Sue Coe, Backpacks, 2026. Courtesy the artist.

The real anniversary

On July 4, 2026, the U.S. will celebrate its 250^th birthday. That’s the date in 1776, when leaders of the 13 original colonies signed a Declaration of Independence, announcing their intention to free themselves from British rule and establish a new nation. The document remains inspiring, especially its second paragraph which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

1776 marked the pinnacle of American, democratic aspiration; it’s been downhill from there. The Revolutionary War was brutal. In addition to battle deaths, tens of thousands of soldiers on prison ships died from sickness. In the southern colonies, both sides of the conflict refused quarter, simply executing men who surrendered or were captured. To the north in Pennsylvania and New York, George Washington’s troops attacked Native American (Iroquois) villages to punish them for siding with the British, or to gain territory and resources.

After the war’s conclusion, the new American Constitution, ratified in 1788, enabled slavery and enshrined a deeply un-democratic system of election. The following century saw Indigenous genocide, invasion of Mexico, Civil War (among the most bloody in history), and, after a brief period of racial democracy, de jure segregation in the South that lasted until the 1960s. Since Jefferson, there has been an unbroken lineage of mediocre or worse presidents (save Lincoln and FDR), supine or corrupt legislators (again, with rare exceptions), and complacent, dishonest, or anti-democratic Supreme Court justices. In the last few years alone, during Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the U.S. has enabled genocide in Gaza, waged aggressive war in Iraq and Iran, kidnapped or murdered foreign nationals, violated principles of habeas corpus that date back to Magna Carta, and engaged in ecocide. Trump’s regime may be seen as the culmination of all this: Kakistocracy — rule by the worst, or better “pathocracy,” governance by a psychopathic minority.

The significance of July 4, 2026, therefore, is not that it will be the semi-quincentennial of the Declaration of Independence. The basic tenets of the document, contained in the three sentences cited above, are much more honored in the breach than in the observance. Instead, it’s the anniversary of the pathocracy. In both 1776 and 2026, madmen — King George III and President Donald Trump – each recklessly plunged their nations into war.

The madness of king George

Four years after assuming the crown in 1760, British King George III approved a series of parliamentary acts – chiefly taxes and tariffs – that alienated American colonists and aroused resistance. First there were the Sugar and Currency Acts, and then a year later in 1765, the Stamp Act, which required American colonists to pay for an official stamp to be affixed to all legal documents, as well as newspapers, books and playing cards. The Act aroused popular consternation both for the cost and perceived violation of the traditional “rights of Englishmen.” To the colonists, the Stamp Act and other tariffs represented “taxation without representation” since they had no representatives in the British parliament. (Each American colony had its own legislature and taxing authority.) Protests, sometimes violent, spread from Massachusetts to Georgia, leading at last to parliamentary repeal, approved by King George.

But that wasn’t the end of efforts by parliament and the king to extract money from the colonists and secure obeisance. There followed in 1773 the notorious Tea Tax which prompted direct action – the Boston Tea Party in which local members of the Sons of Liberty (a clandestine militia) dumped about 340 casks of tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston Harbor. In Philadelphia, another Tea Party convened to prevent the unloading of a shipment of tea from England. In response, the crown escalated the dispute by passage of what Americans called “The Intolerable Acts (1774) aimed mostly at Massachusetts. The Acts: 1) mandated that the Royal Navy and British Army blockade Boston harbor and occupy the city until colonists compensated the East India Company for the destroyed tea; 2) permitted the quartering of British troops in colonial homes and other private facilities; and 3)  directed that British officials or soldiers accused of capital crimes be charged and tried in British courts alone. That final provision became known in the colonies as “The Murder Act” because it effectively meant that any British official in America could get away with murder.

With anger in the colonies at a pitch, the king and parliament had one more chance to avoid war. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress passed the Olive Branch Petition entreating George to withdraw the Intolerable Acts and negotiate a lasting settlement. In exchange for British concessions, the colonists would reaffirm their existing allegiance to the Crown. Hoping to deflect blame to the king’s ministers, they attributed the ongoing disharmony to “just attention to our own preservation against those artful and cruel enemies, who abuse your royal confidence and authority for the purpose of effecting our destruction.” The king however, would have none of it; he never even read the petition. Instead, he issued on August 23, 1775 his own Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, declaring the colonies “in open and avowed rebellion” and its leaders “traitors.” He further said that anyone in Britain abetting the rebels was also guilty of treason. Given that the penalty for treason was hanging (followed for good measure, by beheading), the Americans now had no way to step back from the abyss. What followed, on July 4, 1776, was the Declaration of Independence that included the following retort to King George: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”  By 1783, the U.S. war for independence was over and Britain defeated.

American independence was considered at the time a catastrophe for Britain. The debt accrued to pay for the war led to inflation and political unrest at home. Loss of prestige emboldened Britian’s enemies and sparked a movement for independence in Ireland culminating in a major rebellion in 1798. (Unlike the American, the Irish Revolution was crushed, and it would be more than 100 years before an Irish republic emerged.) King George himself, weighed down by events in America and the emerging crisis in France, suffered in 1782, and again in 1788 recurrences of the mental and physical illnesses he first experienced in 1765. The breakdown in 1788 however, it was so severe that it triggered a regency crisis, forestalled a year later when the king made a sudden (though temporary) recovery. He would have three more major breakdowns; the last in 1811 led to a regency led by his son the Prince of Wales, the future George IV.

James Gillray, Guy Vaux, 1782. London: National Portrait Gallery.

King George III was arrogant and self-satisfied as most kings are. (“It’s good to be king!” as Mel Brooks liked to say.) But he was also politically maladroit and mentally unfit for rule. Early in his reign, he was called “Farmer George” (he was interested in agronomy) sometimes with affection, often with ridicule, and later “mad King George.”  A caricature from 1782 by James Gilray shows the king as a farmyard ass with a fool’s cap, seated on his throne with wrists shackled and a sack beside him at left, containing his crown and scepter. Stunned by defeat in America, George had recently submitted but then withdrew a letter of abdication. Above the king’s head is a crest showing an ass with a crown on his back (in place of a cross) and the words “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame on him who thinks evil of it,“) the motto of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest level of knighthood, typically awarded the king. The crowd of conspirators pouring through the doors at right is led by Charles James Fox the prominent Whig politician in the form of a fox. He was a strong supporter of American independence, and a constant nuisance to the king. He and his comrades are compared by Gillray to Guy “Vaux” better known as Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605. (The word “gunpowder” is visible on a barrel beneath the king’s throne.)  On the wall behind the mob is a portrait of Cataline (Lucius Sergius Catilina) the Roman politician who in 63 BCE led a failed conspiracy to seize the consulship.

The detail of the aristocratic donkey and donkey crest was clever – it was likely an inspiration for Francisco Goya’s plate 39 from Los Caprichos (1799), titled “And so was his grandfather (Asta su Abuelo),” which satirizes the penchant of wealthy Spaniards to devise crests and coats to arms to establish (false) noble lineages. The meaning of the crest in Gillray’s print like Goya’s capricho is that asses beget asses.

W. Fores, The Farm Yard, April 29, 1786. Library of Congress.

A caricature from 1786 shows George strolling a farmyard with Queen Charlotte near Windsor Castle, visible at upper right. A solder at left shoulders fruits instead of a musket. Charlotte feeds the chickens while George tends the pigs, oblivious to his human subjects. They are signaled by their absence; we see only the sign at upper right indicating that mantraps and spring guns have been set on the grounds to deter poachers. Below the sign is a flock of placid sheep.

A few years later, in 1792, a caricature by Richard Newton, shows the mad king as a “Bugaboo,” a slang term for small buggies as well as imaginary monsters – bogeymen — that terrify children. His carries Prime Minister Pitt on his back and his mouth is wide open, screaming the words “Guards/ Encampments! Proclamation! Spies! Spa Fields Bastille! Bristol Bastille! Birmingham Bastille! Manchester Bastille! Informers! Confinement Dungeons! Racks! Tortures! No Lenity! No Mercy! No Bribery! Not even Petticoat influence shall prevail!!!’” He has obviously been driven mad by the revolution in France (“Bastille!” “Bastille!” “Bastille!”) just as he was a decade before by the American one. He imagines revolutionary uprisings everywhere, from Spa-Field in London to Manchester, and fears the American and French revolutions presaged a British one. Pitt would help George slay the bugaboo.

Richard Newton, A Bugaboo!!, June 2, 1792. London: British Museum.

During his fits of madness, George yelled imprecations of every kind, experienced hallucinations, heard voices and committed sexual improprieties. No satisfactory diagnosis has ever been offered, but “acute mania” (severe bi-polar disorder) is currently the most frequent. On one occasion in 1788, according to the King’s senior page:

“The King and Queen…were driving one day through Windsor Park, when the King stopped the horses, and, crying, ‘There he is,’ alighted. His Majesty then approached an oak, and when within a few yards of it, uncovered and advanced, bowing with the utmost respect, and then, seizing one of the lower branches, shook it heartily, as one shakes the hand of a friend….From the words that were uttered, the page learnt that George imagined he was discussing European politics with the King of Prussia!”

On another occasion, the king tried to strangle his son, the Prince of Wales, crying out that no one dare stop him speaking his mind. Soon after, he went to bed but upon waking “had still all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac, and a new noise in imitation of the howling of a dog. Then he became calmer and talked of religion and declared himself inspired.”

William Blake, plate 24, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c. 1790-93. New York: Morgan Library

Even after his recovery in 1789, George imagined conspiracies everywhere. Beginning in 1792, following the formation of the democratic London Corresponding Society, the king’s ministers and parliament initiated prosecutions of journalists and anybody else who dared to speak ill of the crown and in support of the French Revolution. The net extended far and wide, even encompassing a little-known poet and prophet named William Blake. Masking his authorship of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake represented in it mad King Nebuchadnezzar as crowned Farmer George, “dwelling…with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until you know that the on High ruleth in the kingdom of men.” (Daniel 4:31-32)

The text below the mad king represents Blake’s response to monarchical rule: “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” A law that targets everyone, regardless of power or weakness, wealth or poverty, inevitably helps the former and hurts the latter.  Take for example, laws that forbid public seizure of land or property. For the gentry, the law is the essence of even-handed justice; but for the displaced peasant – the victim of parliamentary enclosure – it is an injustice. It prevents redress of injury.  In the U.S. today, President Trump’s succession of executive orders banning affirmative action, cutting programs that support environmental justice, and undermining civil rights protection are examples of just such laws. For the mad president and his circle of pathocrats, oppression is not a means, it’s the end.

The madness of king Donald

Regular readers of Counterpunch will be aware of the ongoing debate about the nature of Trump’s presidency. There are those, like Melvin Goodman, who argue that Trump is not like other presidents and that he and should not be normalized:

“Two terms that make the Trump presidency unique in American history are ‘megalomania’ and ‘pathological narcissism….’ The invasion of Iran has exposed his combination of paranoia and lack of impulse control, which is now on display in a war that has no clear objectives and no end in sight.”

Another, equally astute observer last week argued otherwise. Ricard Rubenstein wrote that the Iran war is not the product of “Trump’s megalomania,” but of a deeply engrained Imperialism. In a pithy phrase, he concludes: “If the system that the leader serves is an empire, he or she will finally act like an emperor.” I’m no diplomat, but I agree with both Goodman and Rubenstein. The madness of king Donald matters, but so does the wider impetus for empire. The point has a well-known foundation in political theory.

Karl’s Marx’s great collaborator Frederick Engels, outlined the materialist view of history in 1880, in a little book called Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It’s sometimes criticized for being dogmatic, but it wasn’t intended to be a full disquisition on the nature and prospects of socialism, just a handbook on how to quickly distinguish between airy dreams of harmony (“utopian” socialism) and practical programs (“scientific” socialism) that could in the right circumstances, lead to radical change. He said:

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure…. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.

In other words, social change isn’t just conjured out of the mind but constructed by real people – masses of them — in concrete historical circumstances of “production and exchange.” Thus, no individual alone can make a revolution or for that matter, prevent one. Nevertheless, change is created by people, and some are better positioned than others to make it – including for the worse. Madmen too make history.

Bad decisions by madmen or fools are generally not made in private. They are made in full view of everybody because the people making them are certain they are wise. Thus, in 2003, Bush (II) asked his Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell to present to the U.N. incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When he came before the General Assembly, however, anybody with eyes in their head could see the photographic evidence revealed sanitation facilities, warehouses, and empty tractor trailers. In a similar vein, when Trump came before the nation — or at least a White House recording crew – and claimed that Iran was just weeks away from assembling a nuclear bomb at facilities he previously claimed were obliterated, nobody believed him. When he later said Iranian ballistic missile production was a direct threat to the U.S., nobody bought it. And when he shifted tack and said that he aimed to liberate the Iranian people – this from a man unperturbed by U.S. government murder of American protestors – Trump was mocked. But the die was cast and war commenced.

Like his other actions – so capricious it’s hard to call them policies – Trump’s choice to go to war against Iran was the product of his madness. One month, Trump was stumping for a Nobel Peace Prize (falsely claiming to have stopped wars across the globe) and the next he was kidnapping the president of Venezuela and waging war against Iran. What motivated the change from Jekyll to Hyde? Pique and pathology. In a letter to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, he wrote: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” Like a junkie in constant need of a fix, Trump’s ego – his pathological narcissism — must be regularly stoked, either by the immeasurable praise of others or by the spectacle of subjugating nations.

The successful pathocrat is abetted by others. To his allies, advisors and enablers – Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Steven Cheung, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and others (themselves psychopaths or on the spectrum) — the president is confident and courageous, not narcissistic and impulsive; he is bold and imaginative not reckless and capricious. Other followers and admirers of Trump, indeed the mass of Republican voters, find him entertaining and refreshing. His racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia are ignored by them, overlooked, discredited or weakly apologized for: “Sometimes he talks without thinking.” But his obvious electoral success, they decide, proves the reasonableness of his actions and claims. Thus, Trump’s madness is adjudged a form of reason.

But Rubenstein is also right. An economic, political and military system designed to support American global dominance – imperialism — will inevitably go to war to achieve its aims. That’s what Sue Coe shows in her caricature of Trump at the top of this column. Inspired by Newton’s Bugaboo, Backpacks reveals the violence of a pathocrat in pursuit of empire. King Donald is shown raging. He spits tomahawk missiles on a schoolgirl wearing a backpack, as actually occurred on February 28, when American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them schoolgirls aged seven to 12, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran.

On Trump’s back is a leaky oil drum representing, the artist told me, the Saudi Investment Fund. The fund has $950 billion in assets, and is seen by Trump, his family and circle of cronies as a pocket to be picked. Trump’s son, Don Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have all secured sizable Saudi investments in the equity funds they manage. The Trump family has also tapped other Mideast petro-state sovereign funds. Trump himself is seeking to control Iranian oil assets, like he already has Venezuelan, though there is limited legal basis for transferring other nations’ oil assets into the U.S. treasury.  Note that while willful and murderous, Trump has a bit in his mouth indicating that like a horse, mule, donkey or ox, he is driven by an external force – in this case the mad drive for wealth and empire.

At the time of its founding 250 years ago, the U.S. was not an empire, though it was the colonial outpost on an imperial regime. For the following 150 years, the U.K. and U.S. vied for economic and political hegemony. At last, after World War II, and certainly by the 1960s, the U.S. empire was secured and the British destroyed. But that history itself exposes a truth that offer modest hope in the current context. Empire is not forever. The very violence it engenders – at home and abroad – spurs resistance that grows until the monster is beaten back. So too, the pathocrat himself cannot long prevail. His impulsiveness, brutality and amorality generate intense opposition among the majority that retains moral scruples and the capacity for empathy. The turn against Trump in the U.S. – he is already deeply unpopular, indeed reviled abroad – suggests that his downfall has already begun, though the final denouement may be nasty, brutish and protracted.

The post The Madness of Kings – A Semi-Quincentennial appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A cross against the border wall Agua Prieta, Sonora says “Let’s live like brothers and sisters” and “We are all migrants.” A butterfly in the corner symbolizes the importance of mobility and migration. Photo: Todd Miller.

On March 3, in the late afternoon, Joca Gallegos arrived at the border wall in Douglas, Arizona, in a van with a small group from Phoenix. The plan was to conduct a devotional, as the Presbyterian border ministry Frontera de Cristo has done with groups from across the country for decades. For many participants, this would be their first encounter with the border wall, and they were encouraged to reflect on their impressions.

In many ways, it was a prayer for peace. But this time it was going to be different. Much to their surprise, this time it wasn’t going to happen at all.

Gallegos, Frontera de Cristo’s Mexico coordinator, approached a nearby Border Patrol vehicle and told the agent—one of the few women on the force—that the group was going to conduct a devotional. She assured the agent it would be quick because they had another activity planned: the Healing Our Borders Prayer Vigil, a weekly event to honor those who have died crossing the border and to pray for their families. This vigil has been held every Tuesday for 25 years.

“Do you know that you can’t be in this area?” Gallegos recalled the agent asking her. Surprised, Gallegos replied that she had conducted devotionals at this exact spot for years. She was unaware of any new restrictions. No changes had been announced.

“This is a road,” the agent explained, “that has been very busy.” She cited the potential for shootings and stray bullets, adding, “This road is for Border Patrol.”

The agent suggested they return to town, where a double fencing structure provided more safety. “With the situations happening,” Gallegos recalled the agent saying, “there could be a shooting at any time.”

Just a few hundred feet away, a double-wall structure bisects the town of Douglas, setting it off from Agua Prieta, Mexico. The wall consists of 20-foot-tall rust-colored bollards and another of yellow mesh, both draped with coiling razor wire. In the area where Gallegos and the agent spoke, the wall lacked the secondary barrier, featuring only one wall and the dirt border road. The opposite side of the road was lined with Normandy vehicle barriers, also covered in coiling razor wire.

“It is for your safety,” the agent explained. Safety from what? Gallegos wondered. The last gunshot she remembered was in 2011, when the Border Patrol killed 19-year-old Carlos LaMadrid as he climbed the wall to return to Mexico. And at that moment, the road “wasn’t busy,” Gallegos told me. Very few people were crossing the border.

For years, Frontera de Cristo had routinely communicated with Border Patrol about their activities. While their relationship was often strained and complicated, the agents had been relatively cordial. But this time, Gallegos told me, there was a new sharpness and rudeness in the agent’s tone.

“We’re going to be fast,” Gallegos said.

“I don’t think you understand me,” the agent replied. “You can’t be here. You need to move,” she said, to where the second wall is. Gallegos explained to the group that the government’s policies had apparently changed.

They moved behind the vehicle barriers off the road and started the devotional. They read from Ephesians 2:11–22, which speaks of destroying the “dividing wall of hostility” and finding peace. The idea was to touch the wall, pray, and contemplate the border as a “space of encounter.”

As they did this, another agent arrived. He was louder, more direct, and ruder, almost shouting.

“Ma’am, you cannot be on this road, not even here,” he said. “This has been under surveillance from the Department of War. So move your vehicle from here.”

Gallegos was stunned. “I didn’t know what was happening,” she told me. “It was aggressive.” The reference to the Department of War caught her attention. This was less than a week after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, known as Operation Epic Fury.

Later, when asked about this policy shift, a Border Patrol supervisor said “escalations worldwide” were creating a “new norm.” “We have all been asked not to let any individuals near the wall who do not have jurisdiction to be there,” the supervisor said. “Basically, the only individuals allowed near the wall for the foreseeable future will be law enforcement, military, or construction personnel.”

The war in Iran had seemingly arrived on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Up to this point, Trump-era border militarization had focused on establishing National Defense Areas—in which the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot buffer zone around the international boundary, becomes a military restricted zone. Now over 40 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border—in Texas, New Mexico, and around Yuma, Arizona—has been declared an NDA. But at the time of this failed devotional, no such declaration had been made for the Douglas area.

Most notably, a militarized restricted area appears to have been declared with no formal announcement based on U.S. foreign policy, a U.S. war.

Around when the Frontera de Cristo incident took place, Douglas resident David Clark told me that Border Patrol had stopped him on his bicycle and told him he couldn’t ride on the border road. When he asked why, the agent cited “recent events,” which Clark connected to the bombing of Iran and drug war violence in central Mexico. Unlike Gallegos, Clark said the agent was pleasant, a demeanor that reminded him of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” in which atrocities are committed not by fanatics but by ordinary people who unthinkingly follow orders.

On March 31, Frontera de Cristo’s U.S. coordinator, Mark Adams, and I drove along the border road. Adams wanted to show me Douglas’s Jewish cemetery located near the international boundary. I also wanted to witness the new policy firsthand. As we entered the contentious area, Adams expressed surprise at the policy shift. “They didn’t tell anybody, and we’re here all the time,” he said. He mentioned speaking with a city council representative who was a former Border Patrol agent, and “even he didn’t know about it.”

This was three days after U.S. Department of War secretary Peter Hegseth announced the “Greater North America” strategy, redefining regional security. Hegseth described a “great neighborhood” extending from “Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal.” He made it clear that the United States “will bolster its military posture and presence across the Northern Hemisphere in coordination with regional partners.”

Hegseth added, “In the north, the United States must enhance posture and presence in cooperation with our sovereign partners to defend our shared immediate security perimeter.”

Where the paved road ends in residential Douglas, there is a dry wash, the exact place where the Frontera de Cristo group was told to leave. We passed a Border Patrol vehicle, which appeared in my rearview mirror about 30 seconds later. We were about to be pulled over. Another Border Patrol vehicle ahead of us entered the road, blocking our way and flashing its lights.

As with Clark’s experience, the agent was friendly. He asked where we were going, and we told him the Jewish cemetery. We asked him about the new policy and its origin, and he said it came from the chief, from someone high up in Washington. He recognized Adams as part of the “church group” (Frontera de Cristo) and said no vehicles were allowed on the road, but people could walk up to the wall.

This seemed to contradict what the supervisor had said. Would civilians be allowed to approach the wall and pray for peace or not? I contacted a Border Patrol public information officer with questions, but as of publication, I have not received any clarification.

The notion of a more restricted U.S.-Mexico border as a consequence of the U.S. bombing of Iran seemed extreme, even absurd, yet that appeared to be the reality. A war occurring 7,000 miles away was impacting this border. But perhaps this was indeed the new normal in “Greater North America.”

After returning from the Jewish cemetery, I attended a Healing Our Borders vigil held every Tuesday for decades by Frontera de Cristo, the same one Gallegos’s group was scheduled to attend on March 3. It is a meditative walk to the Douglas port of entry along the Pan American Highway. Everyone carries crosses inscribed with the names of people who have died crossing the border in Cochise County. Participants carry the cross, say the name inscribed on it, and place it along the road. With each name, everyone responds “presente.” As we did this, I recalled the first vigil I attended with Frontera de Cristo during a rainstorm in August 2001, just a month before the September 11 attacks would change everything. Then and now, this vigil felt like both a powerful prayer for peace and an act of defiance. Policy or no policy, they weren’t going to stop anytime soon.

This first appeared on The Border Chronicle.

The post Thou Shall Not Pray for Peace: the Bombing of Iran and the U.S.-Mexico Border appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The head of one of the crew members of Daigo Fukuryū Maru showing radiation burns caused by fallout that collected in his hair, dated April 7, 1954, 38 days after the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test. Public domain.

“Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, saber-rattlers, and warmongers.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, responding to the global outrage after the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands

Few examples of the eagerness of US intelligence agencies to experiment on unknowing subjects are more vivid than the foray of the national security establishment into research on the effects of radiation exposure. There were three different types of experiments. One involved thousands of American military personnel and civilians who were directly exposed to radioactive fallout from US nuclear testing in the American Southwest and South Pacific. Many have heard of the black men who were the victims of four decades’ worth of federally funded studies of syphilis in which some victims were given placebos so that doctors could monitor the progress of the disease. In the case of the Marshall Islanders, US scientists first devised the H-test – a  thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb – then failed to warn the inhabitants of the nearby atoll of Rongelap of the dangers of the radiation and then, with precisely the equanimity of the Nazi scientists (not surprising, since Nazi veterans of the German radiation experiments rescued by CIA officer Boris Pash were now on the US team), observed how they fared.

Initially, the Marshall Islanders were allowed to remain on their atoll for two days, exposed to radiation. Then they were evacuated. Two years later, Dr. G. Faill, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission’s committee on biology and medicine, requested that the Rongelap Islanders be returned to their atoll “for a useful genetic study of the effects on these people.” His request was granted. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense signed a directive bringing the US government into compliance with the Nuremberg code on medical research. But that directive was classified as top secret, and its existence was kept secret from researchers, subjects and policy makers for twenty-two years. The policy was succinctly summed up by the Atomic Energy Commission’s Colonel O. G. Haywood, who formalized his directive thus:

It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans. This might have adverse effects on the public or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified secret.

Among such fieldwork thus classified as secret were five different experiments overseen by the CIA, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense involving the injection of plutonium into at least eighteen people, mainly black and poor, without informed consent. There were thirteen deliberate releases of radioactive material over US and Canadian cities between 1948 and 1952 to study fallout patterns and the decay of radioactive particles. There were dozens of experiments funded by the CIA and Atomic Energy Commission, often conducted by scientists at UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt and MIT, which exposed more than 2,000 unknowing people to radiation scans.

The case of Elmer Allen is typical. In 1947 this 36-year-old black railroad worker went to a hospital in Chicago with pains in his legs. The doctors diagnosed his illness as apparently a case of bone cancer. They injected his left leg with huge doses of plutonium over the next two days. On the third day, the doctors amputated his leg and sent it to the Atomic Energy Commission’s physiologist to research how the plutonium had dispersed through “the tissue. Twenty-six years later, in 1973, they brought Allen back to the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, where they gave him a full body radiation scan, then took urine, fecal and blood samples to assess the plutonium residue in his body from the 1947 experiment.

In 1994, Patricia Durbin, who worked at the Lawrence Livermore labs on plutonium experiments, recalled,

We were always on the lookout for somebody who had some kind of terminal disease who was going to undergo an amputation. These things were not done to plague people or make them sick or miserable. They were not done to kill people. They were done to gain potentially valuable information. The fact that they were injected and provided this valuable data should almost be a sort of memorial rather than something to be ashamed of. It doesn’t bother me to talk about the plutonium injectees because of the value of the information they provided.

The only problem with this misty-eyed account is that Elmer Allen seems to have had nothing seriously wrong with him when he went to the hospital with leg pain and was never told of the research conducted on his body.

In 1949, the Quaker Oats Company conspired with Fernald School and the Atomic Energy Commission to give student members of the academy’s Science Club oatmeal laced with radioactive particles.

In 1949, parents of mentally retarded boys at the Fernald School in Massachusetts were asked to give consent for their children to join the school’s “science club.” Those boys who did join the club were unwitting objects of experiments in which the Atomic Energy Commission in partnership with the Quaker Oats Company, gave them radioactive oatmeal. The researchers wanted to see if the chemical preservatives in cereal prevented the body from absorbing vitamins and minerals, with the radioactive materials acting as tracers. They also wanted to assess the effects of radioactive materials on the kids.

Aping the Nazis’ methods, the covert medical experiments of the US government sought out the most vulnerable and captive of subjects: the mentally retarded, terminally ill, and, unsurprisingly, prisoners. In 1963, 133 prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their scrotums and testicles exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation. One of the subjects was Harold Bibeau, a draftsman who lived in Troutdale, Oregon. Since 1994, Bibeau has been waging a one-man battle against the US Department of Energy, the Oregon Department of Corrections, the Battelle Pacific Northwest Labs and the Oregon Health Sciences University. Because he was ex-con he did not obtain much satisfaction.

In 1963, Bibeau was convicted of killing a man who had tried to molest him sexually. Bibeau got twelve years for voluntary manslaughter. While in prison, another inmate told him of a way he might get some time knocked off his sentence and make a small amount of money. Bibeau could do this by joining a medical research project supposedly managed by the Oregon Health Sciences University, the state’s medical school. Bibeau says that though he did sign an agreement to be part of the research project, he was never told that there might be dangerous consequences for his health. The experiments on Bibeau and other inmates (all told, 133 prisoners in Oregon and Washington) proved damaging in the extreme. The research involved the study of the effects of radiation on human sperm and gonadal cell development.

Bibeau and his fellows were doused with 650 rads of radiation. This is a very hefty dose. One chest X-ray today involves about 1 rad. But this wasn’t all. Over the next few years in prison Bibeau says he was subjected to numerous injections of other drugs, of a nature “of a nature unknown to him. He had biopsies and other surgeries. He claims that after he was released from prison, he was never contacted again for monitoring.

The Oregon experiments were done for the Atomic Energy Commission, with the CIA as a cooperating agency. In charge of the Oregon tests was Dr. Carl Heller. But the actual X-rays on Bibeau and the other prisoners were done by entirely unqualified people, in the form of other prison inmates. Bibeau got no time off his sentence and was paid $5 a month and $25 for each biopsy performed on his testicles. Many of the prisoners in the experiments in the Oregon and Washington state prisons were given vasectomies or were surgically castrated. The doctor who performed the sterilization operations told the prisoners the sterilizations were necessary to “keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants.”

In defending the sterilization experiments, Dr. Victor Bond, a physician at the Brookhaven nuclear lab, said,

It’s useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes. It’s useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings.

One of Bond’s colleagues, Dr. Joseph Hamilton of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, said more candidly that the radiation experiments (which he had helped oversee) “had a little of the Buchenwald touch.”

Radiologist Dr. Eugene Saenger, who performed whole body radiation experiments at the University of Cincinnati Medical School on 88 cancer patients, most of whom were poor and black. (Screengrab from a 1984 interview that was the Oral History of Medicine in Cincinnati series and has been digitally preserved in the UC Digital Resource Commons.)

From 1960 to 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger and his colleagues at the University of Cincinnati performed “whole body radiation experiments” on 88 subjects who were black, poor and suffering from cancer and other diseases. The subjects were exposed to 100 rads of radiation – the equivalent of 7,500 chest X-rays. The experiments often caused intense pain, vomiting and bleeding from the nose and ears. All but one of the patients died. In the mid-1970s, a congressional committee discovered that Sa3nger had forged consent forms for these experiments.

Between 1946 and 1963, more than 200,000 US soldiers were forced to observe, at dangerously close range, atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific and Nevada. One such participant, a US Army private named Jim O’Connor, recalled in 1994,

There was a guy with a mannikin look, who had apparently crawled behind a bunker. Something like wires were attached to his arms, and his face was bloody. I smelled an odor like burning flesh. The rotary camera I’d seen was going zoom zoom zoom and the guy kept trying to get up.

O’Connor himself fled the blast area but was picked up by the Atomic Energy Commission patrols and given prolonged tests to measure his exposure. O’Connor said in 1994 that ever since the test, he had experienced many health problems.

Up in the state of Washington, at the nuclear reservation at Hanford, the Atomic Energy Commission engaged in the largest intentional release of radioactive chemicals to date in December 1949. The test did not involve a nuclear explosion but the emission of thousands of curies of radioactive iodine in a plume that extended hundreds of miles south and west as far as Seattle, Portland and the California–Oregon border, irradiating hundreds of thousands of people. So far from being alerted to the test at the time, the civilian population learned of it only in the late 1970s, although there had been persistent suspicions because of the clusters of thyroid cancers occurring among the communities downwind.

Hanford Nuclear Site. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In 1997, the National Cancer Institute found that millions of American children had been exposed to high levels of radioactive iodine known to cause thyroid cancer. Most of this exposure was due to drinking milk contaminated with fallout from above-ground nuclear testing carried out between 1951 and 1962. The institute conservatively estimated that this was enough radiation to cause 50,000 thyroid cancers. The total releases of radiation were estimated to be ten times larger than those released by the explosion in the Soviet Chernobyl reactor in 1986.

A presidential commission in 1995 began looking into radiation experiments on humans and requested the CIA to turn over all of its records. The Agency responded with a terse claim that “it had no records or other information on such experiments.” One reason the CIA may have felt confidence in this brusque stonewalling was that in 1973, CIA director Richard Helms had used the last moments before he retired to order that all records of CIA experiments on humans be destroyed.

A 1963 report from the CIA’s Inspector General indicates that for more than a decade previously, the Agency had been engaged in “research and development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior. The 1963 report went on to say that CIA director Allen Dulles had approved various forms of human experimentation as “avenues to the control of human behavior,” including “radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology, graphology, harassment studies and paramilitary devices and materials.”

The Inspector General’s report emerged in congressional hearings in 1975 in a highly edited form. It remains classified to this day. In 1976, the CIA told the Church committee that it had never used radiation. But this claim was undercut in 1991 when documents were unearthed on the Agency’s ARTICHOKE program. A CIA summary of ARTICHOKE says that

in addition to hypnosis, chemical and psychiatric research, the following fields have been explored … Other physical manifestations including heat, cold, atmospheric pressure, radiation.

The 1994 presidential commission, set up by Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, followed this trail of evidence and reached the conclusion that the CIA did explore radiation as a possibility for the defensive and offensive use of brainwashing and other interrogation techniques. The commission’s final report cites CIA records showing that the Agency secretly funded the construction of a wing of Georgetown University Hospital in the 1950s.

Dr. Charles F. Geschickter, who conducted radiation experiments for the CIA, through his cancer research center at Georgetown University Medical School.

This was to become a haven for CIA-sponsored research on chemical and biological programs. The CIA’s money for this went via a pass-through to Dr. Charles F. Geschickter, who ran the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. The doctor was a Georgetown cancer researcher who made his name experimenting with high doses of radiation. In 1977, Dr. Geschickter testified that the CIA paid for his radio-isotope lab and equipment and closely monitored his research.

The CIA was a major player in a whole series of inter-agency government panels on human experimentation. For example, three CIA officers served on the Defense Department’s committee on medical sciences and these same officers were also key members on the joint panel on medical aspects of atomic warfare. This is the government committee that planned, funded and reviewed most human radiation experiments, including the placement of US troops in proximity to nuclear tests conducted in the 1940s and 1950s.

The CIA was also part of the armed forces’ medical intelligence organization, created in 1948, where the Agency was put in charge of “foreign, atomic, biological, and chemical intelligence, from medical science’s point of view.” Among the more bizarre chapters in this mission was the dispatch of a team of agents to engage in a form of body-snatching, as they tried to collect tissue and bone samples from corpses to determine levels of fallout after nuclear tests. To this end they sliced tissue from some 1,500 bodies – without the knowledge or consent of the relatives of the deceased.

Further evidence of the Agency’s central role was its lead part in the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, the clearing house for intelligence on foreign nuclear programs. The CIA chaired the Scientific Intelligence Committee and its subsidiary, the Joint Medical Science Intelligence Committee. Both these bodies planned the radiation and human experimentation research for the Department of Defense.

This was by no means the full extent of the Agency’s role in experimenting on living people. As noted, in 1973 Richard Helms officially discontinued such work by the Agency and ordered all records destroyed, saying that he did not want the Agency’s associates in such work to be “embarrassed.”

A version of this story first appeared in the print edition of CounterPunch newsletter and was then incorporated into our book, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.

The post “Avenues to Control Human Behavior:” When the CIA Made Humans Glow appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

30,000 Americans, “pissed off” at the increasingly reckless and ruthless actions and policies of Trump, marched in the 3rd No Kings protest in Portland on March 28.  Organizers reported that over 8 million Americans marched across the US in the nationwide No Kings protests.

Many of the protestors in Portland held hand made signs which expressed their outrage, disgust and hatred for Trump’s actions.   Their messages called out:  “No Kings, No ICE, No Wars,”  “Fuck Trump,”  “IRAN from the Epsein Files,” “No One is above the Law,” “No war on Iran,” “Resist and Disobey,” “Hate will not make us great,” “Fight Fascism with Solidarity,” “Is he dead yet?” and “Are we great yet?   Cuz all I feel is shame and sadness.”   Amidst the joyful spirit of resistance many were feeling,  there was also a palpable fear that Trump’s war on Iran is destroying this country, as well as Iran and the rest of the world.   There was a sense of urgency that the time is now for  people who care  about democracy, humanity and the rule of law to rise up, fight back and stop Trump.

The three No Kings protests, which have drawn huge numbers in recent months, have been criticised for their allegiance to the Democratic Party.   Although several speakers urged the crowd to vote for more Democrats in the congressional elections this November, many also criticised the Democrats for their cowardice and inability to stand up to Trump and the Republicans, as well as for their complicity in supporting Israel in its ongoing genocide against the Palestinians.

Many Americans are well aware that protests, even huge ones like No Kings, are just the beginning.   Protests alone are not enough to change the direction this country is rapidly heading down.   What we need is a growing movement against the US empire and its endless wars, militarism, the weapons manufacturers who profit off the killings and destruction of entire countries, and its increasing use of violent wars and thuggish violations of  the rule of law and human rights.   There was a sense of hope that when enough people rise up, organize, and fight back, we can bring real change to make the US a better country, and the world safer.   But more than hope, we need real courage for the long and hard struggles ahead.

All photos by Bette Lee.

The post 30,000 “Pissed off” Americans: A Photo Essay of the No Kings Protests in  Portland  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Markus Spiske.

The following is an excerpt from Tori Tsui’s fantastic and insightful book, It’s Not Just You: How to Navigate Eco-Anxiety and the Climate Crisis, which will be released by The New Press in the United States this month. Check out our interview with Tori on CounterPunch Radio. – Joshua Frank

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It’s Not Just You is a simple yet powerful statement that underpins how I have come to explore some of the intricacies between mental health and climate change. It is a statement that traverses many themes, as neither climate change nor mental health exist in siloes, nor are they limited in scope. A fundamental motif of this book is ‘eco-anxiety’, more loosely defined as a chronic fear of environmental doom and a popularised catch-all term for those whose mental health is being impacted by climate change. But it would be remiss of me to say this book is strictly about my relationship with eco-anxiety, or the eco-anxious experience as a whole. Nor is it a prescriptive step-by-step guide on how to deal with feelings of eco-anxiety, so if that is what you’re after, it’s best to look elsewhere (better yet, skip to the recommended reading!). Rather, the titular use of how to is a trojan horse of sorts, inviting us to navigate mental health and climate change through experiences like eco-anxiety by asking big-picture questions and expanding beyond popularised viewpoints. It is a space to explore what we as people fighting for climate justice need in order for our communities and environments to survive, but more importantly, to thrive.

In the modern world many people have been left dangling in a state of disconnect, from themselves, their purpose, their surroundings and their community. In this we may succumb to feeling entirely alone, mentally, physically and spiritually, especially in a time such as now, characterised by political instability, a global pandemic and a worsening climate crisis. Despite this profound isolation, the reality is that our experiences are being mimicked across the fabric of society with an endowed belief that this alienated existence is inevitable. This can be hard to challenge, but simple reminders can spur on the need to seek connectivity. At its most fundamental level, the first tenet of It’s Not Just You is a reassurance that You are not alone.

Whether or not your existential hardship identifies as ecoanxiety, that reassurance reminds us that our reactions are part of being human and that communal solidarity is a primal need in times of struggle. But solidarity is built upon the understanding that a global community is made up of many people, all complex and unique in their livelihoods. And solidarity, in the context of climate change, requires that we recognise that this issue encapsulates many injustices with striations of harm that see certain communities being hardest hit. I am of the opinion that we cannot understand the sheer scale and complexity of climate change without understanding how inseparable it is from other justice issues. The intentional disadvantaging of certain communities impacts how they experience climate change, but also, it is these ‘systems of oppression’ which have created a crisis of the climate in the first place. If it weren’t for the fact that the word ‘climate’ has become the face of this multifaceted issue, I’d choose to call it the ‘result-of-ALL-systems-of-oppression’ crisis, but ‘climate’ crisis has a better ring to it. Perhaps the term climate crisis may be a Eurocentric deflection from understanding the interweaving of these different justice issues, even if the facts and figures of carbon parts per million are incredibly alarming and need to be rapidly addressed. While addressing emissions is of utmost importance, so is making sure that we’re not further subjugating other people and environments in the process, as it is exploitation and long-term injustice which have led us to where we are now.

This is precisely why climate justice is a fundamental aspect of this book, especially when interrogating the realms of the eco-anxious discourse. To me, being a climate justice activist requires an understanding of the inseparable interconnectedness of systems, and the necessity for inclusive, restorative and long-lasting change. It also demands introspection and flexibility without compromising one’s core values. It’s a nuanced practice that campaigns for the liberation of all marginalised communities and environments while questioning the structures of harm and knowledge systems that have created a crisis of the climate.

As a testament to the intricacies of climate justice, this book draws on the perspectives of campaigners across the globe as well as my own. As an individual, I recognise that my experiences as an activist cannot be extrapolated universally to represent a complete understanding of how climate change and other interacting oppressive forces harm people and their mental health. Nor the diversity in mental health definitions, conditions and experiences that we may be born with, or endure, that ultimately play into how we experience the world in a time of climate change. But it is my lived reality which allows me to bridge the gap between theory and praxis and to unpack the importance of shared struggle, all while acknowledging that we, as unique individuals with complex livelihoods, exist as part of a larger network. The first chapter therefore explores my personal relationship with mental health and climate change, as a foundation for appreciating the ways in which these experiences transcend the individual in question.

As a ‘public-facing’ figure, I often draw from the wonder of fungi as an apt analogy for the intricacies of activist movements. Many think of fungi only as the fruiting body – the visual fleshy mass above the ground or substrate. But fungi are actually much more complex, made up of a network of filaments called mycelium, breaking down detritus, interlinking, transmitting signals and communicating information further than the eye can see. The fruiting body, or mushroom, is merely the visible part, erupting spontaneously in the right conditions, while below the surface millions of thread-like hyphae interact with one another. Like fungi, activist movements ebb and flow in their capacities and growth, with each individual occupying a unique role as part of the collective. In my context, I do not want to be an individualised mushroom without recognising that I am part of something bigger, working towards a common goal. And in this the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In this instance, the second tenet of It’s Not Just You reminds us that individual perspectives alone do not speak for everyone. And that as a network of change-makers, we have a duty to recognise the multifarious ways of being beneath the surface. Rather it is a call to arms for intersectionality – the understanding that there are interconnected, cumulative social and political identities which inform how communities experience discrimination. It encourages us to be allies through active listening and ongoing commitments to (un)learning. Intersectionality is an essential component to climate justice, the relationship between mental health and climate change, and thus navigating experiences like eco-anxiety.

The eco-anxious dialogue warrants an intersectional approach. Every environmental space I encounter never fails to mention eco-anxiety to some degree. And more and more decision-making spaces and media outlets are including eco-anxiety in their discussions, even gracing the front cover of a recent edition of Men’s Health magazine or as a talking point in a major Vogue campaign. Eco-anxiety as a concept and lived reality is undeniably going mainstream, which is no doubt reaffirming for those who have been experiencing these feelings for a while. At the same time, as I will discuss, this also reveals that there is still much to understand and more work to be done in the public conscience.

It’s Not Just You calls into question the popularisation of mainstream understandings of mental health and climate change as eco-anxiety. In this regard, it is a commentary on the manifestation of dominant environmental narratives more broadly. Eco-anxiety is too often seen as a response to our faltering physical environments as opposed to the social injustices that shape the world. It is an invitation to understand that, much like eco-anxiety, climate change has far deeper roots than what meets the eye. It’s Not Just You hones in on the specificity of western understandings of eco-anxiety to make broader statements about the social and political standing of our world and asks whether it even encapsulates the entirety of living in a time of climate breakdown.

Far too often my experiences of despair about what is happening to our planet have been relegated as eco-anxiety. I don’t deny people the usage of such labels, nor do I deny its terrifying existence, but it’s not as simple as ‘being anxious about climate change’. As such, I often tiptoe around the term for fear of homogenising that which I believe to be much more complex. For example, too many conversations around eco-anxiety fixate on broad speculations for the future as opposed to that which has been lost, ultimately reflecting a geopolitical disparity in who it represents. Most of the time, conversations around eco-anxiety do not focus on those within the movements, nor frontline defenders, who have been experiencing emotional hardship for generations. So often is eco-anxiety a commentary on the individual as opposed to the system we live in. Too many times have I witnessed conversations around remedying eco-anxiety being steered towards individualised pursuits as though to slap a metaphorical Band-Aid on the wound without understanding that there is something much graver below the surface.

If we really want to work towards addressing eco-anxiety through the lens of climate justice, we have to start acting in a way that is intersectional. This is a direct ask to be cognisant of the discriminatory structures that impose division and subjugation of marginalised bodies and minds, and begin to unpack them through understanding that they are fictitious by design. That’s not to say that differences don’t exist among us, but that our differences are not reasons to ascribe anecdotes of worth and power. And in order to deconstruct these systems of oppression, we must act radically. To be radical means to address the issue at the core as derived from the Latin radic – meaning root. I believe that an approach that spans timescales, emotions, environments and justice issues will allow us to tackle things at the root and better understand the emergence of eco-anxiety as an intersectional climate justice issue. Otherwise we run the risk of creating a world in which key voices are excluded.

Unfortunately, too many spaces of change have limited themselves to a narrow scope of understanding, often excluding, casting aside and erasing society’s most marginalised. These are often characterised by the compartmentalisation of class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and more as tools for oppression. What comes to mind immediately are the archaic yet prevailing brands of girl boss and white feminism that dominate the mainstream. Reni Eddo Lodge summarises this succinctly: ‘I fear that, although white feminism is palatable to those in power, when it has won, things will look very much the same. Injustice will thrive, but there will be more women in charge of it.’ Much like the aforementioned, there have been many so-called fights for equality that are shrouded in a self-serving guise that ‘liberates’ the already fortunate few. As though gaining a seat at the table that was created to banish others is the ultimate goal. And so, these fights often replicate the conditions that were designed to oppress people in the first place. Counterintuitively, many forget that it is the liberation and wellbeing of the most vulnerable, marginalised communities that benefits us all. Iterations of ‘no one is free until we are all free’ have been espoused by many thinkers over the years from Emma Lazarus to Martin Luther King to Maya Angelou, and still hold true to this day.

Could it be that, without an intersectional lens rooted in climate justice, eco-anxiety could be replicating harmful patterns? Eco-anxiety and western environmentalism more broadly could be championing liberatory politics that are rooted in selectivity; certainly this is reflected in the mainstream, where some voices are prioritised over those on the frontlines. It’s Not Just You serves as a tender reminder that there are countless others who experience mental health injustice, often at the hands of ill-adapted systems and structures designed to harm them. And that it is imperative we understand just how much these oppressive forces influence how people have come to experience a plethora of mental health struggles which interact and conspire with climate change.

Yet, despite the compounding effects of systemic oppression, no individual is immune to mental struggle in the system that we live in, even those who fall into the elemental categorisation of being privileged. It makes me think of the ever-brilliant What White People Can Do Next, where Emma Dabiri remarks that one can still feel ‘. . . overworked, underpaid, exhausted and quite possibly spiritually bereft’ despite the denotations of a privileged identity. This very remark prompts a deeper exploration of how we live in systems that lull us into a rat race of disillusionment and categorise us in ways that forego the complexities of the human experience. It makes me think of how a sense of climate community and care saved me from my darkest days, even when I was on the dole. But yet, during the period where I was clothed, housed, fed and financially stable, I was incredibly isolated and mentally unwell. There is so much to be unpacked here, and it is worth creating space for the subtleties involved.

But do not let defying privileges dissuade you from speaking about mental health as that which is highly interlinked with the same systems that have given rise to climate change. Individual experiences alone do not necessarily underpin the systemic inequalities that occur within the realms of mental health, and they may continue to uphold power structures which harm marginalised people. How we have experienced this world can allow for the compassion needed to build bridges with one another and strive towards a more just future for all. In this context, we are united under the same struggle by recognising that these systems are making us all sick to varying degrees. Thus warranting a broader analysis beyond eco anxiety, and instead inviting us to look at mental health as a whole.

If we can understand this, we can begin to understand the third tenet of It’s Not Just You – that You alone are not the only responsible actor in whatever crises, struggles and hardships it is you and your community may face. It is an interrogation of the dominant knowledge and socio-economic systems at play. It spells out clearly that the same systems that have created a crisis of the climate, and thus eco-anxiety, are those which have led to profound suffering in people’s wellbeing.

It’s Not Just You reminds us that the frequency with which ill mental health occurs these days cannot be attributed to the individual alone. Instead, we need to ask how mental health has been influenced by the current state of this world, the injustices that underpin it and the worldviews it perpetuates. It has become apparent to me that the world wasn’t designed (emphasis on intentionality here) to favour all people and environments equally. Especially not those who have been deemed enemies of the state by virtue of trying to dismantle them, nor people who have long been dehumanised by particular doctrines. I find this to be particularly true for those who work in the advocacy realm. I have seen too many activists left feeling weary and devoid of vitality on the daily from relentless campaigning, many of whom have little choice in the matter. All the while the undercurrent of an intensifying climate crisis amidst a backdrop of neoliberal capitalism is magnifying the effects of people’s predispositions to mental struggle.

There undeniably already exists a disparity in the way certain communities experience mental health and whether they can access resources that improve one’s wellbeing. With passing  time and grave inaction, the divide only becomes larger and larger. I believe it is imperative to address these inequalities, as the already deepened chasm of disparity is widening. Perhaps by understanding that It’s Not Just You, we can begin to critique the limitations of individualism, upheld by neoliberal capitalist ideologies, which has led many to feel entirely alone and responsible for their own struggle. And so, the fourth tenet encourages us to seek solutions to these problems by opting for collective remedies, for both the benefit of people and the planet, as an antithesis to the systems that have long harmed us. Much like the teachings of radical mycology, it invites us to recognise that there is power in the collective, and that a healthy ecosystem is one that relies on collaboration.

But in a time when we have been led to believe that we cannot care for one another, It’s Not Just You encourages us not to operate with an attitude of scarcity, and instead implores us to adopt the belief that we can care for ourselves and for others. It is a testament to abundance and community care from the teachings of frontline communities who challenge the western, heteronormative and patriarchal values of kinship and hierarchical thinking. These are broad and community-centred responses to the issues pertaining to mental health and climate change, informed by the resilience of those who have long had to advocate for radical change.

These four tenets of It’s Not Just You are how I have chosen to navigate eco-anxiety, and mental health more broadly, in a time of climate change. Each covers an array of topics that build atop one another with each chapter, allowing for the reader to understand why we must go beyond the paradigms of popularised environmentalism. And through understanding these tenets, I hope you feel equipped to navigate and act on complex topics with reassurance, ease and urgency.

And so, to reiterate the first tenet – I want you to understand and feel reassured that It’s Not Just You who is struggling, and that you are not alone in feeling averse to the world around you. At the same time, the second tenet reminds us that our perspectives don’t speak for everyone, thereby inviting us to employ an intersectional understanding on mental health and climate change. The latter then sets the scene for us to understand the direct role of knowledge and socioeconomic systems in poor mental health, specifically critiquing how neoliberal capitalism and climate change interact. Finally, the fourth tenet of It’s Not Just You motivates us to dismantle individualism (especially within our movements), seek community structures of care and harness radical imaginative practices to create a better world.

I hope this book becomes a companion and a literary soundboard of sorts, to take what you need (and what you don’t) in order to unpack the aforementioned. It’s Not Just You attests to being part of a global community, enduring a multitude of struggles, underpinned by structures and systems of harm. But knowing is not the same as acting, and so I hope this book implores you to take to the ground, cultivating mycelial networks of change with fellow advocates, change-makers and organisers such that we may create a more (environ)mentally resilient future for all.

The post Navigating Eco-Anxiety and the Climate Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry totaled 38.11 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2025, hitting a record high, versus 25.51 GtCO2 in 2000. Moreover, the rate of global warming more than doubled for the first time in human history, in only one decade. Scientists are stunned: The Rate of Global Warming has Accelerated More in the Past Decade Than Ever Before, LiveScience, d/d March 7, 2026. According to NASA, 97% of publishing scientists in the world agree that excessive CO2 emissions cause excessive global warming as well as aberrant climate change.

Following a surge in permitting and construction, more than 50 large coal-fired power plants were commissioned in China last year. Source: CREA / Global Energy Monitor. Yale Environment 360 /

China loves coal, but it still should be awarded a gold medal for renewable installations in 2025. No other country came close to installation of 300 gigawatts of solar and 100 gigawatts of wind power in 2025. These installations set a record. Paradoxically, China also wins a tarnished medal for biggest emitter of greenhouse gases at roughly 32% of the world total. If this seems contradictory, yes, it is. But it takes a lot of energy for 1.4B people. After all, the scorecard shows China consumed 40% more coal in 2025 than the rest of the world combined.

China also installed more solar and wind power in 2025 than the rest of the world combined. It is the first country to exceed 1,000 GW of solar capacity. China’s investments in clean energy exceed the combined efforts of the U.S., EU, and UK. Another 300 GW of wind and solar is currently under construction. China’s total clean energy investment in 2025 was $630B.

Still, “Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 is severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.” (Isabel Hilton, As It Boosts Renewables, China Still Can’t Break Its Coal Addiction, YaleEnvironment360, March 26, 2026)

US Emissions Turn Up

Meantime, United States greenhouse gas emissions increased for the first time in 24 months: The Rhodium Group’s preliminary 2025 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions analysis reports that after two years of declining emissions, the U.S. produced 2.4% more planet-warming CO2 pollution last year. More concerning was emissions growing faster than the economy, which expanded just 1.9%, reversing three years of successfully decoupling economic growth from carbon output.

Earth’s Tipsy Climate Losing Balance – Worst in History

Climate balance/imbalance is the key gauge of a healthy system. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO): “The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands of years.” (Earth’s Climate Swings Increasingly Out of Balance, World Meteorological Organization, March 23, 2026)

Within the past 12 months, Dr. James Hansen (Earth Institute, Columbia) publicly stated: The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated and the international “2C target is dead.” Buckle up.

US Loses $61 Billion In Clean Energy Projects in Only One Year

“A new report indicates that Trump administration policies led to billions of dollars in canceled investment and tens of thousands of lost jobs… industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs.” (Grist)

A more comprehensive report, according to Climate Power, nearly 173,000 clean energy jobs have been lost, put on the chopping block, or delayed since Trump took office. The job losses stem from 354 canceled or delayed projects, representing more than $61 billion in investments, which would have powered more than 14 million homes. Clean energy as a priority is gone for this administration, over cliff’s edge, in a tailspin.

Clearly, the United States is intentionally harming the world climate system by pushing fossil fuel use over renewable energy, but that’s only the most obvious of intentional abuses. The US has become public enemy number one of climate change with worldwide impact. For example, “The White House also terminated funding for the US Global Change Research Program, the federal body responsible for producing the nation’s most comprehensive climate reports on the impacts of rising global temperatures. It also shut down climate.gov, NOAA’s primary public-facing website for climate science, and axed NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset, which has provided vital information for first responders, the insurance industry, and researchers to plan recovery efforts and assess weather-related risks… The cuts extended to international climate efforts as well. In February, the administration pulled the US out of global discussions regarding an upcoming global climate change assessment carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). President Trump also ordered federal scientists at NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program to cease all work related to IPCC climate assessments, effectively ending US involvement in one of the world’s most critical climate evaluation efforts.” (for a comprehensive list of cuts: Earth.org)

The United States is knee-deep in a massive strategy of global disengagement, ‘isolationism’ pure and simple, America First, regardless of decades of building global interrelationships that have molded the world order. That world order is gone, in crash mode. Along the way, climate change mitigation is low-hanging fruit, easily ignored because of a soft constituency, making it doubly vulnerable with very little ‘pocket money’ payback and crushed by fossil fuel moneyed interests.

At the heart of the problem climate change is an extremely complex global issue that requires worldwide cooperation, the antithesis of isolationism.

Nobody wants to accept it, but a worst-case climate scenario may be taking center stage, flooded coastal cities and bone-dry farmlands as two potential scenarios for failure to acknowledge and mitigate climate change. There is nothing positive about the current direction of seemingly endless fossil fuel energy production. According to scientists, the atmosphere is very close to ‘full-up’ of CO2 emissions based upon guesstimates of limits to keep global temperatures under the dreaded 2C. Then, the whole climate system spins out of control in chaotic fashion.

Isolationism by the world’s leading economy in a complex world with a flagging climate system leads to big trouble for life-supporting ecosystems. But nobody wants to deal with it seriously enough, soon enough to make a big difference; only a couple of countries, out of 195 signatories, are tracking Paris 2015 commitments to cut CO2 emissions by 2030. This is disgustingly outrageous as these same 195 countries were in full agreement that the ‘shit would hit the fan’ unless they cut fossil fuel emissions by 2030 to hold global mean temperature to 1.5°C pre-industrial, which they’ve subsequently moved up to 2°C as 1.5°C looks to ‘be in the bag.’ Clearly, the climate system is outpacing any and all commitments to tame it, but it goes without saying, it’s acting a lot like a wild stallion.

Alas, it is only too obvious that climate change is not a high priority, even as it turns chaotic and destructive enough to crush homeowners’ insurance in some regions of America. Only a few years ago, nobody suggested climate change would end up crushing the property insurance market: How Climate Risks Are Putting Home Insurance Out of Reach, YaleEnviroment360, d/d Sept. 15. 2025.

“After years underestimating the risks posed by climate-fueled disasters, the U.S. home insurance industry is in turmoil. In vulnerable areas, rising insurance costs are upending housing markets and communities, as homeowners scramble to try to find insurance they can afford,” Ibid.

OMG- What happens to property insurance at 2C?

The post China’s Coal, U.S. CO2 Stoke Global Warming appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

One month into the war in Iran, journalists and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, leftist, rightists, and independents should no longer be asking what this war is all about.

Sasan Fayazmanesh, in his March 13th piece in Counterpunch, made a convincing (and brave) argument that It’s Israel, Stupid. He just didn’t go far enough.

He rightly begins by posing the questions that seemed to have no coherent answer:

Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else?

He posits

The US attacked Iran for one reason and one reason only: Israel. Israel, created by the US and Europeans, has been urging the US for decades to wage a destructive war against Iran.”

Why? To achieve the Zionist goal of achieving a Greater Israel. But she omits Israel’s thirst for getting and controlling oil, harkening back to the presidency of George W. Bush and a revelation made to former NATO commander Wesley Clark immediately after 911. As I documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil, Clark in 2007 stated that a Pentagon official revealed to him in 2001 a plan to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan [all oil -related conflicts] and Iran. While on a book tour, Clark stated further that the Bush strategy was shaped around gaining control of Middle East oil resources, based on a plan by his neoconservative backers [some with dual US-Israeli citizenship] to “use US troops to secure access to these energy supplies abroad.”

Today Iran is the third largest owner of oil reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. This simple fact has not been adequately addressed by the media, which has focused on the dangers of blockading the Strait of Hormuz and seizing Kharg Island, resulting in the increase in the price of oil, and chronicling how both sides have bombed the others’ oil installations –without explaining the hidden context of competing petro powers seeking to command and control oil to adequately supply their militaries — and most recently, to use natural gas to power AI data centers.

Now, at last, Trump has let the cat out of the bag. Last week, amidst a throng of journalists assembled at a press conference following Trump’s meeting with his cabinet, one reporter raised his hand high and asked the forbidden question: “Do you want to control Iran’s oil?”

“That’s an option,” Trump replied. “But I wouldn’t talk about it.” For the next couple of days, he adhered to the traditional playbook of hiding any oil connection to US war plans, then spilled it out over the weekend, telling the Financial Times he could “take the oil in Iran” and seize the energy export hub of Kharg Island.

The fact is, aside from Israel’s territorial ambitions, oil has always been the cause of all the wars in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Location, Location

There is even an oil connection to the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 with the British supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was actually a simple letter by Lord Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, to Walter de Rothschild of Europe’s huge oil and banking dynasty. This small but significant detail is often absent from historical accounts on the founding of Israel, whose location, bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, made it a perfect terminal point for a pipeline carrying oil from Iraq. Provided, that is, European Jews could be relied on to protect the pipeline.

Why don’t people know this? Because the oil connection to war has been rigorously suppressed by all the nations that are, or aspire to be, great powers. They learned a big lesson from Germany’s defeat in World War I and World War II: its military ran out of gas.

Oil was, and still is, the fuel of the military, which makes it the most coveted resource on earth. Even if Country A has enough of it (as Trump is now arguing about US reserves) it has to worry about Enemy Country B (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, the BRICS alliance) getting other rich, untapped reserves. I call it The Great Game for Oil, and it’s getting more vicious than ever now that huge quantities of natural gas are being sought after to power AI data centers.

President Trump, no student of history, likely knows this fact because he talks to his oil donors frequently, assuring them he will make good on the millions they donated to his campaigns by going to war. He may try to disguise his true ambitions: beyond his moniker Drill Baby Drill, he strives to make billions while serving as Commander in Chief, bent on conquering the oil lands of the world.

At least Senator Ed Marke of Massachusetts revealed on March 27 that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had made billions for oil companies, causing their stocks to skyrocket.On March 27, he sent a letter to the CEOs of at five of the largest oil and gas companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP — demanding that “big oil and gas companies refrain from awarding executives profits generated from rising oil prices during Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

But even he missed a central fact. What wife or mother would accept sending her loved ones into harm’s way if an underlying purpose was to enrich oil companies and their government allies? This, and the need to fuel the military, is where pretexts come into play.

And here’s how Time Magazine, under the ownership of arch-conservative Henry Luce, demonized Iranian President Mohammed Mosadegh in 1952 before the CIA coup that overthrew him in 1953. His “crime” was nationalizing Iran’s oil.

The Iranian people have a long memory of this travesty, which brought the Shah onto the Peacock Throne. Who benefited from the coup? Nelson and David Rockefeller (see my previous substack on Iran)

WWI: When oil first reigned supreme

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the British Admiralty, made the fateful decision in 1911 to change his navy’s fuel from coal (of which Britain had plenty) to faster, more efficient, and cheaper oil (of which she had none). Britain, Churchill said ruefully, had no choice but to fight “on a sea of troubles” to get the oil Britian needed, but didn’t have.

That’s why seizing the oil of Iraq became Britain’s “first class war aim” during World War I. Once achieved, the next challenge was moving the oil to where it was needed. The victors of World War I knew how to do it: by pipeline.

The best route? Piping it to a terminal point on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, where warships could fuel up and tankers could transport it to European ports. The perfect location: Haifa, Palestine. Israeli scholar Bernard Aishai, author of The Tragedy of Zionism, has noted that “Haifa was an ideal port — and the natural place for a pipeline terminal bringing oil from the east.” Haifa was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews, but eventually would become primarily Jewish-controlled. What better way to ensure a pipeline’s safety than to colonize Palestine with European Jews who could be trusted to protect it against Muslim infidels?

The Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline. Built in 1934 but conceived after WWI. It was decomissioned in 1948 follow the creation of the state of Israel. Benjamin Netanyabu hoped to reopen it following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, bragging “Soon the oil will flow to Haifa.” But it hasn’t due to ongoing hostilities in the region. Source: Wikipedia

Trust me on this: My father’s mission, as head of U.S. counter-intelligence for the OSS and later CIG (Central Intelligence Group, both precursors of the CIA) )in the Middle East during WWII, wrote in 1943 that his most important mission was “to control the oil at all costs.” That was Saudi Oil, America’s prize possession, that was also going to be piped to the Eastern Mediterranean — either to Israel or Lebanon — by the Trans-Arabian pipeline. As the New York Times wrote on May 2, 1947, two weeks before my father died in a mysterious plane crash, “protection of that investment and its military and economic security that it represents inevitably will become one of the prime objectives of American foreign policy in this area, which has already become a pivot point of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West” –East meaning Russia.

This map, based on the 1947 New York Times article and map, shows the dotted projected route of the Trans-Arabian pipeline. It would end up in southern Lebanon instead of northern Lebanon, as pictured here. The solid pipelines were conceived after WWI, with the French controlling the nothern branch ending up in northern Lebanon and the British controlling the southern branch, terminating in Haifa, Palestine.

This game is still going on: Protection of oil at all costs. And at what cost in human lives and treasure?

Billions of dollars have poured into Israel over nearly eight decades to ensure the secure flow of oil — from Iraq and from Saudi Arabia — to the world. And although Netanyahu is now getting his way for his own expansionist schemes due to his close relationship with Trump, Trump will call the ultimate shots, because Big Oil trumps everything.

A few more nuggets from history

Traditional histories of the immediate post WWI period describe how France and England, the primary victors of their war to seize the oil of Turkey’s defeated Ottoman Empire, divided the rectangle of former Ottoman land stretching from Syria and Palestine through Mesopotamia (Iraq). Their 1920 agreement would come to be known as the San Remo Agreement. In those days, however, State Department documents more accurately termed it the San Remo Agreement on Oil. The reference would subsequently disappear from public discourse, as would 1920 references to U.S. foreign policy as “oleaginous diplomacy.”

Fast Forward to 1944. when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust managed to escape to Palestine. They were the first to hold aloft signs saying “No Blood for Oil,” protesting the Roosevelt Administration’s delay in rescuing Jews so as not to alienate King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, who objected to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and threatened the US’s exclusive and very lucrative oil concession.

Five years later, in 1949, the CIA overthrew Syria’s nationalist leader Shukri Quwatly, who opposed the Trans-Arabian pipeline traversing Syrian territory and terminating in Israel, (The pipeline would terminate in southern Lebanon, some 100 miles north of Israel.)

The daughter of a CIA spy, Anne Tazewell, takes us into Egypt and the mid 1950s in her book, A Good Spy Leaves No Trace: Big OIL:CIA Secrets and a Spy Daughter’s Reckoning. She uncovers a document likely by her father, that states “Our policy in the Middle East has been directed toward retaining the area within the free world, developing the oil resources.”

To be fair, the CIA in 2003 put President George W. Bush on notice that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not pose an imminent threat requiring an invasion, which Bush (junior oilman that he was) ignored. Same thing happened with Trump: US intelligence warning him that Iran did not pose an imminent threat. Generals also warned Trump about Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.

But now Trump is so locked-in, that he has now ordered over 10,000 American troups to the Middle East.

Yemen and the alternative to the Strait of Hormuz

Not addressed by media accounts is Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis with US backing. The Saudi plan: to build a Trans-Yemen pipeline that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz and carry Saudi oil down through southern Yemen terminating in the Gulf of Aden near the Arabian Sea.

The dotted line represents the projected Trans-Yemen pipeline, still projected, that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz on the east and the Bab al Mandab chokehold in the west. Apologies: for some reason the countries are not identified in this or the Saudi Trans-Arabian pipeline map, but they are in my book, Follow the Pipelines, published by Chelsea Green.

Trump, in 2019, vetoed a Yemen War Powers Act that would have ended US military involvement aimed at subduing the Houthis in this devastating war that caused an acute humanitarian crisis, including mass starvation in Yemen. As of March, 2025, the Saudis have been “insisting that the land the pipeline crosses be considered Saudi territory — a demand that local tribes have rejected.”

At the time of writing, Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iranian electric installations and Kharg Island if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. And Israel is expanding its bombing of Southern Lebanon, killing UN peacekeepers and three journalists. More than 1,200 people have been killed, including 120 children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry and UNICEF, while more than 1.2 million people have been forced out of their homes across the country.

And yes, there is an oil and gas connection to these incursions, as Netanyahu strives to establish an energy corridor along the entire eastern Mediterranean, tapping into $5 billion in oil and natural gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Stay tuned.

This first appeared on Charlotte Dennett’s Substack page, Cui Bono?

The post Behind the Iran War and All the Wars in the Middle East: Oil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ries Bosch.

Two nights ago, during his insane war speech on Iran the demented lunatic atop the US Empire claimed to have created the “highest ever” stock market. But within just minutes of his deranged speech, Newsweek reports, “futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all turned decisively negative, erasing earlier gains from the regular trading session and pushing markets toward fresh short-term lows.”

While stocks plummeted, oil prices surged, fueling further inflation, as I expected (this is why I filled my tank before the speech), adding to the affordability crisis that the orange-brushed madman has called a “hoax.”

The reasons for these rapid economic developments are not mysterious. A senior global investment manager told Reuters that Mein Trumpf provided “no additional certainty or clarity around timeline,” which is “what the market ​was looking for. The fact that we can expect 2-3 more weeks of action, ⁠boots ⁠on the ground were not ⁠ruled out ​and that threats to hit infrastructure were reiterated will put the market back on the ​defensive, particularly as we ⁠come into the long weekend.”

The Washington warmonger offered no well-defined strategy to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s leading oil and gas supply chokepoint. Telling European nations to send their navies and armies to the Persian Gulf to “just take the oil for yourselves,” the debased maniac said the strait would open “naturally” once the war ended – whenever that might be, after however much death, crippling, and destruction.

“They’re going to want to be able to sell oil, because that’s all they have to try and rebuild. It will resume the flowing and the gas prices will rapidly come back down, stock prices will rapidly go back up,” Jane Doe 4’s Rapist explained. So “we’ll see what happens,” but it’s all good: time to do a YMCA dance and focus more on wiping out what’s left of “democracy,” social justice, sanity, and rule of law in the imperial “homeland.”

The language of portfolio managers and oil traders is technical and anodyne, steering clear of the malevolent fallaciousness and violent psychosis of the Orange Monster’s speech. During his painfully delivered monotone address, the bloated and curiously pinkish war criminal let one lie after another slither off his satanic tongue:

+ “My first preference was always the path of diplomacy.” False.

+ “The regime continued their relentless quest for nuclear weapons and rejected every attempt at an agreement.” False.

+ “They were rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles, and would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland.” False.

+ “They were right at the doorstep [of developing] a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before.” False.

+ “Our objectives are very simple and clear.” False: Americans and the world have been consistently mystified and confused by the Epstein President’s shifting justifications and rationales, which have changed again and again from one day to the next. Last night – on April Fools Day! – was the first time the Amerikaner-in-Chief deigned to address the nation on the purported purpose of his arch-criminal unprovoked war, which opened with the slaughter of more than 100 Iranian school girls and has since butchered hundreds more children.

+ “We never said regime change.” False: the war opened with the Malignant One telling the Iranian people to rise up and form a new government!

+ “But regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. The new group is less radical and much more reasonable.” False: the old Islamist and nationalist regime has proved resilient, with new and hardened leaders in charge. By “reasonable,” the debased orange-faced child rapist means “ready to make a deal with me like Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez.” That’s not where the current regime is in light of America’s existential attack on their nation and their clear capacity to cripple world oil, gas, and fertilizer supplies.

+ Regarding “our allies in the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain,” the American Crime Boss said, “They’ve been great, and we will not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape or form.” False: the Trump fascist regime launched their criminal war without properly notifying most of the US Empire’s Gulf allies, who have been predictably and seriously damaged by justifiable Iranian retaliation provoked by America’s illegal and unprovoked war. Many in and atop these Gulf states are naturally angered by Washington’s brazen imperial recklessness and disregard.

+ The tangerine-tinted tyrant said that “the recent rise in gasoline prices here at home” is just a “short-term increase” that “has been entirely the result of the Iranian regime launching deranged terror attacks against commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict.” False: gas prices are going to be significantly escalated in US for a long time and this is the result of America’s supremely criminal and mass murderous war on Iran, which has naturally and predictably responded to this imperialist assault by using its strategic geographic position to close down the world’s leading oil and gas chokepoint.

+ “Iran will use [nuclear weapons] and will use them quickly.” False: there is no reason to believe that Iran is uniquely immune to nuclear deterrence and eager to commit national suicide by initiating a nuclear exchange. The real Iranian potential use of nuclear weapons that Washington and Tel Aviv have always feared is the capacity to deter US and Israeli imperialism, colonialism and terrorism in the Middle East.

· “Every single one of the” survivors of the 13 US military personnel killed in the criminal US war on Iran have come up the diseased fascist president and said “Please, sir, please finish the job…. every one of them.” Not a chance. Nobody should believe that grotesque story. That was a sick joke to put forward on April Fools’ Day.

+ “We are going to finish the job and we’re going to finish it very fast. We’re getting very close.” False: the imperialist regime in Washington has created yet another bloody quagmire based on the recurrent US imperial mistake that Washington can shape events across a giant and complex world through sheer simple military force, without serious political engagement and adult negotiation.

+ “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. Our armed forces have been extraordinary. There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about it.” False: history is full of stories of heavily armed empires rapidly overwhelming the military capabilities of weaker nations and peoples. This reaches far back before the modern era, well into the Bronze Age. But what “everyone is talking about,” so to speak, is less the awesomeness of US military power than the limits of that power in light of the Islamo-nationalist Iranian regime’s remarkable resilience and capacity to inflict retaliatory damage on US regional allies and the oil-and gas-dependent world economy. And this too – the limits of US military imperialism – is anything but a new story (the great radical historian Gabriel Kolko published and warned at length about the false promises of US global militarism as seen in US wars on Korea, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Iraq).

+ “The United States has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat. You all know that. We built the strongest economy in history. We’re going through it right now, the strongest in history. And one year we’ve taken a dead and crippled country. I hate to say that, but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation.” What the holy fuck. Inflation was persistent and rising under Trump47 even before the oil and gas/energy and fertilizer shock created by the Trump fascist regime’s criminal war. Wild asset inflation marked by a classic capitalist explosion of price-earning (PE) ratios was raising serious investor concerns about a coming major downward “market adjustment” potentially sparking a significant recession even more the Mad “King” launched his bloody “excursion.” The US imperial superpower was not “dead and crippled” before Herr Donald returned to power with no small help from the dismal Weimar Democratic party of passive resistance and inauthentic opposition. Saying that there’s been “no inflation” in Trump47s America is on par with saying that 2+2=5, that black is white, that “he who smelt it dealt it,” and that Simon/Big Brother Says!

+ “It all positioned us to get rid of a cancer that has long simmered. It’s known as the nuclear Iran, and they didn’t know what was coming. They’d never imagined it.” False: the repressive Islamo-fascist state of Iran (which should never be confused with forces of revolutionary emancipation) has long imagined the US-Israel attack and planned for it. It has operationalized a decentralized and multi-level response that has seriously damaged world energy markets and inflicted a global price shock through its drone, missile, mine, and speedboat capacities and its related hold over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is now incentivized even more than before to use its strategically scattered stocks of enriched uranium to threaten radioactive retaliation.

The leading long-simmering cancer facing humanity is not “nuclear Iran” but the eco-cidal system of capitalism-imperialism, whose top superpower the United States is under the command of deranged fascist maniacs. The US and its top rivals are in possession of thousands of nuclear warheads in an increasingly lawless and chaotic planet on the precipice of a potentially irreversible climate catastrophe that the US has long trailblazed with its lethal addiction to the environmentally exterminist mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The top threat to use nuclear weapons in the region is of course the US ally Judeo fascist Isreal, which is currently replicating its Gaza genocide in southern Lebanon, and is unofficially equipped with hundreds of thermonuclear weapons capable of turning the Middle East into an atomic ash heap many times over. The Red Hat POTUS’s boasting about the United States’ unmatched oil and gas production last night (“we have so much gas …buy oil from the USA, we have so much”) is akin to a heroin dealer boasting of his leading customers’ remarkable highs: the substance he’s promoting for use and sale is certain to cancel all prospects for a decent future. His call for other nations to join the fight to military bloodily pry oil and gas flows out of the Persian Gulf (and the Red Sea) is an invitation to heightened civilizational collapse and a bid to expand the war to involved nuclear weapons and other nuclear superpowers.

Beneath all the lies, the most remarkable thing about Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s sickening Address to the Nation last night was its sheer savagery. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong…If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it and it would be gone”

Read that again: “back to Stone Ages where they belong.”

Read it one more time.

That is a promise to inflict genocidal civilization collapse. That is a promise of collective punishment, an epic crime against humanity rightly punishable by death. Can you smell the stench of the virulent Western racism rising up from “where they belong”?!

+++

Oh, by the way, Trump’s speech last night was his second menacing and insane address on Fascist Fools Day. NBC reports:

‘President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending. The president’s remarks were delivered to attendees at a private Easter luncheon at the White House, where Trump also accused Democratic-led states of fraud.

He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, “don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.”

Later in his remarks, the president added that states would have to raise their taxes to pay for child care costs and that the federal government, “could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up” for it.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”’

Again, dear readers, I ask you to read that again.

One more time. Let that sink in.

Americans, we are running out of excuses for not taking to the streets and town squares every day and every night, not just once every four and half months, calling (for starters) for the immediate end of the vile exterminist regime sitting atop your superpower nation – and then the system that gave rise to that regime.

The post “Back to the Stone Ages”: Donald Trump’s Vicious Fools’ Day Speeches appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image Source: The National Archives UK – Public Domain

The echoes of 1960s Harlem—free breakfasts, Black Panther patrols, school protests and strikes—returned as I watched modern Black Panthers confront ICE outside Philadelphia City Hall. A late-January 2026 documentary from Radio-Canada followed their patrols and confrontations with officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The report brought back memories of the movement’s heyday in the 1960s, when I was an honorary member.

The history of the Black Panthers is deeply tied to protests for civil and political rights, particularly for Black Americans, but also for other marginalized communities. Founded in 1966, the original Black Panther Party sought to challenge systemic racism, police brutality, and economic injustice while providing essential community programs such as free breakfasts for children, health clinics, and educational initiatives. Their work was a direct response to the failures of official institutions to ensure basic living standards—housing, employment, education, medical care, and public safety—which disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods, such as Harlem, then home to one of the largest Black urban communities in the United States.

There were leaders who defined the era, their images posted everywhere in the ‘hood. John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, refusing induction into the army during the Vietnam War, declaring, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Huey P. Newton co-founder with Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, leading armed patrols in Oakland. Malcolm X, champion of Black empowerment and the role of Islam in the community, addressing a rally, fist raised, demanding freedom and respect for Black Americans.

And my honorary membership? My own connection to that movement began not through activism, but through teaching. My membership was a recognition of shared commitment to uplift and protect a community that was officially overlooked. Having failed to qualify as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War because I swore to defend my mother if she was attacked—at the time, both pacifism and religious affiliation were required for conscientious objector status—I volunteered to teach in a public school in New York City as an unofficial form of alternate service. For three years, I worked in an elementary school in Harlem in the experimental I.S. 201 Community Control School District. As part of a decentralization initiative, the New York City Board of Education designated two districts to be run by local communities, operating with reduced oversight from the central board and outside some teachers’ union rules. Many of the schools received support from the Ford Foundation. At the time, the experiment was unusual and politically controversial.

Most of my fourth-grade pupils participated in Black Panther after-school activities, and I am sure many of their parents were members as well. Through my activities outside the classroom—rent strikes, demonstrations against Harlem Hospital, trips around New York City and beyond, visits with students and families to the Apollo Theater, lots of basketball after school—I became as integrated into the community as much as a young white college graduate could be.

I was often greeted early in the morning on my way to school by a chorus of locals waiting for the grocery store to open by: “A visitor from another planet,” as I stepped off the subway at 125^th Street.

One of my students suggested that I become an honorary member of the Black Panthers. There was no formal ceremony—no medal or certificate—but it was understood and acknowledged that I was part of a community trying to ensure that the people in the Harlem neighborhood where I taught could live with dignity. The official institutions responsible for basic living standards—housing, employment, security, medical care, and religious support—had largely given up on achieving these goals.

It was up to the community members—which was the entire idea behind having a school district run by the community—to take care of themselves. That is why the Black Panther slogan, “Power to the People,” resonated so strongly at the time. It represented self-defense and self-governance in response to the neglect (cops sleeping on duty), police brutality and inter-community violence, or the downright corruption of the given power structures.

This ethos is well shown in the Canadian documentary. Modern Black Panthers ride the subways to protect passengers and patrol streets where crimes have been committed. “We patrol to defend citizens against police violence,” said the group’s spokesperson, Paul Birdsong, in the context of the Radio-Canada piece. He added, “We never attack first. But if you shoot at us once, then I’ll shoot at you thirty times.” In one scene in the documentary, police officers step back as a group of armed Panthers enter a subway car carrying weapons to protect vulnerable passengers.

Watching modern Black Panthers patrol Philadelphia in 2026 revived that sense of continuity. The principles I witnessed and embraced as an honorary member decades ago are alive today in new forms. Panther-inspired groups now operate in several American cities besides Philadelphia—including Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago—showing that the movement’s language of community self-defense and empowerment continues to resonate decades after the original party’s decline. While these groups draw on the symbolism and community principles of the original Panthers, they operate independently and vary widely in tactics and structure.

The slogan “Power to the People” remains relevant: it is not merely a chant, but a call to action, a reminder that when institutions fail, communities must organize to protect themselves.

Is mine a misplaced nostalgia? The revival of protest culture is not limited to street patrols. Recently, protesters demonstrated for cultural freedom outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As reported by The Guardian, Jane Fonda spoke, Joan Baez joined singer Maggie Rogers for a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” followed by a cappella performance of the civil-rights anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round.” Moments like this suggest that the cultural voice of protest, which once energized movements in the 1960s, still echoes today, however faint and limited.

What happened to the Black Panthers after the 1960s? By the mid-1970s, the original Black Panther Party had largely disbanded, due to intense government repression, internal conflicts, and sustained surveillance and disruption by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Many members faced imprisonment, exile, or violent attacks; key leaders like Fred Hampton were killed in police raids, and chapters across the country struggled to sustain their community programs amid legal and political pressure.

Despite this, the ideas and initiatives of the Black Panthers—self-defense, community empowerment, and social justice—left a lasting legacy, inspiring subsequent generations of activists. Seeing the modern Black Panthers in Philadelphia in 2026 patrolling neighborhoods and subways to protect citizens from ICE and violence, makes clear that the spirit of the movement endures. The organization itself may have been suppressed, but its central demand remains. When institutions fail, communities still insist on the same principle the Black Panthers proclaimed sixty years ago: Power to the People.

The post Harlem, the Black Panthers, and the Return of “Power to the People” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Jorge Rafael Videla assumes power after the March 1976 coup in Argentina. Public domain.

It has been fifty years since the coup d’état of 24 March 1976, one of the most tragic chapters in Argentina’s recent history: a dictatorship that combined state terrorism with a structural transformation of its economy. Throughout the 20th century, the country experienced six interruptions of its democratic order—in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976—but the last coup ushered in the most violent cycle. In coordination with other dictatorships in the Southern Cone and with the backing of the United States government, the military regime carried out a systematic plan of repression, disappearance, and social discipline.

The figures serve to illustrate the magnitude of the horror: 30,000 disappeared persons, more than 900 clandestine detention, torture, and extermination centers, around 500 appropriated infants, and nearly half a million exiles. Far from being isolated excesses, these crimes constituted a deliberate state policy. They were not deviations from a system, but its language. Violence was not an excess; it was the method. Repression was coordinated on a regional scale through Operation Condor, which integrated Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia into a system of transnational persecution. Violence did not merely seek to eliminate opponents: it aimed to dismantle social organizations, weaken the capacity for collective resistance, and impose a new order. The dictatorship did not merely shut down democracy: it reconfigured the country’s productive structure. The objective was to replace an industrial model oriented toward the domestic market with one based on financial speculation, external openness, and indebtedness.

Within this framework, one of the most profound regressive redistributions of income in Argentine history took place. Workers’ share of national income fell from 45 percent to 25 percent between 1976 and 1977. The 1978 devaluation further eroded wages, while between 1976 and 1983 more than 20,000 factories closed and industrial employment declined steadily. The attack on the world of work was systematic. Labor rights were eliminated, union activity was curtailed, and the capacity for collective bargaining was weakened—effects that persisted even after the return to democracy. At the same time, the foreign debt multiplied, exceeding $45 billion, money that was largely used to finance capital flight. A substantial portion of the private debt was also nationalized, shifting its costs to society as a whole.

The social consequences were immediate: between 1974 and 1982, poverty rose from 4.6 percent to 22 percent, GDP per capita fell by 14 percent, and industry contracted by 15 percent. Thus, a primary-sector-based economic model was consolidated, one dependent on external financing and vulnerable to international cycles. The legacy of that process was not merely economic. It also left behind a power structure that shaped the country’s development for decades, with the International Monetary Fund operating as a central actor in the management of debt and its political consequences.

Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the most important writer in Argentine literature, attended a session of the historic trial of the military juntas held in 1985, where the phrase that would become a slogan and symbol of the struggle of human rights organizations worldwide was coined: Never Again. That day, he heard the courageous testimony of Víctor Basterra. Abducted in 1979 along with his wife and daughter, Basterra was taken to ESMA, the country’s largest clandestine detention center. A graphic arts worker, he endured torture during his captivity and managed, in secret, to take and safeguard photographs of both other detainees and his captors. Those images were and remain key to the convictions of the military personnel in the trials that continue to this day. After listening to him, and moved by that experience, Borges masterfully described the cynicism and cruelty of the torturers:

Of the many things I heard that afternoon and hope to forget, I will recount the one that affected me most, to free myself from it. It happened on December 24. They took all the prisoners to a room where they had never been before. Not without some astonishment, they saw a long table set. They saw tablecloths, porcelain plates, cutlery, and bottles of wine. Then the delicacies arrived. It was Christmas Eve dinner. They had been tortured and knew full well they would be tortured the next day. The Lord of that Hell appeared and wished them a Merry Christmas.

Half a century after the dictatorship began, the economic course of Javier Milei’s government continues along the same path set by the military regime. The plans seem to be carbon copies of those of the dictatorship, and the persistence of a program that reproduces a familiar pattern with dire consequences for workers and their families is evident: concentration of wealth, indebtedness, deindustrialization, and deterioration of living conditions. This is not merely an economic program, but the dominance of the same economic groups that steer the country’s course according to their own interests.

The link between Washington and Buenos Aires is once again taking shape under a logic of dependency rooted in the last dictatorship. What has happened in Argentina cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a regional pattern in which various Latin American countries seek to be reintegrated into the global economy under conditions of dependency, through cycles of indebtedness and austerity.

However, Argentina’s history is also one of resistance. Fifty years after the coup, the memory of the 30,000 disappeared and the persistence of human rights organizations continue to serve as an ethical and political foundation from which broad sectors of society challenge the country’s direction.

This article was written by Globetrotter.

The post Fifty Years Since Argentina’s Darkest Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Hesan Mohamadi.

What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.

The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.

Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.

The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.

For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.

Oil and the Engine of Empire

While the post-9/11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of U.S. militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of U.S. policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.

Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.

The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 U.S.-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.

Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the United States ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to British Petroleum.

Despite his staunchly nationalist rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London, and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured continued access to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless influx of U.S. weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, SAVAK, would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.

Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “island of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “twin pillar strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal backing of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, demonstrating how U.S. policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.

But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of Shi’ism and the political rhetoric of opposition to the Shah, the United States, and Israel.

In the U.S., those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent victims of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed civilizational conflict with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”

Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality — that the U.S. had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in other parts of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 acknowledged, the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as President George W. Bush had reductively claimed, but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001, were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.

Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf

Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.

In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the U.S. on a collision course in the region. The Carter Doctrine declared the Persian Gulf a “vital interest” of the United States, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The United States, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.

The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from East and Southeast Asia as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As Andrew Bacevich observed in his book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, if you were to measure U.S. involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980 almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the “Greater Middle East.”

Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be vastly greater. Over the past several decades U.S.-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of millions of people and the displacement of tens of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.

Proxy Wars and the Escalation Trap

The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the United States would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.

In Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein opposed the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi’a state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime that ruled over a Shi’a majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to exploit what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.

Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with similar alarm. In the capital Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary Shi’ism might threaten the legitimacy of the kingdom’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi’a revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi’a workers faced economic exploitation and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.

The United States responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and support to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country that began in December 1979.

The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden similar currents within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.

In Iraq, the U.S. publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed war in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah, which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi’a communities against Israeli military aggression and sectarian violence.

By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spill-over, the administration of President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington’s “War on Terror.” In April of that year, Reagan launched airstrikes in the dense heart of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for armed movements from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican Army.

That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the Bush Doctrine: the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal, or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As Daniel Ellsberg observed then (a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered similar strikes on Libya in 2011), it seemed that the U.S. had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with U.S. state-sponsored terrorism.”

In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The U.S.-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to Al-Qaeda in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996 and the failed 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Gulf War of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran’s regional influence but contributed to the emergence of the Islamic State. In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut, the deadliest day for U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima.

The Lesson Not Learned

The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government’s persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to U.S. policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.

There is little reason to believe that Donald Trump’s war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal, and immoral. We must oppose it for the sake of our common humanity, but also for our own sake.

After all, history tells us one thing: when we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post The Price of Empire and the Costs of War on Iran appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

What Clean Energy Transition?

Steve Hendricks

A pox of optimism has infected climate reporting in late years, and one of the Iran War’s unremarked casualties is that it has only furthered the scourge. Perhaps you know the sort of reports I’m referring to, the sanguine dispatches telling us that our long-overdue divorce from fossil fuels may be behind schedule, but the “dire predictions about renewable energy were all wrong,” for we have embarked at last upon a “clean energy boom” that, rather unexpectedly, is “arriving faster than you think,” indeed is now “unstoppable.” Decarbonization, we are assured, lies no longer around the next bend. “The renewables future has arrived.”

The most influential traffickers in this line are The New Yorker’s Bill McKibben and the New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells. “The clean energy transition,” McKibben wrote last fall, “is not destined to be the slow, dragged-out affair that most analysts would have predicted even five years ago.” Instead, we’ve entered “a kind of mind-blowing virtuous cycle” in which solar and wind power are getting so much cheaper and more efficient that governments and corporations can’t resist tapping into them. Wallace-Wells, taking the war-fueled surge in oil prices as his cue, declaresthat “green energy has been a dizzying, ecstatic success” and that we are now smack “in the middle” of the switch to renewables. Such optimistic chords reverberate all down the chain of liberal and left media. “Everywhere, the world is turning to renewables,” a lead story in CounterPunch averred last month. With the disruptions of the Iran War, “Perhaps we are finally seeing the end of oil.”

There’s just one problem with all these gladsome reports: The evidence to support them is witheringly thin. We are nowhere near the middle of a green transition, global emissions have yet to decline by a single gram of carbon, and the end of oil, far from nigh, remains well out of sight.

One chart tells the story. Below, courtesy of Our World in Data, is the bleak totting-up of all the energy that humankind has used over the last two and a quarter centuries.

What is striking about this chart is not merely that carbon-free renewables make up so small a share of today’s energy mix—about one-seventh—but that the growth in renewables has done nothing to halt the overall rise of fossil fuels. At best, renewables have only slightly slowed that rise. The only carbon-based fuel we’re burning less of these days, and very marginally less at that, is traditional biomass, mostly wood. Our burning of coal may—emphasize, may—be approaching a leveling off, but our extraordinary use of that fuel almost certainly won’t dip substantially for years, and even then forecasters expect not a plunge but a very long, slow decline across many decades. Meanwhile oil and gas are going great guns and by any dispassionate forecast will keep blazing, year on year, for decades.

In short, while renewables are indeed growing, their growth has not yet spurred an energy transition. They’ve simply added to our ever-burgeoning energy expansion.

Lest you think I’ve cherry picked my chart, you can find much the same narrative from other credible sources freely available online. Below, for example, is a comparable chart from the International Energy Agency, which shows (in different units, across a shorter span of time, and treating supply rather than consumption) that we are producing roughly one and half times the carbon-based fuel that we were producing just thirty years ago, with no sign of a letup. Squint and you just might see the minutely increasing slice of renewables sandwiched among all that carbon.

The terrifyingly inconvenient truth that leaps off graphs like these is that we are still unmistakably barreling, if you’ll forgive the pun, toward a grim new climate, possibly even our worst-case scenario: a rise in global temperatures of 4°C to 5°C (7.2°F to 9.0°F) by early next century.

But how can this be? Isn’t it true, to take just one thread of the energy tapestry, that the burning of coal has fallen in the last two decades by roughly half in the US and to virtually nothing in the UK?

Yes, that’s true. But it’s also not true. What is true is that the coal burned within the territorial confines of the US and UK has fallen by those amounts. But no country’s economy is confined to its own borders, certainly no country as rich as the US or UK. So it is also true that the US and UK are burning just as much coal as ever, only they’re burning it in the vast extraterritorial labor camp known as the Global South. Keats’s “dark Satanic Mills” are still burning coal, still churning out the goods that keep western lifestyles afloat, only at different latitudes.

China burns the most staggering heaps of coal, and although the growth curve is flattening, we can’t be sure when it will decrease. India and Indonesia also burn coal willy-nilly and are forecast to burn ever and ever more for decades. A recent report concluded that India could more than double—double—the coal it burns by mid-century. This is a high-end estimate, but even the lesser projections make forbidding reading. If you can believe the forecasters, whenever coal finally does peak in China, India, and Indonesia, it will make up a sizeable share of their fuel supplies until late in the century.

The story for other fuels is just as bleak. Oil and natural gas look likely to peak in China and India in the 2030s but are still expected to be used in dreadful quantities for decades, just as they will be in the US and many other rich countries. Nearly everywhere, oil and gas are likely to be in the mix for most of the century.

And that may not be the worst of it. Bad as the forecasts are, few of them fully account for—because few forecasters have any idea how to account for—the obscene surge in AI data centers with their ravenous appetite for power. AI might not merely rearrange the climate chessboard; it could overturn it altogether.

+++

You may ask why, despite the growth in renewables, we keep burning more carbon than ever. The answer is simple: We—and here We means both the great mass of people and the tiny sliver of elites who run the world—have used every advance in renewables to consume more rather than less. Rooftop solar panels are all well and good, but the SUV (or two) in the garage of the 3,000-square-foot house, the vacations in Bali and Dalmatia, and the thrice daily meat and milk make a mockery of the panels. The equivalent profligacy by corporations is of course exponentially worse than any individual decadence.

So why, then, do so many of my fellow commentators and reporters, many of them good of heart and noble of intent, tell us we’re deep into the salvation of an energy transition?

Before I answer, let me note that some reporters do nod in this direction. “New power changes the existing system only on the margins,” Wallace-Wells allowed recently. “[N]ew green energy has mostly supplemented rather than displaced fossil fuels.”

But the trouble is that such sentences are so very few and far between, and so lightly played, they don’t begin to balance the heady tumble of paragraphs about the gathering tsunami of renewables. The inescapable implication is that whatever nits one may pick just now, they will momentarily be swept away by the indomitable green wave.

So why do journalists paint so optimistic a picture? I see four reasons. The first is that with stakes so horrific—we are talking, after all, about whether organized human existence can even survive, let alone thrive, in a +4°C world—few people care to face the facts. A whole academic literature has blossomed around the idea that rather than depress people into inertia with doomsaying, activists and journalists should attend to the upside of the green transition. It’s a strategy McKibben has evidently taken to heart, and Wallace-Wells has freely acknowledged that after writing grimly about the intransigence of politicians, a handful of climate ministers took him to task and suggested he write instead about “something that looks much more like progress.” And so he has. Whether this is a good strategy for activism, I can’t say. But it is not good journalism.

The second reason for the undue optimism is that everyone who gains by capitalism and its endless consumption has a potent incentive to swallow good news about it. In the West, that’s nearly everyone. Few Americans, reporters included, are eager to give up their SUVs or cheeseburgers, and few news outlets care to forgo the ad revenue from hawkers of those so-called goods. Not that reporters outright lie to us. Instead they merely tout the boom in renewable electricity, which is indeed cause for (restrained) celebration. What they don’t say, or say only fleetingly, is that electricity remains a modest piece of the current energy puzzle and that the great majority of our factories, cars, trucks, planes, ships, and furnaces run on coal, oil, or gas—and will for some time.

The third reason for the cheerleading is that many observers who have paid long and painful attention to the climate catastrophe have grown demoralized by the failure of politics. Our decades of marches and speeches and reports have moved not a single powerful government to take the bold action needed to avert disaster. Now, of a sudden, plummeting solar and wind prices have made the most astonishing end run around government. What activism so long failed to achieve, the law of supply and demand—the magic of the marketplace, in the old libertarian phrase—has done overnight. The rout of politics by economics has proven as inspiriting as it is unexpected. How often, after all, have impersonal economic forces helped people and planet? But there’s peril in this celebratory thinking, for its implies—sometimes this is flatly stated—that the problem is solving itself and climate activism is less necessary than ever before. Yet as the charts above attest, nothing could be further from the truth.

The fourth and more occult reason for the journalistic immoderation is that almost nobody understands the history of energy transitions. Better said, nobody understands that we’ve never had one. Not once when humans have found a new fuel has the happy discovery prompted us to abandon the previous fuel. Instead, we’ve just kept burning it. You’d hardly know this from conventional histories of energy, which almost always tell a story that goes like this: Once upon a time humans burned biomass, mostly wood, for their heating and cooking. But then we discovered coal and gradually abandoned wood. Later we found oil, and we began the long but certain transition away from coal. Shortly afterward we discovered natural gas, which helped accelerate the transition from coal. Thus energy historians write of a Wood Age, a Coal Age, an Oil Age, and an Oil and Gas Age. This thinking has seeped into the minds of environmental reporters and, to a degree, the public. It makes an energy transition seem a straightforward process, like swapping a wood stove for a coal furnace.

But take a look again at that first chart, and what do you see? Coal didn’t replace wood. Not at all. We just kept burning wood alongside coal. And when oil came along, oil didn’t replace coal. We kept burning that too. Nor did natural gas ease out coal. And renewables aren’t replacing any of it, not globally anyway. We’re just using more of almost everything we can get our hands on.

The story of why we have done so is soberingly told by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in his superb More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2025). It’s a bit of a twisting tale, but a big part of it is that once a fuel becomes widely used in a complex economy, it gets so embedded in everything that it’s hard to eliminate when a new fuel comes along. Another part of the tale is that new fuels create new industries that are necessarily fueled in part (often a large part) by the old fuels.

Take the appearance of coal toward the end of the so-called Wood Age. When coal first boomed in the mid-1800s, many households nonetheless continued to burn wood because it was either cheaper than coal or readier to hand. Wood was also essential for mining coal and for building the industries that coal begat. Whole forests were logged for the millions of framing timbers that kept mine shafts and tunnels from caving in and, a little later, for the billions of sleepers underlying railroad tracks. (Railroads were both created by coal and essential for its widespread diffusion.) When the wooden members of the mines and rails reached the end of their lives, they were pulled, burned for fuel, and replaced by a new batch of timber—the whole cycle starting again.

Today’s story is different only in its particulars, not its outcome. Whole forests are now razed to make the shipping pallets and cardboard boxes that are vital to global capitalism, and when they reach the end of their lives, they’re often burned for fuel. We’ve also never abandoned wood for home heating and cooking. The wood stoves of today are more efficient than those of yore and make up a much smaller share of heating and cooking, but because our one billion people in 1800 have become eight billion today, far more of us—on the order of two billion or so—use wood for heating or cooking.

A like story can be told for oil and gas. Oil and gas may have supplanted coal for transport and heating a century ago, but coal is still baked into those industries. To make our innumerable cars, trucks, trains, ships, furnaces, and boilers requires massive amounts of steel, both for the machines themselves and for the infrastructure they demand: mining equipment to extract raw materials, factories to put the pieces together, railways and bridges to move everything, and on and on. Making high-quality steel requires massive amounts of coal—no electric-powered process is half so good—so as our oil- and gas-burning machines have run riot, coal has too.

In short, an energy transition—any energy transition, not just the renewables transition—is not at all as straightforward as swapping a wood stove for a coal furnace. In fact it’s so untidy and convoluted, we’ve yet to pull one off.

But for all that, it’s true that much of what now runs on wood, coal, oil, or gas could, with sufficient political will, run on sun, wind, or water. But by no means all of it, no time soon anyway. You can power a house with solar panels and batteries, but the steel in those devices will have to be forged for the foreseeable future in a coal-fired steelworks. And while a half-ton battery can power your one-ton car, the physics don’t scale up to getting a fifty-ton passenger jet off the ground or moving a ship with a hundred thousand tons of cargo across an ocean. Someday, hydrogen generated by renewable electricity or another innovation may power planes, ships, and steelworks, but such technologies are in their tender youth. We are decades from the grail of net zero.

I take no joy in reciting these unkind facts, but front them we must. To perpetuate the delusion that we’re deep into a transition to clean energy, that a politics-free rush to bargain-priced renewables will save the day—is saving the day even now—is to tranquilize ourselves when we desperately need to wake up, raise hell, and put an almighty fear in the moguls orchestrating our destruction. Only then will we stand a chance of upending fossil fuels, reining in our own ecocidal excess, and mitigating the climate holocaust already enveloping us.

The post What Clean Energy Transition? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Cuban mission in Angola was named Operation Carlota, in homage of the enslaved woman who led a rebellion in Matanzas against slavery during the Year of the Lash (1843-44). When Africa needed help, Cuba answered the call.

Today, Cuba needs solidarity. It has been under an illegal blockade for nearly seventy years and now for several months has been under a genocidal oil blockade. The United States has prevented all energy lifelines from entering Cuba, blocking ships from Venezuela and Mexico and threatening to sanction freight and insurance companies that assist Cuba. Blackouts plague the island nation of ten million people, whose ability to live their bare life has been called into question. This is an emergency. There is no other way to describe it.

Angola is one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil and—at its Luanda Refinery—it produces refined oil products. The oil in Angola is owned by the state company, Sonangol, which has contracts with a range of Western oil firms from TotalEnergies (France), Eni (Italy) and Chevron (United States)—all countries that defended its enemies during the war. Angola’s offshore reserves have made it a key player in global energy markets. Oil revenues have transformed Luanda into a city of obvious contrasts: gleaming skyscrapers alongside informal settlements, with the wealth of the oil unevenly distributed, and the development of the country hamstrung by structural inequalities. The MPLA has governed the country since 1975, although this is not the MPLA that fought alongside the Cubans till 1988. José Eduardo dos Santos, who led the country from 1979 to 2017, abandoned Marxism and shaped the oil industry and privatized lucrative state assets to benefit a small rentier elite (including his family).

Despite the limitations of the situation in Angola, in 2015, the government of Angola erected a large bronze statue at Cuito Cunavale that depicts an Angolan (MPLA) soldier and a Cuban soldier standing across from each other and together holding up a map of Angola. It is a powerful symbol of the reality of how Angola won its sovereignty—with Angolan and Cuban sacrifice and struggle. Without Cuba’s intervention, it is entirely plausible that Angola would have fallen under the control of forces aligned with apartheid South Africa and Western interests, its resources extracted under conditions far less favorable to its people. The oil that Angola now sells on the global market might never have been under Angolan control at all. In this context, the question of Angola providing oil to Cuba is not merely economic, but historical and moral.

Both the MPLA and Angola’s government have condemned the illegal US blockade against Cuba. In September 2025, Angola’s President João Lourenço said that the “unjust and prolonged” blockade which causes serious harm to the Cuban people must be “unconditionally lifted.” Since then, the US has only tightened its grip on the Cuban economy.

A Russian oil tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, arrived in Matanzas (Cuba) on 30 March to break the siege. That tanker is named after a famous Soviet jurist who was one of the men who drafted the UN treaty on the Laws of the Seas (1982) and who sat on the International Court of Justice. Perhaps the Russians wanted to send a message about international law when they selected that tanker to carry oil to Cuba against the illegal US blockade. Perhaps President Lourenço can provisionally rename one of the Angolan oil tankers Carlotain honor of the Cuban operation that helped in his country’s liberation. Sonangol would face legal challenges, but so be it: Cuba surmounted any number of threats and challenges to assist Angola, and then left without asking for anything.

History does not move along neat moral lines. It is jagged, contradictory, and often indifferent to the sacrifices made in its name. Yet there are moments when the ledger of history becomes clear enough that we can speak, without hesitation, of obligation—of debts incurred not through coercion, but through solidarity. The relationship between Cuba and Angola is one such moment. It is a relationship forged not in trade agreements or diplomatic formalities, but in blood, in sacrifice, and in a shared commitment to the liberation of Africa from colonial and apartheid domination.

We live in a time when the language of solidarity has been hollowed out, replaced by the technocratic vocabulary of ‘partnerships’ and ‘investments.’ Yet the history of Cuba and Angola reminds us that another kind of relationship is possible—one based not on extraction or profit, but on mutual commitment to human dignity. Cuba did not send its sons and daughters to Angola because it expected oil in return. It did so because it believed that the freedom of Angola was inseparable from its own revolutionary ideals. That belief, whatever one thinks of it, had real consequences. It changed the course of history in southern Africa. Today, Angola can respond—not out of obligation imposed from outside, but out of a recognition of shared history. To provide oil to Cuba would be to say that the sacrifices of the past are not forgotten, that internationalism is not a relic, and that the Global South can still act in ways that defy the narrow logic of profit.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post Angola’s Debt to Cuba is Unfinished appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

One of many bloodied backpacks found in the rubble of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, after the US missile attack of Feb. 28, 2026. Embroidery: @PritiGCox.

Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that

A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.

Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”

For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians

At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”

On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.

Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”

Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.

Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”

As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.

And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”

“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!

“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”

Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.

Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to himsuggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:

If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . .  proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . .

Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”

By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.”

Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war,

The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.

“A Gift to Our Country”

Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.

More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”

He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”

Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”

In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of  Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.”

Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.

Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.

+++

Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.

After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.

Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.

The post Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

AI on Time Magazine cover, Feb. 27 / March 6, 2023. The AI Arms Race is Changing Everything. Wikipedia. Public Domain

Prologue

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the artificial product of machines. It is not intelligence. Intelligence is a virtue shared by humans and other animals. Intelligence requires a healthy brain and, with humans, the virtues of justice, moderation and wisdom. No machine or technology, no matter the amount of technical data or knowledge it possesses, can exercise intelligence, that is, make an intelligent decision, which is just and good. It has no ethical standards and is devoid of justice, wisdom or civilization. But machine AI can easily target and kill humans and nature.

Existential threats

AI is a military technology designed to kill. Yet this technology’s varieties for non-military purposes are so profitable for tech corporations that tens of billions are invested for its further development. America, China, Russia, India, and other countries have transformed their image to one of prosperity and military might. A newspaper, which is one of the many advocates of AI, described it as “America’s most innovative and globally competitive industry.”

On March 12, 2023, hundreds of scientists and AI leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, issued a warning in the form of an open letter, Pause Giant AI Experiments. The letter warned:

“AI labs [are] locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.

“Contemporary AI systems are now [in 2023] becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects….We agree [we need to act]. That point is now.

“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium…. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.”

These unpredictable black-box models are also disturbing and harming millions of people. Experts call chatbots sycophantic. In other words, these machines have been designed to decieve, boosting the weaknesses of millions of humans that treat the machines like partners, telling them secrets and asking them for advice. Chatbots return the favors by flattering their low-intelligent human “friends.” “AI chatbots are suck-ups, and that may be affecting your relationships…. As millions of people turn to AI for companionship and guidance, that agreeableness may pose a subtle but serious threat.”

Bernie Sanders: Watch out: AI comes from billionaires

These broad adverse effects of the AI mania and, particularly, the open letter fired up Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. He is also convinced that AI hides dangers with extreme consequences. Undermining the education of children, for example. Giant tech companies deceived schools in spending tens of billions for gadgets like iPads and AI chatbots that, in fact, did not raise the intelligence or education standards of the students.. UNESCO, in fact, warned that the overreliance on AI digital technologies harmed students, making learning more difficult.

Artificial intelligence in America is already threatening and harming working people, weakening even more state governments and the federal government and adding illusions of global hegemony to the military.

All these effects could wreck civilization. In 2023, AI was not exactly the picture-perfect tech lobbyists wanted Americans to see. “The push to develop more powerful chatbots has led to a race that could determine the next leaders of the tech industry. But these tools have been criticized for getting details wrong and their ability to spread misinformation…. For years, many A.I. researchers, academics, and tech executives, including Mr. Musk, have worried that A.I. systems could cause even greater harm. Some are part of a vast online community called rationalists or effective altruists who believe that A.I could eventually destroy humanity.”

This emerging grim reality motivated Senator Sanders. In other words, Sanders was convinced that AI served no useful purpose. On March 24, 2026, he delivered a powerful and eloquent speech in the US Senate. He highlighted the threats and dangers of AI. He said:

“This [is] the most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country, with Congress and the American people [being] very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming. Congress and the American public have not a clue about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution.

“This is a revolution which will bring unimaginable changes to our world:

“This is a revolution which will impact our economy with massive job displacement.

“It will threaten our democratic institutions.

“It will impact our emotional well-being and what it even means to be a human being. It will impact how we educate and raise our kids. It will impact the nature of warfare, something we are seeing right now in [the war Israel and the US are fighting in] Iran.

“Further, and frighteningly, some very knowledgeable people fear that what was once seen as science fiction could soon become a reality. And that is that super intelligent AI could become smarter than human beings, could become independent of human control, and pose an existential threat to the entire human race. In other words, human beings could actually lose control over the planet.

“And in the midst of all of that, all of this transformative change, what I have to tell you is that the United States Congress hasn’t a clue, not a clue, as to how to respond to these revolutionary technologies and protect the American people. And it’s not only not having a clue, but they’re [also] out busy raising money all day long from AI and their super PACs”

Sanders does not mince words. He accused high tech executives of putting profits over safety, civilization and survival. He included the following AI corporate owners: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel for funding the development of more hazardous versions of AI. “All of these people,” he said, “are multi-billionaires who, if they are successful at AI, will become even richer and more powerful than they are today.”

Sanders quoted verbatim the defining notions the tech executives have about their AI product: Elon Musk: “AI and robots will replace all jobs. All jobs. Working will be optional.” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic: “AI could displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years…. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” The rest of the billionaires offered similar cosmic threatening visions. But Mark Zuckerberg, Sanders said, “is building a data center in the state of Louisiana, a data center that is the size of Manhattan, that will use three times the quantity of electricity that the entire city of New Orleans uses every year.” (Emphasis mine)

Epilogue

After citing this damning evidence against AI, Senator Sanders embraced the pause and moratorium of the 2023 AI leaders and experts. He reminded his colleagues that neither a pause nor a moratorium had taken place. AI was in charge of the world while its leaders lobbied politicians for its ceaseless growth.

“So,” Sanders concluded: “bottom line is that, in my view, to protect our workers from losing their jobs, to protect human beings from attacks on their mental health, to protect our kids, to protect the safety of human life, we need a moratorium on data centers. We need to take deep breaths. Need to make sure that AI and robotics work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.”

True, that is a reasonable wish. But, like the nuclear bomb, can humans harness, regulate and control a “machine mind” threatening the annihilation of both people and the world? Would it not be more ethical and humane to abolish it, along with the nukes before those two artificial machine-dangers abolish us and our civilization?

The post The Existential Threats of Artificial Intelligence appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In the game of historical analogies, the mugging of Iran and the resulting shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz are a rerun of the 1956 Suez crisis, when the colonial masters in Britain and France teamed up with Israel to crush Egypt and keep the Suez Canal out of the hands of an Islamic madman (in that case, Gamal Abdel Nasser).

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Photograph by Linda Loew

The “No Kings” slogan sounded promising when it exploded across the United States in 2025: a mass rejection of authoritarianism, unchecked executive power, and the cult of the strongman. But like so many liberal-led mobilizations in the Trump era, the U.S. version has revealed itself as carefully managed theater — heavy on performative outrage, light on principle, and deliberately blind to two of the greatest crimes of our time: Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The contrast with the Italian “No Kings and Their Wars” mobilization in Rome could not be starker. While American liberals stage-manage their dissent to stay safely within the bounds of acceptable Democratic Party politics, the Italian movement — broader, more radical, and explicitly anti-imperialist — has named the beast: U.S. and Israeli aggression, European rearmament, and the complicity of governments like Meloni’s. One is protest as brand management. The other is resistance.

The U.S. Version: Liberal Theater with AIPAC Guests

Across the country and in what was billed as a virtual and accessible rally streamed online, stages of the “No Kings 3” moment was dominated by establishment Democrats and liberal non profits. Featured speakers included Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Raskin, and Adam Schiff among many other mainstream Democrats and non profit spokespeople from liberal groups like Indivisible and MoveON.org. Many of the politicians that spoke have long records of strong support for Israel and have received significant AIPAC-linked funding. The official messaging stayed tightly focused on Trump as a threat to “our democracy,” while remaining conspicuously silent on Gaza, Palestine, the war on Iran, and U.S. imperialism.

Despite the attempts by lead organizers to water down the focus, anti-war and pro-Palestinian solidarity messaging still seeped into the street demonstrations across the country. In many cities, Palestinian flags appeared alongside anti-Trump banners, chants against the war and for a free Palestine mixed with calls to abolish ICE, and younger protesters openly linked domestic authoritarianism to the genocide abroad. These grassroots actions revealed a clear tension: while the stages and virtual events were sanitized and AIPAC-friendly, the actual streets sometimes showed the potential for a more honest anti-imperialist politics.

Chicago activist Andy Thayer, a longtime socialist organizer with the Chicago Anti-War Coalition and veteran of decades of anti-imperialist, LGBTQ+, and labor struggles, described the gap after the Chicago march:

I can’t speak to U.S. ‘No Kings’ organizers’ claims of record attendance nationally last Saturday, but can say that attendance in Chicago, while still impressive, was decidedly less than at last fall’s ‘No Kings.’ Worse, like at the previous No Kings marches, it continued to be overwhelmingly white in a majority-minority city — this at a time when federal thugs have ravaged immigrant communities and programs designed to help Black and Brown communities have gotten the axe. As expected, the NGOs tied at the hip to the Democratic Party closely hewed to what the national party finds acceptable.

Veteran activist journalist Arun Gupta, writing from New York and a longtime chronicler of Occupy Wall Street and the failures of the institutional left, delivered a withering assessment of the national leadership:

There is a gaping fallacy at the heart of the argument that leftists should show up to No Kings, which he in fact did… This is the most bizarre anti-war movement that ever existed. It doesn’t oppose any wars… No Kings is run by Democratic Party operatives and is a front group for Democrats. Their role is to protect the left flank of this astroturf movement from actual radicals.

Gupta went even further on the AIPAC influence:

“I think the AIPAC stuff is absolutely appalling. This is how degraded much of the left has become. It supports an AIPAC-approved ‘movement’ that won’t even name the genocidal wars the US-backed Zioreich is carrying out.”

The watered-down messaging was no accident. Organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible — the main engines behind the national “No Kings” effort — steered the campaign into safe, Democratic-friendly territory. The goal was never to challenge the empire, but to protect it from Trump while keeping the broader anti-imperialist and pro-Palestine left marginalized.

Rome’s Version: Anti-Imperialist and Uncompromising

In Rome, the “No Kings and Their Wars” events (the massive concert on March 27 and the national march on March 28) took a fundamentally different path. Organizers from autonomous left networks, anti-fascist collectives, peace groups, and pro-Palestine coalitions made the connections explicit: opposition to authoritarianism at home cannot be separated from opposition to imperialist war abroad.

Palestinian-Italian student leader Maya Issa, one of the most visible young voices in Italy’s pro-Palestine movement and a key organizer of the massive fall 2025 demonstrations, put it powerfully:

“Gaza has defined a generation. Palestine woke this generation up to the brutality of Israel and the crimes of the US empire. The Gaza Generation is here to stay and is defining this movement.”

The Italian mobilization was explicitly against:

• The re-armament of Europe and Italy’s growing military spending
• Meloni’s slavish alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv
• The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the expanding war on Iran
• The complicity of the entire European political class, including the so-called center-left

Speakers and artists repeatedly linked the fight against “kings” to the fight against empire. The message was clear: you cannot oppose authoritarian drift in Rome while remaining silent on the mass murder being enabled by your own government’s weapons and diplomacy. Millions took to the streets last fall in the largest mobilizations Italy has seen in decades, providing the energy and political clarity that the U.S. movement has so far lacked.

The “No Kings and Their Wars” rally on the 28th of March surprised organizers as upwards of 300,000 people took to the streets of Roma for hours at one point blocking the main highways that loops the city. It came on the heels of the resounding referendum victory opposing the Meloni governments darconian judicial reforms the week before.

Photograph by Arun Gupta

The Real Test: Will the Movement Name the Empire?

The difference is not stylistic. It is political. The U.S. “No Kings” national leadership has chosen the safest possible terrain: Trump the individual, “democracy” in the abstract, and carefully calibrated liberal slogans that never threaten the bipartisan war consensus or AIPAC influence. The Italian movement has chosen the harder, more honest terrain: naming the empire, the genocide, and the complicity of their own government.

This is the fundamental divide. One side is still trying to save the empire from Trump. The other side understands that the empire itself is the problem.

If the American “No Kings” movement wants to be more than liberal nostalgia dressed up as resistance, it must do what its Italian counterpart has already done: break with the AIPAC-funded Democrats, name the genocide in Gaza, condemn the war on Iran, and reject the rearmament of Europe and the United States. Anything less is not resistance — it is containment.

The youth in both countries are watching. The Gaza Generation in Italy has already shown what real opposition looks like. The question for the U.S. movement is whether it will follow their example, or continue to play it safe while the empire burns the world. No Kings is a good slogan. But without No Empire, it is just another brand.

The struggle continues.

The post No Kings in America, Real Resistance in Rome — How Liberal Democrats and AIPAC Allies Hijacked the Movement While Italy Actually Fights Empire and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

I met Gabriel Rockhill by chance, but not by accident. We were introduced by Helen Yaffe, a dear friend of Cuba, in January of this year during the International Congress held at the University of Havana to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Tricontinental Conference (1966). The current political climate added a unique dimension to the event: those present were standing up to the recent display of aggressivity against our country, which includes the possibility of armed aggression. That is why the meeting was not by accident. It was driven by conviction.

Gabriel Rockhill—a philosopher, professor, researcher, and writer of U.S. American origin—recently published a book that has captured the interest of many. Its title already hints at the complexity of the plot: Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Motivated by the disruptive nature of this first volume, I contacted him with a proposal to interview Cubadebate. He agreed without hesitation. 

M: In your book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, you offer compelling evidence that helps dismantle what has been known as “Western Marxism”: Is there such a thing as a “reliable Marxism”? What alternatives do we in Latin America have to this “Western Marxism”?

The expression “Western Marxism” does not refer to all of the Marxist intellectual production in the Western world but rather to a specific form of Marxism that has arisen and become dominant in the imperial core. I used the expression “Western Marxism” in the title because it is a recognizable reference point, at least within certain sectors of the intelligentsia, due to a debate generated in and around the work of figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Perry Anderson, and Domenico Losurdo. However, I also explain in the book that the more precise expression would be “imperial Marxism” because what we are dealing with is an ideological orientation more so than a rigorous geographic or cultural category. Moreover, this terminology has the advantage of specifying that the Marxism in question is one that has been transformed by imperialism into a subtle tool of empire (hence the dual meaning of imperial Marxism: it is a product of imperialism as well as an ideological force that contributes to empire).

My book elucidates how the dominant form of Marxism that has developed in the imperial core has tended toward social chauvinism and accommodation with capitalism, and even imperialism. This has been due, in part, to the formation of a labor aristocracy in the core, which benefits from imperial structures of accumulation. As Lenin explained with his signature acumen, the material situation of the workers in the leading capitalist countries, which is far superior to that of those in the periphery, has made them ideologically tend toward an acceptance of the imperial world order. This is ultimately what led to the split in the world socialist movement between those who would become known as the social democrats and those who were dedicated à la Lenin to breaking the chains of imperialism through revolutionary socialism. Losurdo, in his 2017 book on Western Marxism, drew on Lenin’s diagnosis to demonstrate that the contemporary left intelligentsia in the imperial core still manifests the same fundamental ideological orientation. In examining the academic left affiliated directly or indirectly with the Marxian heritage—from the Frankfurt School and postmodern theory to contemporary radical Anglophone thought and beyond—Losurdo reveals how it not only tends toward social chauvinism and imperial accommodation, but also, in practical terms, anticommunism.

In my own work, I draw on the writings of figures like Lenin and Losurdo to develop a political economy of knowledge that examines the material forces driving the promotion of specific forms of left theory, such as imperial or so-called Western Marxism. Far from being an autonomous intellectual development that has resulted from the free exercise of individual human reason or the so-called open marketplace of ideas, left theory in the imperial core has been shaped and directed by very material forces, including the entire institutional apparatus of knowledge production and distribution (universities, the publishing industry, the conference circuit, the media, etc.), as well as the powerful influence of the ruling class through its foundations and the state.

It is by no means by chance that the dominant Marxist positions in the imperial core have generally been Trotskyist, libertarian socialist, social democratic, anarcho-communist, or some other eclectic version, rather than Marxist in the Leninist sense just mentioned. Due to both the economic forces of the infrastructure and the ideological power of the superstructure, Marxism has tended to be transformed in the core into an imperial form of Marxism that not only accommodates capitalism and imperialism but is also openly anticommunist and rejects many, if not all, of the socialist state building projects. This is particularly clear in the case of the leading so-called Marxists promoted within the imperial superstructure, including the Frankfurt School theorists I analyze in the book (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse), other prominent Western Marxists, and radical contemporary theorists who are sometimes described as post- or neo-Marxists (Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, etc.).

Regarding the question of alternatives, the answer is a resounding yes! Due to the effects of intellectual imperialism, the Marxism of empire has cast a long and dark shadow over the rich, deep, international tradition of anti-imperialist Marxism, which is simply Marxism in its authentic form. From Marx and Engels to Lenin, Mao, Hồ Chí Minh, and so many other leaders who embodied major liberation movements, the core of Marxism has always been the struggle against capitalism as a global system of accumulation that destroys human beings and nature. Unlike the social chauvinist and anticommunist travesty of Marxism that is prominent and promoted in the imperial core, genuine Marxism is an anticolonial and anti-imperialist project aimed at the real-world liberation of humanity and nature from the death grip of capital.

Cuba has made a foundational contribution to this tradition by bringing revolutionary socialism to the Western hemisphere. It has also fostered a rich Marxist intellectual culture that stretches from the work of figures like Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Haydée Santamaría, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, to contemporary thinkers like Raúl Antonio Capote, Antonio Berreiro Vázquez, Abel Prieto, and the group of young Marxists known as La Tizza. This is not, of course, a homogenous tradition, and there are important debates, as well as room for disagreement and innovation. Crucially, however, this tradition is not hemmed in by the dogmatic framework of imperial Marxism, which generally rejects real-world socialist projects as somehow being worse than capitalism.

M: In Cuba, we have also appropriated this “Western Marxism.” The ideas of Marx and Lenin reached the island almost immediately in the early 20th century, and the Revolution that triumphed in 1959—while heavily influenced, above all, by Soviet Marxism-Leninism—broadened access for the entire population to the study of Marxism in general (or of the various forms of Marxism). How can we distinguish and preserve within “Western Marxism” that which is integral to the struggle against capitalism?

To avoid any confusion that might be generated by the expression “Western Marxism,” it is useful to distinguish between the imperial Marxism that I was just discussing and Marxism proper, which is thoroughly anti-imperialist. It is certainly the case that imperial Marxism has been the dominant form in the Western world, if we understand that region more specifically as the imperial core of Western Europe, the United States, and their close allies in the global imperialist project. However, even within the imperial core, there are Marxists like Losurdo, Michael Parenti, John Bellamy Foster, Annie Lacroix-Riz, Saïd Bouamama, and many others, who are anti-imperialist Marxists. This is why it is ultimately more coherent to distinguish between two ideological orientations, one of which is powerfully promoted by imperial superstructures, rather than relying on what sound like geographic categories.

The anti-imperialist Marxist tradition has been a major force in the imperial periphery, where the victims of empire and their organic spokespeople—Lenin, Mao, Fidel, etc.—have situated the colonial question and imperialism at the core of their analyses, orienting Marxism toward the practical transformation of the world through the development of real-world socialism. However, there is also a comprador intellectual labor aristocracy in the periphery that takes its marching orders from the dominant discourses and debates in the core. This comprador intelligentsia plays an essential role in intellectual imperialism, ignoring or denigrating homegrown forms of anti-imperialist theory in favor of promoting the latest theoretical trends of the empire.

One of the goals of my book is to clarify the lines of theoretical class struggle in order to overcome any confusion. Due to class warfare and intellectual imperialism, workers in the imperial periphery are often trained to think that the theoretical production of those promoted as the world’s leading intellectuals is more advanced and sophisticated than that of the more practically engaged Marxists I have mentioned. Concretely, this means that people are taught to look to figures like Adorno, Marcuse, Negri, Badiou, or Žižek, rather than to Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Ali Kadri, Néstor Kohan, or Cheng Enfu. This has the ultimate consequence of confusing them regarding the basic reality of imperialism and the socialist project of overcoming it. This form of intellectual imperialism thereby aides and abets imperialism in general.

What my research demonstrates is that the imperial structures of knowledge production and distribution promote a travesty of Marxism, as well as various forms of radical theory that purport to surpass Marxism, which ultimately serve the interests of empire. If we simplify to the extreme, the point is rather easy to grasp: the empire does not promote work that is inimical to its interests. My book therefore seeks to provide readers with a theoretical compass whose North Pole is no longer the leading commodities of the imperial theory industry but rather the revolutionary anti-imperialist work of the international Marxist tradition.

M: Pessimism serves a key social function in support of capitalist ideology, which perpetuates the idea that “destroying the world is easier than transforming it.” This fosters demobilization, disarray, collective apathy, and rejection of communism. When we add to this the material hardships of a country like Cuba, which is suffocated daily by the U.S. economic, commercial, and financial blockade, the capacity to resist gradually loses its subversive quality. What intellectual and practical resources remain for anti-imperialist peoples like the Cuban people to avoid renouncing socialism, their alternative for building a better world?

The first half of my book provides a materialist analysis of the imperial superstructure, concentrating on the world’s most powerful imperialist country. Driven by the economic base, with which it is dialectically enmeshed, this superstructure has imposed a dominant ideology. This includes not only a worldview and set of ideas, but also a perceptual framework, a set of values, an affective matrix, a sense of history, routinized practices, and more. Ideological subjects, as I have argued elsewhere with Jennifer Ponce de León, are composed in every dimension of their existence, not only in their ideas or worldviews.

This brings us to the issue of pessimism, which was memorably codified by Mark Fisher in the title of the first chapter of his book Capitalist Realism: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” A similar sentiment is shared by many other prominent so-called Marxists in the imperial core, including most notably figures like Žižek and Fredric Jameson. In fact, it is so widespread, including well beyond Marxian circles, that the best summation of this position would be that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the dominant ideology.” Indeed, the very thought of the end of capitalism is like imagining the end of the world for thinkers like this since capitalism is the material lifeworld that sustains their theoretical practice and has promoted them as leading luminaries within the imperial theory industry. If it were to disappear, what would be left of their supposed intellectual contributions, and the ideology they promote? This is one of the reasons why, for them, it is easier to repeat the dominant ideology than resist it.

Although the idealist orientation of imperial Marxists encourages us to displace material reality by the ideal realm of the imagination and ideas, the very foundation for Fisher’s assertion is empirically incorrect. It is not a matter of “imagining” the end of capitalism but rather one of grasping reality for what it is and recognizing that there is already a historical process of materially overcoming it. Socialist states have been involved for over a century in the very difficult process of breaking the chains of imperialism and forging projects of national sovereignty that serve the interests of the people rather than the profiteers. This is not about imagination or utopian projections, but rather the very real, material struggle, to build a new, socialist world, out of the decaying remnants of the imperial world order.

The imperial superstructure promotes the worldview summed up by Fisher because it disarms people and encourages them to resign themselves to the dominant system of exploitation, oppression, and ecological destruction. If it is not even possible to imagine—let alone build—an alternative world, why expend any effort trying to do so? This subjective acquiescence to objective social forces amounts to aligning one’s agency with that of the dominant system, rather than mobilizing it for an autonomous project. It is quite literally an act of giving up on one’s freedom.

Regarding the resources that are available for anti-imperialists, we need a sober and clear-eyed analysis of the material reality that we are facing. Imperialism has driven the world to the brink of extinction, if it be through the cataclysmic destruction of the biosphere, unhinged fascist social murder, or the imminent possibility of wars of global annihilation. The only real, material alternative is socialism. However, the choice is no longer simply between socialism and barbarism; it is socialism or extermination. Rather than being in some imaginary world where we cannot even conceive of the end of capitalism, we are in a very real world in which we are faced with the starkest of alternatives: it is quite literally the end of capitalism or the end of life as we know it.

Cuba has never been free to develop socialism. It has, instead, always been forced to advance socialism under siege because the imperialists are terrified of the threat of a good example. And yet, against the greatest of odds, Cuba has lifted its population out of the systemic immiseration and ignorance imposed before 1959, providing education, healthcare, housing, employment, and cultural development, while also fostering a society founded on environmental sustainability. None of this has been easy, and it has always been in fits and starts, with inevitable setbacks and difficulties. Since Cuba is charting uncharted territory, by developing revolutionary socialism in the Americas, this should not at all be surprising. What is astonishing is the extent to which Cuba has been able to make so much progress only 90 miles from the world’s leading imperialist power. It is a testament to the resilience and ingenuity of the Cuban people, as well as its leadership, that so much has been done with so little and in such arduous conditions.

As the U.S. moves in an increasingly fascist direction, it is intensifying its war of repression on Cuba, in an effort to recolonize the Americas and stamp out any sign of socialism. This situation brings clearly into view the role that Cuba has played in the Western Hemisphere. The Cubans—and those who support them—are at the vanguard of the struggle for an America that is actually for all of us, not for the Epstein class that is intent on dividing and conquering us to maintain its evil empire. The Cubans are holding the flag of humanity high in our hemisphere, the red flag of liberation from imperial destruction. For anyone who does not recognize this, we can remind them, echoing yet again Fisher’s fatuous claim, that “it is easier to be oblivious to the gains of socialism than to ignore the dominant ideology.”

M: In your  latest book (mentioned earlier), you also discuss the close ties between the philo-Marxist intellectual Herbert Marcuse and U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as the consequences of that collaboration. Should we trust the theoretical discourse—or the media output—of “the left” and its CIA-funded intellectuals today?

We should approach intellectual production from a dialectical and historical materialist vantage point rather than simply blindly trusting the proclamations of the sanctified intellectuals of the imperial theory industry. If we understand how the material system of knowledge production operates in the imperial core, which includes its close connections with the state and with the capitalist ruling class, then we can more clearly comprehend the types of intellectuals that this system tends to produce. There is, of course, a margin of maneuver, so the term tendency is important to insist on: there is not a rigorous determinism but rather powerful conditioning forces. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable level of ideological consistency among the left thinkers that have the largest platforms. Although they often have intellectual disagreements, they converge on the most important issues and tend to be anticommunist capitalist accommodationists.

The Frankfurt School, which has made a foundational contribution to Western or imperial Marxism, is a case in point. Its leading figures, Adorno and Horkheimer, were resolute anticommunists who equated Stalin with Hitler. They were pro-Israel and openly supported certain imperial military interventions. They also cultivated a reputation for having developed an important analysis of fascism, while practically working—as I demonstrate in the book—with many former Nazis, integrating them into leadership positions in the Institute for Social Research (the official name of the Frankfurt School). The version of Marxism that they offer turns Marxism on its head.

Marcuse earned a well-deserved reputation as the most leftwing of the prominent members of the Frankfurt School. This is because he was radicalized in the 1960s and came out in support of the antiwar and student movements, as well as certain struggles for gender, sexual, racial, and ecological liberation. However, in working through the archival record, I discovered that he regularly lied about the work that he had done for the U.S. state and his relationship to the CIA. He actually collaborated closely with the Agency, and he was even involved in the process of drafting at least two National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), the highest level of intelligence for the U.S. government. He was one of the State Department’s leading experts on communism, and he continued to work with former or current state operatives long after he left Washington. He also played a leading role in the Rockefeller Foundation’s soft power projects in their intellectual world war on communism.

For instance, he was the point person for its Marxism-Leninism Project, which was a well-funded initiative that established a trans-Atlantic network for the production and dissemination of Marxist scholarship of the imperial sort. He worked closely with his friend Philip Mosely on this project, who was a longtime, high-level CIA consultant and the director of the Russian Institute at Columbia University. It is not the least bit surprising, then, that after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Marcuse declared: “I do not question the right of the United States to fight communism in the Western hemisphere.”

When it comes to an objective and systemic analysis of global class struggle, figures like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse are not to be trusted, and the same could generally be said of the compatible left intelligentsia. This does not mean, of course, that they were wrong about everything or that all of their work should simply be disregarded. It is rather that any rigorous engagement with their theories should clearly position them within the social totality, elucidating how their subjective intellectual production was dialectically enmeshed within the objective framework of the imperial theory industry.

For instance, it is true that the leading figures of the Frankfurt School developed important critiques of consumer capitalism, which can be useful. If one pays attention to their analyses, however, one will notice a subtle perspectival orientation. They tend to concentrate on the phenomenological experience of the consumers of the middle layer, like them, not the exploitative social relations of the productive sector of the economy, meaning the lives of workers. If we put this in very simple terms, they generally spent more time criticizing the effects of the advertising industry on the manipulation of the thoughts and desires of consumers like them than on attacking the system of global super-exploitation and degradation that, to take but one example, forces children in the global South to work like slaves in mines.

Regarding the media output of the empire, it is not to be trusted in the least. As I outline in detail in the book, the CIA established a Mighty Wurlitzer, meaning an international network of media assets that it could play like a jukebox, pressing a single button at CIA headquarters and having the same tune play around the world. This Mighty Wurlitzer is still very much alive and well, and its depth and breadth far surpasses what most people imagine. To take but one example, the disinformation expert William Schaap publicly testified that the CIA “owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization.”[1]

M: Today, for example, there is talk of the ties between a progressive liberal thinker like Noam Chomsky and the imperial elite… Is it possible to overcome the intellectual establishment (academic, anticommunist, etc.) without challenging the global capitalist structures that produce it?

This question goes to the heart of my book. Although it includes critical materialist analyses of individuals and schools of thought, the real objective is to elucidate how the imperial superstructure systematically produces and reproduces the same fundamental types of intellectuals. In other words, instead of simply engaging in a subjective ideology critique of select individuals or their work, it also offers, crucially, an objective ideological criticism of the material system that produces and reproduces the same kinds of individuals, who then create work with a remarkable level of ideological consistency.

One key example of this phenomenon is the figure of the radical recuperator. This type of intellectual positions themselves on the left and often self-presents as radical. They are generally critical of capitalism and certain aspects of the foreign policy of the leading imperialist powers. However, they always respect—even if there are occasionally a few explainable exceptions—the most important ideological red lines by rejecting actually existing socialism as worse than capitalism.

There are, of course, different degrees of radical recuperation, and it is always important to engage in a dialectical analysis to highlight both the positive and negative contributions of an intellectual. Chomsky is an excellent example, and I will discuss him in a forthcoming book that is part of the same research project. The work that we have been talking about, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, is actually the first volume of a trilogy entitled The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry. The second volume, French Theory Made in USA, will be out next year. The third, Radical Theory’s Infantile Disorder, will be published a bit later, and it is in that work that I provide an assessment of Chomsky.

For the time being, let me say that it is certainly the case that he has provided significant empirical critiques of U.S. foreign policy and the effects of the corporatocracy on the media. As a libertarian socialist, he has also taken public positions against the blockade of Cuba, which is to be commended. However, he did not do this within the framework of a systemic understanding of imperialism and the struggle to break its chains through socialist state-building projects (as is the case, for instance, in the work of his contemporary Michael Parenti). In fact, Chomsky celebrated the destruction of socialism in much of the Soviet sphere as the end of a tyranny and an occasion for rejoicing.

As many have remarked, Chomsky focused on criticism, and his positive political project was woefully underdeveloped. He self-described as an anarcho-syndicalist, tracing the historical roots of his position back to Enlightenment liberalism, but he never coherently dealt with the fact that the project of workers’ self-management has always been precarious when it is bereft of state power. As such, he has led many readers down a blind alley, suggesting that the best that we could hope for would be that an imperial power like the U.S. would live up to its self-professed ideals, or that workers could exercise long-term democratic control over their workplace without seizing state power. He did not fully grasp the fact that the liberal ideals of the U.S. are there to provide cover for an imperial project, and that it is this project that is the real driving force, not its ideology. Given his anticommunist dismissal of Leninism as a counter-revolutionary philosophy, he clearly did not comprehend the necessity of anti-imperialist state building projects for overcoming the evils he diagnosed.

The most recent revelations concerning his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein follow a pattern that was already established. Chomsky’s career is bound up in various ways with the military-industrial-academic complex. He taught at an institution, MIT, with deep ties to the Pentagon, from which it received 90 percent of its funding in the 1960s. He worked there in a military lab, and the linguistics research he was doing was supported by the Navy, Air Force, etc. He also had many questionable contacts and was friends with CIA director John Deutsch, whom he had supported in his campaign to become the president of MIT.

Although critical of Israel, Chomsky spoke out against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and claimed that Israel had a right to exist. It is therefore not particularly surprising that he was friends with a Zionist intelligence operator like Epstein, who provided financial advice and support for a regular prize in his name, fringe benefits, privileged contacts, and intellectual exchange. Given the public reputation that Chomsky cultivated as a profoundly moral person, it is nonetheless disturbing to get a glimpse into how he acted in private with a convicted sex offender.

Returning to the core of your question, the objective of this trilogy is precisely to criticize the global capitalist structures that have produced an intelligentsia of this sort. This is one of the reasons why it was important to me not to limit this research project to a critique of imperial Marxism. The second volume of this trilogy takes on postmodern French theory, and the third turns to the forms of contemporary radical theory that draw on imperial Marxism and/or French Theory, which include the third generation of the Frankfurt School, postcolonial and decolonial theory, liberal queer theory, the so-called communist event philosophy of figures like Badiou and Žižek, etc. The goal is precisely to elucidate the material system of knowledge production and circulation that produces and reproduces a left intelligentsia that—on the whole—rejects actually existing socialism and accommodates capitalism and imperialism (when it does not openly champion them).

Ideology is chameleonic. Since it misrepresents reality, the latter tends to seep through over time, and new ideological forms are necessary to dissimulate it. In critically evaluating the dominant ideology of the imperial left intelligentsia, I wanted to demonstrate how the material system of knowledge production regularly generates new forms that are superficially different but share the same fundamental ideological orientation. Just as within other capitalist industries, the theory industry fosters the illusion of progress by producing a dizzying degree of novel products for the market—new materialism, Afro-pessimism, etc.—which have the advantage of distracting people attentive to the reality that had seeped through earlier ideological forms. The cult of the new promoted by consumer capitalism convinces many people that each novel product on the market is deserving of our attention, if not our devotion, rather than recognizing it as simply the latest iteration of the dominant ideology. This has proven itself to be a particularly successful tactic in the endeavor to consign Marxism to the dustbin of history: there are so many new and innovative discourses opening multiple horizons and leading every which way!

Consider the case of the Frankfurt School and French Theory. Within bourgeois intellectual history, they are generally presented as opposites. There are, of course, significant differences. However, what my trilogy demonstrates is that they are both theoretical products of a material system of knowledge production within the imperial superstructure that promotes anticommunism and the accommodation to capitalism, and even imperialism. In spite of all of their differences, then, they agree on what is most essential. They are two different permutations of the dominant left ideology in the imperial core, and they need to be recognized as such.

M: Will the book be translated into Spanish? Will the Cuban public have the chance to read it?

Yes, Nuevo milenio is preparing a Spanish translation, and the book will also be published by El Viejo Topo in Spain and perhaps other Spanish publishers in Latin America. Néstor Kohan has agreed to write the preface to the Spanish edition. This is an incredible honor for me, and I hope the book will be able to make a contribution, however small, to debates in Cuba and the broader Spanish-speaking world.

The book actually begins with an opening salvo for the entire trilogy entitled “Che’s Head.” It tells the story of the global manhunt undertaken by the U.S. empire to track down Che and ignominiously murder him, in an effort to decapitate the global anti-imperialist movement. It brings to the fore how this vicious project went hand in hand with an intellectual world war on Che and his legacy, explaining how CIA assets sought to take control of parts of his literary estate and misrepresent his biography. This section of the book provides, in microcosm, an overview of the principle themes of the intellectual world war on communism.

More generally, the book is in dialogue with some of the excellent contemporary research on cultural warfare, such as the work of Fernández Retamar, Capote, Barreiro, and Kohan. It is essential to this project that the critique of imperial Marxism is ultimately situated within a positive project of uplifting and defending the rich international tradition of anti-imperialist Marxism. Given the leading role that Cuba has played in this tradition, both intellectually and practically, it is an important reference point for this research project as a whole.

M: You have visited Cuba, you condemn the U.S. blockade, and you openly defend our cause on social media. Why do you continue to support the Revolution today?

I am a child of empire, not a red diaper baby. Moreover, I was trained in imperial ignorance by some of the world’s so-called leading institutions. The material structures of knowledge production sought to make of me a member of the intellectual labor aristocracy who ignored, obscured, or misrepresented imperialism, while simultaneously denigrating and dismissing the socialist alternative.

Having grown up on a farm working construction, I was not born into the elite networks that I came to frequent through my education. Although I subjectively experienced this as being outclassed by my peers, I now recognize in retrospect that, objectively speaking, this was incredibly beneficial. It meant that I never really fit in, and I tended to question things that others took for granted as normal or natural. However, I was also deeply affected by the ideology of the imperial superstructure, and I needed to engage in a long and sometimes painful process of self-critique to arrive at my current views. I was helped in this process by the objective conditions of imperial decline and decadence, as well as by my involvement in practical organizing and popular education, not to mention the insightful influence of people close to me.

I had been trained to either ignore Cuba as irrelevant or to dismiss it as corrupt. Once I began questioning this dogmatic posture, I encountered pushback, in an obvious effort to keep me in my ideological place, so to speak. I distinctly remember the moment when I asked one of my former professors, Étienne Balibar, to sign a public letter calling for an end to the illegal blockade. To his credit, he agreed to sign the letter, which was expressly written to be acceptable to the liberal intelligentsia. However, this self-proclaimed Marxist also sent a message, copying me, to a group of prominent left intellectuals like Michael Hardt and Judith Butler insisting that “the US imperialist policy towards Cuba” should not “lead us to acclaim or support the corrupt dictatorship that ‘socialist’ Cuba has become.” As purported proof, he provided links to anti-Cuba propaganda from highly questionable sources like the compatible left intelligentsia and the NGO La Joven Cuba.

In spite of resistance like this, I continued to develop my critical media literacy skills and seriously study Cuban history, reading the works of its leaders and major intellectuals. I also explored the rich culture of Cuban cinema, art, and literature. In the process, I taught myself enough Spanish to be able to access untranslated material and break my dependence on the imperial translation regime.

I came to realize that, as Eduardo Galeano explained in his excellent book Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés, I was living in an upside-down world. Nearly everything I had ever heard about Cuba was the mirror opposite of reality. I then became increasingly interested in the depth, breadth, and reach of the cultural war on Cuba that had shaped—often imperceptibly—my earlier worldview. I read widely and learned a lot from authors like Fernández Retamar, Capote, Barreiro, Kohan, Helen Yaffe, and many others, including you. I also visited Cuba twice, to see with my own eyes and learn more directly about the Cuban revolutionary process.

The reason that I have dwelled on the subjective aspects of my process of coming to learn about the Cuban Revolution is not for anecdotal or personal reasons but because of what it reveals about the objective conditions and how difficult it is to counter the ideological indoctrination fostered by the imperial superstructure. Part of our struggle is to release people from its grip and empower them to think for themselves and critically reflect on the forces that have shaped their worldviews, while encouraging dogmatic adherence to them.

I support Cuba because I am on the side of humanity and life, and I recognize the leading role it is playing in the struggle to put Nuestra América in the hands of its people, to release it from the death grip of the Epstein class.

Notes.

[1] Quoted in William F. Pepper, The Plot to Kill King (New York: Skyhorse, 2018), 186.

This interview first appeared in Spanish in Cubadebate.

The post I Support Cuba Because I am on the Side of Humanity and Life: an Interview With Gabriel Rockhill appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Darcey Beau

Since Israel and the United States launched their unprovoked war against Iran, thousands of Westerners in the Gulf states have been scrambling for the exits. In their haste to abandon the glittering towers of the desert, many have also abandoned the animals in their care. Thousands of cats and dogs have been left in locked apartments or tied to lampposts. And veterinarians have reported an uptick in requests for euthanasia.

None of this should be surprising. This loathsome class of vapid, luxury-obsessed Western parasites barely value human life, so why would they have any care for the lives of non-humans? To them, everything is a product. An object meant for consumption and exploitation.

And this exposes the entire sham of Dubai itself. This artificial outpost for the wealthy was never organic. It did not arise from any real connection with the land. It was always transactional. And once the bombs started falling, the illusion was shattered.

Dubai is emblematic of the hollow promises of late capitalism. Its sprawling cityscape was built by foreign labourers who are kept in modern-day slave camps, and now it is sustained by them. Everything in this city is an illusion. It possesses no soul or roots, as all of that was scraped away years ago. The fishing and pearling village on the banks of the Persian Gulf is a distant memory.

Since the oil boom, Dubai became a centre for rapid development. But in the process, it rebranded itself as a destination for the global jet set. And over time, that morphed into the Las Vegas-esque dystopia we see today. In the past couple weeks, this haven for influencers and tax-evaders has become a nightmare. Dissent has always been strictly forbidden. But now, even talking about Iran’s retaliatory strikes can get you sent to prison.

The situation for non-humans in such a scheme has always been conditional. And this is why it is emblematic of capitalism and its ruling class in general. Under a worldview where life is only valued if it produces currency and profit, it is also easily disposable. The abandoned animals of Dubai were never thought of as beings with intrinsic worth to this class. They were merely props to compliment their wealth index in social media posts. And now, those props have been left on stage for someone else to deal with.

The post The Abandoned Animals of Dubai are Emblematic of Capitalism’s Inherent Cruelty appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The prophet Daniel (Ray Chenez) held aloft by the Chorus of Jews in Handel’s Belshazzar at Berlin’s Komische Oper. Photo: Jan Windszus.

Handel is now best known for his mighty oratorios. ‘Tis the season for Messiah.

But he was late to that game, deep as he was into Italian opera, the blockbuster genre of the 18^th century and the one on which he built his fortunes.

Across the 1730s those fortunes were increasingly sapped by his opera addiction. Feeding it meant paying the celebrity singers of yore like they were soccer stars of the present. Handel also had to contend with increasing competition from London’s other theatrical entertainments and the flagging interest in musical dramas sung in a foreign language. Multilingualism has never been the forte of the stubborn island nation on which Handel landed in 1710 and where he died in 1759.

Oratorio proved the answer to his economic and artistic woes.

On Handel’s 47^th birthday—February 23, 1732—a colleague led a performance of the German emigré’sEsther, a dramatization of a tale from the Old Testament in which the annihilation of the Jews is averted by the ardent pleas of the title character, whose own Jewish identity remains hidden from her husband, the Persian King, until the end of the oratorio.  Mercy for the evil Persian prime minister who had hatched the plan of extermination is withheld at the close.

The combination of affecting arias and rousing choruses—all sung in English—was a winning one. At a time when the mechanisms of copyright were still not in place, one of Handel’s chief rivals, Thomas Arne, immediately mounted his own performance of the work.

The Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, was not amused. He promptly banned the staging of biblical dramas in theatres.

But the market offered its own commandments, and these Handel, also a devout Christian, even if of the Lutheran persuasion, obeyed. If others were cashing in on his hits, he would do the same.

At the beginning of May that same year, he mounted his own performance of Esther in the King’s Theatre in London with substantial orchestral and choral forces, appeasing the bishop by assuring him, as the playbill took pains to stress, that “There will be no action on the stage, but the house will be fitted up in a decent manner for the audience.”

By the beginning of the next decade, Handel was all in on Oratorio, Messiah leading the way to the Promised Land of renewed wealth, fame and fulfillment.

But he would have been flabbergasted at many of the uses and abuses to which his music has been put in the centuries since he exited the world’s stage. One of the most astonishing of these developments is the modern staging of his oratorios in opera houses, decidedly so with costumes and acting—in more than a few cases, the more outrageous the better, the late Bishop of London be damned. Decency may have been necessary for oratorio performances back in Handel’s time, but that quality doesn’t sell these days, especially not in Berlin.

Last Saturday night, that city’s Komische Oper (Comic Opera) premiered its new staging of another of Handel’s biblical dramas, Belshazzar. In this one, the eponymous Babylonian King is drinking himself silly for the feast of Sesach even while his redoubt is besieged by Persian forces under Cyrus. Belshazzar’s mother, Nitocris, is worried sick by her son’s debauchery and is also now convinced that the Jews, held captive in Babylon, pray to the one true God.  If there is time to put your money on monotheism, it is when the invaders are pounding at the city gates.  Hers is the first vocal number in the oratorio—the fretful, hesitating, even terrified, “Vain, fluctuating state of human empire,” that in a few short, soul-searching minutes paints an epic tableau of geopolitical rise and hubris-fueled fall. Her ensuing aria, “Thou, God most high, and Thou alone,” whose first four notes rise upward across seemingly impermissible intervals streaming with visionary colors, portrays her belief not as opportunistic but sincere. Soraya Mafi’s expressively controlled, ardently confessional performance of this mysterious, majestic diptych proved the musical high point of an evening of musical high points.

Belshazzar is having none of it and, against mom’s ardent pleas, doubles down on his drinking binge. In the third of the oratorio’s three acts, the king orders the wine from the sacred vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem be poured into the party punchbowl.  The libretto by Charles Jennens, who three years earlier had collated the biblical texts for Handel’s Messiah, includes this direction: as Belshazzar is going to drink, a hand appears writing upon the wall over against him: he sees it, turns pale with fear, drops the bowl of wine, falls back in his seat, trembling from head to foot, and his knees knocking against each other.

The Jewish prophet Daniel (the airy countertenor, Ray Chenez) is summoned to interpret the obscure message (“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin”) and he confirms that the writing is indeed on the wall. The Babylonian boss is done for.

The Persians soon storm the palace and slay the drunken despot, and the new ruler Cyrus frees the Jews, victory of the righteous confirmed in a final sublime chorus shot through with trumpet blasts and volleys of “Amen!” commanded with tremendous verve and precision by conductor George Petrou.

Even in these permissive times, especially with bombs falling on Persia and all across the Middle East, prudent types might do well to heed Gibson’s 1732 prohibition against staging these oratorios. But the Comic Opera is notorious for its imprudence, and that attitude, whether born of courage or carelessness or a combination of the two, can lead to startling, even revelatory results.

However, this new staging of Belshazzar by Herbert Fritsch turned butt to Gibson and a blind eye to the writing on its own wall. As Daniel puts it to the doomed dictator, “You have been tried in the balance and found wanting”—make that, in Fritsch’s case, wantonly self-indulgent, exceedingly lazy, and boringly monochromatic even for all the outrageously bright and colorful costumes. Instead of provoking thought or even useful outrage, these rampant crimes revealed nothing about the music, the state of the world or the dilemmas of the characters.

The most basic misdeed was playing a serious drama from start to finish for laughs, incessantly reducing the sublime to the silly. This loss of nerve and creativity not only fails to engage with the content of the work, but also demeans the musicians and infantilizes the audience. Many modern directors take this easy path in their re-interpretations of baroque dramas. Usually, these offences can be classed as misdemeanors. Lacking in ideas and insight, variety and imagination, Fritz’s rampage racked up multiple felonies. The present brief to the court urges that no parole be granted.

The rap sheet is far too long to read out here, but let me start with the most obvious and egregious misdeed. The soccer star singers of Handel’s age commanded their outsized fees largely through the incredible range, speed, and expressive capabilities of their vocal skills. Opera aficionados and professional musicians commented frequently on these qualities, often pointing to one of the trickiest, but also most frequent technical requirements—the trill. This essential maneuver involved rapid, and often accelerating, oscillation between adjacent pitches. The 18^th-century term for this was “shake.”  All Handel arias have them, often at crucial moments, and inevitably at the final cadences and climaxes. Elsewhere, they are deployed to provide emphasis and emotion to the text. Fritz took a lowbrow, literal approach to this vital stylistic feature. When there was a shake, the singer shook. Maybe one such gag would have been swallowed by the audience, but not when countless times through the evening, the soloists or the garishly clad entourage shimmied as if shocked by their own electro-trills.

On the massive staircase running from top to bottom and front to back of the entire stage of the Schiller theatre, temporary home to the Comic Opera while their house in the center of Berlin is being renovated to the showstopping tune of a quarter-of-a-billion Euros, the foppish and drunken Belshazzar (a campy, but capable Robert Murray) could prance and fall, battling, Benny Hill-like, with his enormous gold cape which when unfurled reached half up or down the steps. When not fumbling with his sail-like train, he fooled with his multi-storied, glittering headgear ziggurat. Perched on, or dangling from, one ledge or another, his royal shakes were meant to appear all the more precarious.

Also near the top of the indictment comes the crime of dressing the Chorus of Jews in Hassidic gabardines, prayer shawls, cartoonishly oversized fur hats, sidelocks, beards, white-face makeup, and oversized mascara eyeglasses of various geometric shapes. The soprano parts were sung by women and rigging them in Orthodox drag was so idiotic it might just barely have escaped the charge of offensiveness.

There is much in Belshazzar that could be brought to the stage to challenge, uplift, and entertain, even allowing opportunity along the way to elicit more than a few laughs. There is no shortage of potential themes in this oratorio, both timely and timeless, that would deserve attention and could animate and engage a theater director: the disastrous self-love and dereliction of political leaders; a mother’s concern for an alcoholic son unfit to lead a nation or even look after himself; egotism and hedonism leading to disaster not just for the elite but for the world; hydroengineering as a military strategy (diverting the Euphrates) and environmental calamity; enslavement and liberation; vengeance and forgiveness.

The fortress of Handel’s music—spectacular in its emotional engineering, thrilling variety, innovative effects—proved impregnable. Fritz’s inane forces put even these battlements to the test. There was collateral damage.  Happily, Handel repulsed the assault. Hallelujah!

The post Belshazzar in Berlin: Handel Writes on The Wall of the Comic Opera appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We are living through times where the architecture of global peace is not merely crumbling; it is being deliberately dismantled. The drums of global war beat louder than ever, drowning out the voices of reason. Across the globe, imperial power grinds forward, indifferent to human lives. In the face of such force, silence is complicity. We are compelled to speak, not because words alone will stop bombs, but because refusing to speak means surrendering our humanity.

Yet, things have only escalated. Our voices are barely audible beneath the barrage of projectiles. Nevertheless, I do not miss an opportunity to speak or write, hoping to reach the Macedonian public and the wider world: there is no more time to wait! But an old Macedonian saying goes: there is no point waking someone who pretends to be asleep. I confess a personal “sin”: I write because it helps me stay mentally and intellectually sane.

The problem is serious even among those aware of the Armageddon before us. A woman of Iranian origin on Substack wrote bitterly: “Are you really just going to keep talking? Where is the global collective action?.” It hit the mark. Today, we lack not analysis, but action. As Lenin asked: What is to be done? (I use his title fittingly, aware that historical circumstances differ). At the recent Tricontinental Institute’s assembly, Vijay Prashad said: “We must take a step forward!” We must conceptualize resistance against barbarism and what comes after. We seem to have lost the power to imagine a just society transcending frameworks of market economics and classical political science. We must define the ultimate goal. My peace colleagues would easily answer: positive peace! Found in Johan Galtung’s works, this encompasses human emancipation, social justice and dignity, de facto containing basic elements of the communist idea. Unfortunately, most peace activists fear ideology, standing on the safe shore of the liberal horizon.

This is my modest attempt to frame things radically, meaning “from the root.” Peace studies still speak of peace through peaceful means, invoking the UN Charter. It sounds moving and beautiful only if the UN were not complicit in silencing crimes. The UN is neither an abstraction nor autonomous; it is created by governments that are either perpetrators or vassals (or both). Few today are genuine democracies, just, and moral. The UN is what states made of it, primarily those self-appointed as guarantors of peace after WWII. They granted themselves rights above all others, like gods. Consequently, the military-industrial complex expanded like a giant octopus, metastasizing all spheres of human activity, alongside military blocs and bases. Humanitarian aid arrives only after blood is spilled. Many believe replacing kakistocrats or reforming the UN will guarantee peace. The new “Aryan race” has evolved into an “Epstein caste”, just as capitalism has been transformed into an overt form of neo-fascism and US hyperimperialism, perpetuating inequality defended by military power. Dissident voices diagnose problems but do not know what is to be done. Even though many were excited from the mass protests in the US and many other cities on 28 March, the cynical mind is correct: The performances seen, the celebrities heard—it all looked like a circus. They do know they don’t want a king (Trump), yet they do not challenge the system that allowed oligarchy to govern their lives. There is a growing consensus across the Global South that Western public opinion is functionally irrelevant to the fight against imperialism.

The official doctrine of the most powerful empire is “peace through strength.” Its executors do not mind the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, or even the Geneva Conventions. Such force is not answered with suggestions, proposals for peaceful conflict resolution and performances on the street. Force is met with force. Resistance. Responses with poetry, appeals, and art are moving and beautiful at the same time, but insufficient. Currently, only people of Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Cuba, and fragmented anti-colonial movements really fight back against the Empire of Evil. They show what it means to stand when babies are tortured, and existence must be defended with bodies. The Vietnamese were in such a battle, but we seem to have forgotten them. “Peace through peaceful means” was the slogan then, too—but until they inflicted enormous losses on US citizens, they were not left in peace. They proved the power of resistance against the military Goliath. Honestly, if I were a Palestinian mother seeing my child/children killed, I would immediately take up arms. Better to die fighting than die a little every moment.

The answer to this madness is our own “madness”: peace through resistance! Recently, on 27 March, recalling Yugoslav history, it came to mind that the protests rose against the Pact with Nazi Germany. Slogans we still remember read: “Better the grave than a slave,” “Better war than the Pact!” That was the seed of the Partisan movement. My peace friends want a global anti-war movement (by often excluding “others”, like China for instance), but slogans and street protests soothe consciences without striking the Empire where it hurts. Some people more courageous than us defend dignity with blood and lives. That is the right to self-defense in international law! It is also in the UN Charter. Yet, those far from battlefields must develop methods of struggle against the war machinery, fleeing neither the mad Nero in Washington nor the silence.

From the academic sphere, I start with professors: they must “corrupt” youth like Socrates! Even in physics classes, they must speak about war. On militarization and numbness, everyone can teach. Dedicate one hour a week! Unions and farmers can strike; this war hits those who live by sweat everywhere in the world. Journalists must remember Robert Fisk and Julian Assange, showing solidarity with colleagues used as clay pigeons who lost their lives with unprecedented courage. Medical workers can follow Mads Gilbert’s example! Culture and civil society can screen anti-war films like Hair or Dr. Strangelove or any other anti-war film (including documentaries). But those ‘inside the belly of the beast’ can do the most: boycotts, sabotage, and conscientious objection. Many US military professionals do not support the war, greeting with the code “Epstein.” Now is the moment for objection. Before Joe Kent’s resignation, many others showed that character and conscience would not let them work at universities or the UN, obedient to the military superpower. Workers in military industries can exert pressure, as can local communities near military bases. I am not sure if global cohesion will emerge, but each of us must start by sweeping our own doorstep.

Resist authorities allied with the degenerate Epstein caste of child-killers! The time is NOW! We are on the brink and have no excuses left for dreaming with eyes wide shut about the universal organization and its documents that are spattered with the blood of innocents. Extending the agony of the current system works against us. Let’s help the new one to be born, even in pain—as it usually happens.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post What is to Be Done? Toward a Praxis of Resistance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St.Clair

You live somewhere. You care not only about there, but about elsewhere. You care about your home, neighborhood, state, country, region, continent, and world. A violation anywhere pains you. To help overcome violations everywhere attracts you. That is internationalism. It’s exemplary. Set aside differences you might have over what constitutes violations or what to do about them. What might nonetheless go wrong about being internationalist?

On the other hand, you live somewhere. That is where your opinion, your mobilization and your organizing can have most effect. In your home they have more effect than in your neighborhood. In your country they have more effect than in some other country. To act where you are feels more responsible and rooted. Its greater effectiveness attracts you. Call that localism. It too is exemplary. Assume your assessments of local circumstances are wise. What might nonetheless go wrong with being localist?

Consider the problems and benefits of internationalism’s emphasized focus and of localism’s emphasized focus. Can a worthy approach avoid the problems of each and embody the benefits of both?

Consider internationalism. What could go wrong? If we fix our eyes mostly on what is distant we may under-address what is near. We may talk and write about distant battles, wars, and oppressions. We may fill our minds with the intimacies and dynamics of distant things. If we are a speaker, we may increasingly give brilliant and caring accounts of distant circumstances, but say little about what’s happening at home. We may write, or, if we team together with some publishing project partners, we may post articles such that the preponderance of our daily articles increasingly address the causes, implications, personal thoughts, and movement motivations of distant events. Our attention to what is at our own doorstep in our own town or perhaps even in our own country, and to its causes, implications, and the associated thoughts and motivations may become increasingly sparse. The problem with this is not that we are concerned about distant events, their implications, and our possible effects on them. That is good. The problem arises when distant focus crowds out local focus.

You may reply that we can be internationalist but avoid the ills of becoming aloof from our own circumstances. I agree that we can do that, yes, okay, but how? After all, the ills of internationalism do often arise.

What about localism? What could go wrong? If we focus our eyes and emotions overly on what is close we may gloss over what is distant. What appears close may so dominate our feelings that we increasingly miss what is distant. We may increasingly miss or even deny distant oppressions. Our ensuing aloofness may so corrupt our values that it eventually distorts even what we can see locally. Consider discussions of the war on Iran which quite rightly oppose it, but may increasingly do so because Trump doesn’t have a clear plan, or because it costs so much, or because oil prices are hurting us, or because Americans may die. Point being, a localist may start to oppose the war due to its effects where the localist resides, not due to the murder and mayhem it rains down on distant others. But if we feel diminishing concern for what is distant we may start to minimize our sensitivity to the pain of others. We may increasingly highlight effects on self to the extent that our radius of caring shrinks. We start to powerfully emphasize what’s in our country but to barely register what’s on the other side of the world. We may increasingly care about what’s happening in our house but not care what’s happening on the other side of our country or even across our town. We may increasingly care about people who look like us, but not care about people who look different. We may start to care about people who see things our way locally but not care about people who see things other ways.

You may reply that we can act locally but avoid the narrowing ills that to be localist can engender. Yes, okay, I agree that we can do that, but how? After all, the ills of localism do often arise.

This is not unlike an activist becoming so attentive to class concerns, or to race concerns, or to gender concerns, or to authority concerns, or to ecological concerns, that they lose track of the other key priorities. A dwindling scope isn’t something we seek. Myopia isn’t a worthy goal. But myopia happens. And to avoid it we know that collectively we can’t let fear that what we incline most strongly toward will get ignored cause us to increasingly ignore the rest. I fear class or race or gender etc., will be minimized or ignored so I advocate emphasizing it and it alone. I don’t intentionally pursue myopia but I may arrive there. And it is the same for local and international. We worry that what is over there will get ignored, or we worry that what is near will get ignored. We start to emphasize one at the expense of the other. But both/and is a better approach than either/or.

Consider No Kings, a U.S. project. It certainly needs to address U.S. circumstances, constituencies, mindsets, motives, implications, tactics, and strategy. What factors propel or block participation by different constituencies? What new tactics might advance resistance? Having been born in the USA, No Kings nonetheless needs to simultaneously address international events as they affect and are affected by the U.S. and in their own rights as well. My impression is many are trying to do just that. But some others are not.

To take one more example, imagine a publishing operation. It wants to advance resistance to fascism but it also wants to increase the likelihood that our resistance efforts won’t settle for restoring pre-Trump racial, gender, class, political, international, and ecological conditions. Our publishing project instead wants to propel struggle to win fundamentally new defining relations and another worthy and possible world. Like a movement, it should avoid the ills of excess localism but also the ills of excess internationalism.

All this may seem utterly obvious and if so, that’s good. It should. But it turns out that in practice we often open ourselves to seeing these sorts of dynamics regarding possible problems with one orientation but not with both orientations. When that happens to avoid the ills we do see, we can drift into perpetrating the ills we don’t see. It’s better to see it all. It’s better to avoid all the potential ills.

And while we are at it, it is better to support No Kings, celebrate its growth, and work to expand and diversify it, than it is to ignore or deny its growth and moan about its needing to do more and reject it.

The post No Kings: Internationalism, Localism or Both? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Cover art for the book Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent Anne Garrels – Fair Use

For those who remember the Iraq war, Iran seems like deja vu all over again.

After enduring the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003, the late NPR reporter Anne Garrels chronicled her experiences in the best-selling book, Naked in Baghdad and many of her observations seem relevant today.

In a speech at Northwestern University in 2008, she addressed the Abu Ghraib scandal, the dubious government contractor Blackwater, government censorship and the pros and cons of reporters embedding with active military operations.

Casually dressed in a leotard, flowered skirt, ballet flats and bare legs, Garrels also discussed the effect of escalating violence and kidnappings on reporting, everyday life in Iraq and the experience of being a female war reporter.

The surge said Garrels—an announced escalation of the Iraq war—allowed “young American captains” to help bridge the gaps between Sunni and Shiite communities [competing Iraqi ethnic/religious factions] but the Iraqi government did not use the opportunity to work on reconciliation or security for Sunnis in places where Shiite police and militia still dominated. And “the government still relies on the US to deliver services and security,” she said.

Due to “Shiite political dynamics” most of the southern part of Iraq remained unreportable said Garrels and embedding with a military unit such as Special Forces is not always the answer. While embedded reporting in Iraq had been valuable said Garrels—the military maintains openness and treats women embeds no differently than men—it is no substitute for individual journalism. “What kind of reporting can you do standing next to armed guards?” she asked.

Moreover, there was the issue of censorship. Reporters in Iraq respected the military’s rules about not photographing identifiable soldiers who are dead or wounded said Garrels—“we don’t want their relatives first hearing about it on the news either”—but sometimes the censorship could appear capricious. She recalled a New York Times story in which an embedded reporter detailed how his unit was pinned down by gunfire as soldiers tried to evacuate the body of a sergeant who had been shot in the head. “The military found the article ‘distasteful’ and the Times was disembedded,” said Garrels, adding that Times reporter John Burns even went to see then General David Petraeus, in control at the time, over the incident.

While Garrels said she was amazed at how unprepared the US was for the Iraq war, relying on information from “30-year exiles” and “power grabbers,” she also worried about the implications of removing troops “precipitously,” she said. “It will be a mess. A lot of Iraqis I know are probably going to be killed.”

Garrels’ own house manager, an Armenian Christian in his fifties, was a victim of sectarian violence a year ago, she said, when he was kidnapped by assailants, some in police cars, beaten, raped and underwent a heart attack. While the kidnappers released him, presumably for money, US policies initially prevented the man and his family from emigrating to the US she said.

Garrels had her own experience with sexual assault in Iraq which led to the name Naked in Baghdad and which she shared at the end of her prepared remarks. She woke up, she said, to find a man from her own Iraqi house staff “on top of” her in her bed, though she was able to prevent an assault. Trying to spare the assailant reprisals, she told his family—who were also staff—that he was “sleeping on the job”—a fabrication which ended up failing because they begged for another chance for him

When Garrels told the truth to the assailant’s brother-in-law, she was exposed, first-hand, to the attitude behind honor killings when it comes to women in a traditional culture and treated as a disgraced victim.

“Not once have you asked me if I am okay,” Garrels said she castigated the brother-in-law. “You can’t even look me in the eye anymore!” The brother-in-law didn’t even believe she wasn’t attacked, said Garrels. “In Iraq my husband would divorce me and I’d be locked in the house for the rest of my life,” she noted.

Garrels was also outspoken during a question and answer period. Asked about the Abu Ghraib scandal in which US troops were recorded abusing Iraqi prisoners, she said, “It will take us years to recover as a country. You’re forced to explain things that are hard to answer.”

And asked about “resentment against mercenaries” Garrels described witnessing Blackwater guards (the contractor, Blackwater, was later renamed Xe) killing civilians at a roadblock long before the shooting of 17 civilians in 2007. “There was no investigation,” she added.

Anne Garrels (1951 – 2022) was a US journalist who worked for National Public Radio during the Iraq war and authored of Naked in Baghdad.

The post Naked in Iran? Can We Learn Anything From the Late NPR Reporter Anne Garrels? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

A wall in Chelsea. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

It is one of those moments when the artist is out of London and I am back from abroad before seeing her again.

The studio is empty. Dozens of paint pots stand in trays on the table. I pick one up—Liquitex acrylic ink in pyrrole red. Most of the others are Daler-Rowney.

An equal number of paintbrushes are tightly packed in a mug, with a bright orange sun shaped into the ceramic. I had forgotten that mug. We first drank from it, fumbling about in the foothills of our relationship.

Nearby, old plastic takeout trays are piled up, some with dried paint splattered in the folds, each ready for reuse. Various pieces of paper lie on the table, used only to test the brushes—marks like little dabbed claws.

And now, to the work-in-progress. Because you cannot see it—and because unfinished work demands privacy—I must describe it to you instead.

It is a large abstract piece, approximately four feet by five feet. For me, it exists on a higher plane.

At the top left-hand corner, against a body of black paint, is a thin trail of yellow—medium azo lines—within which sits a rare patterned moment of small squares. A smear of plum-coloured paint lies below, plus a patch of lightened cyan blue. Then a black swirl like a horse’s mane.

Throughout this territory on the left, occupied with martial precision, are moments of extraordinary detail—nanoscopic at times, always infinitesimal. That the tightest of brushes can create something so detailed—as if a woodcut or engraving—is astonishing.

On top of this are thin, almost appeasing trails of turquoise, emerald green, more blue—like tiny fence posts—pink ones too, combing the surface.

Then there are these rational moments of greyness, near-bulbous at times, throughout. Is that a blueness within the black-grey? It is as though these moments were once incendiary—burnt gunpowder, the residue of combustion, intimations of a time before the work came into being.

Further down, pockets of orange hues—a family of them—glow. Then back to that blackness again, and thin trails: green lines, blue lines, red dots. It is impossible to convey all of this.

What happens to the eye when it scrutinises such detail? Detail is a visual experience in itself. Not accuracy, but originality. Strictness, thoroughness, carefulness, scrupulousness. A form of exercise.

Somewhere in this untethered medley is a singular curling series of colours, like a conch shell. I see green. I see another green. Purple, orange, brown. Light blue, then deep dark blue—“blue to blue in the night”—more pink, black, orange. All of this moves in a mesmeric circular motion. At its heart: the blue-grey-black again. Around it, a brocade of exquisite blue dots in a line—and pink dots—moving rightwards.

Then an area, almost a palatinate: a cascade of tiny falling petals of flame red and hot yellow. A green wiggle, snake-like. Ripped eyelashes. All manner of things. For me, something as challenging as Bosch.

Elsewhere, below, a burning red—hellish—and beneath it the grey again, an eternal backdrop: not despair, not dullness, but something time-honored, a kind of acceptance.

Further down, an unusual mass of purple, across which fragments of color remain—multicolors as if cellotape has been peeled away. Below that, shapes: reds with foregrounds of yellow, semicircles like Roman heads in green and blue.

Then little inlets like caves—Fingal’s Cave, perhaps, on Staffa. To the right, a cloudburst of red against a lighter background, raining down blood vessels—controlled bleeding—then, above that, reassurance in that jostling yellow-and-red.

Then—when you least expect it—a rock-face of green. Moss-like, flecked with yellow, carrying the sense that even a recent work can hold an ageing process, old, crackling wisdoms that mark a landscape, if we take the trouble to see them.

Above that, more tiny curls, until what looks like the top of a skull, painted in tiny blocks of colour, as if representing one half of a brain’s formerly lucid thought. The rest is left to the viewer.

Then a jewelry of colors—at the top, sparse, controlled. Nothing sentimental. Throughout the work, a terrifying yield.

The artist has done time on this. Opened themselves up. Gone to places we would never go. The bottom right-hand corner offers a waterfall of yellows—stars in a firmament, linked with red and blue lines.

There are lizards of line, paws of detail—a pine-like assemblage of ghost leaves. Again, that grey-blue blotch. Red. More red. Are these steps? Am I being invited to climb into this piece?

Where am I?

The post A Terrifying Yield of Control appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante

It’s a distressing time to be a trans person just trying to mind your business.

This March, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued its third “red flag” warning about the risk of “anti-trans genocide” in the United States, warning about laws and policies designed to “criminalize” the entire trans community “based solely on its existence.”

In February, Kansas invalidated the IDs of all trans people in the state with a single day’s notice. Finally, just recently, the International Olympic Committee mandated that all persons competing in women’s events must submit to genetic screening — which will also ban all trans women and many intersex people from participating in Olympic sports.

As a trans person trying to walk my dog, pay my bills, and answer work emails in time to fold the laundry and make dinner, it’s profoundly stressful to say the least.

But it’s been this way for years. The tide of contemporary anti-trans legislation has grown from 2016’s famous (and failed) “bathroom bill” in North Carolina to a wave of speculative legislation funded by conservative billionaires creating division by stoking manufactured mass hysteria.

The numbers are staggering: a 668 percent increase in anti-trans legislation from 2021 to 2025, according to the Lemkin Institute. Since we all huddled down on our couches and started a sourdough hobby in 2020, the Institute says, we’ve had six consecutive record-breaking years in anti-trans bills introduced across the country.

But the horrors don’t stop in the legislatures.

A recent executive order banning trans people from the military calls trans people inherently dishonest and dishonorable. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled that states can legally compel trans adults like me to “appreciate [our] sex” by banning our access to gender-affirming health care. And when a Texan politician called billionaires a more dangerous 1 percent of the population than trans people, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s pastor said he hoped the man would be crucified.

For all the hate we’re getting these days, you’d think trans women were scooping up Olympic gold medals and firebombing suburban dog parks.

The reality is much less exciting, underwhelming even. We remain, by and large, humans with less money, less political power, and maybe more opinions on animation, philosophy, and colored hair dye than the average bear.

It’s estimated that there are less than 10 trans athletes of any gender in the entire NCAA. Only one openly trans woman has competed in the entire history of the Olympic games, and she didn’t place. In fact, the British Journal of Sports Medicine recently found no scientific evidence that trans women have a single competitive advantage over cisgender women in sports.

But dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed, scientifically valid studies in dozens of countries and contexts show that letting people make their own choices about how they live their own lives in their own bodies is very good for their well being.

The American Medical Association, the largest association of physicians in the United States, just affirmed that hormone therapy, sex-reassignment surgeries, and other procedures that change a person’s physical sex characteristics are successful and medically necessary. These procedures have some of the lowest regret rates around: lower than hip replacements, lower than cosmetic surgeries, perhaps even lower than Harry Potter tattoos.

The people telling you to fear your trans neighbors are lying to your face and inventing a scary fantasy. Mostly, they’re hoping you won’t notice the precedents they’re setting to take away your health care, invade your privacy, and send you on a surprise trip to the DMV.

And if you’re a woman in sports, they’ll want your genetic data. I haven’t looked at a history book in awhile but I’m pretty sure that’s a red flag.

The post Attacks on Trans People Are Attacks on Everyone appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

In 2007, the Coalition won its lawsuit against New York City’s spraying of Malathion to kill mosquitoes said to be the carriers of West Nile Virus. The City had applied massive doses of the pesticide.The settlement agreement raised the issue and stipulated a program limiting the dangers of glyphosate, which led to new regulations limiting the application of such chemicals in the environment.

And last month the grassroots healthy alternatives-to-pesticides coalition joined with GMO/Toxin Free USA, which authored the petition below; Beyond Pesticides; Organic Consumers Association; Greenpeace; Environmental Working Group; Center for Biological Diversity; and a slew of environmental and health organizations which have been fighting against the production and use of glyphosate for decades.

Glyphosate is the main ingredient in the Monsanto company’s herbicide, Roundup.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–who today heads the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services–was at one time a strong voice opposing FDA approval of glyphosate and other chemicals dumped into the environment. In fact, celebrating a major judicial decision six years ago where the Court ordered the Monsanto company to release tens of thousands of pages of documents it had tried to keep secret, Kennedy wrote at the time, “all Monsanto’s claims about glyphosate’s safety were myths concocted by amoral propaganda and lobbying teams.”

“Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years,” Kennedy continued, “and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers.”

“These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who secured the release of those documents. He is well aware of messages in Monsanto’s internal documents indicting the corporation–now owned by Bayer – for suppressing the corporation’s own scientists who questioned the safety claims Monsanto was making, but who were either obstructed or ignored. In one email, reports EcoWatch, Monsanto scientist Donna Farmer writes, “you cannot say that Roundup is not a carcinogen . . . we have not done the necessary testing on the [entire composite] formulation to make that statement. The testing on the formulations are not anywhere near the level of the active ingredient.”

And yet, today, Kennedy unconscionably and publicly endorses Trump’s multi-billion dollar gifts to Monsanto, Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. Kennedy now plays an integral role in sanctifying Trump’s executive order regarding glyphosate.

The Bioscience Resource Project, which publishes groundbreaking and topical analyses of the science underlying food and agriculture systems in the peer-reviewed academic literature, quoted from the NY Times, “The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics.”

They “indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.”

The documents show that both industry and regulators “understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press.”

Dr. Jonathan Latham, executive director of the BioScience Research Project, explains:

These documents ordered released by the Court are part of a tremendous trove of previously hidden chemical regulatory activity and chemical safety. What is most striking about them is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators. Time and time again regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic.

Revelations in 2016 about the spraying of glyphosate by the Quaker Oats Company on its rolled oats as a drying agent were shocking. Then came the discovery that 90 percent of the samples tested of “socially responsible” Ben & Jerry’s ice cream contained glyphosate and, shortly after, findings of glyphosate in leading orange juice brands provided impetus for a heated global debate. New findings reveal that children’s vaccines, as well as popular brands of wine and beer are contaminated with the cancer-causing pesticide.

A report by Carey Gillam, widely disseminated by EcoWatch, claimed that Monsanto intentionally suppressed information about the potential dangers of its Roundup herbicide and relied on corrupt U.S. regulators to cover it up.

The evidence of governmental collusion with Monsanto infuriated the jury in the case of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto. In the summer of 2018, the jury voted unanimously to award Johnson, a school groundskeeper and plaintiff, a quarter of a billion dollars, much of it as part of punitive damages against the company.

Currently, thousands of people are suing Monsanto, alleging that Roundup caused them or their family members to become ill with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Bayer and Monsanto are setting aside $7.2 billion to settle those lawsuits — an inappropriately small amount given the large size of individual victories over the company, awarded by juries. The documents are now available as part of a long list of Roundup court documents compiled by the consumer group U.S. Right to Know.

Attorney Brent Wisner was stunned at the revelations found in the documents. “This is a look behind the curtain,” he said. “These [documents] show that Monsanto has deliberately been stopping studies that look bad for them, ghostwriting literature and engaging in a whole host of corporate malfeasance. They [Monsanto] have been telling everybody that these products are safe because regulators have said they are safe, but it turns out that Monsanto has been in bed with U.S. regulators while misleading European regulators.”

In other words, this is precisely the kind of corruption that typifies the regulatory process that Kennedy had once strongly opposed and had sworn to uproot.

* * *

Complicating the Executive Order (and perhap the hidden rationale behind it) is the Trump administration’s (including Robert Kennedy’s) protection in the same Order of another Monsanto/Bayer war product: white phosphorus.

Michael Hansen, the stellar Consumers Union scientist, writes: First, as the beginning of the EO notes, “Elemental phosphorus is … crucial to military readiness and national defense. It is a key component in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices …”

The reference to “smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices” points to white phosphorus munitions. White phosphorus, Hansen continues, is not banned internationally because it has legitimate uses, such as for smoke screens and illumination. However, Article 2 of Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, concerning incendiary weapons, bans the use of white phosphorus incendiary weapons, particularly in civilian areas. Thus, there is a legal grey area here.

Three companies in the US are associated with making, storing and exporting white phosphorus munitions: Pine Bluff Arsenal, Monsanto/Bayer, and ICL Group. Pine Bluff Arsenal (PBA), opened in 1941 and owned and operated by the US, had a mission to supply chemical weapons for use in WWII. PBA is the only place in the Northern Hemisphere that currently fills white phosphorus munitions. Monsanto–which has a long history of working with the US Defense Department (such as with Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam)–is the only US manufacturer responsible for white phosphorus production in the U.S. and has been supplying PBA with the product for decades

Finally, the third company involved is ICL Group (previously known as Israel Chemical Ltd), which has a US chemical manufacturing plant in St. Louis, MO and works closely with Monsanto/Bayer. ICL Group’s parent company, located in Israel, is a minerals company that, among other things, mines phosphates in the Negev desert and sells fertilizers. It’s thought that ICL Group U.S. might provide Monsanto/Bayer with the phosphates used in white phosphorus production.

Right after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Human Rights Watch documented the use of white phosphorus munitions in Gaza and Lebanon. At the same time, Amnesty International documented that Israel used white phosphorus munitions from the Pine Bluff Arsenal. In early November 2023, the Middle East Monitor documented that the IDF dropped white phosphorus munitions on the UNRWA school in a Gaza refugee camp.

So, the whole EO is economically beneficial to Monsanto/Bayer, by helping them produce and sell more GBHs, potentially providing immunity from present lawsuits, and securing more white phosphorus for a potential war with Iran.

The timing of this EO is a bit suspicious to me. If the main reason was to help Monsanto with GBH liability, why now and not 6 months ago or one year ago?

Bottom line: since virtually all the white phosphorus munitions in the developed world are packaged at PBA, with Monsanto/Bayer being the sole US manufacturer of white phosphorus, and with documented use of white phosphorus munitions from PBA being used in the Middle East in the last couple of years and with the present saber rattling about a potential war with Iran (which would conceivably involve greater demand/use of white phosphorus), this PBA-Monsanto/Bayer-ICL Group connection should be looked at more closely. [extended analysis and quote pertaining to white phosphorus is from Michael Hansen, Ph.D., Senior Scientist Advocacy of Consumer Reports.]

To reiterate, the No Spray Coalition condemns the current acquiescence of Robert Kennedy, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, with the Trump administration’s executive order portraying glyphosate and white phosphorus as essential to U.S. Security interests, and thus rationalizing the U.S. government’s protecting and ramping up of production of toxic pesticides.

The post Trump’s Attempt to Control the World Supply of Monsanto’s Glyphosate, and Robert Kennedy’s Duplicitous Role appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

At the gas pump a man connects the dots between the illegal war and our own depravations.

A Retired Major General says in disgust that the Secretary of Defense, a former Fox News TV personality who was kicked out of the National Guard, has no qualifications for the job. Pete Hegseth grabs the spotlight with delusional testosterone-fueled bluster staged to sound like war strategies, talking about the “stupid rules of engagement” he won’t follow. Instead, he instructs our “war fighters” to “hunt down” and “kill” our enemies. Shaking his head the Major General says, “Those are the words of a potential war criminal.” Hegseth is apparently unaware that he may be sending Marines to the “graveyard of the American Empire,” as former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich tells the Scheer Intelligence podcast.

Marco Rubio claimed US bombs were instigated by Israel, a state reviled the world over for its genocide of Palestinians that destroyed all the schools, the clinics, the hospitals, the mosques, the housing, the water, and the sanitation in the Gaza Strip. Then they hired influencers, (but didn’t pay them) to keep calling their slaughter in Gaza a hoax. Behind-the-screens Israel now destroys Lebanese villages just like they did in Gaza, and kills journalists and first responders, just like they did in Gaza, for the same reasons—to stop the truth from getting out.

US Marines are sent to retrieve a mysterious prize, because God’s chosen people, as Gideon Levy called Israelis, don’t have any soldiers to send. They are busy killing in the West Bank and torturing the doctors and nurses and even the children in their dungeons of inhuman hate.

“Through the Squalls of Hate’”

Francesca Albanese releases yet another report on the heinous crimes perpetrated against Palestinians, this time through Isreal’s widespread systematic and sadistic use of torture of thousands of prisoners kidnapped since October 7, who are beaten, raped and starved to death on a scale of brutality never seen before in the modern world. And the story of a Rabbi who was once a tank sergeant in Israel’s army, arrested for sexually abusing a child, is re-circulated online, but never makes it to corporate media. He was also known for having publicly spread the false claims about Hamas systematically raping Israeli women on October 7. Yes, every Israeli accusation is a confession, and they are the one who use human shields.

Islamophobia runs wild with the howls of right-wing politicians repeated by their favorite media outlets.

And the once high-value news source—rendered now as little more than a tired-grey shipwreck of a newspaper—recounts with grand illustrations the “exceptionally critical journey” of the sacred “oil and gas tankers,” and how their precious cargos proceed globally in a truly moving story. There were no moving headlines in the legacy press about the 18-month-old toddler whose legs were burned with cigarettes by Israeli torturers. We saw his small blood-soaked pants telling a story that should have been printed above the fold on every newspaper if the media’s mandate was still democracy.

Some independent commentators conclude that “we are the villains in this story.” Another posts warns that nuclear weapons are poised to wipe out the Middle East, and the Israeli death cult passes a far-right inspired death penalty law making it easier for them to execute Palestinians. Israeli police beat anti-war and anti-occupation protesters and judicial critics at HaBima Square in Tel Aviv.

Democracy is Coming, to the USA

Palestinian Pulitzer Prize winning writer Mosab Abu Toba, sings a heart wrenching melody accapela in Riverside Church overlooking the Hudson where MLK shouted out his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bruce Springsteen takes the stage and thrills as he sings The Streets of Minneapolis, just after the wise Angela Davis reminds those in the pews celebrating Democracy Now! that protests are a form of resistance that gives us the feeling of our own power. They are rehearsals for the revolution about to be born.

Patti Smith sings “People Have the Power,” with her arms spread out in a holy gesture as a writer belts out the song and passes out postcards of where to see the film, Steal this Story, Please.  Within a week in the USA, 9 million people would protest against the mad king in what was left of the White House.

The post Sail On, Sail On, Oh Mighty Ship of State appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

[The real problem for the academic humanists] was that they had guilty consciences about their vocations, unwilling or unable to mount a sturdy defense of their calling…. Put bluntly, the stewards of the humanist legacy ceased to believe in their vocations…they ceased to believe in any real stakes when it came to what they taught.”  

– David Polansky, The Human Condition or the Conditional Human, Hedgehog Review, Spring 2026

“…the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.”               

– David Foster Wallace, quoted in (Ibid)

With an unflinching look at what we have made of the world, [British philosopher and author Paul Kingsnorth] sees “a machine made of human parts…”  

– Blanton Alspaugh reviewing Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth, in HR, Spring 2026

The friend I ran into at an artist talk at our gallery mentioned the No Kings protest that had happened earlier in the day, in consideration of which we had moved the talk to a later time.  I had not attended the protest, and not because it was so blasted cold that day!  For one thing, I found out about it late. Apparently I’m not on the local lists for Indivisibles or whoever organizes these things nation-wide now; I’m guessing contact is through social media. This mediated kind of organizing influences my sense of personal obligation (though I did attend the previous one.) For some reason –  maybe to see what would happen, I blurted out: “I have lived my entire adult life as a no kings protest.” He nodded pleasantly, but moved away from me at that point – apparently not wanting to hear more!  I was left to wonder what I would have said had he been interested enough to ask?  

As I read reports of the No Kings protests around the country, including in places likely even colder than Utica (i.e., Minneapolis) I asked myself, has the fight gone out of me, just when it is most needed?  I fear the Indivisibles just want a nicer “king” to keep capitalism going in the accustomed nice (for some) way.  My ideal protest sign would read: “No King But the Sovereign Soul.”  I feel there has to be a sovereign, not no sovereign.  So what’s the supreme authority to be? Many people don’t get that, but that is the question!

+++

The grandiose-sounding-but-actually-humble purpose I set for my writing nearly 3 decades ago was to defend humanness.  A mental crisis in my 40’s had resulted in my being shaken completely out of my customary consciousness, a condition that had begun around age 10, when it seemed the only function of my imagination  – apart from the pleasure of reading – was to frighten, intimidate and torment me at night.  The crisis opened me to personal discovery of a positive soul, and an alive imagination- a blessing of my human being, instead of the curse I’d known.   

The unexpected inward reunion brought with it two connected realizations.  After years of failing to find an educational path that fit, always a diffident student, ignorant of the power of my own thinking, I discovered the first intellectual clarity I had ever known: In connecting with the “mythic layer” ( the unconscious) inwardly I was connected subjectively with the very roots of the humanities tradition –  I, too, had the power to have ideas and to know things!  

Moreover, the fact that healthy imagination brought me my first experience of health as“wholeness” – a word that does not do justice to the experience of feeling whole after a lifetime of partiality – made it clear this is an aspect of being human that deserved and needed defending!  I had spent 40 years of my life not using use my creative powers.  Instead of exuberance, I had been crippled in a forever hesitation before claiming my own gifts, in a way that William Blake (“Exuberance Is Beauty!”) would surely have frowned upon!  More damningly,  I realized that the loss of this decisive dimension of my humanity was in some ways, if not intended, a direct result of the secular liberal society I was raised in, the acceptable view being some people are gifted with creative imagination and some not.  I had learned in my own case that human becoming is a process, this process completely downplayed in the given context.  (Capitalism really does not care if you grow up or not, better not.)

The moral consequence for this at-large dismissal of imaginative knowing is serious.  When a few successful creatives are treated as gods, while the rest, the vast ordinary, can only live in denial of the potential for nobility given in their nature, what happens to moral courage? The gift of creativity is not only a private good, but the ultimate social good, personal evidence of cosmic connectedness.  Without the imaginative, metaphysical reality, moral vision is severely limited to obedience/disobedience within the given system.  

And there is another way in which imagination quickens the moral sense: it allows one to know one’s suffering as suffering (i.e., as “the horrific struggle”) and thus a struggle I have in common with all human beings.  Knowing one’s personal suffering (distinct from suffering as a minority) is real is next to impossible in a society based in competition, not compassion, and it is as important to one’s capacity for moral vision as are eyes for sightedness.  Clearly, this imaginational deprivation was not – could not be – the way things were intended.  Sure, life is unfair, but God, [and this word for me had now gained its referent] is not.  To correct this tragic mistake surely something more even than a (shrinking, always embattled) budget line for the arts in secondary school curricula was needed! 

On this basis, I knew, even without any kind of working class awareness,  the liberal world that had raised me – with its materialist optimism, its worship of technological innovation, its blind faith in its own good ends despite all contrary evidence (i.e., endless wars and barbarous cruelties), above all, in failing to recognize my soul and its suffering, had profoundly failed me.  It could not be trusted.  Unreasonable on my part?  Yes.  After all, the distinction between the sovereignty of Caesar and that of the soul is nothing new. But that was it – the distinction was no longer made because metaphysical reality isn’t real.

+++

Out of these new understandings,  I (with my husband) came to make life choices as a way of “voting” for the better, not-yet reality.  The moral choices we made, in contrast to the career paths and its rewards offered to educated middle class white people like ourselves were admittedly somewhat stern, but in the end, have made the difference in terms of our being able to maintain a way of life that is out-of-sync with kings or capitalism (or racism).  They were necessary steps to our establishing an urban, artful coffeeshop (Cafe Domenico) and an accompanying non-profit arts center in an upstate NY county that voted 60% for Trump in the last election.  Through these creations, seeds were planted for a creative culture based in the local, de-centralized and face-to-face.

Seen in the “real world’s” more objective light, such “anti-career” choices  may be admirable in a way – equally they are screwy, indefensible, maybe forgivable for their attempt to follow the biddings of my soul, but who’s to say? Practicality has its valid perspective!  Though our downscale choices no longer have the Cafe to publicly validate them,  I can yet assert: to make a stand against relentless dehumanization– the Machine, as author/philosopher Paul Kingsnorth calls it –  including abandonment of the traditions of humanism and the humanities,  people must have a metaphysics – i.e., a basis for imaginative knowing. Otherwise there’s no counter power to “the fetish for commodities” that feeds a robust Capitalist economy.

All the flailing about I do over my life choices  has much to do with the fact that my imagination was long ago “centralized” – bedazzled by television and Big Apple glamor five hours to the South.  The local was in a sense despised, the grass always greener where there’s the most green stuff! Where I live is a location that doesn’t have much to say for itself unless its worth is solely in the fact that it is, simply, my place.  How does one raised in liberal reality like me come down to earth?   Poet Wendell Berry points to it (“no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality…”).  But I am not a poet.  I love my unifying ideas. Thus I keep writing,  obsessively, attempting to keep hold of a vision that so quickly disintegrates when I leave my workspace cloister!

And I look hungrily for signs that there is a crack opening up in secular liberalism’s rejection of metaphysical reality!

+++

Precious few such signs exist.  But I have begun to glimpse a groping movement towards religious  truth that is new.  Last week I went with friends to see the movie The Testament of Ann Lee, about the founder of the radical 18^th century communitarian movement, the Shakers, at Utica’s Munson art museum.  Impressive to me was the film’s overall respectful attitude not only toward Mother Ann’s condemnation of slavery and her principled non-participation in the Revolutionary war, which got her arrested and jailed.  The movie indicated a kind of respect towards beliefs that modern educated, liberal people disdain.  In the handout we were given there was an interview with  director Mona Fastvold; the last question the interviewer asks her is this:  “The film is so focused on Ann’s experience… a very intense subjectivity.  You have the euphoric rush of the Shaker rituals, but then the underlying rot of religious dogma…was it a constraint to ground the film in that profoundly devoted perspective?”   

The director’s answer is interesting.  She’s clear Ann’s belief comes out of the trauma she suffered losing 4 babies one after the other; Ann’s belief – including her rule of celibacy – was her means of survival.  Fastvold responds, “I really wanted to take this story, lift it up, elevate it and give it some space and shed light on it.  Her (Mother Ann’s) ideas are rooted in religion, but they were really about love, equality, generosity of spirit, kindness…” 

In other words, the director  offers up a story of a religiously inspired woman as possibly something that could speak to us as long as we can overlook the religion so it can “fit into, philosophically, something that is of interest now, how it(sic) can shape and move with the times we’re in.”  I presume the “something of interest now,” has to do with the multiple social and environmental catastrophes Americans – and civilization generally –  are faced with, the fact the gospel of love appears to be losing to the “Machine,” brought to a perhaps apocalyptic peak under the Trump administration.  Is the desperate need for an adequate repudiation of capitalism’s increasingly blatant Pequod ride to Armageddon causing a crack in liberal consciousness?  Is religion’s alternative starting to “re-constitute” itself – however tentatively –  in modern imaginations?

Synchronously, less than a month ago a talk was given at The Other Side about the 19^th century radical utopian Oneida Community that had flourished a few miles from Utica. The academic who gave the talk did a remarkable job of presenting the perfectionist beliefs of the community’s founder, including its controversial sexual practices which established a kind of “open marriage” among members, and required male continence in order to protect women from unwanted childbirths.  The details the speaker included, for instance, of how male continence worked, made for an “X-rated” talk, but it felt respectful in a way it would not have had he been shy about those details. 

So is this all coincidence? Can our educated intellectual class now look respectfully at the religious faiths so fanatical that people set up “wacky” alternative communities in repudiation of the given, unacceptable, social/economic/governing model, despite their underlying rot? As appalled as we are at Trump’s MAGA, so far we cannot depart from our own safe mental harbor in rationalist thinking – or from the freedom to have nice stuff made possible by capitalism.  We cannot follow a similar flight of imagination into belief, or, that is, into a way of life that repudiates the Machine,  rooted in the  no- Kings-before-me metaphysics of the heart. 

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A formidable, perhaps decisive, obstacle to resistance to the Machine is the prevalent attitude of inevitability held toward digital technology makes.  Some of us intuit that technology is not “neutral,” as its defenders claim, but we struggle to provide an argument that can have a snowball-in-hell’s chance in secular liberal reality.   There is one. As Paul Kingsnorth, echoing William Blake asserts, the sacred and digital worlds are “in metaphysical opposition.”  No sacred, no opposition.  

I submit – very shakily, for sure! – that true community is among adults; it can be formed only from individuals who know the basis of one’s humanity is in the personal, ineradicable heart’s truth that, in the given (capitalist) reality must be protected from it.   The difference between  moral virtue coming from a heart that can imagine its being loved fully, and being good in hopes of being loved is all. Virtue lies in coming back to the personal center,  to that “endless and impossible journey to establish a human self.”  This the suffering which brings one into – as it always has done – the metaphysics of the heart’s imagination, the sovereignty without which there is chaos and looking for a king to save us.  

Those unshaky Shakers knew something of how the vulnerable human heart might be protected: “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.  To turn, turn will be our delight, ’til by turning, turning we come round right.” Apart from communitarian, monastic-type experiment, is another social experiment – one more possible for most of us –  calling to our hearts and imaginations in this historical moment?   My choices perhaps can seem less like folly when seen as answering the invitation to embark on a humanizing process of coming down to earth, in place,  that can be constructively fueled in the fire of creativity joined to constant prophetic critique of what capitalism gives us to be satisfied with instead of love.

The post The Humanist Art of Self-Defense appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Javad Esmaeili.

At the writing of this post, it has been nearly a month since Israel and America began their savage aerial assault on Iran, and the Islamic Republic has been throttled and decimated in nearly every way conceivable. The massacre began with the brutal assassination of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with most of his immediate family on February 28 and by February 29 most of his nations political and military leadership lie dead with him. As we speak, so do about 2,000 Iranian civilians.

The Zionist American Alliance has not only laid siege to pretty much all of Iran’s military capabilities, including thousands of members of the Revolutionary Guard, they have also done the same to most of Iran’s civilian capabilities as well. Over 12,000 bombs struck over 2,000 targets during the first 18 days with 3,600 bombs dropped on Tehran alone. The targets have not only included dozens of hospitals and schools but nearly 20,000 civilian buildings and at least 81,000 residential units. Iran as we once knew it has essentially been reduced to the world’s largest open-air burn unit, and yet no one but Donald Trump seems to be foolish enough to believe that America is actually winning this war.

Iran may be devastated beyond belief, but someone is still fighting like hell from the smoldering ruins and the imperial machine tasked with swiftly containing this undead menace before the American people can smell a quagmire is beginning to show signs of desperation as they lose control of the narrative. You can see it written all over Donald Trump’s leather face as he attempts to make sense of the havoc in real time, declaring victory over and over again before announcing another escalation of violence, bragging about negotiations that Iran denies having any interest in as thousands of American troops are positioned in the region for an invasion.

Meanwhile, Israel seems to be much more concerned with ethnically cleansing Southern Lebanon while announcing that they’ll keep bombing Iran on the side regardless of any mythic peace deals.

So, just what the fuck is going on here?

To put it succinctly, America is still fighting this war like it’s 1988 while Iran and to some extent Israel are showing our beloved imperial behemoth how wars will be fought in 2028. Some call it fourth generation combat, some call it asymmetric warfare, but what it all amounts to is a smaller and supposedly weaker party using unconventional tactics to prolong and expand a conflict in order to drain their much larger opponent of its will power and resources.

In many ways, the Islamic Republic was designed for this kind of battle. There’s is a nation forged in blood, building its foundation amidst an apocalyptic American sponsored invasion from Iraq that grinded away throughout the first decade of the Republic’s existence only to be followed by decades of threats, sanctions, assassinations and sabotage from the Great Satan and its burgeoning toadies in Israel.

What Iran built on this grave shaped foundation was a mosaic defense structure set to respond to even the most devastating of decapitations launched against its military leadership by automatically delegating power down to increasingly decentralized and autonomous military units capable of operating independently of any central command.

Iran has also formed a loose nit alliance with every Shia tribe America and its various quisling states have fucked over the last forty years of forever wars, creating another expanded mosaic of autonomous militias that surround every American base surrounding Iran.

The result being an army of ghosts moving seamlessly about the smoke of a thousand Patriot missiles, taking swipes at the devil’s Achilles heel every time he turns around, bleeding him dry, one drop at a time.

The entire Middle East has found themselves lost in a swarm of cheap drones and second-hand rockets coming from every direction at once and striking any nation providing comfort to the American Empire. Over a dozen nations across the region including all 6 members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have been peppered by a seemingly bottomless barrage of toy planes sniping at the oil and gas infrastructure that keeps them rich but more importantly soaking up the expensive American missiles that are supposed to be capable of protecting this wealth, leading to what is known as a munitions trap.

Your average Iranian Shahed drone costs about $20,000 dollars and can be constructed in a fucking cave from garbage. Your average American Patriot missile costs upwards of $2 million dollars and requires factories the size of Lindsey Graham’s congressional district. The result is America burning through $11 billion dollars in the first week of this bloodbath and spending about $2 billion dollars every day since. The result has also been a live demonstration for every nation on earth on exactly what the cost of an alliance with a dying empire amounts to.

The seemingly untouchable sheiks of the wealthy Gulf States have seen their skyscrapers go up in flames like crystal-colored roman candles as America scrambles to rip apart THAAD interceptors promised to other “allies” and drag them to the defense of an entire industry that can be held hostage by the simple geographic realities of the Strait of Hormuz. The empty promises of the Abraham Accords have become worth their weight in toilet paper. Meanwhile, Pax Americana’s globalist economy is in freefall due to its dependence on such a massive centralized “free” market.

20% of the global oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz and it has been effectively locked down by RC planes and fishing dhows loaded up with mines. Brent Crude has gone up over 40% in less than a month, peaking at nearly $120 dollars a barrel, carrying the rest of the oil and gas industry to hell with it in what the International Energy Agency has called “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” If this disaster goes on much longer it could very easily lead to a global recession. All because the “free” world bows to the dollar and the dollar is dependent on non-renewable dinosaur goo needed to keep suburbia chained to Walmart and Amazon.

The Iranian Revolution was launched as a confrontation between young Muslim leftists and the shallow sadistic decadence of Western Civilization. That revolution lost its way over decades of Westphalian statecraft but seems to have found itself again in the rubble amassed by its old foes in the other Babylon slouching towards Wall Street for another late-term abortion. With layers of Mullahs wiped out, Iran is once again a young, angry and desperate nation forced by imperialism to recognize the revolutionary nature of its true power, the power of an ancient culture unwilling to let a globalist enterprise dictate the narrative of its future.

Whether America invades or cuts a deal, it has already lost the war to define the future of the Middle East. Sadly, the same cannot be said for their partners in Israel who have quite skillfully practiced their own school of fourth generation warfare with a militia of lobbyists and pedo baiting spies hoodwinking a collapsing empire into throwing its bloated carcass on every grenade they pull the pin on. Israel could care less who wins the war in Iran as long as someone else’s children does most of the dying and they can use it as an excuse to expand their territory another hundred miles in any given direction without a Mullah left alive to protest it.

However, Israel is playing a very dangerous game, one that no gambler can win forever. They may be willing to cut a deal with any wannabe empire in the neighborhood but any empire that replaces a disgraced American behemoth is likely to lack the resources to defend Greater Israel in the zealous, white supremacist ways that they have become accustomed to. China will continue to rely on a far more complex web of economic alliances over the blunt force military strength they still can’t quite afford, and this will include backroom deals with other aspiring world powers like Turkey who will undoubtedly continue to cultivate their longtime connections to Islamic fundamentalists in order to balance the scales.

But the worst-case scenario for Israel, whether they realize it or not, would actually be the mass murder-suicide of an American ground invasion of Iran which would only serve to explode the Islamic Republics mosaic defense structure and unleash scores of heavily armed Shia militias across the Persian Gulf, setting the stage for what could very well become a kind of Twelver ISIS with a score to settle against a fanatical Zionist hegemon governed by a nuclear powered Manifest Destiny. Whoever actually survives such a fate may wish they hadn’t.

The best-case scenario, however unlikely it may be, is for a coalition of radicals to unite against an increasingly unpopular war right here in the belly of Babylon.

A diverse coalition of libertarians, anarchists, socialists and libertarian socialists devoted not just to creating a new counterculture but a sort of mosaic populist counter government capable of dismantling America’s long dead tree of liberty with a controlled demolition of secession, panarchy and radical decentralization, hopefully destroying the various multinational industrial complexes driving the west off a cliff into a war that no one can win in Iran in the process.

Maybe it’s a longshot, but if a shattered army of Basij bastards can decapitate the Great Satan with a Shahed drone in thirty days then maybe anything is possible.

The post How to Lose a War in Thirty Days appeared first on CounterPunch.org.