Is ‘Neoliberal Feminist’ an Oxymoron?

More women are in positions of power than 50 years ago, but under a fairer system we would have made much more progress on gender equality.

By Max Lawson

March 25, 2024

Source: Inequality.org


Christine Lagarde, visiting Benin as IMF Managing Director, 2017. 

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

Christine Lagarde is one of the strongest proponents of gender equality amongst the global elite. President of the European Central Bank, she is also a former International Monetary Fund Managing Director and French finance minister. The former lawyer was the first woman to chair global law firm Baker McKenzie, the first woman to serve as a finance minister from any G7 country and then the first to lead the IMF.

I have had the opportunity to attend meetings between Lagarde and the head of Oxfam a few times over the last 10 years or so. She is always very impressive. The first time was in her office in France’s ultra-modern Ministry of Economy and Finance in Paris, overlooking the Seine. The office was incredible; it had a red sofa and a zebra skin rug. It felt like we were in a Duran Duran video from 1985. We were here to talk about French support for a Financial Transaction Tax.

As we filed in and took our seats opposite her at a long table, she took one look at us, smiled, and said: “are there no women in Oxfam then?” We were indeed two Frenchmen, an Englishman (me), and an Australian — very pale and male indeed.

I think there is no doubt that Lagarde would describe herself as a feminist, and a very strong advocate of gender equality. She is also without a doubt a big fan of the current neoliberal economic system. She thinks it is far from perfect and could be a lot fairer, but nevertheless very much thinks that this is broadly the best way to organize capitalism.

An interview we did with feminist and decolonial political economist Bhumika Muchhala on our EQUALS podcast this week about feminist economics made me reflect on whether it is in fact possible to be both these things — a champion of feminism and a champion of the current economic system. Or is a “neoliberal feminist” an oxymoron? A contradiction in terms?

The gale force neoliberal headwind

Lagarde in her speeches draws attention to the progress women have seen over the last 50 years, something others too have highlighted. She points out that there is no doubt that in terms of cultural norms, legislation, and participation in the workforce, the life of women in most countries is much improved compared to 50 years ago. That there is still a very long way to go, yes, but that genuine progress has been made.

Muchhala’s argument, by contrast, is that what little progress there has been for women globally is overwhelmingly counteracted by the deeply sexist nature of the global economic system, particularly its neoliberal version. By squeezing workers’ wages and rights, by squeezing the ability of governments to build universal welfare states through seemingly permanent austerity, and by allowing corporations and the richest to increase their wealth at astounding rates, the current system is like a gale force wind blowing in the face of any attempts to take steps in the direction of gender equality.

Particularly, Muchhala felt that women’s participation in the workforce should not be taken as a proxy for women’s empowerment — something that is definitely often done by Lagarde and others.

Young women fighting for their rights in Myanmar

I remember a few years back meeting young women working in the garment industry in Myanmar. They were working 12-hour days in unsafe factories, dismissed for the smallest infringements, or sacked as soon as they got pregnant.

Yet many of these young women felt they were more economically empowered, far freer than their mothers and grandmothers, far more in charge of their own destinies. Their situation was both terrible and better than the past. The point, it seemed to me, was whether this was the best we could — or should — expect. Was the only way to get more women in the workforce globally to accept this appalling level of exploitation, too? Those young garment workers certainly didn’t think so, which was why they were organizing their first trade union, at huge risk.

It seems to me there is little doubt that the main beneficiaries of greater participation of women in the workforce are the owners of wealth. I just look around me here in the UK, where two salaries are needed now to support a household, when one was once enough. Where the huge subsidy of unpaid care is still exactly that: a subsidy to the formal economy (to the tune of at least $10.8 trillion a year). But now women are expected to work and care, too.

In a different system, a fairer system, the huge increase in women’s participation in the workforce should have led to everyone having to work less. The huge boost to productivity and growth, instead of building billionaire bank balances, if fairly distributed could have eliminated poverty and enabled the universal provision of public services, including care services like childcare, eldercare, and healthcare. It could have built a care infrastructure that would further increase both gender and economic equality, as well as well-being.

I think there is a parallel with the broader discussion of poverty and the neoliberal period. It is a fact that extreme poverty has fallen dramatically in the last 40 years, with over a billion less people living on less than $2 a day. Equally, it is true that there has been progress in terms of women’s empowerment and equality. But progress on both has, I think, been a tiny fraction of what it could have been if the global economy was organized on different lines. Instead, the neoliberal economic air we breathe, the neoliberal sea we swim in, constantly and structurally undermines much greater progress. I would go further, in fact: I think it makes a permanent end to poverty and to gender-based discrimination impossible.

Nowhere is that truer than in terms of inequality. As long as 66 cents in every dollar of new wealth goes directly to the top 1%, and as long as the global economy is organized in such a way to ensure that continues happening, women’s oppression will continue. Indeed, as Muchhala points out, women’s oppression is absolutely fundamental to this unequal system continuing, as so much wealth is extracted from their unpaid care work and underpaid work.

Economic equality is central to gender equality

Conversely, an end to gender-based discrimination, an end to gender inequality, will not happen unless we make our societies profoundly more equal economically, too. This means eliminating extreme wealth, ensuring all workers are paid and treated well, that the richest pay tax, and that welfare states are universal and care for all ― these fundamentals of a more economically equal countries are vital to achieving gender equality. Equally, a global economic system that increases equality between countries, rather than increasing it with extraction, exploitation and crippling debts, is indispensable in the fight for an end to our sexist world.

So, is it possible to be a neoliberal feminist? Or is it an oxymoron? I certainly think that our neoliberal economies, that have supercharged the gap between the rich and the rest of us, systematically undermine and sabotage attempts to secure equality between women and men. Conversely, identifying feminism with progressive economic policies to counteract this deeply unequal and extractive economic system, as Muchhala and many other feminist economists are doing, I think is a very valuable thing to do indeed.

Kosovo in Retrospect: Rise and Fall of the ‘Rules-Based Order’

Philip Hammond reflects on the significance of the Kosovo war, which began 25 years ago this week

By Philip Hammond

March 25, 2024

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


Soldiers representing NATO partner and allied nations. Image via GetArchive



NATO expansion, Western leaders vaunting wars for values, international judges ruling on accusations of genocide, calls to defend civilisation against barbarism — it sometimes feels as if we are still in the 1990s. Yet looking back to the 1999 Kosovo conflict reveals how much has changed in the past quarter century. Then, the West’s post-Cold War ‘rules-based order’ was at its height. Today, it is slowly, violently collapsing as a new, multipolar world emerges.

Dawn of the rules-based order

The Kosovo conflict was the key event in establishing the ‘rules-based order’. The term sounds like it might just be a synonym for ‘international law’, but is in fact its antithesis — as legal scholars have belatedly begun to notice. Specifically, the ‘rules-based order’ entails a break from the post-1945 UN system, which was premised on the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

In 1999 the UN was bypassed, to avoid a Security Council veto by Russia, and the bombing of Yugoslavia was instead carried out by NATO. Even its supporters admitted this was illegal under international law, but argued it was nevertheless ‘justified on moral grounds’. This was the era of what in Britain was called ‘ethical foreign policy’, when conscience was said to compel military action in defence of universal moral values.

In a famous April 1999 speech, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed NATO was waging a ‘just war’ which laid the basis for a ‘new doctrine of international community’. The doctrine essentially consisted of a globalist perspective on the economy, the environment and ‘international security’: Blair said the ‘most pressing foreign policy problem’ was to ‘identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’.

This was a vision of a ‘community’ that would be policed by the dominant military states since, as Blair explained, ‘nations which have the power, have the responsibility’. This is the essence of the rules-based order: in line with their own self-proclaimed ‘values’, the powerful decide where and how to ‘get actively involved’ in the affairs of the less powerful.

A ‘right to intervene’

Less than a fortnight before it started bombing Yugoslavia, NATO completed its first wave of eastward enlargement, admitting Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Already it appeared that, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it recently, ‘if you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu’.

The same month as Blair was preaching his ‘doctrine’, Czech president Vaclav Havel similarly envisaged a future world governed by ‘cooperation between larger, mostly supranational, entities’, in which ‘the notion that it is none of our business what happens in another country’ would ‘vanish down the trapdoor of history’. Conceding that Yugoslavia was being ‘attacked … without a direct mandate from the UN’, Havel maintained that this was because of NATO’s ‘respect … for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states’ — the ‘higher value’ of universal human rights.

The logic was drawn out by Bernard Kouchner, the first governor of post-war Kosovo. He claimed it was time for a ‘decisive evolution in international consciousness’, whereby a ‘new morality’ would be ‘codified in the “right to intervention” against abuses of national sovereignty’. Mere humanitarianism was not enough: ‘we need to establish a forward-looking right of the world community to actively interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations’.

After 9/11, ethical justifications for war were incorporated into the ‘war on terror’, despite occasional incongruities of tone. Washington reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring public relations consultants to ‘humanise the war’ in Afghanistan, where US planes dropped aid as well as cluster bombs (both in yellow packaging) in an effort to save some Afghans while killing others. According to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, the bombing was ‘a triumph for human rights’. Similarly, in Iraq president George Bush Jr. promised ‘liberation’ while Blair emphasised the ‘moral case for removing Saddam’.

‘Benign’ dictatorship

Many observers criticised what they saw as the cynical, instrumental use of humanitarianism in the war on terror, yet the problem is not simply that interventions are selective, poorly implemented or undermined by ulterior motives. Rather, the core problem is that the best one can hope for under such a system is a benign global dictatorship. The rules-based order returns us to a neo-colonial world where the powerful decide which people need to be ‘helped’ and abrogate to themselves the right to do so.

It is the polar opposite of sovereign equality, a world of international protectorates (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and regime-change wars (in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya). The latter have produced nothing but bloody chaos; the former have merely frozen conflicts rather than resolving them. In Kosovo, a quarter century of Western state-building has produced a ‘failed state’ where the Serbian minority still endures daily harassment and violence.

None of this is to idealise the UN, where real power has always resided in the Security Council. Before Kosovo, interventions under the UN banner were launched against Iraq, Somalia and Haiti, and Western powers took it upon themselves to decide where to draw the borders of new states in the former Yugoslavia, knowingly exacerbating conflict as they did so. For much of the 1990s it looked like a retooled UN might provide the framework for the ‘new world order’ proclaimed by George Bush Snr. at the start of the decade, but the logic of a unipolar world pointed in the opposite direction.

During the Cold War, although the post-1945 conventions of sovereign equality and non-interference were often infringed, they were nevertheless important in delegitimising aggressive foreign policy, and represented an historic gain for states which were previously mere colonial possessions. The ‘Illegal yet legitimate’ formula used for Kosovo showed how far this had unravelled in the 1990s.

The propaganda war

Critics of Western policy in the 1990s tended to argue that it was not forceful enough; that terrible things were allowed to happen while the Western powers were constrained by the unwieldy UN system. In 1999, NATO leaders were largely successful in presenting themselves as the solution to this problem, thanks to the extreme subservience (with a few honourable exceptions) of Western journalists.

The claim that NATO bombing was morally justified, even if illegal, meant the media presentation of the war was crucial. Yet virtually everything NATO said about Kosovo was either misleading or outright false. NATO supposedly went to war reluctantly, after diplomatic efforts had been exhausted, but the so-called ‘peace agreement’ was designed to be rejected. A US official explicitly told reporters at the time that ‘We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.’ To keep this information from the public, journalists were simply told not to report it, and they complied.

The other key claim in the build-up to war was that Yugoslav forces were massacring ethnic-Albanian civilians, notably at the village of Račak on 15 January 1999. William Walker, the American head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo, visited the scene and immediately declared it an ‘unspeakable atrocity’ and a ‘crime against humanity’. The New York Times ran a front-page story about ‘mutilated bodies’ with ‘eyes gouged out’ and ‘heads smashed in’. President Bill Clinton described ‘innocent men, women and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire’.

These accounts bore little relation to what actually happened at Račak — a firefight between Yugoslav security services and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas — but most Western journalists just repeated them. One of the few who did contest the official version of events, French reporter Renaud Girard, said he was rounded on by British and American colleagues who complained ‘You’re killing our story’. As one study of this and other episodes in the propaganda war notes, the media created an ‘illusion of multiple sources’ as different outlets reproduced the same distorted accounts, and an ‘illusion of independent confirmation’ as officials cited news reports as corroboration of stories they had fed to journalists in the first place.

NATO also repeatedly claimed it had to start bombing to prevent a refugee crisis. State Department spokesman James Rubin, for example, said on 25 March 1999 that if NATO had not acted, ‘you would have had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border’. Privately, however, they knew they were about to cause just such a crisis. A US diplomat with the OSCE, Norma Brown, later said that ‘everyone knew there would be a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions if NATO bombed. It was discussed in NATO; it was discussed in the OSCE’. Yet as the crisis unfolded, journalists treated it as confirmation that the airstrikes were necessary and right, ‘forgetting’ that preventing it had ever been a justification for bombing. One British TV journalist claimed afterwards: ‘This is why NATO went to war: so the refugees could come back to Kosovo’.

NATO of course denied any responsibility, insisting the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo Albanians was the result of a premeditated policy and would have happened anyway. On cue, secret documents outlining just such a Serbian plan – ‘Operation Horseshoe’ – were revealed by the German government. This supposed ‘blueprint for genocide’ was exposed as a fake concocted by the German intelligence services – but only months after the war ended.

Germany was also among the first Western states to start arming and training the KLA from the mid-1990s. In addition to building a guerrilla army, NATO powers also undermined what remained of the Yugoslav state by funding political opponents of the regime, leading to the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević in 2000 — a blueprint for subsequent ‘colour revolutions’.

The fall

The propaganda surrounding the current wars in Ukraine and Israel can sometimes make it seem as if little has changed politically in the West, but of course much has. We are long past the messianic zeal of liberal interventionism or the hubris of war-on-terror attempts to remake reality. The West is even more risk-averse than in 1999, when NATO did its own high-altitude bombing. Now it sends weapons and celebrates what a ‘good deal’ this is for arms manufacturers.

Blair’s description of the Kosovo war as ‘a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship’ was an attempt to sell NATO bombing as an epic struggle for values. Now, just beneath the surface of the values-talk, commentators promote the West’s proxy war against Russia on the grounds that it is ‘cheap’ and that it is somebody else’s sons who are being killed.

Some have taken up Israel’s claim to be waging an ‘existential struggle between civilisation and barbarism’ in Gaza, but Israeli actions — killing more than 30,000, injuring twice as many again, and displacing most of the population — present an even less attractive advertisement for ‘civilisation’ than NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia. As one assessment puts it, whatever the outcome of current conflicts, ‘the West seems to have already lost on the normative and narrative front’.

In part, this is due to the affordances of social media and the increasing irrelevance of the ‘legacy’ gatekeepers, though of course governments are seeking new means of control. But there are two more fundamental changes. The first is the underlying shift in geopolitical power and a growing willingness to challenge Western hegemony. The second is the rise of populism and the rejection of globalist elites within Western countries. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, one of the elite’s greatest worries was that this would be a setback for globalism. The influential writer (and husband of Victoria Nuland) Robert Kagan, for example, said he feared that ‘America may once again start behaving like a normal nation’, pursuing its own interests but not taking ‘responsibility for global order’.

There is no room for complacency. As a new, multipolar order begins to take shape, it sometimes seems that we are entering a period of heightened danger with little to look forward to but a choice between different kinds of authoritarianism. And populist leaders have mostly so far failed to live up to their promises — in Britain, for example, the post-Brexit political class has done everything possible to reinforce the UK’s involvement in trans-national institutions, particularly NATO.

Yet the decline of Western dominance and the rise of multipolarity are inherently positive insofar as they represent a challenge to globalism and offer new possibilities for smaller states to reassert their sovereign independence. Today there is new hope that Kagan’s nightmare — that the US and its allies will get ‘out of the world order business’ — may yet come true.


Philip Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Media & Communications at London South Bank University. He is the editor, with Edward S. Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media & the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press, 2000).

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=KOSOVO

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

 

Can Congress Ban TikTok?

by Andrew P. Napolitano Posted onMarch 25, 2024

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
~ First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

When James Madison set about to draft the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution – he was articulating what lawyers and philosophers and judges call “negative rights.” A positive right grants a privilege, like a driver’s license. A negative right restrains the government from interfering with a preexisting right. In order to emphasize his view that the freedom of speech preexisted the government, Madison insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment.

If the freedom of speech preceded the government, where did it come from?

Speech is a natural right; it comes from our humanity. The framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights understood and recognized this. Congress doesn’t grant the freedom of speech; rather it is prohibited absolutely from interfering with it. In the years following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the courts began applying the restrictions in the First Amendment to the states and their municipalities and subdivisions.

Today, the First Amendment bars all government – federal, state and local – and all branches of government – legislative, executive and judicial – from interfering with the freedom of speech.

You’d never know this listening to Congress today. The same Congress that can’t balance a budget or count the number of foreign military bases the feds own, that thinks it can right any wrong and tax any event, that has borrowed over $34 trillion and not paid back any of it; the same Congress now wants to give the President of the United States – whomever might occupy that office – the lawful power to suppress websites he thinks are spying on their users or permitting foreign governments to influence what folks see on the sites. All this is an effort to ban the popular website for young folks called TikTok and force its owners to sell its assets.

Here is the backstory.

Throughout American history, we have suffered from mass fears. In the 1790s, it was fear of the French and of Native Americans. In the 1860s, it was fear of African Americans and fear of Confederates. In the 1900s, it was fear of anarchists, Nazis and Communists. In the first quarter of the present century, the government has whipped up fear of terrorists, Russians, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin and now the Chinese.

In his dystopian novel, “1984,” George Orwell analyzed the totalitarian mind and recognized the need that totalitarians have for fear and hatred. They know that when folks are afraid, they will bargain away the reality of liberty for the illusion of safety. Without fear and hatred, totalitarians have fewer tools for control of the population.

What is the government’s problem with TikTok? The feds want to use fear and hatred of the Chinese government in order to regulate the sources of data and information that Americans can consult. They have projected upon the government of China the very same unlawful and unconstitutional assaults on natural rights that the feds themselves perpetrate upon us.

Thus, in order to gain control over the American public, the deep state – the parts of the government that do not change, no matter which political party is in power – and its friends in Congress have advanced the myth that the Chinese government, which commands the loyalty of the owners of TikTok, might use the site to pass along misinformation or to spy on its users. The key word here is “might,” as the intelligence officials who testified to Congress on this were unable to produce any solid evidence – just fear – that the Chinese government is doing this.

You can’t make this up.

Remember the bumper stickers from the 1970s: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition!” I thought of that line when analyzing this. Why? Because the federal government itself spies on every American who uses a computer or mobile device. The federal government itself captures every keystroke touched on every device in the U.S. The federal government itself captures all data transmitted into, out of and within the U.S. on fiber-optic cables. And the federal government itself told the Supreme Court earlier this week that it needs to be able to influence what data is available on websites in order to combat misinformation.

The federal government basically told the court that it – and not individual persons – should decide what we can read and from what sources. What the federal government did not reveal is its rapacious desire to control the free market in ideas.

Now back to the First Amendment.

The principal value underlying the freedom of speech is free will. We all have free will to think as we wish, to say what we think, to read what we want, to publish what we say. And we can do all this with perfect freedom. We don’t need a government permission slip. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to guarantee this freedom by keeping the government out of the business of speech – totally and completely. This is the law of the land in modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Were this not the law, then the government could suppress the speech it hates and fears and support the speech of its patrons. And then the values that underly the First Amendment would be degraded and negated. The government has no moral or constitutional authority to spy on us or to influence our thoughts. Period.

Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Have we consented to a nullification of free speech in deference to whomever might be living in the White House? Why do we repose the Constitution into the hands of those who subvert it?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

 

Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size

Military Spending and National (In)Security

by William J. Astore and Tom Engelhardt Posted onMarch 25, 2024

Reprinted from TomDispatch.

It’s one of the stranger phenomena on this planet. By 2023, the U.S. was estimated to spend more money on its “defense budget” than the next 10 countries combined. Yes, the next 10! And yet, whether you’re talking about Korea and Vietnam in the last century, or Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other places involved in what came to be known as the “war on terror” in this one, the U.S. hasn’t won a conflict of any significance (or even insignificance) in recent memory.

Take, for example, Somalia. As Nick Turse reports at the Intercept, the U.S. has been involved in a conflict with what became al-Shabab, a local branch of al-Qaeda, since its special operations forces were first dispatched there in 2002. In the years that followed, conventional troops and air power were added to the mix. In 2007, the U.S. military made its first air strike there and at least 280 air attacks and commando raids on al-Shabab have followed. The result, as Turse notes: “Last year, deaths in Somalia from Islamist violence hit a record high of 7,643 — triple the number in 2020… [including] a 22% rise in fatalities from terrorism in Somalia from 2022 to 2023,” while “violence has increasingly bled across the border into Kenya.”

And that’s about as close to success as the war on terror gets. Meanwhile, last year Congress responded (as always) by passing a record Pentagon budget of $886 billion on its way, it seems, to the trillion-dollar mark in the foreseeable future. Quite a record, all in all, when it comes to squandering your tax dollars on the military-industrial-congressional complex. But let retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore fill you in on what it would now mean (and would have meant once upon a time) to cut that budget in a significant fashion — and then, of course, dream on. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Daring to “Look a Sacred Cow in the Teeth”

by William J. Astore

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn’t won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don’t forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

It should be simple really: national security is best advanced not by endlessly preparing for war, but by fostering peace. Yet, despite their all-too-loud disagreements, Washington’s politicians share a remarkably bipartisan consensus when it comes to genuflecting before and wildly overfunding the military-industrial complex. In truth, ever-rising military spending and yet more wars are a measure of how profoundly unhealthy our country actually is.

“The Scholarly Junior Senator from South Dakota”

Such insights are anything but new and, once upon a time, could even be heard in the halls of Congress. They were, in fact, being aired there within a month of my birth as, on August 2, 1963, Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota — later a hero of mine — rose to address his fellow senators about “New Perspectives on American Security.”

Nine years later, he (and his vision of the military) would, of course, lose badly to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. No matter that he had been the one who served in combat with distinction in World War II, piloting a B-24 bomber on 35 missions over enemy territory, even as Nixon, then a Navy officer, amassed a tidy sum playing poker. Somehow, McGovern, a decorated hero, became associated with “weakness” because he opposed this country’s disastrous Vietnam War, while Nixon manufactured a self-image as the staunchest Cold Warrior around, never missing a chance to pose as tough on communism (until, as president, he memorably visited Communist China, opening relations with that country).

But back to 1963, when McGovern gave that speech (which you can read in the online Senate Congressional Record, volume 109, pages 13,986-94). At that time, the government was already dedicating more than half of all federal discretionary spending to the Pentagon, roughly the same percentage as today. Yet was it spending all that money wisely? McGovern’s answer was a resounding no. Congress, he argued, could instantly cut 10% of the Pentagon budget without compromising national security one bit. Indeed, security would be enhanced by investing in this country instead of buying yet more overpriced weaponry. The senator and former bomber pilot was especially critical of the massive amounts then being spent on the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the absurd planetary “overkill” it represented vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, America’s main competitor in the nuclear arms race. As he put it then:

“What possible advantage [can be had] in appropriating additional billions of dollars to build more [nuclear] missiles and bombs when we already have excess capacity to destroy the potential enemy? How many times is it necessary to kill a man or kill a nation?”

How many, indeed? Think about that question as today’s Congress continues to ramp up spending, now estimated at nearly $2 trillion over the next 30 years, on — and yes, this really is the phrase — “modernizing” the country’s nuclear triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), as well as its ultra-expensive nuclear-missile-firing submarines and stealth bombers. And keep in mind that the U.S. already has an arsenal quite capable of wiping out life on several Earth-sized planets.

What, according to McGovern, was this country sacrificing in its boundless pursuit of mass death? In arguments that should resonate strongly today, he noted that America’s manufacturing base was losing vigor and vitality compared to those of countries like Germany and Japan, while the economy was weakening, thanks to trade imbalances and the exploding costs of that nuclear arms race. Mind you, back then, this country was still on the gold standard and unburdened by an almost inconceivable national debt, 60 years later, of more than $34 trillion, significant parts of it thanks to this country’s failed “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere across all too much of the planet.

McGovern did recognize that, given how the economy was (and still is) organized, meaningful cuts to military spending could hurt in the short term. So, he suggested that Congress create an Economic Conversion Commission to ensure a smoother transition from guns to butter. His goal was simple: to make the economy “less dependent upon arms spending.” Excess military spending, he noted, was “wasting” this country’s human resources, while “restricting” its political leadership in the world.

In short, that distinguished veteran of World War II, then serving as “the scholarly junior Senator from South Dakota” (in the words of Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia), was anything but proud of America’s “arsenal of democracy.” He wasn’t, in fact, a fan of arsenals at all. Rather, he wanted to foster a democracy worthy of the American people, while freeing us as much as possible from the presence of just such an arsenal.

To that end, he explained what he meant by defending democracy:

“When a major percentage of the public resources of our society is devoted to the accumulation of devastating weapons of war, the spirit of democracy suffers. When our laboratories and our universities and our scientists and our youth are caught up in war preparations, the spirit of [freedom] is hampered.

“America must, of course, maintain a fully adequate military defense. But we have a rich heritage and a glorious future that are too precious to risk in an arms race that goes beyond any reasonable criteria of need.

“We need to remind ourselves that we have sources of strength, of prestige, and international leadership based on other than nuclear bombs.”

Imagine if his call had been heeded. This country might today be a far less militaristic place.

Something was, in fact, afoot in the early 1960s in America. In 1962, despite the wishes of the Pentagon, President John F. Kennedy used diplomacy to get us out of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Soviet Union and then, in June 1963, made a classic commencement address about peace at American University. Similarly, in support of his call for substantial reductions in military spending, McGovern cited the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 during which he introduced the now-classic phrase “military-industrial complex,” warning that “we must never let the weight of this combination [of the military with industry, abetted by Congress] endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Echoing Ike’s warning in what truly seems like another age, McGovern earned the approbation of his Senate peers. His vision of a better, more just, more humane America seemed, however briefly, to resonate. He wanted to spend money not on more nuclear bombs and missiles but on “more classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and capable teachers.” On better hospitals and expanded nursing-home care. On a cleaner environment, with rivers and streams saved from pollution related to excessive military production. And he hoped as well that, as military bases were closed, they would be converted to vocational schools or healthcare centers.

McGovern’s vision, in other words, was aspirational and inspirational. He saw a future America increasingly at peace with the world, eschewing arms races for investments in our own country and each other. It was a vision of the future that went down fast in the Vietnam War era to come, yet one that’s even more needed today.

Praise from Senate Peers

Here’s another way in which times have changed: McGovern’s vision won high praise from his Senate peers in the Democratic Party. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia agreed that “unsurpassed military power in combination with areas of grave economic weakness is not a manifestation of sound security policy.” Like McGovern, he called for a reinvestment in America, especially in underdeveloped rural areas like those in his home state. Joseph Clark, Jr., of Pennsylvania, also a World War II veteran, “thoroughly” agreed that the Pentagon budget “needs most careful scrutiny on the floor of the Senate, and that in former years it has not received that scrutiny.” Stephen Young of Ohio, who served in both World War I and World War II, looked ahead toward an age of peace, expressing hope that “perhaps the necessity for these stupendous appropriations [for weaponry] will not be as real in the future.”

Possibly the strongest response came from Frank Church of Idaho, who reminded his fellow senators of their duty to the Constitution. That sacred document, he noted, “vests in Congress the power to determine the size of our military budget, and I feel we have tended too much to rubberstamp the recommendations that come to us from the Pentagon, without making the kind of critical analysis that the Senator from South Dakota has attempted… We cannot any longer shirk this responsibility.” Church saluted McGovern as someone who “dared to look a sacred cow [the Pentagon budget] in the teeth.”

A final word came from Wayne Morse of Oregon. Very much a gadfly, Morse shifted the topic to U.S. foreign aid, noting that too much of that aid was military-related, constituting a “shocking waste” to the taxpayer even as it proved detrimental to the development of democracy abroad, most notably in Latin America. “We should be spending the money for bread, rather than for military aid,” he concluded.

Imagine that! Bread instead of bullets and bombs for the world. Of course, even then, it didn’t happen, but in the 60 years since then, the rhetoric of the Senate has certainly changed. A McGovern-style speech today would undoubtedly be booed down on both sides of the aisle. Consider, for example, consistent presidential and Congressional clamoring now for more military aid to Israel during a genocide in Gaza. So far, U.S. government actions are more consistent with letting starving children in Gaza eat lead instead of bread.

Peace Must Be Our Profession

What was true then remains true today. Real national defense should not be synonymous with massive spending on wars and weaponry. Quite the reverse: whenever possible, wars should be avoided; whenever possible, weapons should be beaten into plowshares, and those plowshares used to improve the health and well-being of people everywhere.

Oh, and that Biblical reference of mine (swords into plowshares) is intentional. It’s meant to highlight the ancient roots of the wisdom of avoiding war, of converting weapons into useful tools to sustain and provide for the rest of us.

Yet America’s leaders on both sides of the aisle have long lost the vision of George McGovern, of John F. Kennedy, of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Today’s president and today’s Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, boast of spending vast sums on weapons, not only to strengthen America’s imperial power but to defeat Russia and deter China, while bragging all the while of the “good” jobs they’re allegedly creating here in America in the process. (This country’s major weapons makers would agree with them, of course!)

McGovern had a telling rejoinder to such thinking. “Building weapons,” he noted in 1963, “is a seriously limited device for building the economy,” while an “excessive reliance on arms,” as well as overly “rigid diplomacy,” serve only to torpedo promising opportunities for peace.

Back then, it seemed to politicians like McGovern, as well as President Kennedy, that clearing a path toward peace was not only possible but imperative, especially considering the previous year’s near-cataclysmic Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet just a few months after McGovern’s inspiring address in the Senate, Kennedy had been assassinated and his calls for peace put on ice as a new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, succumbed to pressure by escalating U.S. military involvement in what mushroomed into the catastrophic Vietnam War.

In today’s climate of perpetual war, the dream of peace continues to wither. Still, despite worsening odds, it’s important that it must not be allowed to die. The high ground must be wrested away from our self-styled “warriors,” who aim to keep the factories of death churning, no matter the cost to humanity and the planet.

My fellow Americans, we need to wake up from the nightmare of forever war. This country’s wars aren’t simply being fought “over there” in faraway and, at least to us, seemingly forgettable places like Syria and Somalia. In some grim fashion, our wars are already very much being fought right here in this deeply over-armed country of ours.

George McGovern, a bomber pilot from World War II, knew the harsh face of war and fought in the Senate for a more peaceful future, one no longer haunted by debilitating arms races and the prospect of a doomsday version of overkill. Joining him in that fight was John F. Kennedy, who, in 1963, suggested that “this generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war, and hate, and oppression.”

If only.

Today’s generation of “leaders” seems not yet to have had their fill of war, hate, and oppression. That tragic fact — not China, not Russia, not any foreign power — is now the greatest threat to this country’s “national security.” And it’s a threat only aggravated by ever more colossal Pentagon budgets still being rubberstamped by a spinelessly complicit Congress.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views. His video testimony for the Merchants of Death Tribunal is available at this link.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

 

 

Julian Assange and the Plea Nibble

by Binoy Kampmark / March 22nd, 2024

Be wary of what Washington offers in negotiations at the best of times.  The empire gives and takes when it can; the hegemon proffers and in equal measure withdraws offers it deems fit.  This is all well known to the legal team of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, who, the Wall Street Journal “exclusively” reveals, is in ongoing negotiations with US Justice Department officials on a possible plea deal.

As things stand, the US Department of Justice is determined to get its mitts on Assange on the dubious strength of 18 charges, 17 confected from the brutal Espionage Act of 1917.  Any conviction from these charges risks a 175-year jail term, effectively constituting a death sentence for the Australian publisher.

The war time statute, which was intended to curb free speech and muzzle the press for the duration of the First World War, was assailed by Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette as a rotten device that impaired “the right of the people to discuss the war in all its phases”.  It was exactly in time of war that the citizen “be more alert to the preservation of his right to control his government.  He must be most watchful of the encroachment of the military upon the civil power.”  And that encroachment is all the more pressing, given the Act’s repurposing as a weapon against leakers and publishers of national security material.  In its most obscene incarnation, it has become the US government’s political spear against a non-US national who published US classified documents outside the United States.

The plea deal idea is not new.  In August last year, the Sydney Morning Herald pounced upon comments from US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy that a “resolution” to the Assange imbroglio might be on the table. “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador suggested at the time.  Any such resolution could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, subject to finalisation by the Department of Justice.  Her remarks were heavily caveated: this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other agency. “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

The WSJ now reports that officials from the DOJ and Assange’s legal team “have had preliminary discussions in recent months about what a plea deal could look like to end the lengthy legal drama”.  These talks “remain in flux” and “could fizzle.”  Redundantly, the Journal reports that any such agreement “would require approval at the highest levels of the Justice Department.”

Barry Pollack, one of Assange’s legal representatives, has not been given any indication that the department would, as such, accept the deal, a point he reiterated to Consortium News: “[W]e have been given no indication that the Department of Justice intends to resolve the case.”

One floated possibility would be a guilty plea on a charge of mishandling classified documents, which would be classed as a misdemeanour.  Doing so would take some of the sting out of the indictment, which is currently thick with felonies and one conspiracy charge of computer intrusion.  “Under the deal, Assange could potentially enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the US.”  Speculation from the paper follows.  “The time he has spent behind bars in London would count toward any US sentence, and he would be likely to be free to leave prison shortly after any deal has concluded.”

With little basis for the claim, the report lightly declares that the failure of plea talks would not necessarily be a bad thing for Assange.  He could still “be sent to the US for trial”, where “he may not stay for long, given the Australia pledge.” The pledge in question is part of a series of highly questionable assurances given to the UK government that Assange’s carceral conditions would not include detention in the supermax ADX Florence facility, the imposition of notorious Special Administrative Measures, and the provision of appropriate healthcare.  Were he to receive a sentence, it would be open to him to apply and serve its balance in Australia.  But all such undertakings have been given on condition that they can be broken, and transfer deals between the US and other countries have been plagued by delays, inconsistencies, and bad faith.

The dangers and opportunities to Assange have been bundled together, a sniff of an idea rather than a formulation of a concrete deal.  And deals can be broken. It is hard to imagine that Assange would not be expected to board a flight bound for the United States, even if he could make his plea remotely.  Constitutional attorney Bruce Afran, in an interview with CN Live! last August, suggested that a plea, taken internationally, was “not barred by any laws.  If all parties consent to it, then the court has jurisdiction.” Yes, but what then?

In any event, once on US soil, there is nothing stopping a grand volte face, that nasty legal practice of tagging on new charges that would carry even more onerous penalties.  It should be never forgotten that Assange would be delivered up to a country whose authorities had contemplated, at points, abduction, illegal rendition, and assassination.

Either way, the current process is one of gradual judicial and penal assassination, conducted through prolonged proceedings that continue to assail the publisher’s health even as he stays confined to Belmarsh Prison.  (Assange awaits the UK High Court’s decision on whether he will be granted leave to appeal the extradition order from the Home Office.)  The concerns will be how to spare WikiLeaks founder further punishment while still forcing Washington to concede defeat in its quest to jail a publisher.  That quest, unfortunately, remains an ongoing one.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

There’s Not a Single Hospital in Gaza Israel Hasn’t Attacked

by George Galloway / March 25th, 2024


The US pier show is not about bringing aid to Gaza but exporting its citizens, hospitals levelled, the crimes of the IDF, murder most foul in Moscow and the Kate cover-up revealed.

 

The Jewish Defense League is at Gaza’s Border

by Brandy Johnson Owen / March 23rd, 2024

Despite Palestinians in Gaza facing a genocide, despite indifference from those in Washington who could stop it, and despite glee from Tel Aviv and the majority of the Israeli population over the mass death and suffering, it would seem that there would be nothing more that could faze those of us who want justice for Palestine.

It is as if we were not already drowning in waves of outrage and despair as new waves continue to barrel in. In addition to the IDF denying aid from coming into Gaza, many groups of Israel’s most depraved citizens are sitting in and blocking aid trucks from coming into the territory as well and have been doing so since at least January. These are a tiny part of the depraved 60% of the population that do not want Netanyahu to release Palestinian prisoners or to halt the bombardment of Gaza in making any deal to return Israeli hostages.

Can’t get any worse? Who is leading those blocking the aid? Meet Andy Green, who also goes by Baruch Ben Yosef. Green is one of the leaders of the citizen blockade and he was also a member of the Jewish Defence League (JDL). Green is a suspect in the 1985 murder by bombing of Palestinian-American Alex Odeh, the then-West Coast Regional Director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The FBI seems to want us to think that they are serious about solving the murder. Green has been a suspect since the late-80s and his presence in Israel was discovered by an Israeli journalist.

The JDL is a far-right, racist terrorist group that is believed to be responsible for Odeh’s murder. The group’s chairman, Irv Rubin, was quoted at the time as saying that Odeh “got what he deserved.” Rubin and another member in 2001 were charged with conspiring to bomb government property. He died in jail from suicide while awaiting trial. The other member pled guilty and was killed in a Phoenix prison in 2005. As of 2015, the JDL-New York chapter has been inactive, but Toronto and Jerusalem are active.

Green is not only out in the open, literally, but he is right now causing even more death and suffering than he and all of the JDL combined ever did or could think about doing. His contact information is listed for his specific group’s fundraising to continue to block the aid. The US could easily get him. In 2021, Israel extradited to the United States Gershon Kranczer, who was accused of sexually abusing two relatives in New York City, one being only six years old at the time. The so-called “Right of Return” allows any Jewish person to attain automatic citizenship in Israel and of course, displace Palestinians by way of settlements, that’s a given. It has also been used by dozens of American men, who have either been accused of or convicted of pedophilia, to flee US authorities by escaping to Israel and setting up a new life, according to a CBS News investigation.

The genocide in Gaza continues as we are coming up on the 45th anniversary of Alex Odeh’s murder, which was a heinous act not only against him and his family, but against all Arab Americans. Now, a Jewish Defence League member gets to commit more crimes against Palestine and pile them above the clouds, on an already sky high alter of indignities, humiliations, thefts, rapes, massacres, shootings, bombings, child murders, famine, with all of the other horrors.

How high will it have to go before it reaches God?

Brandy Johnson Owen is completing the play Randi about the late magician and skeptic, James Randi. She can be reached at: brandyjohnsonowen@gmail.com. Read other articles by Brandy.

Gazans Tell What Its Like To Live Under the Israeli Siege

by Rick Sterling Posted onMarch 27, 2024

The book Gaza Writes Back is a collection of short stories from twenty young Gazans. Although published in 2013, the book is highly relevant today.  The stories reveal how the last five months is the culmination of a process which has been going on for decades.

The title is curious: “Gaza Writes Back”.  Perhaps it is an alternative to “Gaza Fights Back”. Certainly in the context of Gaza, writing is an important form of resistance to Israeli repression, occupation and massacres. The oppressor recognizes this as well. At least ninety five journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7.

The editor of  Gaza Writes Back was an English literature and creative writing professor at Gaza’s Islamic University named Refaat Alareer. Many of the contributors to this collection of short stories were Alareer’s students.

There are many references in the book to Israel’s attacks on Gaza in 2008-9 named “Operation Cast Lead”. As the anthology was being printed and first distributed, Israel launched the massacre named “Operation Protective Edge”.  In six weeks,  Israel killed 2,191 Palestinians and injured 11,231  while 71 Israelis were killed.  Thirty Palestinians for every single Israeli. As editor Alareer says, “This book shows the world that despite Israel’s continuous attempts to kill steadfastness in us, Palestinians keep going on , never surrendering to pain or death, and always seeing and seeking liberty and hope in the darkest of times.”

The editor Alareer says, writing is “an act of resistance and an obligation to humanity to raise awareness among people blinded by the  multi-million dollar Israeli campaign of ‘hasbara’ (‘persuasion’, or more accurately, disinformation.)”

Most of the stories recount difficult moments and experiences. That is natural because the oppression in Gaza has been relentless for decades. Here is a concise summary of the conditions in 2014 when this book came out: “If you lived in Gaza, how would YOU feel?”

It is impressive that Gazans continue to resist and maintain their humanity despite the efforts to dehumanize them.

The story “L is for Life” is about a young woman writing a letter to her father who died eleven years earlier. She speaks of her mother’s “bitter loneliness”. It reminds us that for every Palestinian killed there is pain and suffering caused to each of their friends and family. How many women and men share that “bitter loneliness” because their partners or children were killed? How many lives have been irreparably harmed by the injuries and amputations? The author travels to an orphanage that her late father spoke of  and sees hope in the midst of destruction.

The story “One War Day” describes a mother who opens all the windows at night to avoid windows exploding inwards if there is an Israeli bombing. When the roof collapses the author’s brother is buried under the rubble with his hands still on the book he was reading.

The story “Spared” describes a girl whose mother insists she stay inside for lunch rather than go out where kids are playing soccer in the street.  That saves her from death or injury when a bomb is dropped.  Kids died and there were amputated limbs and scarred faces. “Our neighborhood was blown to smithereens in a split second. No more games played. No more goals. No more cheering. And my friends grew up in a second.”

In the story “A Wish for Insomnia” the writer imagines she is an Israeli soldier with post traumatic stress disorder. As the young writer imagines, there must be Israeli soldiers who take home the nightmare of what they have done just as there are US soldiers with the same mental and emotional disorder. The Palestinian author writes, “The past few weeks were agonizing for the family. Their father (the Israeli soldier) did not leave the bedroom. All they saw and heard of him was his screaming in the middle of the night, the noise of things breaking, and his moaning during the day.”  He has nightmares and says, “We were sent in tanks to Gaza… We were instructed to shoot to kill and we shot almost every moving thing. We shot the water tanks, a couple of stray dogs, a cow, a dozen people, and there was that woman with her kid… I wish I could know what happened to the kid. The kid cried the whole night. I kept hearing the commander’s order in the background, but it was the little kid’s voice that haunted me everywhere…”

The short story titled “Please Shoot to Kill” portrays family life and fear during nights and days of bombing and Israeli soldiers kicking down the door to their house with M16 rifles ready to fire. It describes what it’s like to see the soldiers ransacking the house then hitting the father. What it’s like to see one’s little sibling hit by shrapnel so badly the leg would be amputated. What it’s like to have Apache helicopters overhead and Meerkhava tanks on the street. The father needs a kidney operation in Egypt but is unable to go there. Instead, a baby that needs surgery is allowed to go. “Laila did not hate the little baby who was sent instead of her father. She only hated Israel for making it so that the doctor had to choose. She only wished this baby would survive, grow up, and become a freedom fighter.”

The story titled “From Beneath” describes the thoughts of a young woman under the rubble, unable to move and sensing what parts of her body have been crushed and how her life was coming to end.

The story “Lost at Once” is a love story giving insights into Gazan social class differences.

These are just a few of the twenty-three short stories in this fine book.

The editor, Professor Refaat Alareer, was also a moving poet and an influential voice with 83 thousand followers on Twitter/X. His twitter handle was @ThisIsGaZa.  In his last interview before being killed, Refaat said “I am an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if they barge at us, charge at us, open the door to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that that is the last thing I do. And this is the feeling of everybody. We are helpless. We have nothing to lose.”

Refaat Alareer and his brother, sister and four of their children were killed in a targeted airstrike on 6 December 2023.  His last poem is a testament to his courage and dedication. It has been widely remembered at demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

IF I MUST DIE

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love

If I must die
|let it bring hope
let it be a tale

Photo by Roger Harris

Some of Refaat Alareer’s outstanding academic lectures are available online. A tribute to him by his publisher Just World Books is online here. The heading of Refaat Alareer’s twitter account says, “I teach; therefore, I am.  Have you read Gaza Writes Back?”

This book exemplifies courage and dignity in the face of  hardship and repeated attacks. Each story is different but collectively they give a sense of  continued dignity and hope despite suffering and pain. Ultimately, the stories are uplifting.  It is a measure of Israel’s lawlessness that they had to murder the editor of Gaza Writes Back.

Rick Sterling is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com.