Why History Matters: the Left and Ukraine

BY ROB URIE

JANUARY 6, 2023

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Photograph Source: G. V. Buck, from U. & U. – Public Domain

When US President, racist, segregationist, eugenicist, and liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson sent soldiers from the American Expeditionary Force to ‘negotiate’ the aftermath of the October Revolution in the USSR in 1919, the Indian Wars in the US were still underway, slavery had only recently been abolished, and the inconclusive end of the first global imperialist war—WWI, was setting up a sequel—WWII, to be fought. That Wilson’s worldview in 1919 formed the basis of German fascist ideology a decade later provides insight into how ruling-class ideas take root.

In contrast to liberal political theory where people develop opinions in isolation, Wilson was very much a person of his economic class and time. American capital had close to a billion dollars invested in Russia when the Bolsheviks turned the world upside down by launching a revolution to govern themselves. American (and German) industrialists, having convinced themselves that were rich because they were genetically / racially / morally superior to workers, imagined that a successful workers revolution would place inferiors in charge of their superiors (went the logic).

Since then, an odd selectivity has overtaken Western historians whereby Russian and Soviet history is imagined to have started with the October Revolution (1917), whereas most of two centuries elapsed between the American Revolution (1777) and the point where American history is ‘morally’ imagined to have begun (1945). The history now excluded includes three-centuries of chattel slavery and the extermination of the indigenous population of what is now the US through intentional and unintentional genocide.

This post-War history includes the partial or total destruction by the Americans of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Of these nations, only those that threw off the yoke of American imperialism are prospering today. The child-refugees still finding their way northward to the US from Honduras, ‘illegals,’ are mostly orphans fleeing the political violence that was set in motion when American liberals supported a Right-wing coup there in 2009.

Chart: the oil producing nations that currently are, or have recently been, subject to regime change operations by the US all have large supplies of oil and gas that the Americans want to control. It was therefore unsurprising when the first action taken by the Americans upon commencement of Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) was to seize control of oil and gas pipelines. Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/oil-reserves-by-country

Why would American liberals support a Right-wing coup in Honduras when liberalism is ‘Left?’ The more historically informed question is: when did American liberals ever not support authoritarian and repressive regimes and governments? Until the so-called ‘war on terror,’ liberal wars were launched against Left-wing governments. The first eight wars listed above featured the Americans using every tool at their disposal to crush (real or imagined) Left-wing governments. The point here is that liberal moral posturing only works once history has been erased.

The tie of American liberalism to ‘the Left’ is recent. Historically, ‘Left’ was anti-capitalist by definition, as it emerged from Marx’s critique of capitalism. As anti-capitalist revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were Left. Woodrow Wilson, and later the Nazis, were vying to lead an international capitalist Right. More recently, the Russian Federation abandoned communism prior to its inception. The Left interest in contemporary Russia comes through battling neocolonialism. The New Wilsonians in the Biden administration intend regime change there, or to end the world trying.

Ironically (not), a similar sleight-of-hand is behind competing claims of who started the current war in Ukraine. The Americans claim that the war is unprovoked, thereby wiping away the deep and involved history of US – Russia relations that preceded it. In contrast, Russian claims tie to specific actions and policies by the Americans that the Americans are free to characterize any way they wish. In practical terms, the Russians laid out negotiating points while the Americans maintain that there are none. It is the Americans who have thus far refused to negotiate.

The most basic question then is how the war, and the residual Russian security concerns that motivated it, gets resolved? A loss for Russia would imply a change in its political leadership (regime change) and effective US control of Russia and the region. This is the type of existential threat that would motivate both the leadership and the people of Russia to fight to the bitter end. The more likely partition of Ukraine would leave the US launching CIA-allied attacks against Russia every few days even if it is negotiated. This is a problem.

One would imagine that since the Americans – the CIA, the MIC (Military Industrial Complex), the oil and gas industry, Wall Street, and Big Tech wanted this war with Russia, that there is a plan for ending it. In case you missed it, none of these but the Russians are known for strategic thinking. For the last five decades the US has been systematically de-industrialized with no apparent plan for what else the American people might do to earn a living. Remember when the US was outsourcing its military production to China? The same people are still running things.

From the launch of the Russian SMO (Special Military Operation) in February 2022 to the present, the self-appointed leadership of the American Left has reiterated State Department / CIA talking point that diplomatic solutions to the crisis were available to the Russians, but not taken. With the recent revelation from former French President Francois Hollande that the Minsk Accord was a diplomatic fraud intended to buy time for the Americans to arm and train the Ukrainian military to attack Russia, this position is no longer viable. This kind of duplicity by the Americans may seem clever until the question of how the war will end is considered.

Mr. Hollande’s characterization of the Minsk negotiations as not serious confirms cynical interpretations of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s analogous comments regarding the talks. At the behest of the very same American government that ousted the duly elected President of Ukraine in 2014 to appoint a new government more to its liking, the French and Germans gave credence to fake negotiations between US-allied Ukrainians and the Russians that were never intended to resolve political differences.

Back in the US, the liberal-Left appears to be ignorant of the basic facts of the crisis as it continues to insist that French President Emmanuel Macron was in the process of negotiating a settlement to preclude war in Ukraine when Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that ‘he had to go ice skating’ as he ended the call. While the prior thirty years of bad-faith assurances from the Americans that NATO wouldn’t be used to hem Russia in militarily would seemingly justify Mr. Putin’s dismissal of Macron’s words, both Merkel and Hollande sealed the deal with their Minsk revelations.

When he was Governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson also signed a bill making the forced sterilization of the ‘feeble minded’ law. And in terms that still resonate today, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the first official government agency charged with creating and disseminating state propaganda in the service of promoting American wars. If this reads like the German fascist program that followed, you are correct. Republican Herbert Hoover was busy trying to feed the world while Wilson was stockpiling government jobs for white people.

This question of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ has a history outside of American electoral politics. Woodrow Wilson was everything that modern liberals claim to oppose. However, Progressive science was there to support Wilson’s ‘scientific racism’ like eugenics. And his conspicuous class loathing of the Bolsheviks reads quite like the bitter liberal rants decrying the moral depravity of the American workers who were tossed onto the waste-heap by deindustrialization. Wilson’s racism had the imprimatur of bourgeois respectability when he expressed it.

In the documentary film Harlan County, USA, coal miners in Kentucky in the 1970s were shown to know and use Left political theory in their struggle. What tied industrial workers in the US to antiwar demonstrators was that both had been tossed into the meatgrinder of capitalist imperialism. The coal miners were dying in the mines and the antiwar demonstrators were being sent to kill, and possibly die, in a war that they wanted no part of. In other words, the side of power was with war and the union busters.

If this reads like the stakes were different then than they are now, that depends on where you sit in the social order. The military draft in the US was ended in the early 1970s in favor of an economic draft where poor ‘volunteers’ have replaced the already meager numbers of urban bourgeois who fight American wars. Through the position that Ukraine has been put into by the Americans, the Ukrainian people now exist alongside the poor and downtrodden of the world as willing and unwilling conscripts in an American war. This, while being told by the Americans and their own political leaders that they are the chosen people for fighting and dying for corporate profits and oligarchic control.

With the American Left now channeling Woodrow Wilson with respect to the war in Ukraine —as Russophobic, Nazi- minimizing, peacocks whose political reach is in precise proportion to how little it knows about the conflict, manifest destiny is looking iffy. Liberalism is a class ideology. The PMC (Professional Managerial Class), the manager class, gets paid to take positions on public policies irrespective of their ideological place in the broader political landscape. This is how ‘the Left’ ends up advocating the policies of the neoliberal-Right like the ACA.

Claims of missing ‘nuance’ are related to— while being ignorant of, the point that any statistical result can be undone by redefining the variables. People who don’t like one arrangement of facts use the fact-making process to create another. American liberals are currently allied with WWII-era Nazis in Ukraine because the not-Nazis are the Russians. The ethnic Russians who were Ukrainian before the ‘breakaway’ regions broke away aren’t Nazis, they are ethnic Russians. So, the American Left allied with self-described Nazis to do what? To liberate Nazis?

This isn’t to minimize the plight of the Ukrainians being used as pawns of US foreign policy— some willing, some not. Revisit the list of nations that the US has destroyed since WWII (above). Which benefited from being destroyed by the Americans? None did. And with Nazis and nuclear war back in the mix, what security was gained for the people of the US from this history? Stumbling from one deranged slaughter to another can only be rationally explained through the economic power that is consolidated by doing so.

In fact, the US could have given the Russians the security guarantees that they asked for prior to the start of war at no cost. If the terms were honored by the Americans but not the Russians, international agreement could have been had that the Russians were to blame for the conflict. Recall, US President Joe Biden spent three months trying in vain to convince Chinese Premier Xi Jinping that the Russian move against Ukraine was ‘unprovoked’ while Xi had the evidence in front of him that it was provoked.

How do readers imagine that Biden is now viewed by Xi? More likely than not as a dim con man who can’t distinguish his own bullshit from reality. Moreover, the American political leadership has been so bad for so long for a reason. Capital, in the form of oligarchs and corporations, runs the country. There hasn’t been a military draft in the US since the war in Vietnam for a reason. American foreign policy is a business plan, not a national strategy. If Biden et al imagine that they can raise an army, that is a social experiment that is supported here. Here is where supporters of the war can sign up to fight.

For those interested in ending the war, the first step is to get past the profoundly ill-considered propaganda that the US has been putting out regarding its own history and policies. Again, there is no way to resolve the crisis until the Americans are forced to the negotiating table. Like the US war in Iraq that was sold on lies and deception, there is history between the Americans and the Russians that should be resolved. But the Americans are not going to do so voluntarily. There is no cost to Joe Biden for dead Ukrainians. And given deindustrialization, there is little to the American path forward without an industrial policy. The Green New Deal was an industrial policy.

Counting on the American political class to plot a course forward ignores both that oligarchs and corporations run the country, and that these are the same people who thought that passing NAFTA and deregulating Wall Street were great ideas that have worked out well. The Biden administration reportedly views the war against Russia to be part of a ‘pivot’ toward some nebulous future. While there is no telling how much of the administration’s position is geopolitical posturing, there is also no hiding what a mess the political class has made of the US.

There is no need for virtue for a political solution to the war to be found. ‘The world’ existed for thousands of years before the uninformed idiocy of liberal moralizing was imagined to be ‘politics,’ The irony is that it (moralizing) is political, just not ‘politics.’ Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the difference in ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ While the liberal class was sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement, it had no stake in it. This meant that the liberal timeframe was infinite, while that of actual Civil Rights workers could be measured in days, weeks, and months.

To assertions that there is a ‘Left position’ in favor of battling the Russians, here is where you sign up. Please don’t crash the website by all signing up at once. (Note to Russians: this is irony).

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

Radical Hope for a Democracy in the U.S.

BY IPEK S. BURNETT

 JANUARY 6, 2023

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On January 20, 2021, the twenty-two-year-old National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman took stage at the U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony. Her spine tall and straight, her eyes shining bright, with a slight smile on her lips, and her voice pulsing with passion she delivered her poem “The Hill We Climb.” She began, “When day comes we ask ourselves: Where can we find light in this never ending shade?” almost echoing the very first verses of the Declaration of Independence, “When in the Course of human events”—the verses that prompt one to pause and reflect on what has come before and what needs to come next for not only the continuance but also the survival of a people. Gorman’s poem was a declaration after all, not a declaration of national independence, but a declaration of the necessary humility and radical hope for a democracy in the United States.

Gorman was commissioned to write a poem on the presidential inauguration’s theme, “America United.” The theme of unity was selected specifically in response to the vast challenges with which the United States had been wrestling: political polarization, systematic oppression, discrimination, injustice, and violence to mention but a few. In addition to these age-old, stubborn battles, the United States had been confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, a resulting economic crisis, rising unemployment, as well as an ever-worsening climate crisis stoking fires, severe storms, and hurricanes one after another across the country. The economic, social, and political grievances had given way to wide-spread anger, resentment, anxiety, despair, and fear in the nation. Writing a poem about and toward unity, in the face of all these struggles and suffering was a “monumental” task, in Gorman’s own words. In an interview with the New York Times she admitted to feeling exhausted, writing a few lines a day, and struggling to finish the poem. Then came January 6, 2021.

On Democracy

On January 6, just two weeks before the presidential inauguration took place where Gorman delivered her poem, the U.S. Capitol Building was stormed by a furious mob of right-wing extremists that sought to overturn the 2020 election results and interrupt the confirmation of the 46^th U.S. President Joe Biden. Several insurgents carried confederate flags, some members of militias bore weapons, and a few rioters wore Camp Auschwitz t-shirts. The images in the news outlets and social media showed them scaling walls, assaulting the Capital Police and reporters nearby, and smashing glass windows to enter in. The Senators, members of the Congress, and staff were either escorted out or went into hiding, as the mob ransacked the offices and vandalized the Capital building. Five people died and a hundred and forty police officers were injured during the riot. Two police officers later died by suicide.

The night of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, Gorman finished writing her poem. She added the lines:

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our county if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

Though Gorman wrote these lines in reference to the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, their significance goes beyond the elections and the insurrection. They go beyond the threat posed by right-wing extremism, conspiracy theories, or political polarization between the Republicans and Democrats. These lines are about the essence of democracy in the United States, as well as its history, current status, and future.

The suggestion that a democracy can be periodically delayed implies that this democracy is not yet complete, not yet achieved. Therefore, this democracy is not to be taken for granted, boasted about as an accomplishment, counted on as a possession. The idea that democracy is yet to come or is a work-in-progress, deeply challenges the United States’ celebrated self-image as a democratic state. Moreover, it calls into question the United States’ self-acclaimed missionary role that aims to bring democracy to those countries and regions of the world which the United States itself deems to be under oppressive regimes.

The dominant narrative in the United States projects remarkably noble ideals: It begins with a promised land, a paradise, a new world for new beginnings, a city upon a hill. On this stage it unveils the Declaration of Independence which speaks so eloquently about the self-evident truths of equality, as well as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Then, it weaves in the American dream of opportunity, prosperity, success, upward social mobility. Last but not least, it transports these proclaimed ideas and ideals across its borders in a self-professed effort to redeem the world. However ardent and idealistic, the narrative of course is not absolute. In its shadow fester contradictory realities which persistently haunt the national consciousness. They taunt the simplistic and solipsistic self-narratives that resound goodness, purity, and pride in its enclosed chambers. These realities, though renounced and repressed, are still very prevalent, their evidence entirely apparent: land theft, genocide, slavery, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, mass incarceration, police violence, immigrant detention centers, border killings, abuse and exploitation of laborers, income inequality, unemployment, poverty, mass shootings, suicide, domestic violence, addictions of all sorts from alcohol to opioids, materialism and capitalist excess, corporate corruption, environmental destruction… A great gap as such between the idealized self-image and reality demonstrates an urgent need and necessity for critical self-reflection in the United States, a need and necessity to see through the dominant narratives, ideas and ideals which are consistently taken for granted—including, of course, the idea and ideal of democracy.

Revisiting the Declaration of Independence offers an opportunity for this kind of national self-examination. The Declaration with its empowering message of unity, equality, and freedom has been ingrained in the American consciousness for centuries: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Though eloquent and inspiring, this rhetoric is deceiving; because the self-evident truth when the Declaration was read publicly on July 4^th 1776 was that these rights did not actually apply to everyone. The self-evident truth was inequality. The fifty-six delegates representing the Second Continental Congress who signed the Declaration—all of them white, wealthy, male, and most of them slave-holders—did not intend to include the peasants and workers, the slaves, the Native Americans, or the women. The governed people to which the Declaration referred was only a small group of people: white men with property. They were the ones whose rights were acknowledged. They were the ones whose life, liberty, and happiness mattered. They were the ones whose votes were to be counted. The stated ideal of equality could not have been farther than the lived reality in the colonies. In truth, the new nation suffered from deep divisions—economic, social, racial, and ethnic—and great injustices.

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence did not outline the blueprint for the U.S. legislative system; it, nevertheless, stated the ideals of the nation and therefore provided an ideological foundation for the democratic government of the United States. While doing so, it also revealed the dissonance between political promises and social realities, the disparities between the national ideals and the lived experience of the people. If democracy is built on the ideals that the Declaration put forth, this means that it is also built upon the very dissonances, disparities, contradictions that were—and still are—inseparable from those same ideals. In Democracy Matters, philosopher and social activist Cornel West writes,

The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence.

The undemocratic foundation stones to which West refers undermine both the promise and presence of a democracy in the United States. West expounds, “The most painful truth in the making of America—a truth that shatters all pretensions to innocence and undercuts all efforts of denial—is that the enslavement of Africans and the imperial expansion over indigenous peoples and their lands were undeniable preconditions for the possibility of American democracy.”

The insurrection at the Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. on January 6^th—an unmistakable display of white supremacy with all its violence, willful ignorance, and moral indifference—was an attempt at returning the country to a time when racism or imperialism were not questioned, instead they were granted and treated almost as a badge of honor. A time when the so-called democracy functioned without the votes of countless citizens because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. The political slogan “Make America Great Again” hints at this regressive move, this nostalgia and longing for a time when the words in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, “We the People,” privileged white people and did not take into account the rights, votes, or voices of others in the nation. Reflecting on the events of January 6^th, feminist philosopher Judith Butler writes:

The white supremacists who stormed the Capitol are … convinced not only that the elections were stolen, but their country as well, that they are being “replaced” by black and brown communities, by Jews, and their racism fights against the idea that they are being asked to lose their idea of white entitlement and supremacy. To this end, they transport themselves back in time to become Confederate soldiers, they occupy fantasy figures on video games with superhuman powers, they dress as animals and bear guns openly, reliving the “wild west” and its genocide of indigenous peoples. They also understand themselves as “the people” and “the nation” which is why they are still in some shock as they are arrested for felonies. How could this be trespass or sedition or conspiracy if they were only reclaiming “their house”?

In an essay entitled “Mourning for Whiteness,” which was published in 2016, novelist Toni Morrison had also examined the sense of loss and the ensuing disorientation experienced by white Americans who fear that they are losing their racialized rank in today’s United States:

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

Morrison had pointed out how so many white voters thus welcomed the fear, resentment, and rage sowed by the 45^th U.S. President Donald Trump. A president whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people, who has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, who called immigrants from Mexico rapists and criminals, who proposed a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, who told black and brown U.S. congresswomen who are in fact American citizens to go back to their countries, who called the Black Lives Matter movement “a symbol of hate”. A president whose words and actions not only demonstrated, but openly embraced and exacerbated the systematic racism, injustice, and violence which is entrenched in the United States.

The insurrection at the Capitol Hill was not even a revelation regarding the fragility of the political system or the deep fractures and insecurities at the heart of the American nation, but a mere reminder of them. Yet, as Gorman put it in her inaugural poem, this acknowledgement of inherent vulnerability does not necessarily sentence the United States to brokenness, instead it affirms the task at hand, the arduous work ahead in the name of democracy:

Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed.

A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

The emphasis on “unfinished” urges a conversation both about the nation and its narrative, and about the true meaning of democracy. Because democracy is not solely about the Constitution or the ballot box. Yes, it is a political system, but it is also greater than just that. Democracy is a practice. It goes beyond casting one’s vote; it also requires citizens to strive to remain well-informed, active participants, who do not shy away from questions and national self-reflection, who are willing to imagine, understand, and own the realities overshadowed by rhetoric of pride and power, who are open to candid and at times difficult conversations about their country and its policies and practices. As philosopher Kelly Oliver writes, “We can never stop interrogating and interpreting our notions of justice, democracy and freedom, which means that we can never stop asking ourselves why we do what we do, why we value what we value, why we desire what we desire, and why we fear what we fear.” This ongoing process of self-interrogation and self-interpretation is crucial to a new understanding of democracy not as a given, not a constant, not an indisputable fact, or a dogma. From emancipation to reconstruction, to civil rights, to Black Lives Matter and beyond, movement by movement, milestone by milestone, democracy calls for recognition, resistance, reconciliation. In this way, democracy can be seen as an ongoing, open-ended conversation, a practice, and a struggle.

On Humility and Radical Hope

Because being American is more than a pride we inherit—

It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it.

Stepping into the past and repairing it, as Gorman proposes, requires the American nation to let go of the inflated sense of self and its accompanying illusions, so that it can turn to the eclipsed corners of its history, reckon with the dark presence of its defeated ideals and violent truths. This move to undo collective bad-faith—which is the attempt to escape angst, anguish, and responsibility by overlooking the evidence that contradicts one’s self-narratives, stated values and ideals; living a lie and thus becoming “a deceiver and a deceived in a single consciousness” in philosopher Lewis Gordon’s words—begins with honesty and a willingness to let go of the falsehoods, fictions, pretenses and masks, so one can finally give up the self-deception and deceit, and as a result attain humility. Embracing this spirit, Gorman in her poem revokes the simplistic beliefs in the United States which uphold a self-image of inherent goodness and innocence, she emphasizes instead the importance of purpose over purity and perfection:

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine.

But this doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge a union with purpose.

Striving for purpose, rather than perfection, is at the heart of humility. Humility does not imply inferiority, meekness, or weakness, but rather a commitment to honesty, integrity, and wisdom. The word humility comes from the Latin “humilis,” which derives from “humus” meaning earth or ground. Founded upon a ground of earthy, elemental, essential self-knowledge, humility then is a strength. Because there is a certain wisdom that comes from knowing one’s self—acknowledging one’s accomplishments, as well as failures, admitting one’s strengths, skills, inspirations, as well as limitations, imperfections, and mistakes. In ancient Greece, the aphorism “know thyself” was carved into stone in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus affirmed: “All people ought to know themselves.” The age-old imperative represents not only a theological, philosophical stance, but also a political one; and not only personal, but a collective requisite. Forging a union with purpose is only possible through self-knowledge.

“We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about this past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self,” offers author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, “This is also true of nations.” The collective, national self-knowledge that is attained through historical consciousness undoes blind patriotism and begets a different kind of love for one’s nation—an ethic of love that is founded upon honest, critical social consciousness. An ethic of love that does not attempt to repress that which is problematic or turn away from contradictions, but embraces complexity, paradox, and even uncertainty. As Kelly Oliver argues, “This process of loving, but with critical interpretation, opens up the possibility of working-though rather than merely repeating the blind spots.” Self-knowledge grounded in an ethic of love, with a commitment to critical consciousness, honesty, and wisdom, can help American nation see through its dominant narratives and rhetoric in order to distinguish the realities overshadowed by its ideals, name the unfulfilled promises of democracy, and thus begin on a new path for national healing.

When explaining her vision for national unity and healing to the New York Times, Gorman spoke against “erasing or neglecting the harsh truths” and stressed the need for reconciliation instead. The shade, the loss, the grief, the hurt, the fatigue, the divide, the defeat, the catastrophe, the wound: The words and imagery of “The Hill We Climb” thus admit these harsh truths of the American past and present. Gorman offered:

We will not march back to what was,

But move to what shall be:

A country that is bruised but whole.

Embracing wholeness rather than an illusory perfection, acknowledging and tending to the losses, wounds, and bruises are once again all about humility. For Gorman, unity and healing in the United States are only possible by “making space for grief, horror, hope.” In other words, hope cannot stand alone. It has to embrace grief and horror. Only when the American nation faces the fears, feels the pain, it can attain the necessary resilience and courage to regain and maintain hope—and not just any hope, not mere positivism or optimism, but a hope that acknowledges and honors the suffering, a hope that is grounded in social critical thinking and consciousness. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivety,” cultural critic Maria Popova asserts. The kind of hope that is required for social and political change, embraces the struggle while anticipating and working toward a better future. It is not a hope that merely comforts, but one that demands reflection and action. American philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes about radical hope:

For what may we hope? Kant put this question in the first-person singular along with two others — What can I know? and What ought I to do? — that he thought essentially marked the human condition. With two centuries of philosophical reflection, it seems that these questions are best transposed to the first-person plural. And with that same hindsight: rather than attempt an a priori inquiry, I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence… What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.

Though it keeps an eye on the future, radical hope cannot just dwell in a world to come, it cannot be only about transcendence. True transformation has to be rooted in the depths. While looking ahead into the future, it also necessitates digging deep into the past. The etymology of the word “radical” comes from the Latin “radix,” which means root. Late Latin “radicalis” refers to “of or having roots,” and therefore means going to the origins and essences. A radical hope for unity and democracy, therefore, has to be rooted in an understanding of the very origins—the oppressive, discriminatory, antagonistic, undemocratic roots, the historical and systematic forms of oppression—that underlie social and political struggles, both past and present. All growth and progress, both individual and collective, require this kind of critical self-awareness. As founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung commented, “No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots, for it grows not only upward but downward as well.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois considers the sorrow songs sung by the black slaves: “They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” He reflects on the hopefulness and grace these spirituals communicate in the midst of the slaves’ unbearable experiences of strife, violence, and exile. Du Bois writes:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?

Having also grounded her inaugural poem on the question of justice early on by stating, “what ‘just is’ isn’t always justice,” Gorman brought her recitation to a close, affirming a faith:

For there is always light,

If only we’re brave enough to see it,

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Gorman’s final words assuring the presence of light raises the unanswerable, yet inevitable question posed by Du Bois over a century ago: “Is such a hope justified?”

Justified or not, nothing short of radical hope can loosen the tight grip of collective despair, defeatism, cynicism that has been suffocating the American nation. Nothing short of radical hope can grant the society the resilience and courage that is necessary for tending to the collective wounds. Nothing short of radical hope can fuel the critical reflection and action that is needed to work toward democracy. As long as those like the twenty-two year old poet Amanda Gorman, who not only dream or imagine, but embody and boldly proclaim radical hope continue to sing, this unfinished United States can continue on its path to wholeness.

This piece was first published in “Philosophy and Global Affairs” 1:2, 2021, pp. 225–236.

Ipek S. Burnett is a depth psychologist and Turkish novelist living in San Francisco. She’s the author of A Jungian Inquiry into the American Psyche: The Violence of Innocence (Routledge, 2019). For more information visit: www.ipekburnett.com.    

Netanyahu Ushers in the Most Anti-Palestinian Government in Israel’s History

By Marjorie Cohn

January 5, 2023

Z Article

Source: TruthOut


Benjamin Netanyahu has been sworn in for his sixth term as prime minister of Israel. While his prior tenures resulted in the commission of war crimes against the Palestinian people, Netanyahu’s new regime promises to be the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu won reelection despite facing criminal charges for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

In order to secure a sixth term, Netanyahu made a devil’s bargain with the extreme right-wing religious elements in Israel. Aside from Netanyahu’s largely secular Likud Party, all other parties in his new coalition are religious, with two of them representing ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis, or Haredim.

“The ministers of Netanyahu’s new government have been salivating for weeks at the thought of what they will change once in power,” Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Truthout. “Now that they’ve been sworn in, there is no doubt plans are already afoot for massive settlement expansion, establishment of de facto (albeit illegal) annexation of large parts of the West Bank, widespread increases in house demolitions and forced evictions of Palestinian families, all aimed at escalating what earlier governments also called the ‘Judaization’ of occupied East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank.”

Netanyahu’s coalition declared the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” This goes even further than the 2018 “basic law” — which enshrined apartheid in Israeli law — by stating that only Jews have the right to self-determination.

Under the new government, Palestinians “will face even more horrific discrimination. Military assaults on Gaza, arrests and detention of children, collective punishments — all will escalate,” Bennis said, adding that “the violations will get worse, not only quantitatively but qualitatively as well.”

Israel’s new national security minister is extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted of supporting terrorism and inciting anti-Arab racism. He will oversee Israel’s police force.

Five days after Netanyahu was sworn in, Ben-Gvir entered Islam’s third holiest site, the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, infuriating Palestinians. Hazem Qassem, spokesperson for Hamas, told Al Jazeera that Ben-Gvir’s action is “a continuation of the Zionist occupation’s aggression against our sanctities and its war on its Arab identity.”

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry referred to Ben-Gvir’s “storming” of Al Aqsa as an “unprecedented provocation and a dangerous escalation of the conflict.” Indeed, Al Jazeera noted, “Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s entrance to the site in 2000 sparked the second Palestinian Intifada or uprising.”

Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism Party, will serve as minister of finance. He will appoint the military unit that supervises border crossings and permits for Palestinians. Smotrich has advocated eliminating the authority to indict public servants for breach of trust and fraud, a change that could make charges against Netanyahu disappear.

The coalition also plans to amend the current anti-discrimination law to allow businesses and service providers to refuse services that violate their religious beliefs. It would permit them to discriminate against LGBTQ people and women.

Palestinians are not surprised at the escalation of repression promised by the new government. “Its annexationist agenda of Jewish supremacy is now very blunt and clear,” Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to Britain, told The New York Times.

Several Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, including Adalah, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Peace Now and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, signed a joint statement warning that “the occupation and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories have made Jewish supremacy the de facto law of the land and the new government seeks to adopt this into their official policy.”

More than 100 retired Israeli ambassadors and senior Foreign Ministry officials signed a letter to Netanyahu expressing “profound concern” about possible damage to Israel’s foreign relations.

Hundreds of rabbis in the United States issued an open letter protesting the coalition’s intention to erode the rights of LGBTQ people and women, allow the Knesset (Parliament) to override decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, annex the West Bank without allowing Palestinians to vote, expel Arab Israeli citizens who question the government, and limit the Law of Return to Orthodox Jews. (The Law of Return, enacted in 1950, provides every Jew with the right to come to Israel. Its purpose was to solidify Israel as a Jewish state.)

“When those who tout racism and bigotry claim to speak in the name of Israel, but deny our rights, our heritage, and the rights of the most vulnerable among us, we must take action. We must speak out,” the rabbis wrote.

For the United States’ part, Bennis says, what is needed is “a shift in U.S. policy towards one that reflects the growing public and media opinion in this country — recognition of Israeli apartheid, and the need to challenge the longstanding levels of uncritical military, diplomatic and economic support for apartheid.”

The U.S. government is Israel’s chief enabler, to the tune of $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. Indeed, President Joe Biden reiterated his great affection for Netanyahu, “who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region.” Biden is implementing Donald Trump’s illegal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by building a permanent embassy on land stolen from the Palestinians.

Thomas Nides, U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed Biden’s praise for Netanyahu. “He’s a very talented and very experienced prime minister. We want to work closely with him on mutual values we share, and at this point not get distracted by everyone else,” Nides said. “Here’s to the rock solid US-Israel relationship and unbreakable ties,” he tweeted.

Meanwhile, on December 30, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution urging the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The ICJ, also known as the World Court, is the judicial arm of the UN. It deals with disputes between UN member countries.

The General Assembly resolution seeks an ICJ opinion on the “legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”

In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion which concluded that Israel’s barrier wall built on occupied Palestinian territory violated international law and ordered Israel to dismantle it and pay reparations. Israel ignored the ICJ’s ruling.

There is an effective way to pressure Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and violation of the rights of the Palestinians. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, an initiative of Palestinian civil society, consists of “non-violent punitive measures.” This includes academic, cultural and economic boycotts; divestment from Israeli and allied companies; and sanctions such as ending military trade agreements.

These measures will last until Israel recognizes the Palestinian people’s “inalienable right to self-determination” and fully complies with international law by: (1) ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as required by UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

“The domination of an unabashedly racist, Jewish fundamentalist, genocidal, and homophobic strand of Zionism in the current Netanyahu far-right government makes the ground even more fertile for the BDS movement to further isolate Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid at all levels,” Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights, wrote in an email to Truthout. “But fertile grounds alone do not yield fruit; we still need the passion and the strategic labor of many around the world to plant seeds of change, to amass people’s power and strategically direct it to dismantle systems of oppression.”

Barghouti added, “With this unmasked Israeli fascism in power, it is high time to demolish the colonial hypocrisy of the U.S. and its European allies. They have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia because of its months-long illegal invasion of Ukraine, yet they’ve continued to enable, fund and defend Israel’s decades-long system of violent oppression of the Indigenous Palestinian people.”

BDS has had a measure of success such that Israel sees it as an existential threat. (Those who wish to learn more about the BDS movement can seek information here.)

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace, and the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. A prominent scholar and lecturer, her books include Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law; and Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues She provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media and is co-host of “Law and Disorder” radio.

Israel Was Never a Democracy: So why is the West Lamenting End of ‘Liberal’ Israel?

BY RAMZY BAROUD

 JANUARY 6, 2023
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Image by Taylor Brandon.

Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.

In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly “hinted” that the US government would also boycott “other right-wing extremists” in Netanyahu’s government.

However, these strong concerns seemed absent from the congratulatory statement by the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, on the following day. Nides relayed that he had “congratulated (Netanyahu) on his victory and told him that I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond” between the two countries.

In other words, this ‘unbreakable bond’ is stronger than any public US concern regarding terrorism, extremism, fascism, and criminal activities.

Ben-Gvir is not the only convicted criminal in Netanyahu’s government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was convicted of tax fraud in early 2022 and, in 2000, he served a prison sentence for accepting bribes when he held the position of interior minister.

Bezalel Smotrich is another controversial character, whose anti-Palestinian racism has dominated his political persona for many years.

While Ben-Gvir has been assigned the post of national security minister, Deri has been entrusted with the ministry of interior and Smotrich with the ministry of finance.

Palestinians and Arab countries are rightly angry, because they understand that the new government is likely to sow more violence and chaos.

With many of Israel’s sinister politicians in one place, Arabs know that Israel’s illegal annexation of parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories is back on the agenda; and that incitement against Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem, coupled with raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque will exponentially increase in the coming weeks and months. And, expectedly, the push for the construction and expansion of illegal settlements is likely to grow, as well.

These are not unfounded fears. Aside from the very racist and violent statements and actions by Netanyahu and his allies in recent years, the new government has already declared that the Jewish people have “exclusive and inalienable rights to all parts of the Land of Israel”, promising to expand settlements, while distancing itself from any commitments to establishing a Palestinian State, or even engaging in any ‘peace process’.

But while Palestinians and their Arab allies have been largely consistent in recognizing extremism in the various Israeli governments, what excuse do the US and the West have in failing to recognize that the latest Netanyahu-led government is the most rational outcome of blindly supporting Israel throughout the years?

In March 2019, Politico branded Netanyahu as the creator of “the most right-wing government in Israeli history,” a sentiment that was repeated countless times in other western media outlets.

This ideological shift was, in fact, recognized by Israel’s own media, years earlier. In May 2016, the popular Israeli newspaper Maariv described the Israeli government at the time as the “most right-wing and extremist” in the country’s history. This was, in part, due to the fact that far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman was assigned the role of the defense minister.

The West, then, too, showed concern, warned against the demise of Israel’s supposed liberal democracy, and demanded that Israel must remain committed to the peace process and the two-state solution. None of that actualized. Instead, the terrifying figures of that government were rebranded as merely conservatives, centrists or even liberals in the following years.

The same is likely to happen now. In fact, signs of the US’s willingness to accommodate whatever extremist politics Israel produces are already on display. In his statement, on December 30, welcoming the new Israeli government, Biden said nothing about the threat of Tel Aviv’s far-right politics to the Middle East region but, rather, the “challenges and threats” posed by the region to Israel. In other words, Ben-Gvir or no Ben-Gvir, unconditional support for Israel by the US will remain intact.

If history is a lesson, future violence and incitement in Palestine will also be blamed mostly, if not squarely, on Palestinians. This knee-jerk, pro-Israeli attitude has defined Israel’s relationship with the US, regardless of whether Israeli governments are led by extremists or supposed liberals. No matter, Israel somehow maintained its false status as “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

But if we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racially based ‘democracy’ is a democracy at all, then we are justified to also believe that Israel’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the previous governments.

Yet, western officials, commentators and even pro-Israel Jewish leaders and organizations in the US are now warning against the supposed danger facing Israel’s liberal democracy in the run-up to the formation of Netanyahu’s new government.

This is an indirect, if not clever form of whitewashing, as these views accept that what Israel has practiced since its founding in 1948, until today, was a form of real democracy; and that Israel remained a democracy even after the passing of the controversial Nation-State Law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state, completely disregarding the rights of the country’s non-Jewish citizens.

It is only a matter of time before Israel’s new extremist government is also whitewashed as another working proof that Israel can strike a balance between being Jewish and also democratic at the same time.

The same story was repeated in 2016, when warnings over the rise of far-right extremism in Israel – following the Netanyahu-Lieberman pact – quickly disappeared, and eventually vanished. Instead of boycotting the new unity government, the US government finalized, in September 2016, its largest military aid package to Israel, amounting to $38 billion.

In truth, Israel has not changed much, either in its own self-definition or in its treatment of Palestinians. Failing to understand this is tantamount to tacit approval of Israel’s racist, violent and colonial policies in Occupied Palestine over the course of 75 years.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net