Canada’s McCarthyism

and the spies

stirring a yellow peril scare

Anonymously but very effectively, they’re peddling racist tropes about the loyalty of Canadians of Chinese descent.

• 
  Andrew Mitrovica

  Al Jazeera columnist

Published On 27 Mar 202327 Mar 2023

I grew up in a neurotic, faraway island called Australia during the 1960s.

Even as a youngster, I knew, like millions of frightened Australians, that it seemed only a matter of time before a big, bad boogeyman swooped down and overwhelmed the country, turning it from a sun-kissed land of liberty into a dark, sullen place of brutal, Maoist conformity.

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Back then, the looming threat was called “the yellow peril” and the creeping boogeyman was China’s Chairman Mao, who school children, like me, were taught had sinister designs to overrun our not-so-far-away island.

The manufactured mania reached an almost paralysing pitch when, in 1967, Australia’s prime minister, Harold Holt, went for a swim in the ocean one bright Sunday afternoon and never came back. The all-hands-on-deck search for the missing prime minister proved futile.

In the absence of a body or the good sense to conclude that Holt had probably drowned, “yellow peril”-fuelled conspiracy theories flourished. Countless unnerved Australians, like me, were conditioned to treat them seriously.

One “theory” that took firm root quickly was that the prime minister had, all along, been a traitor who fled the country in swim trunks before being unmasked. His grateful Chinese handlers had arranged to pick up their prized agent just off the Australian coast via a submarine.

Such was the frenzy’s pervasive power that many Australians believed this nonsense and were sure that the feared invasion by China had begun in earnest.

There was, of course, no invasion and Australia remains, for the most part, a sun-kissed and free island.

I am sharing this trip down irrational memory lane because a jarring echo of the “yellow peril” mayhem has gripped the snow-kissed, neurotic country I have, for decades, called home: Canada.

The déjà-vu-like hysteria has been ginned up by reporters, columnists and politicians who have played willing and eager handmaidens to what amounts to a handful of anonymous so-called “security officials” who populate Canada’s vast, largely unaccountable and crappy “intelligence infrastructure”.

China, the boogeyman du jour, is said to have interfered in at least two recent Canadian federal elections and perhaps one municipal election.

Cue the apoplectic outbursts among columnists and politicians who wail in polite code that the scheming “yellow” hordes have undermined the “integrity” of how Canadians vote and who they vote for.

This, despite the fact that a bashful, “senior” spook – who appears to have a number of reporters and news organisations in their front and back pockets – has acknowledged that China had no impact on the outcome of those elections.

Oh, never mind.

Beyond leaking “top secret” stuff about Canada’s compromised-but-not-compromised elections, the unnamed spooks have accused, by name, sitting and former members of parliament and the Ontario legislature of Chinese descent of being, in effect, fifth columnists working in Beijing’s interest.

To date, none of Canada’s suddenly loquacious spooks has found the mettle or courage to step out of the comfortable shadows to point an accusatory finger at their fellow Canadians whom they have, implicitly or explicitly, branded as Chinese “assets”.

Instead, earlier this month, one of the unidentified “security officials” was provided prime, front-page real estate in The Globe and Mail newspaper to write a flowery, self-serving defence of their decision to launder selective secrets that have triggered the latest wave of “yellow peril” hysteria and questioned the allegiances of elected legislators.

To buttress the credibility of its coveted source, the Globe’s editors have, unsurprisingly, touted the anonymous official as a “whistleblower”.

During my long career as an investigative reporter, I have had the privilege of meeting and writing about brave people who have chosen to expose wrongdoing knowing that the consequences of their truth-telling will be swift, blunt and life-altering.

Unlike the Globe’s sneaky leaker, these whistleblowers have not only attached their names to their allegations but have also been prepared to defend themselves, their motives and their understanding of the truth in public, not behind the convenient curtain of anonymity.

Not so The Globe’s mystery leaker who, in the name of patriotism and duty, has cast doubt on the patriotism and duty of other Canadians who have been forced in the House of Commons to deny tearfully that they have been disloyal to the maple leaf.

One rationale The Globe’s leaker used to remain in the shadows is that they might lose their job, or worse, go to jail, for laundering secrets to friendly journalists.

Reminder to the leaker and the Globe: that’s what bona fide whistleblowers do. Reluctantly, they risk their livelihoods and even their freedom to shine a necessary light on often state-sanctioned negligence, deceit or lawlessness.

The Globe’s leaker is no Daniel Ellsberg – the former military analyst who provided the New York Times with a copy of the Pentagon Papers which revealed all about America’s criminal, imperialist adventure in Vietnam.

Ellsberg faced scores of charges that would have sent him to prison for more than a century. Still, as a man of conscience, he arrived in court, ready to answer the charges that were later dismissed.

The Globe’s leaker is no Edward Snowden – the ex-National Security Agency contractor who shared reams of secrets with reporters at The Washington Post and The Guardian which exposed how a network of electronic spy agencies was breaking the law by eavesdropping on citizens they were meant to protect.

Snowden, and his young family, have found safe refuge in Moscow, far from the retributive clutches of vindictive American authorities who mean to make a stiff and unmistakable example of him.

I wrote a book brimming with secrets. I named corrupt CSIS officers who broke the law. My book, Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada’s Secret Service, includes details of their illicit modus operandi and photographs of them. I risked going to jail, too. And my name is on the front jacket of my book.

So, it’s time for Canada’s leak-happy spies to come out – come out from wherever you are if you are going to tar other Canadians as seditious tools of Beijing.

While we wait, The Globe’s sneaky leaker wrote, cross their heart and hope to die, that all they wanted to do was to start a “conversation” about “what it is that we expect of our government” and they are shocked that their good-faith effort has caused such “ugliness and division” in the country.

The naiveté and failure to accept responsibility for the McCarthyite-reminiscent madness they have provoked is astounding, isn’t it?

This self-appointed guardian of Canadian democracy lights an ethnic-laced bush fire and feeds it – drip by drip – with gasoline and has the audacity to claim that they never intended for any of the “ugliness or division” to happen.

My goodness, the blindness and hubris.

If you think race and ethnicity don’t play an essential role in the calculation of how Canada’s myopic “intelligence infrastructure” identifies its adversaries, you have not been paying attention.

In 2017, five Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officers and analysts sued the spy agency for $35m, alleging that it was a cesspool of racism, intolerance and Islamophobia where anti-Muslim slurs and gay-bashing are an institutional norm. The parties settled out of court to save, no doubt, CSIS from having to air its sordid laundry.

If that’s how CSIS treats its own, imagine how it treats “outsiders” – in or outside parliament.

Muslim Canadians have always been considered the suspicious “other” by Canada’s rank, xenophobic spies. These days, they are joined by Chinese Canadians.

It is as shameful as it is predictable.       

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The Secret Chambers of the Heart: Robert W. Chambers and “The King in Yellow”

By Paul StJohn Mackintosh

The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition

By Robert W. Chambers

Published 11.12.2019
Arc Dream
224 Pages

 

JANUARY 3, 2020

ROBERT WILLIAM CHAMBERS (May 26, 1865–December 16, 1933) is practically the Harper Lee of horror, having carved out an enduring reputation from an incredibly small body of work. His Carcosa Mythos is now almost as popular as H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and references to the King in Yellow have become nearly as common as Cthulhu plushies. Figures from the Carcosa Mythos make frequent appearances in horror roleplaying games like Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu and Arc Dream’s Delta Green, and collections like Cassilda’s Song (2016) and The Chromatic Court (2019) have expanded the mythos still further. Most notably, the first season of True Detective (2014) introduced Carcosa and the Yellow King to an even wider public. It is remarkable that Chambers’s work has earned this level of renown based only on the four stories and one poem cycle published in The King in Yellow (1895) which mention or allude to the eponymous supernatural monarch and his attendant mythos. “One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master,” wrote H. P. Lovecraft in his classic study “Supernatural Horror in Literature” — which only devotes two paragraphs to Chambers.

Author and game designer Kenneth Hite has recently released a gorgeously illustrated annotated edition of The King in Yellow, and readers owe Hite a debt for uncovering so much about the text and its author, as well as for clarifying what makes this small group of stories so influential. Other annotated editions of The King in Yellow have appeared in the past, but this edition’s ground-breaking elucidation of the stories and their author make it the definitive one. During a recent panel on Chambers at NecronomiCon 2019 (recorded in Providence, on August 24), Hite noted that the one thing that surprised him as he started working on his annotated edition was just how little had been written and researched on Chambers: “I thought that I would just lean back and find that real scholars of horror had done all the work, and I would just be able to read the five or six really top essays, go through JSTOR […] and I’d be done.” As it turned out, “there was nothing” aside from a trio of essays and a very unscholarly self-published biography. Chambers’s work was so popular in his lifetime as to secure him instant oblivion after it — except, of course, for The King in Yellow.

That’s a pity, considering how well Chambers captured the currents of his time. The King in Yellow was one of a series of seminal horror works published within the same period that dealt with hidden menaces to Western society, including Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Great God Pan (1894), Dracula (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898). Western culture in the 1890s, it seems, was in a fever pitch of anxiety about its own incipient decadence — moral and social rot, it seemed, augured political and military collapse. Hite’s annotations demonstrate how Chambers channeled this zeitgeist, in part thanks to his own experience as an art student in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and also because of his sharp ear for the popular themes of the day.

Hite demonstrates that, as a Francophone expatriate, Chambers’s “The Repairer of Reputations” might well have drawn from Guy de Maupassant’s short story “L’endormeuse” (“The Soporific,” 1889), which features a prototype of the “Oeuvre de la mort volontaire” as well as the trope of a dream vision of a future city, both of which feature heavily in Chambers’s story. The idea of a masked King in Yellow and a catastrophic confrontation at a decadent court may have come from the short story “Le Roi au masque d’or” (“The King in the Golden Mask,” 1892) by Marcel Schwob, as much as from Poe. Or perhaps it drew inspiration from Baudelaire’s “Les Sept vieillards,” where the poet observes seven identical beggars whose “yellow rags / imitate the color of this rainy sky.” The black stars of Carcosa turn out to be coinages from a novel by Heinrich Heine, Florentine Nights, centering on a Satanic performance by Paganini. Antisemitic agitation blocked the erection of a commemorative statue to Heine in Germany in 1891, leading New York to take up the cause, and sparking a controversy in the New York press which Chambers must have followed. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was first published in French in 1893, after being banned from performance in London in 1892: for that production, Wilde had Sarah Bernhardt dressed in yellow and decorated the stage in yellow, because of the traditional yellow badge for Jews in medieval Europe — one detail which probably impressed itself on Chambers, who was himself a noted antisemite. Carcosa itself, of course, comes from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886).

So many of Chambers’s characteristic images and metaphors turn out, thanks to Hite’s sleuthing, to be recastings of similar tropes in rather more highbrow literature. What makes Chambers more than a simple plagiarist, however, is his imaginative synthesis of his sources and influences, in addition to what he chooses to leave unsaid. The suggestive absences and empty spaces in his only partly realized Carcosa Mythos leave room for readers to project their imaginations, and for other writers to take up the baton and explore the same territory. Whether Chambers chose not to fill in all the blanks out of deftness and subtlety or was simply too lazy to do so is another matter — but it is certainly true that writers like Karl Edward Wagner and Joseph S. Pulver have used those spaces as settings for their own masterpieces.

Chambers also gained something else from being on the ground in 1890s Paris: genuine horror at the prospect of death and madness from syphilitic infection, which he saw firsthand all around him. Maupassant died mad from syphilis in 1893, and Chambers had seen the example of countless lesser figures before him. Henrik Ibsen’s doggedly realist interpretation of this issue, Ghosts, debuted in 1882 — staged, appropriately enough, in Chicago. Chambers’s terror in the face of syphilitic infection is far more grounded and legitimate than Lovecraft’s terror of subversive immigrants. Modern critical maunderings about the allure of Forbidden Fruit for ’90s gentlefolk are a whole lot less pointed than the simple, direct, immediate equation, attested on every street corner: fuck and die. No wonder Chambers’s work is so rich with references to Eros and Thanatos.

Chambers duly generalized his personal fear of syphilis to a more widespread social anxiety about corruption and contamination, inextricably interwoven with the milieu of the Decadents and the avant-garde. “It is as though Decadence spreads like syphilis,” says Hite, ticking off the various associations of yellow with disease and decay — the quarantine flag, yellow fever, jaundice, et cetera. But the most effective propagation vector in the stories is the art itself.

The King in Yellow is presented by Chambers as a very real supernatural force, yet we learn far less about him than we do about a play of the same name — Chambers’s master metaphor for so much of the ’90s. He describes its composition and publication history in great detail, yet barely hints at its contents:

No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.

This imaginary play is endowed with far more corrosive, corrupting power than the real-life Salomé ever had. Yet what else but exactly such fears could lead the English authorities to ban Salomé in 1892? The idea of a work of art as a public danger and social hazard was very real in the ’90s.

Himself a hunting and fishing aficionado, Chambers may have felt he had done his duty in issuing the Awful Warning once he returned from Paris to New York: he certainly had no sense of immediate peril back home to give his fiction urgency. Yet his invention of “The King in Yellow,” the play, is one of his other major claims to immortality, where he anticipates Borges and much subsequent writing. If you accept Chambers’s fiction on its own internal rationale, rather than as a coded warning against syphilis and degenerate living or both, then it looks to be a warning against exactly what China Miéville credits J. R. R. Tolkien with achieving: the “neurotic, self-contained, paranoid creation of a secondary world.” This “impossible world which believes in itself” has a power to distort, corrupt, and ultimately supplant reality — a power denied other, more allegorical or even symbolic artistic representations. The very vagueness and multivalence of the King in Yellow mythos, the multiplicity of sources and uncertainty of reference, mean that Carcosa, Ythill, and the black stars do not clearly stand for anything else: they are there in and for themselves, not necessarily signifying anything. Maybe Chambers was deliberately trying to do this, maybe not: he certainly created a very effective warning against the threat of such a world.

In case True Detective hadn’t already convinced you, it’s a warning that carries unexpected contemporary relevance. From QAnon to the Jeffrey Epstein story, neurotic, self-contained, and paranoid secondary worlds have shown a nasty mainstream prevalence lately (and that’s not even to mention the paranoid ravings of climate-change deniers and other purveyors of fake news and alternative facts). Indeed, many modern neo-pagans seem to have swallowed Tolkien’s neurotic, self-contained, paranoid secondary world whole, as a gateway drug to the neo-fascist maunderings of Odinism. It is a shame that the Phantom of Truth, another of Chambers’s coinages, seems distressingly absent these latter days.

¤

Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish writer of weird fiction, poet, translator and journalist.

President Trump Raises the Spectre of the Yellow Peril to Divide Americans and Shortchange Working People in $1 Trillion Stimulus Package

Criminalizing immigrant workers and dividing working people will NOT bring about public health security. But ensuring equal rights to universal healthcare and economic relief will. 

by

Josephine Lee

Trump criminalizes and blames immigrants for this crisis, the government seeks to get away with excluding undocumented immigrants from any sort of governmental relief, while allowing employers to continue to super-exploit them. (Photo: Josephine Lee)

Months before the first case of COVID-19 was identified in the U.S., neighbors and friends stopped letting their kids play with my son, eyeing me with sideway looks when I said hello to their children on the street. 

Although I have not been attacked or cursed at, as some other Asian Americans have been, the silent social exclusion began long before Trump started calling for social distancing, a reminder that I am still seen as a foreigner, even though I was born and raised in this country. 

Framing the virus as a foreign threat Trump not only seeks to deflect blame for his inaction, but it allows him to further his efforts to criminalize immigrant workers in this country. 

Trump has long framed the spread of the coronavirus as a foreign threat to spare him of his responsibility and failure to take action to protect Americans from this crisis. Trump dismantled the National Security Council’s global health security office, slashed CDC’s budget, criticized media outlets who covered the spread of COVID-19  for “panicking markets”, while reassuring Americans that the virus would just “disappear.” It is no wonder that we are woefully short of test kits, and people are being turned away from hospitals. 

By framing the virus as a foreign threat Trump not only seeks to deflect blame for his inaction, but it allows him to further his efforts to criminalize immigrant workers in this country. 

On February 28, at a South Carolina rally Trump used the crisis to push his divisive immigration policies saying, “Border security is also health security” and criticized, albeit inaccurately, “the Democrat policy of open borders” for bringing in the virus into the country. 

On March 11, before Trump imposed a travel ban, the president shared a tweet by the conservative youth activist Charlie Kirk, who branded the disease the "China virus,” writing, “Now, more than ever, we need the wall. With China Virus spreading across the globe, the US stands a chance if we can control of our borders. President Trump is making it happen.” 

In the U.S. during the 1880s, as the nation was recovering from the Civil War, propaganda of the “Yellow Peril” stoked divisions among Chinese and Irish workers in the American West. Fears of Chinese immigrants taking jobs away from Irish immigrants turned into outright attacks of the Chinese, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Similarly in the South, former slaveholders spread propaganda that newly freed black workers would take away jobs from white workers, sowing divisions among workers, and building support among poor whites for the passage of Jim Crow laws and the re-enslavement of African-Americans. Meanwhile, the robber barons of the railroad, banking, and manufacturing industries, benefited from this disunity, impoverishing workers while enriching themselves.

This past Wednesday during a news conference Trump, again called the COVID-19 virus the “Chinese virus,” and defended White House officials’ use of the phrase “kung flu,” while he introduced the $1 trillion economic stimulus package. How much of our taxpayers’ money will working people actually receive? While Congress chips away at the paid sick leave, not only exempting employers with over 500 employees, but now allowing employers with less than 50 workers to be exempted, Trump extends billions in bailouts to the airline and cruise industry. Haven’t we learned from corporate bailouts of 2008, that wealth does not trickle down? And while Americans still are waiting for test kits and 27.5 million Americans without insurance will not be able to afford treatment, Trump seeks to help the private healthcare industry profit from America gaining exclusive rights to the COVID-19 vaccine. 

So while Trump criminalizes and blames immigrants for this crisis, the government seeks to get away with excluding undocumented immigrants from any sort of governmental relief, while allowing employers to continue to super-exploit them. It seeks to get away with hoodwinking the working Americans to blame “the yellow peril” and other immigrants so that we do not hold the government accountable for using this crisis to further deepen the wealth gap, enriching the robber barons of our time. 

We need to come together, as working people, to make sure that any government response to the coronavirus prioritizes the needs of working people, and is not used by private corporations to enrich themselves off this crisis. ALL working people should have equal rights to free testing and treatment, housing relief, direct economic assistance, and paid sick leave. All states should take California’s lead and ensure that all workers qualify for unemployment benefits, regardless of their immigration status. 

Criminalizing immigrant workers and dividing working people will NOT bring about public health security. But ensuring equal rights to universal healthcare and economic relief will. 

Josephine Lee is an organizer with El Pueblo Primero workers organization in Houston, TX and the Break the Chains Alliance, which calls for equal rights for all workers.

CHOMSKY GREW A BEARD
“Gangster in the White House”: Noam Chomsky on COVID-19, WHO, China, Gaza and Global Capitalism

STORY APRIL 17, 2020

GUEST
Noam Chomsky
world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

We continue our conversation with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky. He responds to President Trump’s cuts to U.S. support for the World Health Organization and the surge in deaths in the United States to another record high, and discusses conditions in Gaza, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and the progressive response. “This is typical behavior of autocrats and dictators. When you make colossal errors which are killing thousands of people, find somebody else to blame,” say Chomsky. “In the United States, it’s unfortunately the case, for well over a century, century and a half, that it’s always easy to blame the 'yellow peril.'”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The death rate from the coronavirus pandemic continues to accelerate, with worldwide confirmed deaths topping 145,000. In the United States, deaths surged to another record high Thursday, nearly doubling to surpass the previous record set just a day before, at 4,591, U.S. residents died over a single 24-hour period.

Well, today we continue my conversation with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author of more than a hundred books. He’s a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than half a century. Professor Chomsky joined us last week from his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he is sheltering in place his wife Valeria. We spoke just after President Donald Trump foreshadowed this week’s announcement that he would cut off U.S. support for the World Health Organization. This is Trump addressing reporters last week.


REPORTER 1: Is the time to freeze funding to the WHO during a pandemic of this magnitude?


PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, maybe not. I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but we’re going to look at it.

REPORTER 2: You did say that you’re going to do it.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We give a tremendous — no, I didn’t. I said we’re going to look at it. We’re going to investigate it. We’re going to look at it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what he’s threatening to do right now? First they reject the WHO tests, that would have been critical, and now saying they’re going to defund the World Health Organization.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, this is typical behavior of autocrats and dictators. When you make colossal errors which are killing thousands of people, find somebody else to blame. And in the United States, it’s unfortunately the case, for well over a century, century and a half, that it’s always easy to blame the “yellow peril.” The yellow — “They’re coming after us.” We’ve seen this all through my life, in fact way before. So, blame the World Health Organization, blame China, claim that the World Health Organization has insidious relations with China, is practically working for them. And that sells to a population that’s been deeply indoctrinated for a long time, way back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the 19th century, to say, “Yeah, those yellow barbarians are coming over to destroy us.” That’s almost instinctive.

And it’s backed up by the echo chamber, so, you know, say, Rush Limbaugh. Science is one of the four corners of deceit, along with the media, academia — I forget one of the others, but they’re the four corners of deceit. They live on deceit. You keep driving that into people’s heads. They say, “Why should we believe anything? Why should we believe the news? It’s just fake news. They’re all trying to destroy our savior, our president, the greatest president ever.”

I’m old enough to remember as a child listening to Hitler’s speeches over the radio, Nuremberg rallies. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone and the reaction of the crowd, the adoring crowd, was very clear and very frightening. We know what it led to. It’s hard to — it comes to mind at once when you listen to Trump’s ravings and the crowd. I don’t suggest that he’s anything like Hitler. Hitler had an ideology, horrible ideology, not only massacring all the Jews and 30 million Slavs and the Roma, and conquering much of the world, but also an internal ideology: The state, under control of the Nazi Party, should control every aspect of life, should even control the business community. That’s not the world we’re in. In fact, it’s almost the opposite, business controlling the government. And as far as Trump is concerned, the only detectable ideology is pure narcissism. Me, that’s the ideology. As long as I am smart enough to keep serving the real masters, pour money into the pockets of the very wealthy and the corporate sector, and they’ll let you get away with your antics.

It’s pretty striking to see what happened at the Davos conference this January. That’s the meeting of the people who are called the “masters of the universe” — CEOs of the major corporations, you know, big media stars and so on. They get together in Davos once a year, congratulate each other on how wonderful they are, put on a pose of dedicated humanists who couldn’t do — you know, just totally devoted to the welfare of the people of the world. “You’re safe leaving your fate in our hands because we’re such good guys.”

Trump came along and gave the keynote address. They don’t like Trump. His vulgarity is incompatible with the image that they’re trying to project of cultivated humanism. But they wildly applauded him, lustily applauded every word, because they know that he does recognize which pockets you have to fill with dollars and how to do it. And as long as he does that, as long as he serves his major constituency, they’ll let him get away with the antics — in fact, like it, because he mobilizes a crowd that will back policies like his legislative achievements. Main one is a tax scam that pours money into the hands of the corporate coffers and harms everyone else. The deregulation is great for business. They love it. They can destroy the environment and harm people as much as they want. Very harmful to the population.

You cut back on pollution constraints, on auto emission regulations, what happens? People die of pollution, of mercury poisoning. The waters are poisoned. And the world, it goes, is facing disaster. You’re accelerating the disaster. As I said, even in the February 10th budget, while cutting back on protection against diseases in the midst of a raging pandemic, increases funding for fossil fuel production, which is going to destroy us all. Of course, a lot more money for the Pentagon and for his famous wall. But that’s the world we’re living in — here, not everywhere. As I said, the Asian countries have been acting sensibly. New Zealand actually seems to have killed it also. Taiwan is doing very well. In Europe, Germany has maybe the lowest death rate in the world, Norway, as well. There are ways to react.

And there are ways to try to destroy everything — what President Trump is leading, with the support of the Murdoch echo chamber, Fox News and others. And amazingly, this conjuring act is working. So, with one hand, you raise your hand to heaven: “I’m the chosen one. I’m your savior. I’m going to rebuild America, make it great again for you, because I’m the servant. I’m the loyal servant of the working class,” and so on. Meanwhile, with the other hand, you’re stabbing them all in the back. And to carry this off is an act of political genius. You have to recognize that serious talent is involved, whether intuitive or conscious planning. It’s devastating. We’ve seen it before. We see it now in dictators, autocrats, sociopaths who happen to get into leadership positions. And it’s now happening in the richest, most important country in world history.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have this situation in the United States where the economy has been brought to a standstill because of the absolute catastrophe of this pandemic, that people have to isolate — although isolation is a luxury. For so many essential workers, they have to come out into this pandemic and face enormous threat to their own lives. If you can talk about whether you see this pandemic perhaps threatening global capitalism overall or shoring it up, and how the trillions of dollars that are being put into these stimulus packages are going to simply intensify inequality or actually going to help people at the bottom?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s a choice, not an inevitability. I mean, the corporate sector is working hard to plan for a future of the kind that you’re describing. The question is whether popular organizations will be able to impose enough pressure to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

And there are ways. Take the corporate — what you just described. The corporations right now are hiding their copies of Ayn Rand and rushing to the nanny state and asking for benefits from the public to overcome the results of their criminal behavior. What have they been doing for the last years? Profits have been going sky high. They’ve been indulging in an orgy of stock buybacks, which are devices to increase the wealth for the rich shareholders and for management while undermining the productive capacity of the enterprise at a huge scale, setting their offices somewhere in a little room in Ireland so they don’t have to pay taxes, using tax havens. This is not small change. This is tens of trillions of dollars, robbing the taxpayer. Does that have to be the case?

Take the current giveaway to corporations. It should be accompanied by conditionalities — term we’re familiar with from the IMF. They should be required to ensure that there will be no more use of tax havens, there will be no more stock buybacks, period. If they don’t do that, with a firm guarantee, no money from the public.

Is that utopian? Not at all. That was the law, and the law was enforced, up until Ronald Reagan, who turned on the spigot to rob as much as you like, with Milton Friedman and other luminaries in the background telling him, “That’s liberty.” “Liberty” means rob the public massively by things like tax havens and stock buybacks. So there’s nothing utopian about these conditions. It says, “Let’s go back to a period of pretty much regimented capitalism,” which developed since Roosevelt, was carried through ’til the ’70s, when it began to erode, and, with Reagan, just ended.

There should be further conditionalities, should be working people should be placed — part of management should be representatives of workers. Is that impossible? No, it’s done in other countries, Germany, for example. There should be a requirement that they guarantee a living wage — not just minimum wage, a living wage. That’s a conditionality that can be imposed.

Now, we can move further and recognize — notice that all of this is pre-Trump. Trump is taking a failing, lethal system and turning it into a monstrosity, but the roots were before him. Just think back to the reason why the pandemic occurred in the first place. Drug companies are following capitalist logic. They don’t want to do anything. The neoliberal hammer says the government can’t do anything the way it did in the past. You’re caught in a vise. Then comes along Trump and makes it incomparably worse. But the roots of the crisis are pre-Trump.

The same with the healthcare system. Like we know that — everyone knows — they should know the basic facts. It’s an international scandal: twice the costs of comparable countries, some of the worst outcomes. The costs were recently estimated by a study in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. They estimated that the costs, the annual — annual costs to Americans are close to half a trillion dollars and 68,000 lives lost. That’s not so small.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky. When we come back, he’ll discuss conditions in Gaza during the pandemic, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and the progressive response. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: The Puerto Rican rapper Residente, performing the “Quarantine Edition” of his new song “René.” This version includes his mom and about 30 other musicians who joined him from their homes.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to Part 2 of our conversation with Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist, political dissident and author. I asked him about Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, where at least 13 cases of COVID-19 have been reported. The World Health Organization reports there are just 87 ventilators for Gaza’s 2 million residents. Nearly 300 cases and two deaths have been confirmed in the West Bank. This is Professor Chomsky.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk for a moment, globally, about what’s happening on an issue that has been close to your heart for decades, and that is the Occupied Territories, Gaza and the West Bank, what it means for a place like Gaza, called by the U.N. and people around the world a kind of “open-air prison” of almost 2 million people, what the pandemic could mean there?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s almost impossible to think about. Gaza is 2 million people who are in the — living in a prison, open-air prison, under constant attack. Israel, which is the occupying power, recognized by everyone in the world except Israel — Israel is imposing — has been imposing very harsh sanctions ever since the Palestinians made the mistake of carrying out the first free election in the Arab world and electing the wrong people. The United States and Israel came down on them like a ton of bricks.

Israel’s policy, as was explained by Dov Weissglas, the person in charge of the withdrawal of Israeli troops, the withdrawal of the settlers and imposition of the new regime — he explained frankly, “We are putting the people of Gaza on a diet, just enough to keep them alive,” meaning wouldn’t look good if they all die, but not anything more than that. So, not a piece of chocolate or a toy for a child. That’s out. Just enough to stay alive. And if you have a serious health problem, maybe you can apply to go to the hospital in East Jerusalem. Maybe after a couple of weeks, you’ll be allowed to go. Maybe a child is allowed to go, but his mother is not allowed to come.

If the pandemic — there are now a couple of cases in Gaza. If that extends, it’s a total disaster. International institutions have pointed out that by 2020 — that’s now — Gaza will probably become barely livable. About 95% of the water is totally polluted. The place is a disaster. And Trump has made sure that it will get worse. He withdrew funding from the support systems for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank — UNRWA, killed the funding; Palestinian hospitals, killed the funding. And he had a reason. They weren’t praising him enough. They weren’t respectful of the god, so, therefore, we’ll strangle them, even when they’re barely surviving under a harsh and brutal regime.

Incidentally, this extends to Palestinians in Israel, as well. Human rights activists in Israel pointed out recently — there’s articles about it in Haaretz — that Israel finally began to set up a few drive-by testing areas only in Jewish areas, not in the areas with Palestinian population. And to make sure that the intended results would follow, they announced it only in Hebrew, not in Arabic, so Palestinians wouldn’t even know. Well, that’s within Israel. In the Occupied Territories, far worse.

And the Trump hammer came in saying, “We’re not even going to give you a penny, because you’re not respectful enough of me.” I don’t know how to describe this kind of thing. I can’t find words for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, what do you think is required in an international response to stop the rise of authoritarianism in response to this pandemic? For example, in the Philippines, where the authoritarian leader, Trump ally, Duterte, talks about killing people; the massive crackdown, without support of the people of India, 1.3 billion people, with Narendra Modi. President Trump was in India as the pandemic was taking off, never saying a word about it, packing a stadium of 100,000 people. You have Orbán in Hungary, who is now ruling by decree. What would it take to turn that around to be a progressive response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, actually, what’s happening, to the extent that you can find some coherent policy in the madness in the White House, one thing does emerge with considerable clarity — namely, an effort to construct an international of the most reactionary states and oppressive states, led by the gangster in the White House. Now, this is taking shape.

I can run through it, but since you mentioned India, Modi, who is a Hindu nationalist extremist, is systematically moving to destroy Indian secular democracy and to crush the Muslim population. What’s happening in Kashmir is horrifying. It was bad enough before, now getting much worse. Same with the Muslim population, a huge population in India. The current lockdown is almost — you can almost describe it as genocidal. Modi gave, I think, a four-hour warning saying total lockdown. That’s over a billion people. Some of them have nowhere to go. People in the informal economy, which is a huge number of people, are just cast out. “Go walk back to your village,” which may be a thousand miles away. “Die on the roadside.” This is a huge catastrophe in the making, right on top of the strong efforts to impose the ultra-right Hindutva doctrines that are at the core of Modi’s thinking and background.

What’s happening in — quite apart from this, India — in fact, South Asia generally — is going to become unlivable pretty soon, if current climate policies persist. Last summer, the temperature in Rajasthan went up to 50 degrees centigrade. And it’s increasing. There’s hundreds of millions of people in India that don’t have access to water. It’s going to get much worse, could lead to a nuclear war between the two powers that basically rely on the same water resources, which are declining under global warming: Pakistan and India. I mean, the horror story that’s developing is, again, indescribable. You can’t find words for it. And some people are cheering about it, like Donald Trump and his friend Bolsonaro in Brazil, a couple of other sociopaths.

But how do you counter a reactionary international? By developing a Progressive International. And there are steps to that. They don’t get much publicity, but this — I think it’s this coming December, there will be a formal announcement of what has been in process for some time. Yanis Varoufakis, the founder and leading figure in DiEM25, the progressive movement in Europe, very important — Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders came out with a declaration calling for a Progressive International to combat and, we hope, overcome the reactionary international based in the White House.

Now, if you look at the level of states, this looks like an extremely unequal competition. But states are not the only things that exist. If you look at the level of people, it’s not impossible. It’s possible to construct a Progressive International based on people, ranging from the organized political groups that have been proliferating, that have gotten a huge shot in the arm from the Sanders campaign, ranging from them to self-help mutual aid, self-help organizations that are rising in communities all over the world, in the most impoverished areas of Brazil, for example, and even this astonishing fact that I mentioned, that the murderous crime gangs are taking responsibility for bringing some form of decent protection against the pandemic in the favelas, the miserable slums, in Rio. All of this is happening on the popular level. If it expands and develops, if people don’t just give up in despair but work to change the world, as they’ve done in the past under much worse conditions, if they do that, there’s a chance for a Progressive International.

And notice, bear in mind, that there are also striking cases of internationalism, progressive internationalism, at the state level. So, take a look at the European Union. The rich countries in Europe, like Germany, have recently given us a lesson in just what the union means. Right? Germany is managing pretty well. They probably have the lowest death rate in the world, in organized society. Right next door, northern Italy is suffering miserably. Is Germany giving them any aid? No. In fact, Germany even blocked the effort to develop euro bonds, general bonds in Europe which could be used to alleviate the suffering in the countries under the worst conditions. But fortunately for Italy, it can look across the Atlantic for aid from the superpower on the Western Hemisphere, Cuba. Cuba is, once again, as before, exhibiting extraordinary internationalism, sending doctors to Italy. Germany won’t do it, but Cuba can. China is providing material aid. So, these are steps towards progressive internationalism at the state level.

AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky, laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than half a century. Noam Chomsky joined us last week from his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he’s sheltering in place with his wife Valeria. Go to our website at Democracy Now! to see Part 1 of our conversation.

When we come back, a new policy at New York’s public hospitals requires medical workers who call in sick to produce a doctor’s note. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. The legendary singer-songwriter Bill Withers died last month at the age of 81 from heart complications. We were showing, during that music break, nurses dancing around the world to give strength to each other, themselves and their patients.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. 

Don’t buy West’s hypocrisy over Chinese cyber-spying

A Chinese cyber-attack has left the British and US governments raging. Thomas Foster explains why this is hypocritical—and how cyber-warfare is a ruling class tool

Thursday 28 March 2024 

SOCIALIST WORKER  Issue 2899

Both the West and China use cyber-espionage 

(Picture: Flickr/ Focal Foto)

The United States and British governments accused China of being behind a years-long cyber-attack campaign against politicians, journalists and businesses last week. Chinese cyber-espionage group APT-31 carried out the campaign, targeting critics of China with sophisticated hacks of work accounts, personal emails, online storage and telephone call records to steal information.

In response, the US and Britain sanctioned a handful of individuals and a company described as a front for the Chinese ministry of state security. The reality is that the attacks—and threat of them—are one group of elites trying to use its influence to bribe another group at the top. Cyber-attacks aren’t an attack on us all.

But, they can spill over to see elites competing over real things, like economic domination and military power. China is a class ridden society—and attacks and represses its own people. It spies on workers, tries to stop their organisation and crushes trade unions for the millions in its factories.

The Chinese state has also locked up to one million Uyghurs Muslims in internment camps and suppresses Uyghur culture and national self-determination claims. But there is hypocrisy in the US and British government’s grandstanding over cyber-warfare. Rulers in Britain and the US have their own empire of hacking, which they extensively use for their own interests.

When imperialist rivals compete against each other, they use whatever means they can to gain an advantage. British officials said the Chinese government is responsible for gaining access to information on millions of British voters by hacking the Electoral Commission. Chinese surveillance doesn’t influence and tamper with Western elections.

The US and Britain always rush to call out Chinese cyber-warfare that threatens their own power. But both have been carrying out cyber-attack campaigns against China and a whole array of countries.

Last year, the US National Security Agency (NSA) carried out a number of cyber-attacks against Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies to monitor and steal critical data.

Don’t be pulled in by rulers’ Chinese spy claims

In 2022 the US hacked a government-funded Chinese university, Northwestern Polytechnical University, which conducts military research. After infiltrating the university’s network, NSA infiltrated wider telecommunications infrastructure to steal Chinese user data. The US and Britain don’t contain their cyber-espionage to China—they also carry out cyber-attacks on their allies.

In 2014 the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) hacked into Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom between 2010 and 2013. GCHQ hacked the company to steal data from mobile devices and carry out cyber-attacks, in a cyber-warfare campaign titled “Operation Socialist”.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Britain’s yearly National Cyber Force report admits that the government carries out an array of cyber-warfare all the time, from “influencing behavior” to “gathering data on hostile actors”. And it’s likely that the US and Britain will use the latest revelations as an excuse to ramp up their own attacks even further.
Racism against China

There is a racist undercurrent to some of the language used in the United States and Europe when discussing China’s economic growth. The rhetoric at times falls into the trope of “Yellow Peril”. “Yellow Peril” is a form of racism that depicts “barbaric” Asian countries as an existential threat to Western “civilisation”.

Throughout history, racists have depicted Asian countries as “uncivilised”, “unclean”, or “filthy”, to look at just a few examples. Elements of these disgusting tropes remain today. In 2019 US state department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner described the US’s competition with the Soviet Union as “a fight within the Western family” but China as “a really different civilisation”.

Zhang Xiaoming, a professor at Peking university, writes that US and European ruling classes often describe China “either as an uncivilised outsider or as a less-civilised insider”. He adds that the racist “clash of civilisations” trope leads Chinese people to be seen as the “other”.
Imperialists locked into global competition

China threatens the United States’ domination of global capitalism. In response, the US and other Western countries are ramping up their rhetoric, sanctions and economic policies against Chinese state capitalism. The growth of China’s economic power has meant that Western ruling classes see it as a threat to its own.

After the news of the latest cyber-attack campaign, prime minister Rishi Sunak said that China is “the greatest state-based threat to our economic security”. In recent years, the ruling classes of the US and other Western countries have taken a harder line against China.

The reason why is found in the structural features of global capitalism. While the US remains the world’s most powerful country, its relative power has been declining since the turn of the 21st century.

Imperialism, competition and violence

In this time China has massively expanded its economic production. Chinese state capitalism transformed half a billion peasants into industrial workers—transforming the economy into the world’s second largest.

The US’s ruling class first saw China as just a place for cheap labour. But now China’s economic power means it is the US’s biggest challenge in a system of global competition and imperialist rivalry.

As its economic power has grown, China’s ruling class has become more assertive in fighting for its economic and political interests. Its Belt and Road Initiative—which commits over £800 billion to hundreds of infrastructure projects—is threatening US influence in the Global South.

But despite the increasing imperialist rivalry between US and Chinese ruling classes, there remains a mutual economic dependency. The support of US bosses is vital for China remaining a key base for global production.

And China is vulnerable around technology, depending on Western production of semiconductors and other microchips. And the US still depends on China’s low-cost production base, taking advantage of Chinese manufacturing.

The globalisation of capital has led to supply chains crossing borders and spanning the world. The result is the contradiction of both China’s and the US’s economy being reliant on each other while also competing against each other. But ruling classes can’t escape the logic of competition internally. As long as China rivals the US economically, it will be treated as a threat.

Last wild macaw in Rio is lonely and looking for love

RIO DE JANEIRO — Some have claimed she’s indulging a forbidden romance. More likely, loneliness compels her to seek company at Rio de Janeiro’s zoo.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Either way, a blue-and-yellow macaw that zookeepers named Juliet is believed to be the only wild bird of its kind left in the Brazilian city where the birds once flew far and wide.

Almost every morning for the last two decades, Juliet has appeared. She swoops onto the zoo enclosure where macaws are kept and, through its fence, engages in grooming behaviour that looks like conjugal canoodling. Sometimes she just sits, relishing the presence of others. She is quieter — shier? more coy? — than her squawking chums.

Blue-and-yellow macaws live to be about 35 years old and Juliet — no spring chicken — should have found a lifelong mate years ago, according to Neiva Guedes, president of the Hyacinth Macaw Institute, an environmental group. But Juliet hasn’t coupled, built a nest or had chicks, so at most she’s “still just dating.”

“They’re social birds, and that means they don’t like to live alone, whether in nature or captivity. They need company,” said Guedes, who also co-ordinates a project that researches macaws in urban settings. Juliet “very probably feels lonely, and for that reason goes to the enclosure to communicate and interact.”

Aside from Juliet, the last sighting of a blue-and-yellow macaw flying free in Rio was in 1818 by an Austrian naturalist, according to Marcelo Rheingantz, a biologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and there are no other types of macaws in the city. The lovebirds featured in the 2011 film “Rio? are Spix’s macaws, which are native to a different region of Brazil and possibly extinct in the wild.

Being boisterous with brilliant plumage helps macaws find each other in dense forest, but also makes them easier targets for hunters and animal traffickers. They're often seen in other Brazilian states and across the Amazon, and it is suspected Juliet escaped from captivity.

Biologists at BioParque aren’t sure if Juliet’s nuzzling is limited to one caged Romeo, or a few of them. They’re not even certain Juliet is female; macaw gender is near impossible to determine by sight, and requires either genetic testing of feathers or blood, or examination of the gonads.

Either would be interference merely to satisfy human curiosity with no scientific end, biologist Angelita Capobianco said inside the enclosure. Nor would they consider confining Juliet, who often soars overhead and appears well-nourished.

“We don’t want to project human feelings. I look at the animal, and see an animal at ease,” Capobianco said, noting Juliet has never exhibited behaviour to indicate disturbance, such as insistently pecking at the fence.

“Who am I to decide it should only stay here? I won’t. It comes and goes, and its feathers are beautiful.”

After more than a year of COVID-19 quarantine and travel bans, the appeal of roaming without restriction is evident to humankind. Macaws are used to flying great distances of more than 30 kilometres (20 miles) a day, Guedes said.

Last year, BioParque g ave its macaws more space: a 1,000-square-meter (10,700-square-foot) aviary where they fly beside green parrots and golden parakeets to compose an aerial, technicolour swirl. It’s a massive upgrade from prior enclosures that were roughly 100 square feet. BioParque reopened to the public in March, after privatization of Rio’s dilapidated zoo and almost 17 months of renovations.

BioParque aims to feature species associated with research programs at universities and institutes. One such initiative is Refauna, which reintroduces species into protected areas with an eye on rebuilding ecosystems, and is participating with BioParque to start breeding blue-and-yellow macaws.

The plan is for parents to raise some 20 chicks that will receive training on forest food sources, the peril of predators and avoidance of power lines. Then the youngsters will be released into Rio’s immense Tijuca Forest National Park, where Juliet has been sighted and is thought to sleep each night.

“Their role could be important in terms of ecosystem and reforestation. It’s a big animal with big beak that can crack the biggest seeds, and not all birds can,” said Rheingantz, the university biologist, who is also Refauna’s technical co-ordinator. “The idea is for it to start dispersing those seeds, complementing forest animals that can’t.”

After some pandemic-induced delays, the project has slowly restarted and Rheingantz expects to release blue-and-yellow macaws into Tijuca park toward the end of 2022.

After two decades of relative solitude, Juliet will then have the chance to fly with friends. Neves said Juliet could teach them how to navigate the forest, or even find a love of her own.

David Biller, The Associated Press