Identity, Religion, Nationalism, And Political Mobilization In The Middle East – Analysis

July 8, 2026 
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Key Takeaways

Identity Politics in the Middle East is Fluid and Instrumentalised — Nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender are not fixed but continuously renegotiated by state and non-state actors depending on power, legitimacy, and political opportunity.

Modern Constructs Meet Deep Cultural Repertoires — While Arab nationalism and state borders were modern inventions (shaped by colonialism and print capitalism), they draw on pre-existing ethnic, religious, and symbolic resources that give them strong affective power.

No Single Identity Dominates — Secular Arab nationalism declined after 1967, Islamism rose then adapted, and sectarian/ethnic identities persist — all are strategically mobilised rather than primordial, with outcomes shaped by context and elite competition.

Introduction

The politics of identity—encompassing nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender—provides the affective and normative fuel of political mobilisation across all regime types, and its comparative analysis has generated some of the most vibrant and contested debates in the discipline. Nationalism, as the ideological claim that the legitimate unit of political authority is the nation, was analysed by Anderson (1983/2006) as the product of particular conditions of modernity—print capitalism, vernacular standardisation, and the displacement of religious cosmologies—rather than as the natural political expression of pre-existing primordial communities. Gellner’s (1983) structural account, which derived nationalism from the homogenising cultural demands of industrial society, and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) constructivist emphasis on the ‘invention of tradition’ converge on the insight that national identities, however experienced as ancient and organic, are modern political constructions whose genealogies are contingent and recoverable.

The Middle East, however, poses a set of complications for this modernist consensus that make it an especially productive terrain for comparative analysis. First, the region’s national boundaries were substantially the product of external imperial cartography—the Sykes-Picot arrangement and the League of Nations mandate system—such that the ‘nation’ frequently postdated, rather than preceded, the state (Hourani, 1991; Fromkin, 1989). Second, Islam supplies a transnational normative vocabulary—the umma, the caliphate, sharī’a—that both antedates and persistently competes with the territorial nation-state as a locus of ultimate political loyalty (Piscatori, 1986; Zubaida, 1993). Third, ethnic and sectarian cleavages—Kurdish, Amazigh, Shi’a, Sunni, Christian, and others—cross-cut and often subvert the nationalist project, producing what Makdisi (2000) termed ‘the culture of sectarianism’ as a durable political technology rather than a residue of primordial hatred. This essay argues that political mobilisation in the Middle East is best understood not as the triumph of one axis of identity over the others but as a continuous, historically contingent renegotiation among nationalist, religious, ethnic, class, and gendered idioms of solidarity, each instrumentalised by state and non-state actors according to shifting configurations of legitimacy and power (Barnett, 1998; Telhami & Barnett, 2002).

Theorising Nationalism: Modernism, Ethno-Symbolism, and Their Limits

The modernist paradigm associated with Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm (1990) treats the nation as an artefact of capitalism, bureaucratic rationalisation, and mass literacy. Anderson’s (1983/2006) concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’—imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow-nationals yet nonetheless perceive a horizontal fraternity—rests on the technological precondition of print capitalism, which standardised vernacular languages and created the simultaneity of experience that national consciousness requires. Gellner (1983) located the causal mechanism instead in the functional requirements of industrial society, which demands a culturally homogeneous, literate workforce mobile across an anonymous labour market; nationalism, in this reading, is the political roof that industrialism requires. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) edited volume complements both accounts by demonstrating empirically how ostensibly ancient traditions—kilts, coronations, civic rituals—were frequently fabricated in the nineteenth century to manufacture the historical depth that new political communities required (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Against this modernist current, Smith (1986, 1991) advanced an ethno-symbolist corrective, arguing that modern nations, whatever their political novelty, typically crystallise around pre-existing ethnies—named human populations with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, and cultural markers—such that nationalism’s ideological work is one of reinterpretation and mobilisation rather than pure invention. Connor (1994) pressed a related point about the affective, quasi-kinship character of national feeling, cautioning that instrumentalist accounts of nationalism-as-elite-manipulation understate the visceral force such identities exert once activated. The Middle Eastern cases discussed below vindicate elements of both positions: Arab nationalism’s ideologues self-consciously constructed a modern qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) using print media and party organisation in a manner consistent with Anderson and Gellner, yet they did so by reworking pre-existing linguistic, tribal, and religious materials whose symbolic resonance—per Smith and Connor—could not simply be manufactured ex nihilo (Dawisha, 2003; Choueiri, 2000). The analytical task, then, is not to adjudicate definitively between constructivist and ethno-symbolist positions but to trace how political entrepreneurs mobilise available cultural repertoires under specific structural constraints (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).
Religion and the Nation-State: A Structural Tension

A second complication specific to the Middle East concerns the relationship between religion and the nationalist project. Piscatori (1986) demonstrated that Islamic political thought has historically resisted full assimilation into the Westphalian logic of territorially bounded, mutually exclusive sovereignties, since the umma is conceived as a single moral-political community transcending ethnic and territorial particularism. Zubaida (1993) extended this analysis by showing how modern Middle Eastern states have nonetheless successfully appropriated Islamic symbolism in the service of territorial nationalism—Egyptian, Moroccan, and Saudi state Islam each construct a nationally bounded religious authority that domesticates the universalist claims of the umma. Ayubi (1991) characterised this appropriation as constitutive of what he called ‘the over-stated’ Arab state: a state apparatus strong in coercive and symbolic reach yet weak in autonomous legitimacy, compelled continuously to borrow religious authority to compensate for thin nationalist consensus.

Halliday (2000) usefully disaggregated the analytic confusion that often attends discussions of ‘religious nationalism’ in the region, distinguishing between religion as a marker of communal boundary (a functional equivalent of ethnicity), religion as a totalising political ideology (Islamism proper), and religion as a legitimating discourse instrumentalised by incumbent states. These are analytically distinct even though empirically entangled: Ba’athist Syria’s minority-inflected Alawite leadership deployed a studiously secular Arab nationalist idiom precisely because sectarian identity could not supply legitimating universality (Batatu, 1999), whereas Saudi Arabia’s ruling family fused dynastic nationalism with Wahhabi religious authority from the state’s founding (Al-Rasheed, 2010). The variation across cases confirms Barnett’s (1998) broader point that Arab and Middle Eastern politics unfold within a shared normative field—pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, sovereignty—whose meaning is nonetheless perpetually contested and redeployed by rival elites for domestic and regional advantage (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Arab Nationalism and Its Vicissitudes

Arab nationalism (qawmiyya) emerged in the late Ottoman period among Christian and Muslim intellectuals of the Levant who sought, per Anderson’s (1983/2006) model, to construct a horizontal fraternity transcending confessional and dynastic loyalty through a shared Arabic print culture (Hourani, 1991; Dawisha, 2003). Its interwar and post-independence apotheosis under Nasserism and Ba’athism reworked this cultural nationalism into a state-centred ideology of anti-imperial liberation, non-alignment, and Arab unity, most spectacularly embodied in the short-lived United Arab Republic (Choueiri, 2000). Yet as Ajami (1978) diagnosed with prescient bitterness, pan-Arab nationalism’s normative claim—that the Arab nation, not the individual territorial state, constituted the legitimate unit of sovereignty—generated a persistent legitimacy deficit for the very states that invoked it, since qutriyya (territorial patriotism) and qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationhood) pointed in mutually undermining directions.

The 1967 defeat is conventionally treated as the watershed moment in this ideology’s decline (Ajami, 1978; Kerr, 1971), discrediting the secular nationalist regimes’ claim to have mastered the instruments of modern statecraft and creating the ideational vacuum into which Islamist movements would later expand (Kepel, 2002). Batatu’s (1999) monumental study of Syria demonstrates how, even as pan-Arab rhetoric persisted, Ba’athist power became increasingly captured by minority-sectarian and rural class networks, such that official nationalist ideology functioned less as a description of the regime’s social base than as a legitimating veneer over what was, in practice, an exclusionary patrimonial order—an early instance of the instrumentalisation dynamic elaborated below (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).

The Islamist Alternative: Religion as Mobilising Ideology

The eclipse of secular pan-Arabism created the political opening that Islamist movements—the Muslim Brotherhood chief among them—were organisationally and ideologically positioned to exploit (Kepel, 2002; Wickham, 2002). Wickham’s (2002) ethnographic study of Egyptian Islamist activism reframes mobilisation theory itself: rather than treating Islamism as a spontaneous outpouring of religious sentiment, she demonstrates how movements like the Muslim Brotherhood built dense networks of social provision, professional syndicates, and moral community that functioned as parallel infrastructures of solidarity where the state had retreated under structural adjustment. Ismail (2003) similarly emphasised the everyday, associational, and disciplinary dimensions of Islamist politics—mosque study circles, dress codes, neighbourhood surveillance of moral conduct—arguing that Islamism’s political effectiveness lay as much in its capacity to reshape the texture of daily life as in its formal ideological claims.

Roy’s (1994) comparative analysis complicated any triumphalist reading of political Islam’s ascendancy, arguing that Islamism as a totalising revolutionary project—aiming at the wholesale Islamisation of state and society—had substantively failed by the 1990s even as ‘neo-fundamentalism,’ a more socially conservative, depoliticised piety movement, continued to expand. This distinction proved analytically prescient: the subsequent trajectories of Islamist parties after 2011, from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s brief and calamitous experience of incumbency to Tunisia’s Ennahda’s pragmatic accommodation with pluralist competition (Cavatorta & Merone, 2015), illustrate the instability of Islamism’s relationship to formal state power, in contrast to its comparatively greater durability as a social and associational force. Kandiyoti’s (1991) work on gender and Kepel’s (2002) transnational history of jihadist trajectories further indicate that Islamist mobilisation itself fractured along multiple axes—reformist versus revolutionary, quietist versus militant, nationally bounded versus transnational—undermining any monolithic characterisation of ‘political Islam’ as a single actor or ideology.

Sectarianism, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Fragmentation

Where Arab nationalism and Islamism each aspired, in different registers, to transcend sub-national particularism, a third body of scholarship has examined how ethnic and sectarian identities have been actively produced and instrumentalised as bases of political mobilisation rather than surviving as inert pre-modern residues. Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism is foundational here: he shows that the very category of a fixed, politically salient sectarian identity was itself a product of nineteenth-century Ottoman reform and European intervention, which recast a more fluid social order into administratively legible confessional communities—an argument structurally parallel to Anderson’s (1983/2006) and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) treatment of nationalism as constructed rather than primordial. Salloukh et al. (2015) extended this analysis to contemporary Lebanon, arguing that the post-civil-war confessional power-sharing arrangement did not merely reflect sectarian identity but actively reproduced and hardened it, since political elites’ access to patronage resources depends on the perpetuation of confessional voting blocs—an instance of what Cammett (2014) termed ‘compassionate communalism,’ whereby sectarian parties furnish welfare goods in ways that entrench, rather than dissolve, communal boundaries (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).


Comparable dynamics obtain for ethnic mobilisation more broadly. Kurdish nationalism, straddling Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, illustrates Brubaker’s (1996) argument that nationalism is best conceptualised not as the property of bounded groups but as a relational, contingent ‘nationalising’ practice pursued by state elites, homeland minorities, and external patrons in dynamic triadic interaction; Kurdish mobilisation has accordingly taken sharply divergent institutional forms—armed insurgency in Turkey, federal autonomy in Iraq, and localised self-administration in Syria—depending on the specific configuration of state strategy and external alliance in each context (McDowall, 2004; Romano, 2006). Amazigh (Berber) mobilisation in North Africa presents a further variant: rather than seeking territorial secession, Amazigh movements in Morocco and Algeria have pursued cultural and linguistic recognition within the existing nation-state, contesting the Arabo-Islamic monopoly on official national identity while working through, rather than against, state institutions (Maddy-Weitzman, 2011; Silverstein & Crawford, 2004). This variation across the Kurdish and Amazigh cases underscores that ethnic mobilisation, no less than religious or nationalist mobilisation, is shaped by the political opportunity structures within which it operates rather than by the intrinsic content of ethnic grievance alone (Wimmer, 2013).
Class, Gender, and the Intersectional Terrain of Identity Politics

Identity politics in the Middle East cannot be reduced to nationalism, religion, and ethnicity alone; class and gender constitute intersecting axes that mediate how the former are experienced and mobilised. Batatu’s (1999) analysis of Syria already demonstrated the inseparability of sectarian and class dynamics, as rural, minority-sect officers used the vehicle of Ba’athist party organisation to displace an urban Sunni landholding elite—sectarian mobilisation, in this instance, cannot be understood independently of the class realignment it accomplished. Bayat’s (2010) concept of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ similarly reframes subaltern class politics in the region away from formal movements and towards incremental, informal appropriations of urban space and resources by the poor, a mode of mobilisation that operates beneath, rather than through, the nationalist or religious idioms more commonly studied.


Gender constitutes an equally constitutive axis. Kandiyoti’s (1991) edited collection demonstrated that nationalist and Islamist projects alike have relied on the regulation of women’s bodies, dress, and family status law as a primary terrain upon which competing visions of authentic national or religious identity are enacted and contested—the female body functions, in this literature, as a privileged symbolic site onto which anxieties about modernity, authenticity, and communal boundary are projected. Moghadam’s (1993) comparative study extended this argument by tracing how state-led modernisation projects across Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere instrumentalised women’s legal and social status as an index of national progress, only for subsequent Islamist reactions to reverse these very reforms as a means of repudiating a discredited secular-nationalist order. Joseph’s (2000) concept of ‘relational rights’—wherein legal and political personhood in much of the region is mediated through kinship and confessional status rather than direct individual citizenship—further demonstrates how gender, sect, and nationality are structurally co-constituted within the region’s legal and political architecture rather than analytically separable variables (Chtatou, 2025, January 14).
Authoritarian Durability and the Instrumentalisation of Identity

A final dimension concerns the relationship between identity politics and the durability of authoritarian rule that long characterised, and in most cases still characterises, the region. Bellin’s (2004) influential ‘robustness of authoritarianism’ thesis located regime durability primarily in the coercive apparatus’s institutional cohesion and willingness to repress, but subsequent scholarship has argued that coercive capacity alone cannot explain variation in regime survival without attention to how identity cleavages are managed. Anderson (1991) had earlier shown that Middle Eastern monarchies in particular derived resilience from dynastic and tribal legitimating formulas unavailable to republican regimes, which were correspondingly more reliant on the nationalist and populist legitimation whose 1967 collapse Ajami (1978) diagnosed. Brownlee’s (2007) comparative analysis of party institutionalisation similarly demonstrated that regimes which successfully channelled elite competition through ruling-party structures—again frequently articulated through nationalist or religious idiom—proved more durable than those relying on coercion alone (Chtatou, 2026, June 7).

Lynch’s (2006) study of the post-2000 Arab public sphere added a further dimension: the proliferation of satellite television and, later, social media created a transnational discursive space in which pan-Arab identity was reactivated—now channelled through networks like Al Jazeera rather than Nasserist state broadcasting—generating new forms of mobilisation, most consequentially during the 2011 uprisings, that cut across the boundaries of individual authoritarian states even as those states’ formal identity-management strategies remained nationally bounded (Lynch, 2012). The uprisings themselves, and their profoundly divergent outcomes—democratic transition in Tunisia, military restoration in Egypt, state collapse in Libya, Syria, and Yemen—confirm that identity mobilisation is neither uniformly liberalising nor uniformly authoritarian in its effects; rather, as Barnett (1998) and Telhami and Barnett (2002) argued in advance of these events, the political consequences of identity mobilisation depend on the specific institutional and coalitional context into which mobilised sentiment is channelled, not on the intrinsic content of the identity invoked (Chtatou, 2022, January 11).

Conclusion

The comparative study of identity politics in the Middle East vindicates the modernist premise, shared by Anderson (1983/2006), Gellner (1983), and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), that nationalism and its cognate identity formations are historically contingent constructions rather than primordial essences—a premise borne out empirically by Makdisi’s (2000) genealogy of Lebanese sectarianism, Batatu’s (1999) account of Syrian Ba’athism, and Dawisha’s (2003) history of Arab nationalism’s rise and decline. Yet the region’s experience equally illustrates the limits of a purely constructivist account: religious, ethnic, and communal identities, once activated by political entrepreneurs, acquire an affective density and institutional entrenchment—through confessional power-sharing, welfare provision, and associational life—that render them resistant to unmaking even after the political conditions that produced them have changed, a durability closer to Smith’s (1986) and Connor’s (1994) ethno-symbolist emphasis (Chtatou, 2022, January 11). The overarching lesson for comparative politics is that nationalism, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender in the Middle East are not competing, mutually exclusive vectors of political mobilisation but a continuously reconfigured repertoire, whose relative salience at any moment reflects the shifting strategic calculations of state and non-state actors operating within specific, historically produced structures of opportunity and constraint (Barnett, 1998; Wimmer, 2013).


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About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou

Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.

View all posts by Dr. Mohamed Chtatou →

Progressive Patriotism for America’s 250th Birthday

Progressive believe that the core claims of this nation—fairness, equality, freedom, and justice—are their own. And they are right


“This year as a time when democracy itself is under serious threat, progressives are seeking ways to claim their patriotism and recapture the flag,” write Dreier and Flack.
(Photo by Bradyn Shock on Unsplash)

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Peter Dreier

Dick Flacks
Jul 04, 2026

Common Dreams

July 4 is the big occasion for Americans to express patriotism, none more so than this year, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. But the ways we do so are as diverse as the country. People and groups from right to left celebrate in conflicting ways and with conflicting views—from “love it or leave it” to “love it and fix it.”

This year as a time when democracy itself is under serious threat, progressives are seeking ways to claim their patriotism and recapture the flag.

“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished,” wrote Zohran Mamdani last July 4 before he had been elected mayor of New York City. “I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”

Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking, rejecting blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism. Democratic movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—sought to overturn the established order while claiming to fulfill America’s promise. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.

Even the founders would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state.

As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”.

Donald Trump consciously and cynically has been re-enacting the long tradition of patriotism as jingoism, nationalism, flag waving, and “America first” sloganeering. What seems new is his systematic drive to debase major symbols of national identity—such as the White House, the reflecting pool, and Arlington Cemetery—while wrecking the entire national plan to celebrate America at 250.

Although they disagreed on many issues, the founders were adamant that they didn’t want the country to be run by an all-powerful king. Yet here we are 250 year later, governed by a president publicly claiming such power, with a Supreme Court majority acting as his enablers,

Of course, many of the founders were skeptical of a robust democracy. They created institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, that were never intended to completely reflect the voice of the people.

Even the founders, however, would be aghast at how far Trump, and his courtiers, as well as most Republican politicians, have gone to establish an authoritarian state, exploiting the opportunities provided by the Constitution’s elitist features.

The Gallup poll regularly asks Americans what the founders would think of America today. This year, only 19% think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased with how the country has turned out. Over three quarters (77%) now say the founders would be disappointed. This compares with 42% in 2001.

Americans’ disappointment with the country is obviously tied to Trump’s performance and his low favorability ratings in the polls. We expect our nation’s leaders, especially our president, to express a deep loyalty to a vision bigger than one person. But Trump has no overarching vision. Besides grabbing power and wealth for himself, his major commitment appears to white nationalism—turning America into a country for the uber rich and white people only. In contrast to the patriotism expressed in Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”), Trump wants, to rid the nation of immigrants of color, whom, in his eugenicist view, he thinks “pollute” the country with bad genes.

Trump and his coterie have systematically acted to undermine the spirit and letter of the Constitution. One of America’s core beliefs since its founding has been that elections should determine who becomes president and that it is important to ensure the orderly transfer of power. But insurrectionists at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—urged on by and loyal to Trump— attempted to stop that process, while. carrying American flags. Many of these were convicted and sentenced for insurrectionary crimes. Trump’s blanket pardon and embrace of the convicted was an announcement of his autocratic hopes and plans.

As the 250th anniversary approaches, Trump is intensifying his campaign to end the right to vote—the fundamental idea of the American Revolution. Abetted by the Supreme Court majority’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act (a key victory of the 1960s), and building on the ongoing GOP campaign to maintain power as they lose their capacity to win the national popular vote, Trump is trying to undermine states’ control over the electoral process.

He’s used his powers to eviscerate other cherished rights, including free speech, a free press, and freedom of assembly and dissent. He has used the tools of government—including the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS—to unleash his revenge on protesters, the media, immigrants, Democrats, and all others he considers his opponents.

Right wingers have always wrapped themselves in the flag under the guise of being the true patriots. ‘“Americanism” campaigns in the early 20th century were designed to undermine the labor movement and limit immigration. Congressional and state legislative “Unamerican Activities” committees collaborated with the FBI beginning in the 1930s, to build blacklists against leftwing activists and artists,

Even American Nazis sought to be seen as patriots. On Feb. 20, 1939, 20,000 of them filled Madison Square Garden for a “Pro-America Rally.” They erected a massive 30-foot banner of George Washington (it was timed to celebrate his birthday) surrounded by American flags and swastika banners.

Trump’s own MAGA rallies feel like modern-day versions of that Nazi event. He fetishizes the American flag and other patriotic symbols, even while displaying a shallow, ahistorical, and bizarre understanding of what they meant.

Once, at a campaign rally in Tampa, as his cult followers chanted, “Build that wall,” Trump interrupted his speech to give a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him.

“We want to make sure that anyone who seeks to join our country, shares our values and has the capacity to love our people,” Trump said at a rally at the Kennedy Center in 2017.

“We all salute the same great American flag,” Trump said in his 2017 inauguration address—a line he has repeated in many speeches since then.

To Trump and his followers, the flag is synonymous with “America First.” It was a slogan used to unite isolationists and Nazi sympathizers against involvement in the European war in 1939. For Trump, it means reporting undocumented immigrants and caging their children in detention centers, restricting visitors from Muslim countries, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and other international agreements, and engaging in friendships with like-minded dictators.

Trump’s faux patriotism and its clownish griftiness has been providing a wide space for coalitions of resistance. The “No Kings” protests and the slogan itself help provide a very fitting frame for revitalizing a progressive, democratic, populist patriotism. Many participants waved American flags.

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance.

President Barack Obama said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”

President Joe Biden said that “we’re all part of a chain of patriots” who fought for democracy, freedom, fair play, peace, security, and opportunity. Patriots, he explained, seek “the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come; the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given talent can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”

In the Sixties, as hundreds of thousands of American youth were radicalized by the senseless Vietnam war, resistance included acts of defiance of patriotic symbols and rhetoric. Flag burnings would sometimes combine with the burning of draft cards. But other radicals took a different stance. In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the rather moribund Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.”

“It was as a Socialist, and because I was a Socialist, that I fell in love with America,” wrote Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, in his 1973 book, Fragments of a Century. “In saying that, I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a Socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies. To be a radical is, in the best and only decent sense of the word, patriotic.”

Harrington was identifying with the many radicals and progressive reformers who proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America promised democratic fulfillment—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech, and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and people of color, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

It is largely underrecognized that some of the most important and popular ways all Americans experience and express patriotism were the creation of radical writers and artists. What they created continues to inspire.

Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist who lived from 1855 to 1931, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to express his outrage at the Gilded Age’s widening economic divide. He had been ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist, and for his work among the It was the Gilded Age, an era marked by major political, economic, and social conflicts. Progressive reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers were joining forces in the so-called Populist movement to rein in the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Socialists and other leftist radicals were gaining new converts.

In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and the argument that it was spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups across the country were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—who were cast as polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance not to the American but to the Confederate flag.

Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two bestselling socialistic books, Looking Backward and Equality, believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped that the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he argued was undermining the nation.

When composing the Pledge, Bellamy had initially intended to use the phrase “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” but concluded that the radical rhetoric of the French Revolution wouldn’t sit well with many Americans. So he coined the phrase, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” to express his more egalitarian vision of America, and a secular patriotism aimed at helping unite a divided nation.

In 1891, Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000, hired Bellamy to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ so-called discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools.

Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age.

In 1923, over the objections of the aging Bellamy, the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the opening, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” Ostensibly, it was revised to make sure that immigrant children—who might have thought that “my flag” referred to their native countries—knew that they were pledging allegiance to the American flag.

In 1954, at the height of the Cold War—when many political leaders believed that the nation was threatened by godless communism—the Knights of Columbus led a successful campaign to lobby Congress to add the words “under God.”

A year after Bellamy composed the pledge, Kathryn Lee Bates wrote the poem “America the Beautiful,” which was later set to music by Samuel Ward, the organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey

Like Bellamy, Bates was a Christian socialist. A well-respected poet and professor of English at Wellesley College, Bates (1859-1929) was also a lesbian who lived with Katharine Coman, an economics professor. They belonged to progressive circles in the Boston area that supported labor unions, advocated for immigrants, and fought for women’s suffrage. She was an ardent foe of American imperialism.

“America the Beautiful” was initially published in 1895 to commemorate the Fourth of July. The poem is usually heard as an unalloyed paean to American virtue. But a close reading of her words makes it clear that she had something more in mind. She wrote:

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free!

Bates hoped that a progressive movement could overcome the Gilded Age’s greed. And when sung by Ray Charles and other African American artists, listeners can’t help but be inspired by the song’s plea for brotherhood – or, as the left calls it, solidarity.

Lazarus, author of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, was a Jewish poet of considerable reputation in her day, who was a strong supporter of Henry George and his “socialistic” single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the Earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American Dream.

In the Depression years and during World War II, the fusion of populist, egalitarian, and anti-racist values with patriotic expression reached full flower. The rise of fascism was countered in the US with efforts to build a center-left coalition in critical support of the New Deal and a parallel cultural upsurge.

Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1936, contrasted the nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African-Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers, and immigrants:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath
But opportunity is real, and life is free
Equality is in the air we breathe.

It’s a poem that encapsulates the anger and the hope integral to the American experience.

In 1939, composer Earl Robinson teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write “Ballad for Americans,” which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This 11-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the “nobody who’s everybody” and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.

Broadcasts and recordings of “Ballad for Americans,” (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, “Ballad for Americans” has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV. This might be the year to revive and revise it.

Earl Robinson wrote the melody for another important patriotic song of the World War 2 era -- “The House I Live In.” The lyric was written by Lewis Allen, the pen-name of a New York teacher, activist and poet named Abel Meeropol, who had, a few years earlier, written the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit” for Billie Holiday.

The song was the centerpiece of an Oscar winning short film starring Frank Sinatra. In the film, Sinatra uses the song to instruct a group of kids who were bullying a Jewish classmate. Sinatra made the song a hit in 1945. Other versions were recorded by Robeson and by Josh White. Sinatra kept it in his repertoire for his whole career, even though he publicly associated with the Republican right (abandoning his earlier left-wing sympathies). Sinatra performed the song as the finale to a nationally broadcast celebration of the Statue of Liberty centenary, addressing it to Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the platform with him. Only a few watching were aware of the song’s origins.

Composer Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “A Lincoln Portrait,” both written in 1942, are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events. Copland was a member of a radical composers’ group as well as a gay man.

Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie, a radical, was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin’s popular “God Bless America,” which he thought failed to recognize that it was the “people” to whom America belonged.

The song reflects Guthrie’s belief that patriotism and support for the underdog were interconnected. He celebrated America’s natural beauty and bounty, but criticized the country for its failure to share its riches. This is revealed in the song’s last and least-known verse, which Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performed at Obama’s pre-inaugural concert in 2009 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with Obama in the audience:

One bright sunny morning;
In the shadow of the steeple;
By the relief office;
I saw my people.
As they stood hungry;
I stood there wondering;
If this land was made for you and me.

You can find Spanish and Native American versions of the song. Guthrie would have approved. Both he and Seeger, who were part of Communist circles, helped popularize socially conscious music reflecting the country’s diversity. They are now viewed as American icons.

During the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the government’s policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King famously quoted the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” 11 times. That 19th century song seems politically neutral, but it was a defiantly anti-monarchy anthem, written as a kind of parody of “God Save the King.” An abolitionist version soon followed its initial release. Marian Anderson, the great African American contralto, sang the song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 because the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform at its Constitution Hall due to her race.

Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, “The Power and the Glory,” that coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. The words to the chorus echo the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement:

Here is a land full of power and glory;
Beauty that words cannot recall;
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom;
Her glory shall rest on us all.

One of its stanzas updated Guthrie’s combination of outrage and patriotism:

Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor;
Only as free as the padlocked prison door;
Only as strong as our love for this land;
Only as tall as we stand.

This song later became part of the repertoire of the U.S. Army band.

In recent decades, Springsteen has closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From “Born in the USA” to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), to his anthem about the 9/11 tragedy (“Empty Sky”), to his album Wrecking Ball (including its opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own”), Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals. In January, Springsteen wrote “Streets of Minneapolis,” which describe how “a city aflame fought fire and ice ‘neath an occupier’s boots,” which Springsteen calls “King Trump’s private army.” He wrote it in response to the second deadly shooting by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and dedicated it to the people of that city. At the opening of Obama’s new presidential center in Chicago, Springsteen sang his song, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which includes lines adopted from Guthrie’s song, “This Train is Bound for Glory.” The train – a metaphor for America -- carries “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” and “fools and kings.”

America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance. Americans are upset by the unbridled selfishness and political influence-peddling demonstrated by banks, oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, and other large corporations. They are angry at the growing power of American-based global firms who show no loyalty to their country, outsource jobs to low-wage countries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the environment.

During the ICE raids in Minnesota a group called “Singing Resistance” emerged to encourage singing during protests. Troubadours of multiple generations sang new and classic songs of protest on stage and via You Tube.

One fascinating moment happened at this year’s Super Bowl when Coco Jones sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” For 100 years that song has been the African American national anthem. It lyrics include these lines:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ‘til victory is won.

To have it performed at the Super Bowl, alongside the “Star Spangled Banner,” may have been an affront to right-wingers, , but it was an inspiring moment for many other Americans. Cong. James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) has sponsored a bill to make “Life Every Voice” the national hymn.

Throughout American history, progressive movements had won major victories and also experienced setbacks. When those setbacks occur, it is understandable that people sometimes lose hope, and even give up the fight. But our history also teaches us that we can’t give up, because we must keep the struggle alive for a new generation.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Peter Dreier
Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College. He joined the Occidental faculty in January 1993 after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style" and co-author of "Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America" (2022).
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Dick Flacks
Dick Flacks is research professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. His books include: "Making History: The American Left and the American Mind;" "Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up;" "The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left's Founding Manifesto" His research and teaching centers on issues of political participation, commitment and protest. His weekly radio program, "Culture of Protest," has been on Santa Barbara radio for 25 years.
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Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom or None at All: the Comprador Politics of Fear in Bosnia

By Vuk Bačanović

June 30, 2026

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

Image by Michal Maňas/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

The news that Mehter, a Turkish military band, paraded through Baščaršija — Sarajevo’s old Ottoman-era bazaar and historic city center – and performed in the Bosnian capital should not be met with hysteria or panic about “the Turks,” a reaction that largely comes from Serbian and Croatian circles, but also from secular Bosniak ones. The very description of the event already says enough: this is a military band of Ottoman provenance, associated with the ceremonial traditions of the Janissaries and the sultans – in other words, not exactly a children’s choir called “Little Butterfly” brought in to cheer up the gathered tourists.

Still, it is not entirely incomprehensible that part of the public sees a symbolic problem here. There are memorials to şehids – Muslim martyrs – connected to the Ottoman conquest of Jajce in 1463, a fortified royal town in central Bosnia and the last seat of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. There are also narratives that link those şehids to the army of Mehmed II, known as Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan whose campaign brought an end to the medieval Bosnian state. And there are even preschool institutions such as the “Sultan Fatih Kindergarten” in Novi Travnik, a town in central Bosnia, which appears on official lists of preschool institutions. None of this, however, means that one should launch a moral panic complete with a warning siren for the “return of the Janissaries.”

Intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge that the culture of a former conqueror or occupier does not have to remain forever what is often superficially – and frequently with disastrous consequences – classified as “occupying culture.” It is indeed that at the moment of military domination, political subjugation, and institutional coercion. Over centuries of local life, however, through family memory, language, architecture, music, religious practice, and everyday customs, it can become part of domestic culture. The postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha would say that culture is not transmitted as a dead package from the imperial center to a passive periphery; rather, it emerges in the in-between spaces, through repetition, translation, mimicry, hybridization, and local reworking.

In other words, once an imperial form is adopted by the native population, it is no longer necessarily a pure marker of foreign rule. It becomes something “almost the same, but not quite” – a new cultural fabric that simultaneously remembers its origin and changes its meaning. The Serbian appropriation of the cross with the so-called ocila – the four fire-steels arranged around a cross in Serbian heraldry – and of the Byzantine double-headed eagle illustrates precisely this process. Imperial symbols, once adopted and recoded dynastically, heraldically, and nationally, cease to be mere remnants of Byzantine rule or cultural influence. They become authentic signs of Serbian statehood, ecclesiastical identity, and collective self-understanding.

In the same way as in the Serbian case of appropriating Byzantine Christian symbolism, the Ottoman legacy of Bosnian Muslims is not, as is often offensively suggested, the political sediment of a failed empire. Rather, it is deeply connected to Islam as a universal religion, one that cannot be reduced exclusively to the Ottoman state, to the policies of this or that sultan, or to the beat of a Janissary drum. The Islam of Bosnian Muslims is not simply the extended arm of a former empire, but a living faith, a local experience, and a cultural world that took shape in Bosnia over centuries.

Here one should also recall the almost laboratory-pure hysteria that erupted in Sarajevo and Serbia when, during the student protests in Serbia, a young man wearing a šajkača  – a traditional Serbian military-style cap, widely associated with Serbian national symbolism – embraced a young woman wearing a hijab. Religious fanatics, party heralds, and factory-calibrated bots on both sides of the Drina River – the river that forms much of the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia – immediately recognized in this most ordinary warm human gesture proof of the end of the world. For one side, she instantly became a “Turk”; for the other, he became a “Chetnik,” as if people did not wear clothes, symbols, religious and cultural signs, but historical criminal indictments on their heads. In that small scene one could see how deeply the public sphere shaped by rigid nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia remains imprisoned in the most primitive Goebbelsian grammar: take a single sign, tear it out of life, history, family, faith, homeland, and personal experience, and turn it into a wanted poster.

At the same time, however, it is understandable that a certain unease remains among non-Muslims, among Muslims who do not feel any particular closeness to the Ottomans, and among secular people of various backgrounds, when precisely the military-conquest symbols of that tradition are presented as entirely neutral folklore.

Historical memories in Bosnia, in the absence of a shared cultural policy in a decentralized country, are not exactly neatly arranged in a museum display case so that the masses may understand them and place them where they belong. Instead, they wander around like exceptionally honorable village hosts with unresolved property disputes over a boundary line between two fields.

If we accept that the Ottoman-Islamic legacy is not an “occupying remnant” – and it is not – but also part of the identity of one people, why is it still almost unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Sarajevo, a city that aspires to function as the capital of all Bosnia and Herzegovina, about, for example, a Vidovdan procession? Vidovdan, or St. Vitus Day, is one of the central dates in Serbian historical and religious memory, especially because of its association with the Battle of Kosovo of 1389. Or why is it so difficult to discuss restoring street names dedicated to Vuk Karadžić, the nineteenth-century reformer of the Serbian language; Petar II Petrović Njegoš, the Montenegrin prince-bishop and poet; Hajduk Veljko, a Serbian rebel commander from the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans; or Miloš Obilić, the legendary hero of the Kosovo cycle?

We are speaking of figures without whom – regardless of the natural controversies attached to them, controversies that exist in every plural society – it is difficult to explain the language, literature, political imagination, and cultural memory of the Serbian people. If Mehter is also part of the cultural heritage of Bosnian Muslims, and there is no reason why it should not be, then Vuk Karadžić cannot be treated as the fourth horseman of the apocalypse with a Cyrillic primer tucked under his arm.

Naturally, in that case Mehter, understood as an exceptionally interesting historical, folkloric, and performance tradition rather than as a desire for “the return of the Turks,” would also have to be welcome in Banja Luka – the largest city in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority entity – and in the western, predominantly Croat part of Mostar, the divided Herzegovinian city whose eastern and western halves still carry heavy postwar symbolic meanings.

That, of course, is how things would have to be in a society that truly belongs to itself. But it is not so in a colonized country where comprador elites build their power on the production of apocalyptic scenarios and on reducing culture to a tribal alarm system. Since they are not meaningfully asked about the economy, sovereignty, or real social development, all that remains for them is to perform the role of historical guards at a village checkpoint: they, allegedly, get to decide which cap, which street, and which long-dead poet will receive permission to pass through their miniature customs office of fear.

In other words, if we want Bosnia and Herzegovina truly to be a shared society, and not a collection of shattered fragments held together by international diktat, ever-scarcer grants, and the occasional ambassadorial bandage, then the same principle must apply to everyone. This is especially true because Bosnia and Herzegovina is, statistically, one of the societies with the lowest number of ethnically and confessionally motivated incidents in the world. Either we will agree that all historical cultures in Bosnia and Herzegovina have the right to public space throughout its entire territory – without triumphalism, humiliation, vulgarity, or the symbolic trampling of others – or we will finally admit that everyone is in fact demanding pluralism only within the limits of their own self-satisfaction. In that case, there is no Bosnia and Herzegovina as a shared society, but only three parallel memorial zones – Bosniak, Serb, and Croat – connected not even by a common electric utility.

That is why the rule would have to be simple: either let a thousand flowers bloom, or let nothing bloom at all. But not in such a way that some get a botanical garden, others a herbarium, and the third are granted permission to exist only if they remain buried deep beneath uncut grass, neither smelling nor blooming, as if they had not grown from that very soil in the first place.

P.S. This text is being written in the middle of the hot summer of an election campaign, at a moment when the hooligan service of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo – East Sarajevo being the Serb-majority city administratively adjacent to Sarajevo, in Republika Srpska – is, according to a duly stamped purchase order from campaign headquarters, burning Serbian tricolors, snatching flags with lilies – the golden fleur-de-lis associated with the medieval Bosnian Kotromanić dynasty and later with the wartime flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – drawing crosses with the Serbian ocila on them, and then bragging about this epic achievement on social media. The intellectual level is roughly that of sixth grade, during school recess, among children in urgent need of supervision.

And all of this is happening in two cities where people live, work, shop, fall in love, quarrel, seek medical treatment, and move back and forth every day in the tens of thousands without any apocalypse whatsoever, while the electoral shamans on the sidelines desperately try to explain to them that, for campaign purposes, it would be desirable if they could hate one another just a little more.Email

Vuk Bačanović

Vuk Bačanović is a Sarajevo-based historian and a long-time journalist and editor. He is the author of numerous scholarly and journalistic articles. He generally advocates a historical-anthropological approach to the study of the past, particularly the phenomenon of ethnic identities. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and serves as an editor of the Podgorica-based political portal Žurnal.me.

What is There to Celebrate on the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America?

By C.J. Polychroniou

June 30, 2026

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

Image by John Trumbull/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America turns 250 years old. Should the Left celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence? After all, this is a nation with a very dark and ugly past — with racism, genocide, and imperialism deeply embedded in its psyche.

Surely Native Americans have no reason to celebrate. The history of the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of cruelty, oppression, and extermination. Leaving aside the 56 million indigenous people that were killed by European settlers across the Americas by 1600, since its independence in 1776, the U.S. government has launched more than 1500 attacks against various indigenous people, slaughtering them, and taking their lands. Native Americans in the U.S. continue to face oppression, poverty, and discrimination, and rank near the bottom of all other groups in terms of health, education, and employment.  

What about blacks? Do they have a reason to celebrate a nation that denied them their humanity for much of those 250 years, while they continue to experience racial discrimination to this day? Racism against blacks remains very much widespread in the Good Ol’ USA.

Should American women have a reason to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday? They have been treated as second-class citizens until fairly recently, and while many countries around the world have or had female leaders, it is a widely shared belief that the U.S. is still not ready for a woman president.

If anything, a major milestone like the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should be an opportunity to confront the nation’s dark and ugly past and reflect on what has gone wrong with U.S. democracy and what we can do about it. After all, isn’t it a tragic irony that the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which is supposed to honor the principles of liberty and equality upon which the nation was allegedly founded, will take place with an administration in power whose own beliefs and actions embody the very tyrannical rule that the Declaration of Independence sought to overthrow?

What manner of national progress is this?

But history is not a linear progression. Nor is it guided by the realization of freedom and rationality, as Hegel thought. Human history moves in a spiral, and irrationality makes up a great part of human life and history. Moreover, not only does the value of ideals vary greatly (Nazism and imperialism were as potent ideals as those of democracy and self-determination), but there is usually a disconnect between ideals and political reality. Some of the lofty principles in the Declaration of Independence, such as “all men are created equal,” collided with the facts on the ground and, in fact, had a very narrow interpretation when they were written, as they applied only to white, propertied men.

Indeed, in 2026, we have a president who likes to govern like a king, or a dictator. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court has given Donald J. Trump king-like powers. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Trump 2.0 has demolished democracy by initiating a new age of authoritarian rule with civil and human rights rollbacks, weaponizing the federal government against the president’s political rivals, and unleashing a paramilitary squad of fascist thugs into communities across the nation. It is also hardly surprising that Trump has become the most corrupt president in U.S. history. He is exploiting shamelessly the highest office in the land to enrich himself and his family.

Trump’s enablers extend beyond today’s Supreme Court, which has moved so far rightward that it qualifies as the most reactionary in the nation’s modern history. It includes the plutocrats, media conglomerates, evangelical Christians, and pro-Israel political networks. Retail corporations, major law firms, and academic institutions capitulated with such ease to Trump’s bullying tactics that they made a mockery of liberal ideals.

All that being said, it is difficult not to appreciate the importance of the Declaration of Independence. It is indeed one of the most important documents in the history of politics and ideas for the simple but radical fact that, by articulating the intention of the American colonies to separate from British rule, it established the principles of self-government and individual rights while connecting equality and freedom.

Being profoundly influenced by the philosophical thinking of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (unlike contemporary U.S. leaders, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams were deeply learned men and had extensive knowledge of history and philosophy), the Declaration of Independence solidified the claims of social contract theory—that is, the idea that governments receive their just powers from the consent of the governed—and justified rebellion against tyranny. Within just a couple of decades, the Declaration of Independence inspired revolts across the globe. It had great impact on political and philosophical debates leading up to the French Revolution (1789) and served as a reference point behind the slave revolt against French colonial rule in Haiti in 1791 and the Irish rebellion against British rule in May 1798.

When Ho Chi Ming declared Vietnam an independent nation on September 2, 1945, he paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He opened his declaration of independence with the statement from the 1776 Declaration “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” But then he updated those words by saying “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have the right to live, to be happy and free.”

Indeed, the Declaration of Independence served as a “universal blueprint” for the anti-colonial struggles that occurred after World War II. It is indeed a radical document. One of its foundational principles is that “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” governments that become destructive to their fundamental rights. This principle is a cornerstone of democratic theory and should never be forgotten.

Ironically enough, all U.S. administrations have largely abandoned the fundamental principles underpinning the Declaration of Independence–and none more so than President Donald Trump’s administration. The country is on a very slippery path under Donald Trump’s imperial proto-fascism. Democracy is dying before our very own eyes and Trump’s desire to reshape the world order not only creates more uncertainty and instability but risks opening a Pandora’s box.

It is in this context that the Declaration of Independence should serve as a stark reminder of the need for a call to action when a government, like the one represented by Donald Trump, acts illegally and unconstitutionally to weaken democratic institutions and engages purely in self-dealing while endangering our communities. We have a monstrous, tyrannical government in power that the People must stand up to with all their might before it ruins everything.  

If we must, what we need to celebrate on the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence is nothing more and nothing less than the basic principles and ideas behind this document, in an updated manner, of course, à la Ho Chi Ming, while being fully cognizant of the fact that we still have a long way to go to achieve equality in this country. That was not the intention of those who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence; nonetheless, they gave the world a political and philosophical document for the ages.

250th: Their Heroes Are Monsters to Us

Ishmael Reed
July 3, 2026


Stereoscope photograph of the slave quarters at Monticello, 

James C. Sawders, Keystone View Company, Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.

The segregated American media spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July praising the founding fathers and paying tribute to other American heroes. Heroes to them. Monsters to us.

For CNN, Kit Carson is a hero. They showed a scene in which Carson walked miles, nearly barefoot, to rescue his men. We grew up watching the exploits of Kit Carson on cartoon shows. Our Settler education didn’t inform us that Kit Carson committed atrocities against the Navajo. How did the Navajo regard the American hero, Kit Carson? From a site called Partnership with Native Americans.


In 1863, General James Carleton began a renewed effort to eradicate the Navajo. In charge of the operation was Colonel Kit Carson. Knowing he couldn’t defeat the Navajo militarily, Carson began to destroy the Navajo homes, crops, and livestock. More than two million pounds of corn, a staple of the Indian diet, were burned. Forced to survive on nuts and berries many families, starving during the long winter months, began turning themselves into the military. About 8,000 men, women, and children were forced to make the “Long Walk” to Basque Redondo, a reservation in New Mexico about 300 miles away. Many died on the way of hunger and cold. Others drowned when they were forced to cross the Rio Grande during the spring floods.

Douglass Brinkley is a good guy. I spent a couple of days with him in New Orleans under a grant he’d received to bring writers to New Orleans. But now, he’s become a TV historian instead of someone who would challenge the decadent old boy Historical establishment, now under attack from a generation of women, Black, and Native American historians. But he’s right at home in a media that considers Confederacy apologist Ken Burns a historian. On a Wed.TV show, he expressed his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt.In 2021 Brinkley was named the inaugural historian in residence at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

How do Blacks feel about Theodore Roosevelt?


America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Post

On December 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment following what became known as the Brownsville Affair—one of the most consequential racial injustices in American military history.

The events that led to the order began months earlier, on the night of August 13, 1906, in Brownsville, Texas. A white bartender was killed and a police officer wounded by gunfire. Almost immediately, white residents accused Black soldiers stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Despite testimony from commanding officers that the soldiers were in their barracks at the time, and despite glaring inconsistencies in the physical evidence, local authorities focused exclusively on the regiment.

… No individual soldier was identified as a suspect, and no court-martial ever took place.

Nevertheless, under political pressure and citing a supposed “conspiracy of silence,” Roosevelt imposed collective punishment. His order stripped all 167 soldiers of their honor, pensions, and the possibility of future federal employment. Many of the men had served honorably for years, including during the Spanish-American War. Some were nearing retirement and lost the economic security they had earned through decades of service.

The consequences were lifelong. Families fell into poverty. Reputations were destroyed. The Army’s decision reinforced a painful contradiction: It was not until 1972 that the U.S. Army formally acknowledged the wrongdoing and exonerated the soldiers.”

I asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers why he omitted Roosevelt’s role in the Brownsville incident. He said that he didn’t have space to include it. Booker T. Washington tried to persuade Roosevelt to give the soldiers a fair trial.

Francine Prose showed up in the Guardian on July 2nd, where she expressed her reverence for Thomas Jefferson, a hypocrite who found slavery ”excreable,” yet bred Slaves like livestock and consigned them to cramped quarters that were unsanitary. He broke up families and had his slaves beaten. Indeed, he might have beaten them himself. A visitor from France said that he accompanied Jefferson as he reviewed his slaves and that while walking up and down, he slapped a riding crop in his hand. The slaves responded to this gesture by trembling. Though much has been made about his having a Black mistress, another oral tradition describes him as a promiscuous rapist. Why would feminists honor this man? I think Jefferson is admired for his Hollywood Raj look, the name given to Cary Grant and other British actors who acted in films that promoted British imperialism.

Benjamin Franklin was called “Old Double-Face; ” yet he was smarter than the other Founding Fathers. Franklin began opposing slavery in the late 1750s after visiting a school for Black children and realizing their lack of education was due to their environment, not nature. His opposition peaked at the end of his life. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787. He petitioned Congress to end slavery in February 1790. While Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton advocated the extermination of Native Americans, Franklin protested the massacre of Native Americans.

Benjamin Franklin protested the 1763–1764 slaughter of 20 peaceful, unarmed Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians by writing a fiery pamphlet titled A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. He condemned the killers as a “barbarous mob” and passionately argued against collective racial punishment.

So if the country needs a founding father, maybe it should be Franklin?

Priapic Ambitions: Notes on George Washington

Jeffrey St. Clair

 July 3, 2026

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Portrait of George Washington (detail) by Charles Willson Peale (1776).

+ I excavated my way through Ron Chernow’s bulging, semi-woke (by the standards of the Texas Schoolbook Commission)  biography of George Washington. I say, “semi-woke,” because while it discreetly admits that Washington was a patrician dandy of no exceptional military or administrative genius, who abused his troops, committed war crimes, bought his first election to public office with booze, and held 100s of slaves, often treating them cruelly in response to his own ineptitudes as a gentleman planter, it is quick to balance any evidence of fault in the character of the founding father with a statement to the effect that “while this may sound extreme to our ears, it was fairly typical for the time.” Which is, of course, exactly the point.

+ While Chernow’s text is rather elliptical on these decisive episodes in Washington’s life (there’s little risk of it being pulled from libraries in most of the states, at this point), the book is generously foot-noted with primary sources, many of them in Washington’s own hand (he was a prolific self-promoter of his own exalted life), which fill-in the more tenebrous aspects of his character.

+ The first member of the Washington clan to step foot in Virginia was John, who came ashore in the Tidewater area in 1676. George’s great-grandfather wasn’t much of a farmer (after all, he only owned three slaves and some Irish “servants”), but he did amass thousands of acres of land along the Potomac and received a military commission to kill Indians in Maryland, where he earned a reputation for treachery and slaughter. In one notorious incident, Washington murdered five Indian leaders who had come to negotiate a treaty, then claimed their land. He was known by the Potomac tribes as Conotocarious, “destroyer of villages, devourer of homes.”

+ It turns out George Washington could have easily run a CIA black site or the Gitmo torture camp. As an officer of the VA Regiment in the French & Indian wars, he proved a sadistic disciplinarian inflicting as many as 1500 lashes a day for relatively minor offenses: “drinking in and informed another officer he “was determined to hang two or three at a time as an example to the others. (ie., his soldiers).” He kept his condemned prisoners in iron chains in total darkness. In a letter to Robert Dimwiddie, the Lt Governor of VA, with whom he would later clash in the revolutionary war, Washington wrote coldly: Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others and was for example’s sake we did it.”

+”To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”

– Rev. Peter Fontaine, 1757

+ Though they can’t be blamed for its pompous and derivative neo-classical design, seven master black carpenters built most of the plantation house at Mount Vernon. They were all enslaved by Washington. The overseer of the construction, Humphrey Knight, wrote Washington, assuring the young land baron that he wasn’t light with the whip when he spotted a loose board or crooked plank: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt ’em when I could see a fault.”

+ Martha Washington kept her own sister, Ann Dandridge, as a slave. Ann was the daughter of Martha’s father John Dandridge and a young, enslaved woman, who was half-black, half-Cherokee. Ann lived as a slave at Mount Vernon until 1802, after first George, then Martha died.

+ Re: Pentagon contracts & high-tech weaponry, when Washington learned the Continental Army only had 300 barrels of gunpowder–not the 10k he’d been promised–Benjamin Franklin urged him to arm the troops with bows and arrows. “They’ve worked pretty well for centuries,” Franklin wryly noted. If only the bow-makers had had a PAC!

+ George Washington had a brilliant aide-de-camp during the final three years of the Revolutionary War. No, not Alexander Hamilton. His name was John Laurens. Laurens was that rare thing: a wealthy abolitionist from South Carolina. Even rarer, his father had amassed the family fortune through the slave trade, purchasing and selling as many as 10,000 people captured in Africa and shipped in chains to Charleston. Laurens had already developed plans to free his own family’s slaves and eagerly approached Washington with a daring scheme to shift the balance of power in a stagnating war, especially in the South, where British forces had just ransacked and torched Savannah. Laurens proposed emancipating at least 3,000 blacks who would be willing to serve in a South Carolina regiment to confront the marauding troops of Banastre Tarleton, who had terrorized the southern coast from Virginia to Georgia. Members of the Continental Congress warmed to the plan and some even wanted to go further, emancipating all slaves who’d be willing to serve in the American army.

After all, at that point, the Continental Army was already more integrated than any US army until the Vietnam War, with free blacks accounting for more than six percent of the total force. But Washington, who still owned or controlled as many as 300 slaves, recoiled at the idea of arming emancipated blacks in the South. He rejected Laurens’ plan and quietly contemplated a scheme, typically reactionary, of his own: sell off the slaves of Mt. Vernon and his other properties and loan the proceeds to finance the maintenance of his bedraggled army. In a letter to his plantation overseer (and distant cousin) Lund Washington, the general wrote that if the Americans lost the war

it would be a matter of little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his Most Gracious Majesty…the only points therefore for me to consider are…whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have Negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will fetch and the interest of the money.

So the war dragged on another three years, until finally the decisive blow was struck at Yorktown, where the nearly all-black First Rhode Island Regiment made one of the most audacious raids. As for Laurens, who dreamed of abolishing slavery across the Americas, he soon became one of the last casualties of the war, shot in the head during a skirmish with British troops pillaging a rice field along the Combahee River, a couple of weeks after the British fled Charleston.

+ George Washington’s First Inaugural Address was written by James Madison. Congress’s Response was written by James Madison. And Washington’s rejoinder was written by…James Madison. At the operational level, America’s politics has always been a charade.

+ Even George Washington drew the line at separating the families of the people he “owned”…

+ Baron Johann de Kalb, a German mercenary whom Lafayette recruited to aid the American Revolutionaries on Washington’s military acumen:

He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man, but as a General he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption. 

+ George Washington railed incessantly against the war profiteers and speculators during the Revolution, calling them “plundering scoundrels,” while today’s members of Congress (and sons of Trump) make millions trading in weapons and oil stocks, as their states and districts get gouged at the pump.

+ For all of his faults, Washington was no nativist. He encouraged mass immigration to the young Republic, writing  to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp in 1788: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

+ Tom Paine, that Che Guevara of the 18th century, in a letter to George Washington, May 1, 1790: 

Our very good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has intrusted to my care the key of the Bastille, and a drawing handsomely framed representing the demolition of that detestable prison. I feel myself happy, and being the person through whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe….

Soon, the nation Washington was building would be putting its own dissidents into similar prisons, under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

+ During the war, Tom Paine served as George Washington’s chief propagandist. His fiery pamphlets kept the money flowing and the popular spirits elevated even as the Revolutionary Army stumbled and stuttered up and down the Atlantic seaboard. After the Brits called it quits and Washington assumed power, he turned his back on his old friend. When Paine, the trans-Atlantic rebel, faced the guillotine in Revolutionary France for refusing to endorse the execution of the King, Washington failed to intervene, ignoring the urgings of Jefferson and Franklin. (Paine survived the Terror by a freak accident, as the prison guards mismarked his cell door.) Paine came to consider Washington a “counter-revolutionary” (he coined the term), denouncing the former revolutionary-turned-imperious leader as either “an apostate or an imposter.” 

+ Washington wasn’t a religious man. He countenanced religion, but didn’t practice it. He saw himself, a little grandly perhaps, as a figure of the enlightenment, a man of reason and science. If anything, he was a Deist, who believed in a Supreme Being and saw Jesus as a moral teacher, not a god. Still, he wasn’t hostile to religion in the manner of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who, in an 1816 letter to the writer Horatio Gates Spafford, described the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale as “seminaries of despotism.” For Jefferson, the Church was as oppressive as the monarchy.

Jefferson and Washington certainly were no Christian Nationalists. Jefferson wasn’t even a Christian. His biographer Joseph Ellis describes him as a secular humanist, though I don’t know what kind of humanism can rationalize holding other humans in bondage. Perhaps a future Supreme Court decision from Alito or Thomas will explain.

+ Hirsute historical note: The powdered wigs worn by European and American elites in the 17th and 18th centuries were originally designed to cover hair loss from syphilis and only later became such powerful symbols of status and high station that most of George Washington’s portraits depict him wearing one, though he never did. He did use scented powder on his hair, though that was mainly to prevent lice and to disguise the smell of the animal lard pomade used to flatten and sculpt his naturally red locks. (See: Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo.)

+ In reading about Washington, I’ve become increasingly distracted by Peggy Shippen, wife of Benedict Arnold. Washington was so entranced by her that, even after evidence of her complicity in Benedict’s treason came to light, he refused to believe it. Shippen was reportedly the highest-paid British spy of the Revolutionary period. Aaron Burr was almost certainly right in charging that Shippen was not only central to the conspiracy but also enticed Arnold into becoming a British agent and surrendering West Point. This image of Shippen, whose coif would have shamed Madame Pompadour, gives you some idea of what charged the erotic fantasies of the nation’s first president, who called himself “a votary to love.” He remained in the thrall of a similar “Georgian era” English beauty, Sally Fairfax, who fled the nearby Belvoir plantation at the start of the Revolution for Bath, England, for most of his life…

+ Speaking of Burr, in Gore Vidal’s novel the slight that prompts the fatal duel on the Heights of Weehawken is Hamilton’s assertion that Burr regularly had incestuous relations with his daughter Theodosia, these maulings occurring at roughly the same time Burr’s other hated rival, Thomas Jefferson (who had manufactured evidence against Burr at his treason trial), was raping his enslaved house servant Sally Hemings. So when the Originalists piously ask about some Constitutional nuance, what was the intent of the Founders? It was probably something designed to indemnify their own felonious predilections.

+ There’s no question Washington obsessed over sex. On his bookshelves lurked two of the age’s most notorious sex tutorials, The Lover’s Watch: or the Art of Making Love by Aphra Benn and Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom. The question is why the father of the country failed to father any children by Martha or any of his hundreds of enslaved women? (Martha gave birth to four children in her first marriage, so the lack of fecundity in her relations with George probably didn’t originate with her.) Was it sterility or impotence? If you’d been able to peek inside Washington’s medicine cabinet at Mount Vernon, you’d have found it well-stocked with Spanish Fly, the sex potion made from dead blister beetles, purchased, like Viagra today, by mail order. In Washington’s case, it came from chemists in London in four-ounce jars.

+ But Spanish Fly often proved lethal, especially when administered to women orally. (Men tended to rub the mixture on their penises, hoping to swell and prolong their erections.)  In 1772, the Marquis de Sade fatally poisoned five Parisian prostitutes when, in anticipation of a weekend orgy (at which he longed to spend hours with his nose between their buttocks sampling their farts), de Sade compelled the young women to eat anise seed cupcakes liberally laced with Spanish Fly. Since Martha outlived George, we can perhaps assume that the orders of Spanish Fly were meant to fortify his own faltering Priapic ambitions.

+ While George Washington, the Father of the Country, didn’t have biological progeny that we know of, during his second term, his favoritism toward Alexander Hamilton led to charges that Hamilton was actually his illegitimate son. (This might give new subtext to “The Room Where It Happened.”) American politics has always featured this scurrilous element. It’s one of its most endearing features and, at least until Trump, has helped to serve as a check on the development of cult-like followings for American presidents. (See The George Washington Scandals by John C. Fitzpatrick.)

Washington’s false teeth, some of which were extracted from enslaved people. Photo: Mount Vernon.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

From Independence to Interdependence

By Lawrence S. Wittner

July 3, 2026

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

As Americans and people of other former colonies recognize, there’s a great deal to be said for national independence.

But, at times, we might also wonder: is it sufficient?

Until recently in human history, imperialism was widespread. In 1939, Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth alone had direct or de facto political and economic control of 25 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its land mass. In fact, only a century ago, nearly half of today’s independent nations were European colonies.

Imperialism, of course, had severe drawbacks. For the colonized, these drawbacks included genocide, enslavement, exploitation, and the looting of resources. But the colonizers, too, despite the vast riches acquired by a small minority among them, suffered losses. They perished in imperialist wars, died of starvation and diseases, and became infected by arrogance, brutality and racism. Above all, imperialism denied people in the colonies the right to self-government and, therefore, the right to determine the future of their own nations.

But World War II destabilized the imperialist system and, also, discredited it. As a result, a vast wave of decolonization occurred in the aftermath of the war, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Although there are still holdouts from the worldwide anti-imperialist approach―Vladimir Putin, committed to annexing Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu, battling to prevent Palestinian statehood, and Donald Trump, constantly demanding new territory―for the most part national independence has become the acceptable norm.

The problem, however, is that although national independence is preferable to imperialist domination, it does not get us very far toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Perhaps the most serious of the problems facing us today is war, with wars currently raging throughout large portions of the world. Global military spending continues to soar (reaching $2.9 trillion in 2025), with enormous increases already slated for the future. The result is―and seems likely to continue to be―an enormous loss of lives and economic resources. 

Nuclear weapons, of course, threaten to turn war into a catastrophe almost beyond human comprehension, annihilating virtually all life on earth. And yet, in a sharp break with the nuclear arms control and disarmament measures of past decades, the nuclear powers have recently abandoned their commitment to reducing and, ultimately, abolishing the nuclear menace. Having increased their nuclear spending by 19 percent in 2025, they are currently developing a dazzling array of new nuclear weapons.

How are nations going to deal with the immense problem of war and modern weaponry without collective action? Certainly, the solution to the problem does not lie in the hands of any one nation.

If human beings, as well as other species, are not exterminated in the near future by war, they are likely to face gradual extinction by environmental catastrophe. Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, melting ice caps, sea level rise, soil degradation, overfishing, and a host of other ills are already here and leading to an increasingly unsustainable, unlivable future. Meanwhile, intense heat, raging wildfires, and massive floods are destroying agriculture and sending millions of desperate climate refugees fleeing from their homelands.

Effective protection of the world’s environment surpasses the ability of any one nation, however well-meaning. Surely it is a global matter, requiring global cooperation.

Diseases, of course, also transcend national lines. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, caused between 15 million and 18 million deaths in nations around the world. But, of course, in recent decades there have been other disease epidemics and pandemics that have shown no regard for national boundaries, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, influenza, hepatitis, SARS, swine flu, dengue fever, Western African Ebola, mpox, MERS, and cholera.

When it comes to diseases, there has been widespread recognition that a global approach is necessary. As a result, 192 nations belong to the World Health Organization (WHO). Three nations, however, stubbornly resist WHO membership. The United States is one of them, thanks to the decision of U.S. President Trump to withdraw from it.

Numerous other challenges―including widespread poverty, the irresponsible behavior of multinational corporations, mass migration, resource scarcity, and the risks of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence―also suggest the need for global collaboration.

These kinds of global issues are frequently discussed at the United Nations, leading to statements made by the UN Secretary-General and other UN officials that appeal for remedial action. But, unfortunately, some nations, and especially the great powers, which seem less committed to global betterment than to their own national agendas, have seen to it that the United Nations is denied the authority and the resources to adequately address these challenges. Russia, for example, has repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to its continued military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine. For its part, the United States has compiled a debt of nearly $4 billion to the cash-strapped United Nations by halting its payments for UN dues and UN peacekeeping operations.

The logical solution to the frustration of collective action is to strengthen the United Nations. Several proposals have been advanced along these lines, including enhancing the power of the General Assembly and limiting the veto in the Security Council. In addition, a campaign has recently been launched to reduce the obstacles to more effective UN action in global affairs by employing Article 109 of the UN Charter to hold a UN Charter review conference. If this conference were held and the Charter revised, it could transform world organization into what the campaign calls “a stronger, fairer, and more inclusive international system.”

But the strengthening of the United Nations won’t occur automatically. It will require worldwide public pressure, driven by citizens’ organizations committed to peace, environmental sustainability, public health, and other global imperatives. Ultimately, it’s up to these organizations and to their allies among wise public officials to secure the next great shift in human consciousness and behavior―a shift from a parochial national independence to the interdependence of nations.Email

Lawrence S. Wittner

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Lawrence ("Larry") Wittner was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1967.  Thereafter, he taught history at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at SUNY/Albany.  In 2010, he retired as professor of history emeritus.  A writer on peace and foreign policy issues, he is the author or editor of twelve books and hundreds of published articles and book reviews and a former president of the Peace History Society.  Since 1961, he has been active in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements, and currently serves as a national board member of Peace Action (America's largest grassroots peace organization) and as executive secretary of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.  On occasion, he helps to fan the flames of discontent by performing vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers.  His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).  More information about him can be found at his website:  http://lawrenceswittner.com.