricter rules and tighter regulations that the Biden administration has succeeded in enacting would only find themselves on the chopping block during a second Trump term.
A healthy, functioning EPA, along with state-level environmental regulating bodies, must be empowered to investigate and enforce against corporate malfeasance. Decades of precedent illustrate that Republican governance of these institutions, however, would only result in the subversion of their intended function — for the benefit of corporate greed, and to the detriment of clean air, climate adaptation, and Americans’ overall standard of living.
