It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Police officers stand guard outside a cathedral during a Sunday service, in Lahore, Pakistan, 20 August 2023, after a mob attacked several Christian churches over blasphemy allegations. ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images
Report highlights that the rise of the internet has led to an increase in blasphemy prosecutions in the country.
This statement was originally published on pakvoices.bk on 19 April 2024.
A new report by Bytes for All, Pakistan, a leading digital rights organization, sheds light on the concerning rise of online blasphemy cases in Pakistan and the ongoing legal challenges. Titled “State of Online Blasphemy Cases and Unfolding Legal Saga”, the report delves into Pakistan’s legal framework surrounding blasphemy and its impact on online religious expression.
The report highlights that the rise of the internet has led to an increase in blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan. Social media platforms are often used to disseminate allegedly blasphemous content. The misuse of blasphemy laws has a chilling effect on freedom of expression online. Religious minorities are particularly vulnerable to blasphemy accusations.
Pakistan’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but restricts speech deemed offensive to religious sentiments. The penal code includes blasphemy laws, criticized for misuse and abuse, enabling prosecution for online content deemed to disrespect Islam. The report emphasizes a concerning surge in online blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan with the internet’s rise. Social media platforms are identified as a common hotspot for the spread of alleged blasphemous content. The report underscores the misuse of blasphemy laws as a barrier to free religious expression in online spaces. Individuals expressing themselves freely online risk facing blasphemy accusations, fostering a climate of fear and self-censorship.
The report underscores the particular vulnerability of religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians, and Ahmadis to blasphemy accusations. Ahmadiyya, a faith based group, not recognized as Muslim by the statute, are targeted specially, as documented in this report.
The report urges the Pakistani government to undertake a legislative reform to ensure blasphemy laws comply with international human rights standards. The report further emphasizes the need for measures safeguarding religious minorities from baseless blasphemy charges, including establishment of a redress mechanism enabling blasphemy accused to access legal remedies, for example, lawyers.
THE Faizabad sit-in inquiry report is another chapter in the country’s probe commission history. However, it falls disappointingly short of fixing responsibility or uncovering substantial evidence.
Like its predecessors, the report has stirred controversy but has not reached a concrete conclusion. Key figures are now surfacing with ‘new facts’, suggesting that further investigation may be warranted. However, any such endeavour will likely meet the same fate as the report.
One significant critique of the report is its notable failure to address the Supreme Court’s explicit directive concerning the timing of and rationale behind the submission and the withdrawal of review petitions about its judgement.
Specifically, in its ruling on Nov 13, 2023, the Supreme Court anticipated that the inquiry commission would thoroughly investigate the factors contributing to the failure to implement the Faizabad dharna judgement and examine the context surrounding the submission and withdrawal of the review petitions. The report’s failure to adhere to this directive raises concerns about the thoroughness and impartiality of the investigation. The report risks its credibility and effectiveness by neglecting to address such a crucial aspect of the Supreme Court’s instructions.
The recommendations, outlined in the report, as conveyed by the media, lack exclusivity, having been previously suggested and incorporated into policy documents concerning the mitigation of violent extremism and internal security. Emphasising a ‘zero tolerance’ stance towards violent extremism, the report urges the government to reassess its policies and target the underlying causes of this threat. It advocates for enhanced coordination among the law-enforcement agencies, Pemra, and the interior ministry to monitor social media for content that breaches legal standards.
Furthermore, the commission identifies shortcomings in implementing the National Action Plan and proposes reforms within the criminal justice system to bolster the anti-terrorism agencies. In its concluding remarks, the report directs both the federal and provincial governments to actively monitor and prosecute individuals promoting hate, extremism, and terrorism.
The leaked report neglects the imperative for state institutions to abandon the use of religious and extremist groups for political purposes. The rise of the TLP exemplifies this trend, as its popularity is fuelled by emotional rhetoric rooted in radical ideology and its manipulation by state entities for political goals since 2018. Despite losing backing from these institutions in 2024, the TLP managed to amass even more votes, reaching 2.89 million, compared to the 2.2m votes it garnered in 2018. This highlights the urgent need to confront the fusion of extremist factions with political interests. Addressing this issue is crucial to safeguarding the integrity of political processes and preventing further entrenchment of radical ideologies within the political landscape.
There is an urgent need to confront the fusion of extremist factions with political interests.
The TLP’s support base remains steadfast, primarily due to its leadership’s effective utilisation of religious narratives, a practice the state has been unable to curtail. The influence of the leadership of banned groups, including sectarian outfits, has left its imprint on even the official counter-narrative strategy called Paigham-i-Pakistan, in which alterations have been made to appease the TLP leadership.
The TLP has never acknowledged this official narrative, nor has the state effectively employed its counter-narrative in the public sphere. The TLP has capitalised on the state’s inadequate response, refining its tactics and presenting itself as ‘modern’ by including the protection of religious minorities’ rights in its manifesto. However, it remains staunch in its core agenda regarding blasphemy.
Meanwhile, state institutions cannot combat ideology solely through administrative measures; instead, they must permit moderate religious scholarship to emerge in the country, offering a counterbalance to toxic narratives.
In his book The Fallacy of Militant Ideology: Competing Ideologies and Conflict Among Militants, the Muslim World, and the West, author Munir Masood Marath argues that ideology serves as the “centre of gravity” for terrorism and extremism, emphasising the importance of understanding militants’ belief systems to counter these threats effectively. Marath, a police officer, contends that societal and state perceptions of religious narratives are often oversimplified. Religious institutions play a pivotal role in shaping and propagating these narratives, with seminaries influencing students and local clergy (ulema) outside the formal education system, influencing society as a whole. This “informal religious indoctrination” arises from the marginalisation of religious education, leaving the secular population reliant on less qualified imams.
The state still needs to devise a comprehensive strategy to address the challenges of radical groups like the TLP effectively. State institutions believe they can manage extremism through engagement and disengagement tactics. However, genuine innovation arises only when academic campuses are granted the freedom to explore ideas, with the state as a guardian of this freedom. Otherwise, groups promoting exclusivity find favour with state institutions.
It is worth noting that sometimes these groups become overly confident and challenge the state’s authority or undermine its interests, as the TLP has done, making it tough to maintain smooth relations with the Western world.
The state institutions must acknowledge that despite the existence of 40,000 seminaries, 500 public and private religious institutions, and a vast network of religious groups and parties, Pakistan still needs to cultivate scholarly minds comparable to those found elsewhere.
Without addressing this deficiency, the state will continue to bow to radical groups, as in 2021 when the TLP took to the streets to pressure the government to expel the French ambassador. Despite efforts by police and paramilitary forces, they struggled to control the fanatical elements. Under pressure from the TLP, the government opted to remove several TLP leaders, including Saad Rizvi, from a terrorism watch list and rescinded the group’s proscribed status.
The sit-in commission report has brought attention to these compromises without holding anyone accountable, exonerating almost everyone involved in the 2017 sit-in. Consequently, this report has once again thrust the TLP into mainstream discussions as it seeks to garner attention in the mainstream media.
The writer is a security analyst.
Published in Dawn, April 21st, 2024
Sunday, March 31, 2024
TURKISH ELECTIONS THE KURDS VIEW
KCK (Kurdistan Communities Union)
Besê Hozat: The municipal elections are being held in a very undemocratic and fascist atmosphere
INTERVIEW WITH BESÊ HOZAT ANF BEHDINAN Saturday, 30 March 2024 In the second part of this interview, co-chair of the KCK Executive Council, Besê Hozat, spoke about the local elections to be held tomorrow, 31 March.
As is known, the municipal elections in Turkey are set to take place on 31 March. How do you evaluate the elections and the preparations set for the elections?
It is important in which atmosphere, in which political and social climate this election will be held. There is an uninterrupted war, an ongoing genocide in Kurdistan and a war on the peoples of Turkey, a fascist regime in Turkey, an AKP-MHP-Ergenekon ruled fascist government. This fascist government has really suffocated Turkey. Turkey has collapsed politically, economically, ecologically. The government has plundered Turkey’s nature and geography. We saw it in the earthquake last year. With these construction projects, Turkey has completely turned its cities into concrete. In a severe earthquake in Turkey, especially in Kurdistan, cities are leveled to the ground. Now the municipal elections are being held in a very undemocratic and fascist atmosphere. Therefore, it has no legitimacy. These elections will not be democratic. The municipalities are also very important to this government. It wants to take back the places it lost in the previous elections.
For years, the municipalities have really been the center of governmental looting. They have become centers of theft, of plunder, of distributing wealth to cronies, and of looting all the riches. The municipalities in this system have become centers of theft and corruption. This is commonly known and can easily be observed. There is such a system in Turkey that it is a centralist system. The nation-state system in Turkey has already taken its most fascist form. Municipalities have no will, no initiative, and no authority. Everything is determined in Ankara.
In Ankara, this fascist power determines everything on the basis of its own interests. To get richer, to make their cronies earn more, to provide loot, to open areas of undetectable theft, to give away all the values, all the property, and all the riches of the people. The municipalities have really turned into loot distribution centers. That’s why they care so much. They will try to take over every place, they will try to give away the people’s values to their cronies. The more municipalities are taken from the hands of this fascist power, the weaker this fascist power will become. That’s why they are in a panic. Especially in Istanbul, for example, this panic is quite intense. Because Istanbul is the center of life, I mean, almost a quarter of Turkey’s population is there. All the coastal cities are like that, actually. That’s why the current election process in Turkey has become a war process.
I mean, there are no elections, there is a war going on. There is a power struggle, and it is very ugly. No ethical values are recognized. Politics within the Turkish state has become very dirty. You can’t even call it politics. It’s not politics at all, it’s trade. What they call politics is dirty trade and dirty bargaining. There is really no politics left in Turkey. Except for the Kurds and the democratic forces, there is no one practicing clean, democratic, moral, ethical politics. That’s why our people in Turkey should vote for patriotic, democratic, libertarian, and egalitarian candidates. Never should the votes of our people be used as material for this dirty politics. This is very important. The democratic political parties have fielded candidates everywhere. They are the most patriotic, democratic, and libertarian candidates. They do clean politics.
Now that there is already a war of genocide in Kurdistan, the election in Kurdistan is also part of the war. For eight years, they have been appointing trustees. What is a trustee? A trustee is a colonizer, a genocidal occupier. They loot wherever they go. Seeing that they will lose the municipalities, the appointed trustees are selling off anything they can to harm the elected officials who will take their place. They are selling and plundering the property and everything. For eight years in Kurdistan, theft, corruption, and loot have been rampant. They steal from the people and distribute it to their cronies. Everyone in Kurdistan is hungry, poor, and unemployed. They are doing this consciously, to break the will of the people, to make them surrender, and to migrate. This trustee policy is also part of genocide policies.
As if this was not enough, they also mobilized Hizbulkontra. Hizbulkontra have massacred thousands of people in the past, functioning as paramilitary forces of the fascist government at the time. The same government who carried out well-documented genocidal attacks against the Kurdish people, killing hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians. Now, the Hizbulkontra has become activated again and is implementing genocide policies in Kurdistan, but this time through politics. It is trying to make itself the most effective argument in the current situation as part of the total genocide policies all over Kurdistan. It is mobilized everywhere. They are focusing on Batman a lot. These Hizbukontra candidates are speaking Kurdish everywhere. They are trying to deceive people by speaking Kurdish. KDP also speaks Kurdish. By speaking Kurdish, KDP is committing Kurdish genocide together with AKP-MHP- Ergenekon. It is taking part in Kurdish genocide policies. Though, is the KDP really Kurdish in that matter? Can you call it patriotic? Does it have anything to do with Kurdishness? Can a power, a structure that commits Kurdish genocide represent Kurds, their interests and values? In reality, Kurds have gained their values through struggle, resistance, at great cost, with a lot of loss of life, bloodshed, suffering and getting tortured for 100 years, especially over the last 50 years. They are now trying to eliminate, plunder, usurp, and assimilate the values that were created through resistance. And they are doing this by using Kurdish. There is also the TRT 6 channel. By this television channel, they are trying to assimilate Kurds by using Kurdish. It is trying to make Kurds internalize the system, it is committing cultural genocide. It is committing cultural genocide by speaking Kurdish. Every day it curses Kurds, it schemes on how to enslave Kurds, how to make them serve the fascist Turkish state, how to make them servants. Hizbulkontra does the same thing. The AKP-MHP together with Ergenekon are waging a war of genocide by speaking Kurdish everywhere. This contra is doing what JITEM did.
They shamelessly put forward a candidate in a place like Dersim, the center of Alevism and the Reya Heq faith. They are all people of this faith. This is an insult and curse to them. This is blasphemy, this is an attack, this is an attack of genocide. This is the modern day expression of the 1937-38 massacre, and its special warfare tool the Hizbulkontra. It is a war of genocide currently being waged in Dersim. The people of Dersim should spit in the face of these contras. They should not allow those with the blood of the people of Dersim on their hands to even dare to set foot in Dersim, let alone go and make propaganda. Hizbulkontra candidates should not even dare to set foot in Kurdistan, in the cities of Kurdistan. All of them have bloodied their hands with genocide, all of them are assimilation pawns, they are elements within the concepts of special warfare, JITEM elements who develop genocide policies. They have nothing to do with Kurdishness. They insult the Kurdish language by speaking it. They will not be able to assimilate Kurdish culture by using the Kurdish language, they will not be allowed to commit cultural genocide again. Our people will not give in to this. In these municipal elections, at the ballot box, both this genocidal colonialist fascist power, the state, and the elements of special warfare of Hizbulkontra and other collaborator traitor groups will give their answers. I believe in this. Our people are struggling against this, and will show the strongest attitude.
There is currently a lot of discussion about the co-chairman system. Apparently, there are some men who are not in favor of it. What can they tell us about this system? Why is the co-chairman system of such significance in your eyes?
The co-chairman system really plays a very decisive role in the democratization and liberation of politics and society. It plays a transformative, changing role. It is a system developed against the male-dominated mentality, understanding and system. It rejects the male-dominated mentality, system, patriarchal mentality and system, and expresses a break from it. It is an alternative, democratic, libertarian and egalitarian system. Now, in order for this system to be successfully developed, established and executed, first of all, the people responsible for developing this system must completely purify themselves from the mentality and understanding of the dominant, traditional perspective. In other words, they need to experience a break from the dominant, traditional mentality. This is very important. Because this is a system developed against male domination. It is a system based on democratic politics, a form of government and a way of life based on the freedom of women, the freedom of men, the equality and freedom of women and men. In order for this system to develop, first of all, the male friends who take part in this system must experience a radical cut from the male-dominated mentality and understanding. Their mentality must be democratic, libertarian, egalitarian, their understanding must be like this. If this does not happen, they constitute a great obstacle to this system. They are doing everything to frustrate this system.
A man who does not want to give up his male-dominant understanding will create obstacles and resist the development of the co-chairman system. Because male domination wants to rule with its own understanding and mentality. But this system is not like that. This system rejects the way of governing with a male-dominated mentality. It is based on a free, equal, democratic form of government, politics, lifestyle and working style. Now, since this system has developed, there has been a dual attack. There is a state attack against this system. There is a systematic attack. Because the development of this system will bring about democratic politics. It will change and transform society. Changing, transforming, democratizing and liberating society and politics will challenge the state power system. It will challenge and weaken fascist, colonialist, genocidal policies, mentalities and understandings. This frightens the state and the powers. So what will they do? Attack. An attack against this, is an attack on the paradigm of women’s freedom. It is an attack on the free women, free society, free politics, free governance. The state is doing this. It has done this from the beginning. That’s why it imprisoned all the co-chairs. It is trying to take all women’s gains away from women. First it attacked the co-chair system, then it canceled the Istanbul Convention. Now, it is trying to remove anything in its own constitution that is even the slightest bit useful or in favor of women. The whole reaction is united against the paradigm and struggle of women’s freedom.
This is a form of attack that feeds the state and strengthens the state-power system. How does that happen? The man refuses to give up the male-dominated mentality, he does not give up this understanding. He does not give up his way of governing because he thinks it is in his favor. He does not want to live in equal partnership with women, he does not want to share. He does not want to form a joint governing on an equal, free and democratic basis. He insists on his own way of ruling. He insists on his way of domination, suppression, hegemony, he wants to be the one and only. This also happened in the municipalities. This is a fundamental problem we are currently experiencing in all areas. Since male friends do not give up their male-dominated understanding and mentality, there is a problem because they do not take a free, equal, democratic governance and working style as a basis together with their female friends. This process is developing in a constant conflict, constant discussion, constant struggle. This is the nature of the work.
Of course, men do not easily give up their male-dominated understanding. Women need to struggle strongly, men who seek freedom need to struggle very strongly, social segments of our society who want to be liberated, who want democratization need to embrace this system very strongly, and fight against the male-dominated patriarchal system, sexist state and power. This struggle is not only the struggle of women. Women will struggle first and foremost, of course, but men and everybody else who seeks freedom must also struggle. In other words, it is necessary so that the system can settle, function and succeed. If this system is successful, there will definitely be a serious transformation in society, a level of emancipation and democratization will emerge. Society will be liberated and democratized. These fascist nation-state systems, ruling state systems will no longer be able to maintain their rule, they will dissolve and fall apart. In other words, they will no longer be able to exert pressure on the peoples and practice fascism. Therefore, co-chairman means that the system of equal representation becomes a cultural component, vitalized, systematized, a style of governance, a style and understanding of politics. It means the elimination of sexism, nationalism, racism, and religious sectarianism. It means the liberation, democratization and flourishing of society. It means to not only breath but to live freely. It is that important. It is really the resistance point of freedom. But unfortunately, a male approach that will comprehend this, understand it and approach it accordingly has not yet emerged. A women’s struggle that will comprehend this in depth and wage a much more radical and effective struggle, is still not fully sufficient. There are problems in this regard. But this definitely needs to be overcome. This system is very important for the democratization of local governments, society, and the emancipation of political governance.
Now, in local governments, wherever a democratic political party enters the elections in Kurdistan, that is, wherever a political party based on the paradigm of Democratic Nation enters the elections, the co-chairmanship system is taken as a basis. It is absolutely necessary to implement this system in accordance with its essence, philosophy and understanding. This is very important.
In terms of municipalities, it is also necessary to state the following. We see what kind of municipalism our people want. The demands of the people are clear. The people want a pluralist, egalitarian, libertarian, democratic, multicultural, multilingual, socialist municipality. It wants a municipality governance approach in which it will directly participate, be involved in the governance, have a say in the services related to it, in the problems of the local area, and have a will. Our people express this everywhere. If a municipality is not democratic and socialist, it cannot be the administration of the people. That municipality will not provide democratic, free and equal services to the people, it will not be fair. Therefore, a democratic and socialist understanding of municipal administration would provide services to the people in a fairer, more equal manner, without discrimination. This is what the people demand and want. And we think this will be the case. Because all the candidates of democratic political parties in Kurdistan have made these promises. They must fulfill their promises. Of course the people expect them to fulfill their promises in practice, they expect them to implement this.
As is so often the case shortly before elections, there have recently been many attempts by the AKP to present itself as if it were interested in a supposed solution to the Kurdish question. How do you evaluate this?
We see in the press that some AKP officials, special warfare pawns, are trying to create a perception in regard to Rêber Apo. Officials from our party were also evaluating this the other day. Tülay Hatimoğulları also participated in a TV program several days ago, we listened to it. She made very important evaluations and calls. She also addressed this issue. So this is a really serious situation.
AKP circles and officials are trying to create a perception among Kurds that a different process may develop after 1 April. In other words, they are trying to create perceptions. They are aiming to get Kurdish votes in these municipal elections. They say that if the Kurds vote for the AKP, a new solution process can start after the elections. They are conducting a very intense propaganda and perception work, a special warfare policy in Kurdistan. This is very dangerous, since it is completely false. Whether they vote for the AKP or not, there is only one thing that the Kurds will experience after the elections; it will be a deepened, widened and intensified attempt to finish off the genocide. At the moment, all the preparations of this government are on this basis, this is the only plan they will try to implement after elections. This special warfare propaganda aims to confuse the Kurds, creating expectations, creating confusion and gaining votes. It is nothing more than psychological warfare. Our people do not and should not believe them. Already the practice is obvious, the policies are obvious. The rest is a lie. Our people don’t believe it, we don’t believe it. If anyone pays attention, they should never pay attention. This is a genocidal, colonialist, fascist power. And it definitely wants to finalize this genocide policy within a year or two after the elections. It is working on this basis, preparing on this basis. No one should be fooled by the propaganda of the special warfare. No one should fall under the influence of special warfare. Our people should vote for those who represent their own will and their own values. There should be no confusion on this issue. It must be as clear as the sun. It must be as clear as water.
The state, this AKP-MHP-Ergenekon fascist alliance, focuses on some places in Kurdistan with much more importance. It has also identified those places as flagship areas. It is trying to usurp and seize them in this election. In fact, the trustee policy has changed its form a little more in this period. In this process, the Erdogan regime is attempting to achieve this by moving voters. He has filled everywhere with police, gendarmerie and soldiers. He spread the army across Kurdistan and registered each of them as voters. He also created imaginary voters. He will do a lot of cheating anyway. Especially in the past elections, he is paying more attention to the places where the voting rates and the difference in votes were small. For example, he is now very serious about Agri, Şirnak, Urfa, Kars and particularly Igdir. He is concentrating on these areas. He is developing a thousand and one ways and methods to usurp these areas. I believe that our people are sensitive to this. Our people should listen the calls of their political party. All voters in the cities and metropolises of Turkey should go to their places, go to their cities, go to their towns and vote. This must be strictly adhered to. Our people should definitely go to the ballot box wherever they are. They must cast their vote. They must protect their vote, they must protect their will. They should not only vote and come back. They should also protect the ballot box until the results are announced. Because there is a very intense attack, there is a special war, there is cheating, there is a trap. It is our people who will frustrate all these. It is our people’s sensitivity, responsible approach, participation, protecting their will, protecting their votes. We should definitely pay attention to these. This is the measure. We trust our people. Our people must trust themselves. Otherwise, the democratic political party in Kurdistan is forced to become a coalition, it will not be allowed to perform freely per the will of the people. When it comes to Kurdistan, all state parties develop an alliance against the democratic political party, against the Kurds. This is very clear. They enter the elections with the state. Therefore, we must be very sensitive everywhere. Our people must vote. They must protect the ballot box. Those who have moved to the cities of Turkey should come to their own place, come to their home city, come to their home town, cast their vote there. They should make such a sacrifice. Because this enemy, this state, this government treats the election as a war. It treats it as a war to break the will of the Kurds, as a form of developing a new slaughter policy. Our people must really resist, fight against this, and put forward their will in a very strong way. This is important. I would like to make a call on this basis.
Friday, March 29, 2024
Intel Brags of $152 Billion in Stock Buybacks Over Last 35 Years. So Why Does It Need an $8 Billion Subsidy?
What’s to stop the chip-making giant from shoveling taxpayer grants into more stock buybacks?
An illustration of INTEL and the US dollar is being displayed in Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, China, on February 17, 2024. The Biden administration is currently negotiating to provide more than $10 billion in subsidies to Intel Corp., which may include loans and direct grants. (Photo Illustration by Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Intel, the largest chip maker in America, with 2023 revenues of $54 billion, has just been awarded an $8.5 billion grant from the federal CHIPS and Science Act, plus $11 billion in favorable loans.
In addition to badly needed microchips, Intel produces totally useless stock buybacks. On its website the company proudly proclaims to have spent $152 billion on stock buybacks since 1990. That’s not a typo: $152,000,000,000. Which is why I call it "Stock Buybacks Я Us."
Intel took $152 billion of its revenues, some portion of which could have been used for R&D and building new microchip facilities in the U.S. as well as paying workers more, and instead funneled it to its largest Wall Street stockholders and corporate executives, enriching the top fraction of the top one percent.
A company repurchasing its own shares sees earnings per share rise because there are fewer shares in circulation. Share prices rise, though nothing new is made, and the largest stockholders, including top Intel executives, cash out with eye-popping profits. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger hauled in $179 million in 2021, most of it coming from stock-related compensation.
How can you tell if such a large company is using CHIPS money or other money to conduct its buybacks? You can’t.
Stock buybacks are a form of stock manipulation, which is why they were outlawed by the Securities and Exchange Commission after the Great Depression, up until deregulation in 1982, that limited buybacks to two percent of profits. Now it’s all the buybacks your corporation can eat, with nearly 70 percent of all corporate profits going to this form of stock manipulation.
So, why are we giving Intel another $8 billion?
National security is at risk, we are told. Semi-conductors are far too important to our defense and to our economy to be produced overseas, especially in or anywhere near China, our communist enemy de jure. If we don’t bribe Intel to build here, the argument goes, they just might go elsewhere. They are in business to produce profits (and stock buybacks) not national security.
But the biggest selling point, as always, from politicians of both parties, is Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The White House calculates that Intel will generate 20,000 temporary construction jobs and 10,000 more permanent manufacturing jobs because of this grant.
But what’s to stop Intel from shoveling taxpayer grants into more stock buybacks?
Not much. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) writes: “While the legislation specifically prohibits the use of CHIPS funds for stock buybacks and dividend payments, these restrictions do not explicitly prohibit award recipients from using CHIPS funds to free up their own funds, which they can then use for those purposes.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is already worried that BAE Systems, a much smaller CHIPS recipient, but also a buyback recidivist, has not said it would refrain from stock buybacks for the duration of its CHIPS money.
Intel hasn’t made that pledge either. In fact, Intel’s website states it still has authorization to conduct another $7.24 billion in stock buybacks.
How can you tell if such a large company is using CHIPS money or other money to conduct its buybacks? You can’t.
Doesn’t the CHIPS Act prohibit Intel from conducting mass layoffs?
Not a chance.
Intel could very well increase jobs in some locations while cutting jobs in other locations. And there is evidence that they are doing that right now.
As the CHIPS Act was moving through Congress in 2022, strongly lobbied for by CEO Gelsinger, Intel laid off approximately 2,000 employees in California. Now, the company says, it “is working to accelerate its strategy while reducing costs through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company."
What that word salad means is that by the time Intel creates 10,000 new manufacturing jobs, it will have laid off more workers than that. And they know there’s nothing the government will do about it.
Why are most politicians so gutless about preventing mass layoffs?
That’s a longer story that I cover in Wall Street’s War on Workers. Simply put, our political system refuses to acknowledge that mass layoffs are the ruination of working people.
By the time Intel creates 10,000 new manufacturing jobs, it will have laid off more workers than that. And they know there’s nothing the government will do about it.
More than 30 million working people have suffered through mass layoffs since 1996. Last year there were more than 260,000 jobs lost in the highly prosperous tech sector, with another 50,000 so far this year. In January 2024, there were 82,000 layoffs across the economy. Many of those workers will suffer greatly both from financial loss and deterioration of their health. (For those worried about the catastrophic impact of artificial intelligence, the Challenger Report claims AI killed only 381 jobs in January 2024.)
It should be a no-brainer for the government to make a simple regulation: If you are supping at the taxpayer trough, you can’t conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All your layoffs must be voluntary. That is, you have to buy workers out. No forced layoffs!
Most elected leaders believe that regulating corporations about how they can and can’t destroy jobs is blasphemy, an attack on sacred capitalist freedoms, something that only the Communists would do! In addition to the ideological blowback, the political establishment actually buys the corporate line that halting mass layoffs would make corporations uncompetitive, which is total nonsense.
Here’s a telling piece of evidence.
In 2021, Siemens Energy, the German-based company with 90,000 employees globally, decided to stop making equipment used in oil extraction and fracking. In Germany, 3,000 workers were to lose their jobs, and another 1,700 in the U.S.
In Germany, companies must live within a legislated system of codetermination, meaning that half the seats on a company’s board of directors are held by worker representatives, and labor-management committees run the day-to-day operations of each facility. (As an aside, this system was urged upon German businesses by the U.S. after WWII, because we believed unionized workers were less likely than their bosses to cozy up to fascists.)
The political establishment actually buys the corporate line that halting mass layoffs would make corporations uncompetitive, which is total nonsense.
In Germany, the workers used their power to persuade Siemens management to agree to no forced layoffs. On top of that, Siemens agreed not to shut down six facilities and instead put other production lines in them.
In the United States? All 1,700 workers lost their jobs AND the president of Siemens USA was invited to the infrastructure bill signing ceremony. In honor of the legislation she had the gall to say, “This is a historic moment in America – one that sets the stage for decarbonizing the economy, boosting U.S. manufacturing, creating jobs, and increasing equity.”
Moral of the story: In addition to fabricating hypocritical public statements, global corporations have incredible flexibility and resources to modify production, employment, wages, and working conditions. “No forced layoffs” would not put Siemens or Intel or any other global corporation out of business. Instead, there might be a microscopic dip in stock buybacks!
Every single company that is getting a CHIPS grant has the capacity to modify its operations to avoid forced layoffs, just as Siemens has done in Germany. In fact, every company that gets a federal contract should agree to do the same, as well as forswearing stock buybacks.
There’s only one way out of this non-stop shakedown: expand labor unions and build a powerful mass movement.
The second moral of the story: Wall Street and corporate America are so accustomed to getting their way that they will only pursue national goals when they are bribed. No matter how rich, no matter how large their stock buyback scams, they want our tax dollars with no strings attached. And very few politicians have the nerve to resist.
There’s only one way out of this non-stop shakedown: expand labor unions and build a powerful mass movement. Until we, the people, rise up and demand it, no one will derail the Wall Street gravy train that runs from our pockets to theirs via stock buybacks and pink slips.
And we wonder why so many Americans think the system is rigged and that democracy isn’t working for us.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is directly connected to nationalism. Animistic tribal societies and Bronze Age agricultural states did not have the same religious paraphernalia as monotheism, and societies like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamian, China and India were never nationalistic.
The second part of my article focuses on how monotheistic beliefs and dramatization have the same parallels in nationalization processes. The categories include the destruction of intermediary institutions, the commitment to expansion and the importance of both origins and future destiny in history as opposed to mythology. In both nationalism and monotheism founders are mythologized. Both nationalism and monotheism use the arts (painting, music and literature) for altering states of consciousness.
Coming Attractions
In this article we will be discussing the social-psychological and psychological techniques by which both monotheism and nationalism promote loyalty. These include means of transmission (writing as opposed to oral), how social time (holidays) is marked throughout the year as well as individual time (rites of passage). We find that marking geography (territory and cityscapes) is crucial to both monotheism and nationalism. Each demands self-sacrifice, either as religious martyrs or soldiers. Each requires a conversion process. Membership is usually lifetime. Each has processes of exclusion and its members are purified through wars. Membership is sustained over time through fear of being exiled.
Next, I show that both nationalism and monotheism support individualism (as opposed to collectivism) for different reasons. I provide six reasons why each supports individualism. Lastly, I provide two qualifications. First, I pose the question of why the monotheistic religion of Islam is not included. After all, Islam began as a world religion hundreds of years before the rise of nation-states. It would seem to have had plenty of time to connect to the emergence of nation-states around the world. Why didn’t it? Secondly, in the 21st century we have a nation-state that is very powerful (India) that is founded on Hinduism, a polytheistic rather than a monotheistic religion. How do I explain that?
Marking Time: Special Occasions
The ability to recognize patterns is one of the adaptive skills that allowed the human species to survive in competition with other species. We live most of our everyday lives as problem solvers. But at the same time we need to be socialized to rise, metaphorically, from the ground level and examine long-term patterns to assess where we have been and where we are going.
In pagan traditions, sacred patterns involve the changing of the seasons. In Catholicism they include Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days and saints’ days. At the same time, at the micro level, the rites of passage in the life of an individual are linked to spiritual traditions through the sacraments. In Catholicism, the sacraments include baptism at birth, confirmation during adolescence, marriage in adulthood, and the last rites just before death. Further, a Catholic is expected to attend mass at least once a week and to go to confession. Lastly, monotheists – whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim – make pilgrimages. What does this have to do with socialization into nationalism? Like monotheism, nationalism has its special days, including Independence Day, various presidents’ days, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. There are pilgrimages to Washington, DC and trips to Mount Rushmore all of which support nationalism.
Marking Places: Geographies of Loyalty
Socialization takes place in physical spaces. Pagan societies built mounds and temples to spirits or deities. In caste agricultural civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia, physical buildings of monumental proportions made of impenetrable materials had a psychologically intimidating impact that was not lost on those in power. Likewise, Christians, Jews and Muslim elites build churches, synagogues and mosques, not just to pay homage to their deities, but to propagandize the lower classes into following them since they are God’s representatives on earth. Sacred sites are not limited to places of worship. Streets and buildings are named after saints. In the case of nationalism, we have gargantuan state buildings in Washington, streets named after presidents, and monuments at Bunker Hill, the Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock, and Mount Rushmore.
Creating Atmosphere: Literature and Painting
For most “people of the book,” hearing stories from sacred texts like the Bible or the Koran begins at a very young age. This upbringing is strengthened by studying, as with learning the Catholic catechism in grammar school or preparing to read an excerpt from the Old Testament as part of a Jewish bar or bat mitzvah. The most logical parallel to nationalism would be reading or even memorizing the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. However, since this is rarely done, a very important source of nationalistic literature is novels about the American West.
Animistic hunting and gathering societies used cave paintings, amulets and totems) long before monotheists to socialize (Lewis-Williams, 2002) their members. In the case of Catholicism in the 17th century, baroque paintings were epically dramatized to overwhelm the population with monumental scale. Furthermore, music has perhaps been the most compelling of the arts in creating an immediate emotional reaction. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace”help the faithful sing their way into submission.
Nationalist socialization may come about when the population is being exposed to patriotic paintings such as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Music such as the “Star-Spangled Banner”, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and “God Bless America” are bound to rouse even the most reluctant patriot.
Social Action: Fulfilling Destiny Through Sacrifice
As we have seen, both monotheism and nationalism must use the past in order to justify the present. However, each must also organize in the present by referring to the future. This is done through the expectation of sacrifice of the participants to life itself.
Anthony Smith (2003) points out five instances in which fulfilling destiny through sacrifice is depicted in paintings. In Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s painting Manlius Torquatus Condemning His Son to Death, we see the conflicted determination of a Roman father’s loyalty to the state in executing his own child for disobeying his order to not engage the enemy in combat. Though torn by the clash of the demands of state and family, Torquatus overcomes his paternal feelings and refuses to listen to his son’s appeal, despite fervent pleas for mercy from friends and family. He maintains legal impartiality and values the state’s welfare over his personal interests. His right hand is publicly outstretched in the preservation of justice while his left hand clutches privately at a father’s agonizing heart.
According to Smith, the painting The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, Jacques-Louis David chose the moment when an anguished Brutus, returning home after the execution of his own sons, hears the cries of his wife and the swooning of his eldest daughter as the bodies of his sons are brought to his house. Having driven out the Tarquin and helping to institute the Republic, Brutus was elected consul in 508 BCE only to discover a monarchial plot fostered by his wife’s family and supported by his two sons. He saw it as his duty to suppress all enemies of the republic, including his own sons.
In 1778 Johann Heinrich Füssli was commissioned by the Zurich council to paint Oath on the Rütli, the cornerstone of Swiss unity and independence. This painting depicts three towering figures who represent the three original forest cantons swearing “an oath of everlasting alliance in the Rütli meadow”. Smith argues that it expresses defiance, struggle, unification, and sacrifice for freedom. In its thrusting defiant male figures embody the ideal of willingness to die for the freedom of the nation.
About a century later, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII also conveys the ideal of self-sacrifice as struggle in the service of a higher cause. In 1770 Benjamin West painted The Death of General Wolfe, an epic depiction of the British general who was mortally wounded at the height of victory over the French in Quebec in 1759.
Lastly, Smith points out that during the French Revolution:
On the occasion of Marat’s murder in July 1793, art and ritual proceeded hand in hand. Marat’s friend David was immediately urged by the assembly to paint his portrait. Marat’s assassination shows with great veracity the ‘Friend of the People’ dying in his bathtub, with a Christ-like wound in his right lung…
David also had to supervise the lying in state and funeral of his friend. Marat’s corpse was exhibited on a high dais in the Cordeliers Church, above the bath and the packing case, with a smoking incense burner as the only light. The funeral…which lasted six hours took place to the accompaniment of muffled drum-beat and cannon… Girls in white with branches of cypress surrounded it, and they were followed by the entire Convention, the municipal authorities and the people of Paris. (Smith, 237)
These examples show how the political religion of nationalism draws upon Catholic traditions and uses them for national ends in order to evoke a sense of sacred communion with the glorious dead.
Sacrifice Choreographed in Festivals, Monuments and Song
The Napoleonic Wars were a catalyst for the process of cementing a sense of national identity not just among the French but for those societies under attack. French nationalism was answered by a growing German nationalism, which was at first cultural but soon became politicized with the Prussian defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The War of Liberation of 1813 and the return of aristocratic regimes after Napoleon’s defeat stimulated collective expressions of national sentiment in the form of festivals and monuments.
Smith informs us that in 1832 the Germans held their first mass festival in the same alleged place where the ancient German tribes had held their meetings. There was a procession to the ruins of the castle ruins in which patriotic songs were sung and people wore ancient German dress. The later 19th century saw greater efforts to invite people into the sacred communion of the nation through mass celebrations. This began with the songs of the volunteers for the armies of the French Revolution.
Dancing and Military Drills
Sustaining nationalist and religious loyalties is not just about getting lost in mystical symbols and myths or engaging in altruistic actions. Building political loyalty to a nation or a religion also involves acting collectively in a very structured way. In his very provocative book, Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argues that building community involves “muscular bonding”: community dancing, communal work, singing, religious rituals and military drills. In community dancing, moving and singing together tends to dissolve group tensions, reminding community members that they have more in common than they have differences. In the area of work, singing and moving together makes otherwise boring work more creative. The great large-scale architectural projects of ancient civilizations could never have been built without workers singing and moving in sync. McNeill points out that the rise of religious dervish orders at the beginning of the 11th century was so powerful in altering states of consciousness that they came close to being declared heretical.
In addition, McNeill argues that militarymuscular bonding, specifically close-order drilling, creates altered states. In his book The Pursuit of Power, McNeill concluded that the victory of European armies over non-European armies was largely due to well-drilled troops who were more efficient in battle. Soldiers moved in unison while performing each of the actions needed to load, aim, and fire their guns. The volleys came faster and misfires were fewer when everyone acted in unison and kept time to shouted commands. The result was more ammunition projected at the enemy in less time.
However, it was not only the superiority of weapons or efficiency in using them that made Europeans victorious. Drilled troops created deep social-psychological altered states. McNeill suggests that many veterans report that group effort in battle was the high point of their lives. Just like the boundary loss of whirling dervishes, the individual merges with the platoon.
By inadvertently tapping the inherent human emotional response to keeping together in time, military drills helped create obedient, reliable, and effective soldiers with a spirit that not only superseded previous identities – ethnicity, region, religion – but also insulated them from outside attachments. Soldiers could be counted on to obey their officers predictably even when fighting hundreds or thousands of miles away from their home base.
McNeill describes witnessing soldiers marching in step as both awe inspiring and terrifying. No twitches, twists, mutterings nor distractions could be seen or heard in the ranks. On the one hand, soldiers were perfectly composed, calm and moving to music. But on the other hand, they were completely poised to destroy human life or be destroyed by it.
For most of human history, the ruling classes understandably had reservations with arming the lower classes for fear they might recognize their class interests. However, the group experience of altered states that resulted from prolonged drills made soldiers loyal and devoted far beyond any class loyalties. In the 17th century, for poverty-stricken peasant recruits and jobless urbanites recruited from the fringes of an increasingly atomized, commercialized society, the military created a new artificial primary community, providing camaraderie that prevailed in good times and bad, where old-fashioned principles of command and subordination gave meaning and direction to life. It became safe to arm even the poorest classes, pay them a regular wage and expect obedience. In a time of domestic conflict, European soldiers were even willing to fire upon their own social class.
Before the drill, in the standing army of kings, obedience was extracted through fear of punishment. But the coming of the drill created a lively spirit between soldiers that was less prevalent than before. Now, instead of standing armies of subjects to a king, the citizens’ army shared the collective emotional identity of the nation. For soldiers who received regular pay, there was a good reason to not break ranks.
It would be an overstatement to say that drilling caused nationalism. The military revolution occurred hundreds of years before the rise of nationalism, which I said came about at the end of the 18th century. But there is no question that military drills helped sustain nationalism once it appeared. Other military formations such as the cavalry couldn’t create such a solidarity among those fighting.
Conversion and Exile
The last part of socialization to nationalism is the unusual time when a person either joins through conversion or departs in an imposed or self-imposed exile. Typical examples of conversion for monotheists are the moment when Moses was on Mount Sinai or when Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus. The Great Awakenings in the United States in 1725 and 1780, though starting out as Protestant religious revivals, had nationalist implications, according to Wilbur Zelinsky (1988). A nationalist counterpart of conversion is the indoctrination immigrants or refugees receive upon becoming U.S. citizens.
Neither monotheists nor nationalists tolerate rejection lightly. For both, membership is expected to be lifetime. For national states, registration at birth and death is compulsory. What becomes of people who decide to leave? In the case of Catholicism, there is excommunication. In all monotheistic religions, there are attacks for such deviations as apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, inquisitions and witch hunts. Nonbelievers are attacked in religious wars as godless atheists. So too, in nationalism, expatriates are feared, ostracized and shunned. They are considered unworthy, traitorous or treasonous. In the case of political opposition, such people become the targets of CIA spying and assassination attempts. As for countries that oppose the nationalist vision, they are subject to state terror, world wars and torture. Please see my summary table at the end of this article.
Monotheism, Nationalism and Individualism
Both monotheism and nationalism support individualism in the following ways:
Each focuses the attention of the individual on a singlesource of loyalty in the objective world: in the case of nationalism it is the nation, and in the case of monotheism it is a single deity.
Each marginalizes and undermines intermediate loyalties between the individual and the single, ultimate source. In the case of monotheism, it is earth spirits, ancestor spirits, totems or gods and goddesses. Similarly, nationalism demands that citizens subordinate regional, class, ethnic and even religious loyalties in favor of the state. The individual must have one and only one loyalty: the state. So with religion, the second commandment of the Bible reads, “I am the Lord Thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. This not only applies to religion, but also holds as an expectation that the state demands of its citizens. Both nationalism and monotheism are large-scale emulsifiers that hold together and paper over class or religious conflicts, which monotheists and nationalists tell us will grow and spread otherwise.
Each replaces customs and community traditions with written laws. In the case of nationalism, it is the constitution; in the case of monotheism, it is the sacred text of the Bible or the Koran.
The relationship between the individual and the nation or the religion is presented as a freely chosen association or a covenant. In the case of monotheism, individuals are proclaimed to have free will, with the choice for whether to obey God. In the case of the nation, individuals are free to renounce their citizenship and go elsewhere.
Each binds strangers together as opposed to kin groups, clans or neighborhoods.
Both have extremely violent ideologies. Monotheism has been responsible for more deaths than any other group membership. After the military revolution in the 17th century, nationalistic wars at the end of the 19th century (and, of course, the 20th century) show that the state has been at least as violent.
I hope to have shown that it is a mistake to think of individualism as either anti-social or a withdrawal from social relations. Individualism does mean a weakening of particular kinds of loyalties: kin group, village, regional or estate. But it also means a connection with a de-sensualized community, made possible by the printing press and newspapers.
While the forces of modernization may have weakenedreligious beliefs, the doctrines, myths, rituals, and entire architecture of religion (specifically monotheism) were reorganized and used in the name of a secular political religion: nationalism. Beginning in the 19th century, individualists were expected to renounce loyalty to class, ethnicity, and region – not so they could be “free as a bird,” but also to become bound to a new secular community of strangers serving the state. Citizens may gain political rights, but that is far from the end of the story. The socialization into nationalism has been an enormously successful project of the 19th-century ruling classes. Individualists were mobilized to fight and die in wars to prove their patriotism. The reality is now that stateless individuals are not allowed to exist anywhere in the world.
Please see my table at the end of this article.
Qualifications: What About the Place of Islam in Nationalism?
It might have crossed your mind that I did not include Islam in my monotheistic roots of nationalism comparisons. Certainly, Islam is monotheistic. Furthermore, when we look at Islamic fundamentalism, it would seem that surely there is fanatical nationalism at work. But a closer look shows that Islam has a similar internationalism as the Catholics. Being fanatical about your religion so that you will kill and die for it is not necessarily nationalism. Why did Islam not develop a nationalism the way the Jews and the Christians did: There are at least the following reasons:
Western nationalism was inseparable from the development of industry.While Islam went through a “merchant capital” phase of capitalism, they never initiated an industrialization process that capitalism did in the West. Industrialization is very important in pulverizing intermediate loyalties which is crucial to the emergence of nationalism.
Nationalism in the West was not built by one country at a time. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created a system of states that became the foundation for nationalism at the end of the 18th century. There was no system of states that existed in West Asia at the time. Predominantly what existed were sprawling tribes, kingdoms or empires, not nation-states.
In the 19th and 20th century, Islam has become a religion of the oppressed. European nation-states were not fighting against imperialism when they arose in England, France, the United States and Holland. Their development was not shackled by fighting defensive wars. West Asian nationalism could not develop autonomously, but as a reaction to being colonized
Qualification: What About the Presence of a Polytheistic Nationalism in India?
It would seem that when we look at the nation-state of India today, it would constitute a clear exception to my argument that only monotheism develops nationalism. Here we have the polytheistic religion of Hinduism as the guiding religion of Modi’s India. How can this be?
The title of my article is the monotheistic roots of nationalism. As we know, the origin of anything (monotheism) does not guarantee destiny (what something becomes in the future). New processes can take place later in time which are independent of their origin. My two previous articles on nationalism only went as far as the beginning of World War I. The events in the 20th century that went beyond the monotheistic roots of nationalism were two World Wars, a depression, fascism and national liberation movements especially after World War II.
In Europe as far back as the Middle Ages there were other political formations long before there were nation-states. There were tribes, city-states, federations, principalities, provinces, kingdoms and empires. With the exception of some empires, all these formations were decentralized. These forms of political organizations continued to exist all over the world even after nation-states emerged. But the effect of political mobilization first in World War I and then World War II, pulverized these earlier formations. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires did not survive World Wars. Tribes, federations and city-states were too weak to survive two world wars and became hammered into nation-states. It is no accident that at the end of World War I, the new global mediator was the League of Nations not the League of provinces, kingdom or empires. After World War II it was the United Nations that was promoted. After that it is very difficult to have any political standing in world politics without being organized into a nation-state.
In the case of India, revolutionaries had to build up and centralize their states if they were to fight the British. They succeeded. After World War II Indian religions continued to compete – Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism to name three. As India (as many nations in the 20th century) turned politically to the right over the last thirty years it needed a religious justification for its shift. Hinduism, as the oldest Indian religion, was championed. So, in the case of India, Hinduism did not help to form nationalism as Western monotheism helped nationalism. It was a reaction after a political nationalism that had already formed.
Something similar happened in the African liberation movements after World War II. African centralized states had to form in order for those revolutionaries to overthrow the colonizers. This has not been easy for those states as tribal and ethic loyalties in parts of Africa were fierce. Islam proved to be a better unifying force as a world religion than various decentralized pagan magical traditions. In the case of Africa Islam, though itself not a religion that helped nation-states to form prior to the 20th century, became one. Again, we have the case of a religion not being the cause of nationalism but a secondary reaction.
Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism in the Socialization Process From Birth to Death
Monotheism (Judeo-Christian)
Category of Comparison
Nationalism (United States)
Written Scriptures (Bible) interpreted by priests or rabbis
Means of Transmission
Written Constitutions interpreted by courts (judges)
Special occasions throughout the year: Christmas day, Easter, Lent, feast days, saints days
Marking Social time
Special occasions throughout the year: Independence Day, President’s Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day
Rites of passage: Baptism, confirmation, marriage, anointing of the sick and last rites
Marking Individual Time
Rites of passage: Cub scouts, boy scouts, girl scouts, draft registration
Sunday school, private religious schools
Educational Training
Public school civics classes on American government and history
Detached from territory: Cosmopolitan (early prophets) Attached to Territory: Promised land, Zionists-Palestine, Christians-Bethlehem
Marking Geography (territory)
Attached to territory: (Promised land) Swiss Alps, U.S. Western frontier
Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Vatican, streets named after saints, religious statues
Marking geography (urban landmarks)
Federal and state buildings, Streets named after presidents, Monuments: Bunker Hill, Statue of Liberty, Plymouth Rock. Mount Rushmore
Pilgrimages to Mecca, Jerusalem, Bethlehem
Marking Geography (movement)
Pilgrimages to Washington DC
Sacrifice self (religious martyrs)
Sacrifice
Sacrifice of self in patriotic wars (Tomb of Unknown Soldier)
Community dancing rituals
Collective Bodily Orchestration
Military drills
Moses on Mount Sinai, St. Paul on the road to Damascus
Conversion
Great Awakening in America (1725), Second Great Awakening (1780), Naturalization ceremony with immigrants and refugees receiving citizenship rights
To be free every individual must belong to a religion (no pagans or atheists)
Loyalty and Exclusivity
To be free, every individual must belong to a nation (no nationless individuals)
Religious wars
Attitude Towards Nonbelievers
State-to-state wars
Usually lifetime
Length of Membership
State membership usually lifelong (compulsory registration of birth, death)
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.
Friday, March 15, 2024
Oscars Speech Smear Campaign Shows Lying For Israel Is A Good Career Move
Film director Jonathan Gazer’s acceptance speech went viral. But Jewish community leaders know there will be no professional damage for misrepresenting his words
Film director Jonathan Glazer poked a hornet’s nest with his acceptance speech this week as he won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest, a film about the family of Auschwitz’s Nazi commandant who live peacefully inside a walled garden, cut off from the horrors just the other side.
Glazer says the film’s point is not simply to drive home a history lesson. It’s “not to say, ‘Look what they did then.’ Rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”
There could not be pithier summary of the difference between the universal moral impulse found in Jews like Glazer, and the particularist Zionist impulse found in the people who noisily claim to speak for the Jewish community – and are readily given a bullhorn to do so by western establishments.
The first group says, “Never again.” The second group cries, “Never again, unless it serves Israel’s interests.”
And given Israel’s decades-long craving to dispossess the Palestinians of their entire homeland, that second “Never again” is as good as worthless. Palestinians were always in danger of erasure – not just territorially, as happened in 1948 and 1967, but existentially, as is happening now – by a state misleadingly declaring itself to be Jewish.
Universal ethics sidelined
The assumption of many was that the West would never tolerate another genocide being conducted in its name.
How misplaced that certainty was. The West is arming and funding the genocide in Gaza, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Its commitment to helping Israel carry out mass slaughter is such that many western states have frozen their funding to the UN aid agency UNRWA, which is specifically charged with keeping Palestinians in Gaza fed and alive.
Observers underestimated how far things had shifted. Over many decades, a universal ethics that drew on the lessons of the Holocaust – and solidified into international law – was intentionally undermined, sidelined and replaced by a particularist Zionist “ethics”.
That readjustment happened with the active connivance of western powers, which had no interest in promoting the universal lessons of recent history. For their own self-interested reasons, they preferred the particularist agenda of Zionism. It sat easily with the West’s insistence that its privileges continue: the right to wage wars and steal the resources of others, the ability to trample on indigenous peoples, and the power to destroy the planet and other species.
Ideology for dark times
In fact, Zionism was never centrally about Israel. It is a much broader ideology, rooted in western tradition and tailor-made for the darker times we are entering, in which systems collapse – of economies, of climate stability, of authority – poses new challenges to western establishments.
Zionism started as a Christian doctrine centuries ago, and flourished in the Victorian era among British politicians. It views Jews chiefly as a vehicle to advance a brutal, end-of-times redemption in which they are to be the the main sacrificial victims.
Though less conspicuously today, Christian Zionism still shapes the climate in which today’s politicians operate – as the large number of “Friends of Israel” in both major parties attests. Christian Zionism is the self-professed view too of many tens of millions of rightwing evangelicals in the US and elsewhere.
Whether in its Christian or Jewish incarnations, Zionism was always a “might is right”, “law of the jungle” doctrine, drawing on Old Testament-style ideas of chosen-ness, divine purpose, and rationalisations for violence and savagery. It sits all too comfortably with the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.
No disgrace or shame
Jewish leaders and influencers in the West who champion more, not less, genocide in Gaza face neither disgrace nor shame. They are not shunned for cheering policies that have entailed so far the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of at least 100,000 Palestinian children. Why? Because they are articulating an Israel-focused version of an ideology that fits neatly with the worldview of western establishments.
For this reason, Jewish influencers lost no time working to smear Glazer as a self-hating Jew by misrepresenting his speech – quite literally by editing out the parts that did not fit their particularist, anti-universal agenda.
Referencing the victims both of October 7 and of Israel’s attack on Gaza, Glazer told the Oscars audience: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
He was expressly opposing his Jewishness being weaponised in support of a genocide. He was standing apart from many Jewish community leaders and influencers who have weaponised their own Jewishness to justify violence against civilians. He was reminding us that the Holocaust’s lesson is that ideologies must never trump our humanity, must never be used to rationalise evil.
All of which poses a huge threat to those in the Jewish community who have, for years, been precisely weaponising their Jewishness for political ends – in the service of Israel and its decades-old project to remove the Palestinian people from their historic homeland.
The real moral rot
In a moment of pure projection, for example, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, dubbed by media outlets as “the most famous rabbi in America“, castigated Glazer for supposedly “exploiting the Holocaust” and for trivializing “the memory of the 6 million victims through whom he found Hollywood glory”.
Boteach apparently cannot understand that it is he, not Glazer, who has been exploiting the Holocaust – in his case, for decades in the service of protecting Israel from any criticism, even now as it commits a genocide.
Meanwhile, Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek, broke with all journalistic norms to completely misrepresent Glazer’s speech, accusing him of “moral rot” for supposedly disavowing his Jewishness. Rather, as he made all too clear, he was rejecting how his Jewishness and the Holocaust were being hijacked by genocide apologists such as Ungar-Sargon to promote a violent ideological agenda.
The Newsweek editor knows that Glazer’s speech was the most listened to and discussed moment of the Oscars. There are few who read her tweeted comment that had not heard for themselves what Glazer said in his speech rather than the misinformation Ungar-Sargon peddled about it.
Lying about his remarks should have been an act of professional self-harm. It should have been a dark stain on her journalistic credibility. And yet Ungar-Sargon proudly left up her tweet, even as it received X’s humiliating “Readers added…” footnote exposing her deception.
She did so because that tweet is her calling card. It declares her not a talented or careful journalist but as something far more useful: one who will do whatever is required to get ahead. Like Shmuley, she was projecting – in her case, with the accusation of “moral rot”. She was advertising that she lacks a moral compass, and that she is willing to do whatever is needed to advance establishment interests.
Like those who lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there will be no price to pay for these all-too-visible failings, or for promoting a catastrophe for a people whose lives and fate are of no import to the West.
Shmuley and Ungar-Sargon are determined to buttress the walled garden, shielding us from the suffering, the terrors, inflicted by the West just out of view.
These courtiers and charlatans must be shamed and shunned. We must listen instead to those like Glazer trying to tear down the wall to show us the reality outside.
How The Fight Against Antisemitism’ Became A Shield For Israel’s Genocide
Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable of slaughtering children, but rather as a sacred cause. So any opposition has to be a blasphemy
If you read the establishment media, you might conclude that a serious battle is being waged by Israel and its most ardent supporters to tackle an apparent new wave of antisemitism in the West.
In article after article, we are told how Israel and western Jewish leadership bodies are demanding our concern, and outrage, at a rise in anti-Jewish hate incidents. Organisations such as the Community Security Trust in the UK and the Anti-Defamation League in the US produce lengthy reports on the relentless increase in antisemitism, especially since 7 October, and warn that action is urgently required.
Undoubtedly, there is a real threat of antisemitism, and as ever it comes largely from the far right. Israel’s actions – and its false claim to be representing all Jews – only help to stoke it.
This moral panic is transparently self-serving. It directs our attention away from the pressing, all-too-concrete evidence that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza – one that has slaughtered and maimed many tens of thousands of innocents.
It redirects our attention instead towards tenuous claims of a deepening antisemitism crisis, one whose tangible effects appear limited and for which the evidence is all too clearly exaggerated.
After all, a rise in “Jew hatred” is all but inevitable if you redefine antisemitism, as western officials have recently done via the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, to include antipathy towards Israel – and at the moment when Israel appears, even to the World Court, to be carrying out a genocide.
The logic of Israel and its supporters runs something like this: many more people than usual are expressing hatred of Israel, the self-declared state of the Jewish people. There is no reason to hate Israel unless you hate what it represents, which is Jews. Therefore, antisemitism is on the rise.
This argument makes sense to most Israelis, to its partisans, and to the overwhelming majority of western politicians and career-minded establishment journalists. That is: the very same people who interpret calls for equality in historic Palestine – “from the river to the sea” – as demands for a genocide against Jews.
The singer Charlotte Church, for example, found herself accused of antisemitism by the entire establishment media after a “pro-Palestinian chant” to raise money for Gaza’s children being starved by an Israeli aid blockade. The offending song had included the lyric “From the river to the sea”, calling for the liberation of Palestinians from decades of Israeli oppression.
At the weekend, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt once again suggested marches calling for a ceasefire were antisemitic because they supposedly “intimidated” Jews. In fact, Jews are prominent at those marches. He was referring to Zionists who excuse the slaughter in Gaza.
Similarly, in the wake of George Galloway’s overwhelming byelection win “for Gaza” in Rochdale last week, a BBC reporter berated former Labour MP Chris Williamson for using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions.
The reporter was worried that the term “might offend some people”, despite the World Court finding the accusation of genocide plausible.
A ghoulish phenomenon
But the ambition of these Israel zealots runs much deeper than mere deflection. Israel’s leaders and most of its citizens are not ashamed of their genocide, it seems, and neither are their overseas backers.
If my social media feeds are any guide, the slaughter in Gaza is not discomfiting these apologists, or even giving them pause for thought. They appear to revel in their support for Israel as the world looks on in horror.
Every Palestinian child’s bloodied body, and the outrage it provokes from onlookers, fuels their self-righteousness. They entrench, they do not retreat.
They appear to be finding a strange reassurance – comfort even – in the wider public’s anger and indignation at the extinguishing of so many young lives.
It mirrors very precisely Israeli officials’ own reaction to the International Court of Justice’s verdict that there is a plausible case Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Many observers assumed that Israel would seek to placate the judges and world opinion by toning down its atrocities. They could not have been more wrong. In defying the court, Israel became even more brazen, as attested to by its horrifying assault on the Nasser hospital last month and its lethal attack on Palestinians scrambling to reach an aid convoy last week.
This phenomenon needs explaining. It looks ghoulish. But it has an internal logic that shines a light on why Israel has become an emotional crutch for many Jewish people, both inside the country and abroad, as well as for others.
It is not just that Jews and non-Jews who strongly subscribe to the ideology of Zionism identify with Israel. It runs deeper still. They are utterly dependent on a worldview – long cultivated in them by Israel and by their own community leaders, as well as by oil-grabbing western establishments – that places Israel at the centre of the moral universe.
They have been drawn into what looks more like a cult – and a very dangerous one at that, as the horrors of Gaza are revealing.
Albatross, not sanctuary
The claim they have internalised – that Israel is a necessary sanctuary in a future time of trouble from the supposedly innate, genocidal impulses of non-Jews – should have come crashing down on their heads over the past five months.
If the price of reassurance – of having a “just-in-case” bolthole – is the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and the slow starvation of hundreds of thousands more, then that bolthole is not worth preserving.
It is not a sanctuary; it is an albatross. It is a stain. It must go, to be replaced by something better for Jews and Palestinians in the region – “from the river to the sea”.
So why have these Israel partisans not been able to reach a conclusion so morally self-evident to everyone else – or at least those not suborned to the interests of western establishments?
Because like all cults, hardcore Zionists are immune to self-reflection. Not only that, but their reasoning is inherently circular.
Israel, Zionism’s creation, is not in the least concerned with providing a solution to antisemitism, as it professes. Quite the reverse. It feeds on antisemitism and needs it
Israel, Zionism’s creation, is not in the least concerned with providing a solution to antisemitism, as it professes. Quite the reverse. It feeds on antisemitism and needs it.
Antisemitism is its lifeblood, the very reason for Israel’s existence. Without antisemitism, Israel would be redundant, there would be no need for it as a sanctuary.
The cult would be over, and so would the endless military aid, the special trading status with the West, the jobs, the land grabs, the privileges and the sense of importance and ultimate victimhood that allows for the dehumanisation of others, not least the Palestinians.
Like all true believers, Israel’s partisans overseas – who proudly call themselves “Zionists” but are now pressuring social media platforms to ban the term as antisemitic, as the movement’s goals become more transparent – have too much to lose from self- and communal doubt.
The fight against antisemitism means nothing else can take priority – not even genocide. Which, in turn, means no greater evil can be acknowledged, not even the mass murder of children. No bigger threat, however pressing, however urgent, can be allowed to come to the fore.
And to keep the doubt at bay, more antisemitism – more supposed existential threats – must be generated.
Racism in new garb
In recent years, the biggest difficulty facing Zionism has been that the true racists – on the right, often in power in western capitals – have also served as Israel’s strongest allies. They have dressed up their traditional racist ideologies – that once fed antisemitism, and could again – in new garb: as Islamophobia.
In Europe and the United States, Muslims are the new Jews.
Which is ideal for Israel and its partisans. A supposed “global, civilisational war” – ideological cover to justify continuing western domination of the oil-rich Middle East – always places Israel, the regional attack dog, on the side of the angels, firmly alongside the white nationalists.
Because Israel and its apologists cannot expose the true racists and antisemites in power, they must create new ones. And that has required changing antisemitism’s definition beyond recognition, to refer to those who oppose the colonial domination project into which Israel is profoundly integrated.
In this upside-down worldview, one that prevails not only among Israel partisans but in western capitals, we have arrived at a nonsense: to reject Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and now even its genocide of them – is supposedly to reveal oneself as antisemitic.
Palestinians dehumanised
This was precisely the position in which Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, found herself last month after she criticised French President Emmanuel Macron.
Israel has, as a consequence, declared it is banning her from entry to the occupied territories to record its human rights abuses.
To ascribe antisemitism as Hamas’ motivation is intended to scrub out those many, many decades of oppression
But notably, as Albanese pointed out, nothing has changed in practice. Israel has excluded all UN rapporteurs from the occupied territories for the past 16 years, during its siege of Gaza, so they cannot witness the crimes that foregrounded the attack on 7 October.
Last month, Macron made a patently preposterous statement, though one promoted by Israel and treated seriously by the western media. He described Hamas’ attack on Israel as the “biggest antisemitic massacre of our century” – that is, he claimed it was driven by hatred of Jews.
One can criticise Hamas for how it carried out its attack, as Albanese has done: undoubtedly, its fighters committed many violations of international law that day in killing civilians and taking them hostage.
Exactly the same kind of violations, we should note in the interests of balance, that Israel has committed day in, day out for decades against the Palestinians forced to live under its military occupation.
Palestinian prisoners, seized by an occupying Israeli army in the middle of the night, held in military jails and denied proper trials, are no less hostages.
But to ascribe antisemitism as Hamas’ motivation is intended to scrub out those many decades of oppression. It airbrushes out the very abuses faced by the Palestinians that Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions were established to resist.
That right of resistance to belligerent military occupation is enshrined in international law, even if the West rarely acknowledges the fact.
Or as Albanese put it: “The victims in the October 7 massacre were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.”
Macron’s ridiculous remark also wiped out the past 17 years of the siege of Gaza – a slow-motion genocide that Israel has now put on steroids.
And he did so precisely because western colonial interests – just like Israel’s interests – must rationalise the dehumanisation of Palestinians and their supporters as racists and barbarians, in the West’s pursuit of domination and old-fashioned resource control in the Middle East.
But it is Albanese, not Macron, now fighting to save her reputation. She is the one being smeared as a racist and antisemite. By whom? By Israel and the genocide-supporting leaders of Europe.
Sacred cause
Israel needs antisemitism. And armed with a ludicrous redefinition adopted by western allies that classifies as Jew hatred any opposition to its crimes – any rejection of its bogus claims of “self-defence” as it crushes resistance to its occupation and its oppression of Palestinians – Israel has every incentive to commit more crimes.
It is a moral duty to defeat these ‘antisemitism’ warriors and assert our shared humanity – and the right of all to live in peace and dignity
Every atrocity produces more outrage, more resentment, more “antisemitism”. And the more resentment, the more outrage, the more “antisemitism”, the more Israel and its supporters can present the self-declared Jewish state as a sanctuary from that “antisemitism”.
Israel is no longer treated as a state, as a political actor capable of committing crimes and slaughtering children, but as an article of faith. It is transformed into a belief system, one immune to criticism or scrutiny. It transcends politics to become a sacred cause. And any opposition must be damned as wicked, as blasphemy.
Which is precisely the state to which western politics has devolved.
This battle against “antisemitism” – or rather, the battle being waged by Israel and its partisans – is to turn the meaning of words, and the values they represent, on their head. It is a fight to crush solidarity with the Palestinian people, and leave them friendless and naked before Israel’s campaign of genocide.
It is a moral duty to defeat these “antisemitism” warriors and assert our shared humanity – and the right of all to live in peace and dignity – before Israel and its apologists pave the way to an even greater slaughter.
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).
