They once were rebels

Ranters, Diggers & mystics who challenged church authority

by Bill Weinberg

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

This potential recently made a media splash when Trump posted to his Truth Social platform an ultra-creepy video entitled “God Made Trump,” portraying a personification of him as Redeemer and Avenger sent by the Almighty. Ralph Reed, founder of the Christian Coalition, is hawking his new book, For God and Country:: The Christian Case For Trump.

Under a restored Trump regime, evangelical Protestantism could play the same role that reactionary Catholicism did in the clerical-fascist regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, Ante Pavelic in Croatia and, to an extent, Benito Mussolini in Italy, in which the state and the ultimate leader are sanctified, labor suppressed, harsh and repressive interpretation of Christian morality made law, and enemies of the state eliminated.

A contemporary example of such a clerical-fascist regime is Putin’s Russia, in which rights for women and sexual non-conformists are being rapidly repealed, even very indirect expressions of disagreement with the regime are severely punished, with the Russian Orthodox Church of Patriarch Kirill, a key propaganda pillar of the aggressive war in Ukraine. The church promotes a narrative of protecting Russian traditional values against Western liberal assault, and is in explicit alliance with the evangelical right in the U.S., despite the denominational gulf.

However, beside the usual role of Christianity functioning as a handmaiden of repressive state authority, heresies have emerged under its rule that have a long history of birthing rebellious groups. They are chronicled by Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in this comprehensive account of rebels, ranters, and millenarians.

In Resistance to Christianity, he traces a chronology from the heresies of the ancient and medieval periods, especially those in the Gnostic tradition that rejected the Church and worldly authority as inherently corrupt, through the millenarian movements that ultimately prefigured the Protestant Reformation, a heresy that succeeded.

A key episode was the German Peasants’ War of 1524, which had a spiritual and millennial aspect in the person of the revolutionary priest Thomas Müntzer. He was a contemporary of Martin Luther, who disavowed Müntzer as being far too radical with his call for expropriation of the aristocracy by the commoners. The peasant army flew a rainbow flag as a symbol of solidarity and hope, but were ultimately defeated by armed forces of the lords.

This spirit was also present in the revolutionary movements of the English Civil War of the 1640s. This period famously saw the Diggers, who in 1649 at St George’s Hill pulled off what the historian George Woodcock called the world’s first anarchist direct action, reclaiming land from the aristocracy for their collective farms, with a vision of the earth as a “common treasury for all.” The Ranters of the same period were fiery mystical anarchists who rejected all worldly authority and Christian morality.

Both the Puritans and the Quakers also came out of this ferment, and have had a significant influence on our side of the Atlantic. The Quakers were deeply involved in slavery abolitionism, aiding escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, and in later struggles for social justice, especially war resistance based on their pacifism.

The more militant abolitionism of the armed insurrectionist John Brown in the 1850s, of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas fame, was steeped in Puritan millenarianism. And, there is a stamp of this a century later in the Baptist and pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., seen in his famous invocation of the Old Testament: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

So, how did this trajectory warp into its opposite?

A turning point can be seen in the late 19th century with the rise of Biblical literalism in reaction to the rise of science, characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scripture.

In the 1890s, the fundamentalist and populist politician William Jennings Bryan was a fighter for small farmers and laborers who sought to abolish the gold standard in the interest of working people. But he was on the wrong side in the 1925 Scopes trial, opposing the teaching of evolution in the schools. Battles still going on today a century later strongly echo such religiously-inspired themes.

The 1920s saw the formal, doctrinal establishment of fundamentalism. But the critical turning point was the weaponizing of the abortion issue by the Republican Party after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, concomitant with the founding of the Moral Majority, comprised of conservative Christian political action committees.

This sealed the pact between the GOP and Protestant fundamentalism, with the fundis abandoning any remnant of economic populism to close ranks with neoliberalism and Reaganomics as the price for mainstreaming of their cultural-conservative agenda.

The surviving millenarian stamp in this new ultra-reactionary and Biblical-literalist form is particularly ominous. In the Book of Revelations, with which evangelicals are so obsessed, the foretold Apocalypse for John the Revelator, writing in the first century CE, was the fall of Rome. Jumping forward a millennium and a half to the English Civil War era, the prophecy was reconceived as overthrow of the aristocracy and lords of property, exemplified by the execution of the king.

For contemporary evangelicals and fundamentalists, the Apocalypse can be seen as a literal rain of fire and brimstone which state rulers now have the power to bring about through modern military weapons technology. The notion of believers in an imminent and literal Apocalypse getting anywhere near the U.S. nuclear arsenal is terrifying.

Despite his supposed love affair with Putin, the blustering, erratic Trump taking power in what is, after Ukraine and Gaza, a world at war, holds unprecedented risk of escalation to the unthinkable despite those sectors of the left who view Trump as the less dangerous candidate because he would be less likely to get into a war with Russia.

Vaneigem’s title, Resistance to Christianity, is in some ways more relevant and in other ways less than the author himself anticipated when he first wrote the book in 1994. Vaneigem ends his story with the 1789 French Revolution, saying that it brought about the “fall of god”—after which liberatory movements no longer had to resort to the vocabulary and iconography of religion. In an afterword for the new English edition, Vaneigem doesn’t really rethink that, seeing the world as moving “beyond religion.” This is, especially at this moment, entirely too optimistic.

On the other hand, secularism isn’t sufficient to resist the MAGA variant of clerical fascism on its own. Resistance is going to have to come, in part at least, from within elements of Christianity, and others who view the struggle in spiritual rather than rationalist terms.

Hopefully, the contradiction will be too blatant for some of those rallying around the obviously irreligious Trump in the name of religion. Some lonely figures have indeed broken ranks, such as Russell Moore, once a top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and now author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America, warning that evangelism is becoming the antithesis of everything it supposedly stands for by embracing MAGA.

There are also pastors in the Black church who are keeping the MLK tradition alive, such as Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, who led the Moral Mondays campaign in that state against the overturn of civil rights protections and imposition of restrictions on abortion rights. And, there are Christians who are risking their freedom to assist desperate migrants in the southern borderlands. These are a reminder that there are other currents in the Christian tradition, broadly defined, than its most reactionary exponents now preparing a bid for total power.

The history chronicled in Vaneigem’s book, as obscure as much of it may seem for contemporary readers, is well worth grappling with at this moment.

Bill Weinberg rants weekly on his podcast CounterVortex.

The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast: Pacifica Radio at 75

Iain Boal

October 4, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

The Exacting Ear, ed. Eleanor McKinney, Pantheon 1966.

At three o’clock on a spring afternoon in 1949, in a sixth floor studio above University Avenue in Berkeley, volunteer sound-proofers, “hammering down the carpet at the last moment”, paused in their work. Lewis Hill stepped to a microphone and in his distinctive baritone announced for the first time: “This is KPFA, listener-sponsored radio in Berkeley.” It was an experiment so unlikely (“Why would anyone subscribe to a station they can hear for free?”) that the scoffers in the local Bay Area press predicted it would be lucky to survive six months.

Seventy five years later, the survival of KPFA, founded by conscientious objectors, poets and pacifists in the aftermath of a catastrophic global war, was celebrated by a flying visit to the Bay Area from Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! which started life in the mid-1990s broadcasting from the Wall Street studios of WBAI, Pacifica’s New York station.

Goodman is a star in the firmament of community radio, and her tribute to Pacifica’s history, in which she has played such a central role for three decades, was warmly applauded by the congregation at the Church of Christ Scientist, Maybeck’s gorgeous architectural masterpiece on the south side of the Berkeley campus. Perhaps the spirit of the occasion forebade mention of the fact that, directly across the street, People’s Park – a landmark both in the history of the city and of KPFA – lies invisible and impenetrable, brutally enclosed by barbed wire and a ring of steel containers planted by the University of California administration bent on erasing both the park and the popular memory of what happened there in the 60s.

The struggle over People’s Park and Pacifica’s own Civil War, triggered by Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 and culminating in the so-called Battle of Berkeley in 1999, are connected through the deep history of settler-colonial dispossession, neoliberal enclosures and now a re-privatization of the liberated common land. The ill-judged revision of the network’s governance in response to the drastic deregulation of the airwaves has left KPFA, and the Pacifica Foundation that owns the station, in deep financial and managerial trouble.

The originating impulse of the Pacifica project, poetically named as a gesture to the founding vision, was to explore through peaceable dialogue the root causes of conflict — between individuals, nations, and belligerent empires. By bringing to the airwaves “informal, intensely personal, uncensored, and free-ranging discussion” – the description is philosopher Erich Fromm’s – together with the finest of the radio arts, the listening community would be equipped with an “exacting ear”, in the happy phrase of Eleanor McKinney, one of the trio of syndicalist founders.

[Image hereabouts]

There is a special intimacy to radio when not used for commercial or state propaganda, understood as the discourse of domination. The tone and rhythm of those first KPFA broadcasts are crucial to understanding the power of “the Pacifica idea” and the enduring loyalty it has evoked in its audience. Recollecting the very early days at the station, another of the founders, the poet and documentarian Richard Moore, expressed it to me this way: “It was our experiment with form that was radical, as much as any content.” Margot Adler, a student at Berkeley in the mid-60s and later host of a phone-in show on Pacifica’s New York station, recalled: “It’s hard to imagine how different it was to hear someone talking honestly — about anything — on the air.”

The bonds forged between the Pacificans and the audience they conjured out of the air was tested after fifteen months, when in the summer of 1950 the money ran out. Lewis Hill’s imagined audience showed up in the flesh at a packed community meeting at the Fellowship Hall in Berkeley, intent on bailing out the sinking vessel. Lewis Hill was never so moved as by that gathering; “We can’t let this die”, he told his confederates. With collective self-salvage in mind, Hill argued in his 1951 manifesto, “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio”, that the KPFA experiment entailed a “two-way responsibility”, a “conscious flow of influences, some creative tension between broadcaster and audience”.

What was “the Pacifica idea”? Firstly, for those at the microphone the freedom of not having “to simulate emotions, intentions and beliefs” was the essence. Hill had not shed a vague sense of ethical corruption from his time as an announcer at a commercial radio station in Washington DC – “the words are familiar, and every sentence is grammatically sound, but the text is gibberish”). “The people who actually do the broadcasting should also be responsible for what and why they broadcast”, insisted Hill the syndicalist. At the other end of the apparatus, for the project to succeed, the listener subscribers demonstrated what he called “a kind of cultural engagement”, amounting to a “mutual stimulus”. Success for Hill would mean the pilot experiment resulting in “a new focus of action or a new shaping influence that can hardly fail to strengthen all of us”. The “us” began for Hill with his personal circle of friends and comrades —the war resisters of the CO camps and the poets, artists and writers in San Francisco’s bohemia — but the aim was also to reach, via the apparatus of radio, the shipyards of Richmond and the neighbourhoods of Oakland.

Hill understood very well that listener-sponsorship could go wrong, if subscribing were reduced, as he said, to a tax write-off, or a response to special gift premiums (“We’ve got hoodies, we’ve got socks, we’ve got water bottles – check it out!”, cajoled one announcer during a recent fund drive on KPFA.) ‘Underwriting’ by big business has led directly to the soporific diet now on offer from NPR. (Is that why they’re constantly advertising mattresses?) The recent decision by Pacifica’s management to take advertisers’ money suggests that it may be time to wind up the experiment. Indeed there might be no option. Some readers of CounterPunch will recall the news that, in December 2022, US marshals seized 305,000 dollars from KPFA’s cash reserves to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by a former interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, the legal owner of the station. Since then there have been staff layoffs and preparations to sell off physical assets. KPFA, the flagship of the five listener-sponsored stations, is now in real danger of sinking along with its owner and the rest of the network, thanks to mismanagement at the national level and the perversely bloated Pacifica governance structure adopted in the wake of the crisis of 1999-2001.

Can the Pacifica network survive? Notoriously, Pacifica thrives in times of emergency. Dan Coughlin, the executive director who guided the network away from the brink of bankruptcy at the millennium, drily quipped: “War is the health of the station”. Pacifica’s fortunes wax and wane according to the rhythms of the US imperium. Margot Adler, host of ‘Hour of the Wolf’ in the 1970s, put it bluntly: “The Vietnam War ended, and we lost half our audience. It was as simple as that. WBAI grew from the blood of the Vietnamese.”

Some veteran activists believe that KPFA remains a viable institution, provided that the station can get out from under the Pacifica Foundation, owner turned parasite — and lately, asset stripper. The business of cutting KPFA free from its incubus will require serious forensic skills, and very likely some real street heat.

In any case a campaign for KPFA’s survival will have to be waged in the current mediascape, including the new (anti-)social media, whose wider context is the political economy of telecommunications in the US. The situation remains fundamentally unchanged since I spoke at a Federal Communications Commission Hearing on Media Ownership, in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which led to a predictable looting of the public airwaves (see “A May Day Message to the FCC”, CounterPunch, April 30th, 2003). I noted that “the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements well understand the lethal connections between the so-called market, concentrated media ownership, and untrammeled militarism.” I still stand by my assertion to the Commission that “the flourishing of life…around the planet, now depends on the reappropriation of the commons, and that includes – because the means of communication without limits is the very condition of possibility of all else – the seizing back of the electromagnetic spectrum, the de-commodification of the airwaves.”

Now, suppose the good ship Pacifica goes under. What would be lost? Above all, a dependable forum for the candid and dissenting dialogics that inspired the original vision, still embodied in a handful of excellent Public Affairs programs the founding trio would recognize – such as Letters and Politics, Against the Grain, and Behind the News. The rhythm and cadence of Against the Grain, for example, is recognisably in a venerable KPFA tradition, and helps to account for its enduring vitality. The interviews are recorded in advance, impeccably edited, and broadcast three days a week at noon. Taking turns at the microphone, and making decisions independently as to topics and guests, the hosts Sasha Lilley and C.S. Soong evince a congenial complementarity in style and emphasis. Soong is inclined to the philosophical and esoteric (the shade of Alan Watts hovers nearby), while Lilley clearly draws on her training in political economy. Questions are always posed in a spirit of open inquiry, with the aim of drawing out, maieutically, the fruits of new scholarship or critique, often focused on a recently published book, essay or article. By their deep, evident commitment to socratic form, and by coming to the interviews formidably prepared, a mutual respect with the interlocutor is quickly established and conveyed to the listener.

The original idea for the program emerged in discussions in 2002 between the two producers, who agreed there was a kind of vacuum in strategic thinking on the left. The reasons were perhaps not hard to find. Violent state repression directed at the worldwide movement against capitalist enclosures, aka “globalisation”, had taken a toll, both in the streets and in the theory kitchens. The repression only intensified in the wake of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.

It was clear to Lilley and Soong that, for antagonists of capital and empire, these new conditions lacked critical scrutiny. “When we launched”, recalls Sasha Lilley, “we felt strongly that many of the ideas of the anti-globalization movement, the antiwar movement, and the left more broadly, needed interrogation. Apparently many KPFA listeners agreed, because when C.S. Soong and I ran a four part series challenging conventional wisdom on the left, called Free Radicals, it led to a flurry of emails to KPFA management asking for more.”

An opening in KPFA’s schedule gave them the opportunity for extending the interrogations. In their sights, recalls Lilley, was “the localism fetish of the global justice movement; the anti-war movement’s “No Blood for Oil” simplification, the romanticizing of the subaltern and the Global South; and of course conspiracism instead of anticapitalist analysis.”

The boisterous street carnivals of refusal north and south, galvanised by the spellbinding—and spell-breaking—eloquence of Subcommandante Marcos, and amplified by vibrant indymedia, seemed briefly to herald the birth of a countervailing force that might truly disrupt the specialists in ’structural adjustment’ at the IMF and WTO. But the ’second superpower’ (to use the anxious, hyperventilating language of the New York Times commentariat), which flared brightly in Seattle, Porto Allegre and around the planet, turned out to be a will o’ the wisp, its fragile transnational infrastructure interrupted by, among other things, ‘anti-terrorist’ restrictions on travel. In the assessment of Seamus Davis, cartographer of anticapitalist resistance, “By 2003 the movement was punching below its weight”. Things were not helped by the widespread privileging of activism at the expense of analysis and reflection. “Activist” had become, at least in the US, a badge of identity, an occupation without any content except perhaps a romancing of barricades, which, as their historian Eric Hazan drily observed, were already out of date by 1871.

Two decades on, Against the Grain is going strong. It has been, by any worthwhile measure, a resounding success of the kind the founders of the station hoped for, though they could hardly have imagined the instantaneous planetary reach of the program made possible by the internet. The roster of guests amounts to a pantheon of contemporary radical thought —  to name just a few: geographer David Harvey, socialist feminist Silvia Federici, demographer Amartya Sen, urbanist Mike Davis, classicist Ellen Meiksins Wood, economist Thomas Piketty, historians Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, Vijay Prashad and Howard Zinn, linguist Noam Chomsky, anthropologist David Graeber, journalist Naomi Klein, psychiatrist Joel Kovel, lawyer Staughton Lynd, sociologist Frances Fox Piven. The program’s archive is a treasure house of critical exchange in the early 21st century.

No doubt Against the Grain could take its chances – likewise Doug Henwood’s Behind the News and Mitch Jeserich’s Letters and Politics – and even flourish among the flood of podcasts coming online at the rate of 500 a week (although half of them expire within six months.) Against the Grain, by now an institution within an institution, has conjured into being an ‘imagined community’, albeit uncertain of its collective powers. We badly need such a program in the days ahead, to assist in the hard work of root-and-branch rethinking of the terms and tactics necessary to a planetary politics for commoners, after the Holocene.

I believe it’s also important for KPFA listeners to organize against the loss of the station’s bricks-and-mortar studios, an underused community asset moored like a ghost ship on MLK Way in Berkeley, and to keep broadcasting from Grizzly Peak and its 94.1MHz home on the FM dial, an island in the privatised spectrum, amid the rumbling basso continuo of commercial America (“I drive my car to supermarket / The way I take is superhigh /A superlot is where I park it /And Super Suds are what I buy.”) It was a minor miracle in a nation Melville saw as dedicated only to commerce that Lewis Hill’s pilot experiment took flight. The choice of fare on offer – drama and literature, music, public affairs, children’s programming – was only part of the magic; more potent was the mutual recognition, respect and camaraderie that passed between the pioneering broadcasters and the audience conjured into being.

Unfortunately, the essential syndicalist principles were overlooked – Hill’s anarchist comrades warned him that worker control would be broken on the anvil of bureaucratic governance required by federal regulation, if state censorship didn’t get them first. It’s a grim irony that the new internal governance structure, put in place after the crisis of 1999 to safeguard the network, may materially contribute to the demise of the Pacificans’ noble experiment.

The radical Cornell scholar Benedict Anderson in the 1980s achieved intellectual fame for his notion of the “imagined community”, about which he later remarked that they were “a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.” Anderson coined the phrase to theorize not the radio but the printing press and the emergence of “the nation,” specifically, the role of print capitalism in the spread of nationalism. Anderson defined the nation as a collection of strangers who do not know each other and will never meet but nevertheless are able to exert a world-changing social force. I think it fair to say that Lewis Hill had such business in mind when he composed “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio” back in 1951. But if KPFA is reduced, at best, to an online ‘platform’ of serial, atomized podcasts, then what will surely be lost is the integrating impulse of Hill’s vision, the possibility of a collectively imagined “focus of action” necessary to the building of a peaceable world.

Iain Auchinleck Boal is a social historian of science, technics and the commons. He is associated with the Retort group of antinomians based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In London, he co-founded MayDay Rooms, a safe haven for archives of dissent and a meeting place for weary utopians. He can be reached via carpenox@sonic.net> 

Exceptionalism and international law

Alfred de Zayas

September 25, 2024Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Exceptionalism is an expression of the aninmus dominandi of powerful nations who refuse to submit to established rules of human coexistence and reject customary international law. Instead, these actors invent new rules as they go along and pretend that their fabled “rules based international order” somehow has legitimacy. A recent study established by Professor Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) for the UN Summit of the Future[1], provides an index ranking Barbados first and the United States last in the list of countries likely to support UN principles and international solidarity[2].

A close relative of exceptionalism is chauvinism, sometimes falsely labelled patriotism in order to make it sound more palatable, even noble, although the obvious imbalance makes us feel vaguely uneasy about it. Exceptionalism has been successful hitherto because its victims possess scarce power to effectively oppose it, weaker countries being blackmail victims, in fear of military and other intervention.  Exceptionalism is a manifestation of that old rule we remember from the Melian Dialogue[3] in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War – “the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must”.  This also reflects the Latin saying “quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” – What Jupiter can get away with, is not what we bovines are permitted to do.

Throughout history The Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Spaniards, British have practiced “might is right” with impunity.   Notable practitioners in the 21^st century are the United States, its NATO vassals, plus Israel, with the support and complicity of the mainstream media.  Indeed, public relations and relentless propaganda have succeeded in persuading many that exceptionalism and militant interventionism are O.K.  This perception prevails in the “collective West”, but the Global Majority in Latin America, Africa and Asia does not seem to agree with the pastel colours of US benevolence.  A new multipolar world is gradually emerging.

The spirit of exceptionalism pervades Western society and reveals itself in much of what our politicians, academics and journalists say and do. Thus, we remember US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s statement that the United States is the “indispensable nation”[4].  She is also remembered for an interview in which she expressed the view that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children (UNICEF estimates) “was worth it”[5] because of the ultimate positive goal to remove Saddam Hussein from power.  The end justifies the means. Her approach is not too far from the self-serving statements by George W. Bush before, during and after the Iraq war, or from Donald Trump’s pompous “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogan, or from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s jubilant admission, “we lied, we cheated, we stole”[6].  On an even lower moral plane we situate Hillary Clinton’s comment on Moammar Gaddafi’s killing as “We came, we saw, he died.”[7]  This was hubris at its worst.

Exceptionalism flourishes in the universe of American solipsism – only we matter.  In a certain sense, this Weltanschauung echoes a Calvinistic tradition carried by the Puritans to Massachusetts in the 17^thcentury[8]. The pious Pilgrims saw themselves as the “elect”, predestined to occupy the lands of North America as their rightful heritage, to be fruitful and multiply[9], successors as they were of old Jerusalem, the city on the hill.  They set the stage for the muscled American exceptionalism of later centuries, as proclaimed in the Monroe Doctrine and implemented in the geopolitics of Manifest Destiny[10].  This mental disposition made it possible to dispossess and ethnically cleanse North America of its native indigenous population, the Algonquins, Crees, Cherokees, Dakotas, Hopi, Iroquois, Lakotas, Mohawks, Navajos, Pequots, Seminoles, Sioux, Squamish, etc., who once numbered 10 million human beings and by the end of the 19^th century had been reduced to three hundred thousand[11].

Few Americans have been willing to recognize the magnitude of this tragedy, which Martin Luther King Jr. rightly called “genocide”.  In 1964, four years before he was assassinated, MLK published a remarkable book Why we can’t Wait.[12]  On page 141 we read:

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. »[13]  That too was a form of American exceptionalism.”

The relationship between international law and human rights

International law and human rights law are intimately related and mutually reinforcing.  Thus, when international law is breached with impunity, the entire system suffers, including the human rights protection mechanisms.  Applying international law in an arbitrary manner means that some human beings are not fully protected by the law, are left behind, while others enjoy privileges; it cements a Herrenmensch philosophy and entails a separate and distinct violation of the most fundamental principle of human rights :  The equality of all human beings.

Exceptionalism violates the dignity of the individual when the law favours some, but is used to exploit, oppress, and persecute others.  It contravenes article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stipulates “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. ”[14]

Exceptionalism also breaches article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR): ”All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. »[15]

The exceptionalist approach to international law confirms the imperial prerogative to go to war, to engage in pre-emptive attacks on potential enemies.  It reflects the pseudo-religious, pseudo-scientific philosophy of superiority.  In order to counter this outlawry, the ICCPR stipulates in its article 20: “1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law. 2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”[16]  It is no surprise that most of the countries of the “collective West” introduced reservations to the ICCPR stating that they would not accept Article 20.

This animus dominandi also violates article 4 of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination[17]:  “States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of persons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination…”  Similarly, the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid[18] is violated – not only in South Africa before Nelson Mandela, but today in Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu.

In this connection it is also appropriate to recall the words at the beginning of the US Declaration of Independence of 1776: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal…”[19]  In the same tenor, the 1789 French Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen[20], article 1 of which stipulates :  « Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. »

Now, how does the doctrine of exceptionalism in domestic and international practice impact this over-arching principle of equality?  In an op-ed published on 11 September 2013 in the New York Times, Vladimir Putin expressed a concern: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation…. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”[21]

Exceptionalism and the risk of nuclear confrontation

There are many dangers associated with exceptionalism.  Especially in the nuclear age, some exceptionalist attitudes may cloud our perception, lead us to misjudge how others think, and thus hinder our assessment of risk.  Countries that practice exceptionalism have traditionally exhibited a naive nonchalance about what they say and do.  They like to gamble.  They take risks for themselves and others.  They provoke and expect that the other side will not react, that the provocation will be “absorbed”.

Alas, in the nuclear age it is not only the safety of the exceptionalist provoker that is at stake, but the fate of all of humanity.  The US and NATO countries, notably the UK, have been playing vabanquefor years and they evidently think that they can do so indefinitely.  While it should be obvious to all that no one is going to survive a nuclear confrontation, the US, UK and some NATO countries continue playing with fire and irresponsibly escalating the Ukraine war, instead of looking for ways to end the conflict by diplomacy and negotiation.  This is yet another reason why the Global Majority in Latin America, Africa and Asia must become more vocal, because if NATO miscalculates, as it has done in the past, the consequences will be borne by all inhabitants of Planet Earth.

At the United Nations there is consensus that nuclear weapons must never be used.  Already in 1995, the Security Council adopted resolution 984[22] and indefinitely extended the Non-Proliferation Treaty[23].  In 2004 the SC adopted Resolution 1540, imposing binding obligations on all States to establish domestic controls to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  On 20 November 2022 Resolution 2663 decided “that the 1540 Committee will conduct comprehensive reviews on the status of implementation of resolution 1540 (2004), including through the holding of open consultations of the Committee in New York, both after five years and prior to the renewal of its mandate…” and called on States “to take into account developments on the evolving nature of risk of proliferation and rapid advances in science and technology in their implementation of resolution 1540 (2004)”[24].  Meanwhile the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons[25] entered into force on 22 January 2021, but the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Israel are not states parties

Lip-service to international law is easy.  Everybody does it. But can we rely on a dysfunctional United Nations to protect the world from risky vabanque politicians?  The UN could not prevent NATO from violating the ius cogens prohibition of the use of force (Art. 2(4) UN Charter) and bombard Yugoslavia in 1999, destroying its territorial integrity under false pretences and in total impunity.  In 2003, again under a demonstrably phoney pretext of weapons of mass destruction[26], the United States put together the infamous “coalition of the willing” to invade and devastate Iraq, just to complete the assault on the people of Iraq and the pillaging of its resources, already begun in 1991.  The 2003 war, which Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned as an “illegal war”[27], constituted a rebellion against international law and the UN Charter by a considerable number of States ostensibly committed to the rule of law and human rights.  No one was held accountable.

Let us not forget that already in August 1945, when Japan had already lost the war in the Pacific and the Unites States was not under any existential threat by Japan, Harry Truman decided to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States, in its singular hubris, demanded “unconditional surrender” from Japan and would accept nothing less, notwithstanding peace feelers extended by Japan since 1944[28].  Consistent with its exceptionalist philosophy, the United States decided to humiliate the Japanese and their Emperor.  The atomic weapon was used not for any legitimate military purpose but rather for psychological purposes – to terrorise the Japanese into submission and at the same time to warn the Soviets that hitherto the US was the only hegemon and that it would not hesitate to use the atomic bomb against any potential enemy, even pre-emptively. Hitherto only the United States has used nuclear weapons in war.  If it did it twice against Japan, can it do it again, this time against Russia and China[29]?

In the nuclear age this bravado lacks persuasive power.  The Russians have more nuclear warheads than the United States, and they also have hypersonic missiles to deliver them, which the US lacks.  It is time to revisit John F. Kennedy’s commencement address of 10 June 1963 at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”[30]

I fear that in the current world of fake news and manipulated narratives, in today’s brainwashed society, Kennedy would be accused of being an “appeaser”[31], even a traitor.  And yet, today the fate of all of humanity is at stake. What we really need is another JFK or Jimmy Carter in the White House.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that American exceptionalism contravenes the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, countless General Assembly Resolutions including 2625, 3314, 60/1.  Unilateralism is also incompatible with many articles of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which provides in its article 26 that treaties must be observed in good faith, pacta sunt servanda.  Among the treaties that must be enforced, we acknowledge first and foremost the UN Charter, article 103 of which, the supremacy clause, gives the Charter precedence over all other treaties, including the treaty of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

There are plenty of United States academics that have warned us about the danger of nuclear annihilation and the necessity to deescalate. Among them we count Professors John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Kinzer, Francis Boyle.  Alas, they are modern Cassandras. The sad fact is that exceptionalism and unilateralism are part of the DNA of many of our political leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Public relations and propaganda have convinced many that NATO is a “defense alliance”.  Yet, since 1991 and the dismantlement of the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s raison d’être disappeared, and it morphed into an aggressive military force whose function is not defence, but expansion for the sake of expansion, expansion to bully others into submission to the will of Washington and Brussels, an organization that pretends to usurp the functions of the United Nations.

NATO forces have committed aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. but the fake news that accompanied those wars by now have evolved into fake history, and many believe the apologetics of NATO’s criminal actions.  In a very real sense, NATO should be labelled a criminal organization within the meaning of the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 and articles 9 and 10 of the Statute of the International Military Tribunal (London Agreement of 8 August 1945, ironically adopted two days after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and one day before the annihilation of Nagasaki).

Government lawyers bear significant responsibility for this outlawry, because instead of advising political leaders how best to implement the UN Charter and judgments of the International Court of Justice, how to keep the peace, how to practice international solidarity, they look for ways how to weasel out of international commitments, how to invent loopholes to treaties, how to formulate exceptionalist interpretations of international law.

On this 21^st day of September 2024, International Day of Peace[32], we are closer to annihilation than ever before since 1945. NATO is out of control.  What we need is an immediate cease fire and diplomatic negotiations to end the wars in Ukraine and in Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria. The Global Majority must reject the obsolete paradigms of exceptionalism and unilateralism and rediscover the spirituality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Pax optima rerum.

Notes.

[1] https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future

[2] https://impakter.com/the-nations-most-and-least-likely-to-support-un-principles/

[3] https://www.thecollector.com/melian-dialogue-thucydides/

[4] https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU

[8] David Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford 1992.

[9] Genesis,9:7.

[10] Richard Drinnon, Facing West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

[11] Alfred de Zayas, Countering Mainstream Narratives, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2022.

[12] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 2000); de Zayas, Countering Mainstream Narratives, p. 54.

[14] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

[15] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

[16] Ibid.

[17] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-convention-elimination-all-forms-racial

[18] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.10_International%20Convention%20on%20the%20Suppression%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Apartheid.pdf

[19] https://declaration.fas.harvard.edu/resources/text

[20] https://www.elysee.fr/la-presidence/la-declaration-des-droits-de-l-homme-et-du-citoyen

[21] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html

[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_984

[23] https://disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/npt/

[24] https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n22/716/75/pdf/n2271675.pdf

[25] https://disarmament.unoda.org/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/

[26] Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, Pantheon, 2004.

[27] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm

[28] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2049539

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/abs/japanese-peace-maneuver-in-19441/1B5B584A53782C211CB28AE71BA3EA56

[29] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/27/united-states-middle-east-wars-asia-europe-same-time/

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/could-america-win-new-world-war

[30] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/14/natos-death-wish-will-destroy-not-only-europe-but-the-rest-of-the-world-as-well/

NATO’s “Death Wish” Will Destroy Not Only Europe but the Rest of the World as Well

[31] https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/09/appeasement-reconsidered/

[32] https://internationaldayofpeace.org/

Alfred de Zayas is a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order 2012-18. He is the author of twelve books including “Building a Just World Order” (2021) “Countering Mainstream Narratives” 2022, and “The Human Rights Industry” (Clarity Press, 2021).

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Logo de Temu (marché)

On September 13, the Biden administration announced a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” to “protect American consumers, workers, and businesses by addressing the significant increased abuse of the de minimis exemption.”

That’s a pretty bland way of saying that Biden and Friends are opening up a new front in the US government’s war on your ability to find and purchase the things you want at a price you find attractive.

The current targets of opportunity in that war: Chinese e-commerce outfits like Temu and Shein, which use the “de minimis exemption” to ship goods directly to American consumers at low prices.

Under the de minimis exemption, items worth less than $800 aren’t subject to the tariffs Donald Trump and Joe Biden have increasingly leaned on over the last few years as a way of rewarding  American business donors and organized labor supporters at your expense.

How things used to work: A US importer would order, say, $10,000 worth of, say, motorcycle helmets. They’d arrive in a big shipping container and if the tariff was 10%, the importer’s cost (passed on to retail customers, of course) now became $11,000 — and the customers’ cost came to that higher price plus the wholesalers’ and retailers’ markups.

How it works now: You find a motorcycle helmet you like online, priced with no tariff and fewer “middleman” markups. You click. You pay. It arrives. It’s not as quick as going to a local shop or ordering from Amazon, but it’s usually MUCH cheaper.

American customers love paying less for what they want or need.

American producers, wholesalers, and labor unions hate that you’re able to pay less for something you want or need … because they’re not getting their cut.

Domestic retailers, meanwhile, are increasingly eyeing the whole thing as a new supply chain streamlining opportunity. With so much commerce taking place online now, why not just drop-ship individual items directly from China to consumers instead of paying tariffs on bulk purchases that then require additional shipping and take up expensive shelf space until they’re bought  with the assistance of paid store staff?

Biden’s hoping Big Business and Big Labor will notice he’s ripping you off for their benefit and support Democrats in November. He’s also hoping voters won’t notice their lighter wallets.

Don’t buy Biden’s malarkey about “national security,” fentanyl, and “protecting” you from “abuse.” This is about paying political allies off with your hard-earned money, and that’s all it’s about.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.