I’m no expert on 9/11 and do not believe in esoteric theories. My attitude towards 9/11 has been marked by a certain curiosity, but also by healthy skepticism. When I initially stumbled across articles questioning the official 9/11 narrative, I just read them and put them away. With Davidsson’s book, it was different: it immediately captivated me.
Having hitch-hiked extensively all over the United States and studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I am somehow familiar with how American society ticks. I have noted that after every severe calamity in the US, an immediate inquiry is initiated to determine the facts. When it comes to airplane crashes, it befalls the National Transportation Security Board (NTSB) to determine the circumstances in which the airplane crashed: the plane is pieced together from the debris, the cause of the crash is determined and a public report is issued regarding the circumstances of the crash. The U.S. government did not, however, permit the NTSB to investigate the 9/11 crashes. It had to be carried out, exceptionally, by the more secretive FBI, which has no obligation to publish its findings. Why did the U.S. government insist on such unprecedented secrecy?
Elias Davidsson’s book may provide an answer to this question. His book is a very thorough study of specific aspects of the 9/11 events that have hitherto been neglected. The strength of his book lies in its reliance on primary evidence, the sources for which are provided so that readers can check for themselves the accuracy and relevance of the evidence. Davidsson does not merely provide footnoted references to the sources but has actually posted a great number of source documents on his website, sparing readers tedious searches. This unusually user-friendly approach indicates the author’s willingness to subject him to the most exacting scrutiny by readers. What makes his study so compelling is his judicious use of official U.S. government documents to undermine the assertions of the U.S. government itself? A great part of his sources are FBI documents culled from the U.S. National Archives (NARA).
The author provides persuasive evidence that the official narrative is riddled with contradictions, anomalies, puzzling coincidences, lies, forged and planted evidence; that witnesses were intimidated; and that news was fabricated. A substantial chunk of his book is devoted to an analysis of the telephone calls made between passengers and crew-members with their colleagues or loved-ones on the ground. It is actually the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of these phone calls undertaken to date. One gets the rather sinister impression – reading the quoted phone calls – that the callers were not experiencing true hijackings. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether this impression is justified.
The author was born in Palestine in 1941 to Jewish parents and grew up in Jerusalem but lived for most of his life in Iceland. Apart from his double professional career, first as a computer expert and then as a music teacher and composer, he became interested in international law in the 1990s and published a number of extensive papers in the fields of international law, human rights law, and international criminal law. In 2002, prompted by anomalies he discovered in the official narrative on 9/11, he started researching these events. The present book represents the culmination of ten years’ work.
The book is divided into four parts and 14 chapters. The style of the presentation is narrative and easy to follow. Davidsson’s book is the first one that demonstrates, beyond reasonable doubt, that there exists no evidence for the claim that Muslim terrorists hijacked planes on 9/11. His book is not limited to debunking this claim. He also shows that the U.S. authorities have failed to identify the debris of the aircraft that crashed or allegedly crashed at the various sites on 9/11. Based on his comprehensive analysis of the phone calls, Davidsson invites readers to consider what he designates as his best theory regarding the nature of the phone calls.
Before involving readers with the intricate forensics of the case, the author highlights the incredible swiftness with which the official narrative on 9/11 emerged: CBS News named Osama bin Laden as the main suspect within 15 minutes. Approximately 20 minutes after the second plane crash, President Bush declared that “America is under attack,” although he had no evidence that the events were related to a foreign source. The facts of the case were not determined by investigators, but by the U.S. Congress, meeting 24 hours after the events. Relying on a statement made by Senator Lott, Davidsson reveals that the congressional resolution was already in the works on the very day of the incident.
For the author, 9/11 was a brilliantly orchestrated “propaganda coup”. The dramatists of 9/11 must have envisaged that the events, played out real time on television, would serve to unite the American people and rally the population behind the flag. This turned out to be the case. The role of U.S. and European media in promoting the official 9/11 version is well known. Established media deliberately and routinely suppress facts that might undermine public belief in the official version, for example the admission by the FBI in June 2006 to possess no hard evidence of a link between Osama bin Laden and 9/11.
Is it possible to challenge Davidsson’s work? One might argue that a colossal crime such as 9/11 would involve so many people, that the plot could not be kept secret. According to this argument someone, among the many participants, would have long ago “spilled the beans.” How compelling is this view? What does it mean to “spill the beans”? How likely will eyewitnesses “spill the beans”?
First, it should be clarified that government conspiracies do not always remain secret. They are often exposed by scholars and historians. But as long as such exposure is limited to scholarly books and suppressed by the corporate media, these plots remain – for the general public – “conspiracy theories”. A few examples should suffice:
In 1967, the US and Israel conspired in attempting to sink the USS Liberty off the coast of Israel. The US Navy personnel who survived the perfidious attack attempted to raise public knowledge about this conspiracy but did not succeed. The facts have been thoroughly documented by British journalist Peter Hounam, who interviewed survivors and participants. They are known to those who wish to know, but are kept suppressed from the large public.
The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment is cited as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.” This experiment was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The conspiracy of deception on which this experiment was based, was only brought to public in 1972 by a whistleblower, i.e. 40 years after the experiment began.
Operation Gladio refers to terrorist acts secretly engineered by the secret services in Italy, Belgium, Greece, Turkey and possibly Germany during the Cold War. These murderous acts were staged to appear as terrorism by leftist groups. The operation was kept secret for 40 years in Western Europe with no one blowing the whistle. It was revealed in 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Julio Andreotti, addressing the Italian parliament, but even that did not ensure wide public knowledge because major media did not cover the story. Most European people, including academics, journalists and politicians, are not aware of this murderous conspiracy which was carried out by their own governments. Those unaware of this operation will be tempted to call it a “conspiracy theory”.
In addition to media reluctance to report government conspiracies, the modus operandi of covert operations needs also to be considered. Covert operations carried out by the military are always organized according to the “need to know” principle. Michael Ruppert, one of the first independent investigators of 9/11, reminded readers: “From the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully kept secrets involving thousands of people. Secondly, in order to execute a conspiracy of the size and type I am suggesting – 9/11 — it is not necessary that thousands of people see the whole picture. The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies in compartmentalization. A technician in Tennessee refining uranium ore in 1943 would have had no knowledge of its intended use or any moral culpability in any deaths that occurred as a result of it. Another technician in Ohio, mixing a polymer resin in 1985, would have had no knowledge of what an F117A looked like or what it was intended to do.”
Many people believe that a government employee aware of illegal practices by his agency or his superiors will immediately report to the police or speak to a journalist. This belief is not justified. Exposing a high state crime requires great personal courage and entails risks to one’s career, security or even life. Even the courageous whistleblower cannot be certain that those, to whom he confides will publicize the information, suppress it or inform on him to his superiors. Just consider what happened to Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange! Sadly, most people do not even dare to ask elementary questions about 9/11, afraid of being ostracized or even losing their jobs. Civil courage is a rare commodity.
Summing up his findings, Elias Davidsson refers to human rights norms according to which the families of 9/11 victims are entitled to know what happened to their next-of-kin and society is entitled to have the perpetrators, planners and facilitators of the mass-murder identified, prosecuted and convicted. He furthermore sees in efforts to expose 9/11 a “revolutionary potential” because it would reveal what he sees as the monumental failure of our institutions to seek the truth on these murderous events.
Davidsson’s book is not an introduction to 9/11 critical studies. It caters to those who are already aware of the major anomalies in the official narrative. The book is a must read to those concerned with the stealthy transformation of Western democracies into police states and to those who oppose the wars conducted by the United States and its allies.
Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany.
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, a new book by writer/professor Sarah Schulman, tells the story of Schulman’s transformation from a “Jewish, lesbian New Yorker” into a “Cosmopolitan queer and avid BDS[1] advocate.” Her book is a must read—and not because it offers original ideological or political outlook, not at all. Schulman actually provides us with a unique and invaluable window into Jewish secular progressive thought. It unveils the structure of LGBT[2] politics and its operation within the Palestinian solidarity movement. Schulman also provides the reader some crucial and juicy references to the direct involvement of George Soros’ network in promoting a gay rights revolution in the Arab world in general, and in Iran and Egypt in particular.
Schulman is a fluent writer, her narration is smooth and flowing. But more than anything, she is astonishingly honest in her attempt to describe her journey. Indeed, her genuine openness is almost suicidal at times. This fact alone may explain why, despite its sensational title, her book has received little attention from the usually loud Jewish progressive network.
In the very beginning of the book, Schulman provides us with an amazing confession most Jews would prefer to shove far under the carpet.
“We were raised with two Yiddish concepts about Christians: kopf and punim. Yiddishe kopf and Goyishe kopf. To say that someone had a Yiddishe kopf (A Jewish mind) was to say admiringly that he was a genius, that he was analytical and conceptual and an original thinker. To say that someone had a goyishe kopf was to say that he was dull-witted, conformist and slow” (p. 2).
One must admit that only rarely do Jews volunteer such intimate information that confirms the depth of racism and supremacy embedded within Jewish culture.
A few pages later Schulman is honest enough to admit that she also is immersed in some deep biological determinist thinking.
“Of course, like many Jews, I do think of myself in biological terms, despite how convenient that is for anti-Semitism. There is after all, a genetic component, since Jewish Identity—from the Jewish point of view is biologically essentialist, dependent on having a Jewish mother” (p. 10).
It goes without saying that evolutionary psychologist Prof. Kevin MacDonald and Right Wing author David Duke are hounded relentlessly by the ADL and the progressive Jewish network for basically agreeing with Schulman.
Ideological Collectivism
Interestingly enough, despite her honesty, Schulman rarely thinks for herself on her path toward universal justice. Instead she always consults with such progressive luminaries as Judith Butler, who is ‘on the top’ of her “list of credible LGBT people.” As an activist and campaigner, Schulman always builds fronts and forms leagues. She always seeks advice, she always consults with someone who knows better. These facts are actually very significant: Schulman is telling us a story about someone who thinks and operates “as a Jew,” “as a lesbian,” “as a Queer International,” “as a progressive,” etc. The truth of the matter is that people who “think” and “act” “as a something” hardly think for themselves. Instead they operate within the parameters set by an imaginary political and ideological collective (the gay, the Jew, the progressive, the Queer International’ the Black, the Muslim) instead of thinking authentically and operating autonomously.
To a certain extent Schulman’s extended monologue helps us grasp marginal politics as a powerful attempt to reduce the individual to a mere “pile of signifiers.”
Jewish Victimhood and Homo-centrism
Two years ago Jewish pro-Palestinian blogger Philip Weiss was brave enough to admit to me in an interview that it is Jewish self-interest that motivates his pro-Palestinian activism. For Weiss it wasn’t an “altruistic” concern for the oppressed—he actually believed that his activism was ‘good for the Jews.’ Schulman reminds me of Weiss. Like Weiss she is brave and honest to say it all. But she is also interested in promoting her ‘queer political agenda’. For Schulman, Palestinians are simply a means toward her sacred progressive end. “If people like me are going to turn our backs on [Israeli] queer events in support of the boycott [BDS], then we must be assured that the boycott both recognizes queer support and acknowledges Palestinian LGBT organizing,” she writes.
In short, it is the primacy of “queer and LGBT interests” that determines Schulman’s commitment to a battle for “universal justice.” As one would expect, Schulman’s solidarity has a clear price tag—one attuned primarily to the benefit of the LGBT movement. To my mind the meaning of this is simple: Schulman has managed to successfully transfer her Jewish tribalism into a form of sexually oriented political affinity.
Schulman isn’t just a “boring gay” activist. She is also an Ashkenazi (European) Jew, with all the necessary victim paraphernalia which she waves proudly in the very beginning of her book. “I was born in 1958, 13 years after the end of the Holocaust” begins the third paragraph. “I was born only three years after my maternal grandmother finally confirmed that her two brothers and two sisters had been exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators 10 to 15 years before,” she continues (p. 1). Her choice of words leaves no room for speculation: Schulman is a traumatized Ashkenazi Jew. She is an adherent and follower of what Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir defines as the Holocaust religion. Her entire universe is codified in reference to the “primacy of Jewish suffering.” Needless to say, this amalgam of Jewish suffering and gay victimhood translates in Schulman’s case into a solipsistic political argument.
I guess at this point I should admit that I have never been convinced that “the personal is political,” as many marginal ideologists insist. I’ve always been certain that the personal is actually personal—and, as such, consider an individual’s sexual orientation to be his or her own business—and that when it becomes political it stops being personal. But for Schulman, as for so many other political activists within her milieu, the ‘personal’ certainly is ‘political.’ She celebrates each of her symptoms publicly and politically and, if this is not enough, she is kind enough to share it all with us.
Homonationalism, the Queer International and Joseph Massad
Schulman’s political universe is divided into binary oppositions: Homonationalism vs. the Queer International is one example.
Homonationalism describes a contemporary phenomenon most prevalent in some liberal Western countries where “white gays, lesbians and bisexuals won a full range of rights…they become accepted and realigned with patriotic or nationalistic ideologies of their countries” (p. 104).
The notion of Homonationalism is particularly relevant to Israel, for the Zionist state has been very successful in mobilizing its patriotic gay community. It has managed to recruit the vast majority of its gay population in order to convey the perception that it is way ahead of its neighbors as far as gay rights are concerned. Being a “progressive Jew” and committed to the notion of “Tikkun Olam” (fixing the world), Schulman is very upset by Homonationalism in general and Israeli Homonationalism in particular. She would prefer that gays and lesbians be primarily committed to a universal political discourse defined by their sexual orientation. This is precisely where the notion of “Queer International” comes in. Schulman is aiming at a “worldwide movement that brings queer liberation and feminism to the principle of international autonomy from occupation, colonialism, and globalized capital.”
And yet, one question remains: How is it possible that so many gays prefer to identify with their national and patriotic environment rather than with a ‘universal’ sexually oriented ideology? Apparently most people, including gays and lesbians, accept a clear dichotomy between their sexual orientation and their political identification. It also seems natural to me that a country’s LGBT citizens would be thankful to a society or culture that liberates them and respects their needs and rights.
From a heterosexual perspective (as if that exists), the above observation seems very natural. Since the vast majority of healthy people spend most of their time out of bed, it only makes sense that one’s sexual orientation is not a primary focus of one’s civil and political life. Furthermore, Schulman’s so-called ‘progressive’ expectation of homosexuals that they be devoted primarily to queer ‘universal’ issues is in itself a form of oppression that borders on abuse, since it imposes on the individual an ideological collectivism and epistemological mantra.
As an enthusiastic advocate of Queer International, Schulman is up against Palestinian academic Joseph Massad. According to Massad, the heterosexual/homosexual binary opposition is itself foreign to the Orient – it is basically “a Western apparatus imposing concepts of homosexuality on Palestinian sex between men” (p. 66). For Massad gays and lesbians are not universal categories, and the attempt to universalize them is the direct outcome of human rights activists who project their own symptom at the expense of their ‘solidarity subject.’
I am far from being an admirer of Massad, yet his argument here is coherent and deserves attention. Like Heidegger and other developed minds, Massad considers the human subject to be a product of his/her culture, language, rituals, geography and so on. Schulman’s approach, on the other hand, is the outcome of the most simplistic phenomenological anthropocentric and Judeo-centric school of thought. Like many others, she naively believes that people are actually the authors of their own biography, and that this biography is somehow universal, transferable and translatable.
This ideological clash obviously is crucial, for if Massad is correct then the “universalization” of the queer condition suggested by Schulman and the Queer International is obviously a form of interventionism. It imposes Western liberal categories on the oppressed. As we will soon see, this exact agenda is far from being kept secret; to be precise, it is actually funded largely by the liberal Zionist George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
Schulman clearly views Massad as a threat, referring to him and his criticism at least twice in her book. Yet, she doesn’t make a single theoretical effort to counter Massad’s argument. Instead she informs us that Massad had never met with the “new wave of young queer Palestinian activists.” Schulman may well be correct here, yet this is far from being an argument. It is merely an anecdote. In other words, the fact that a few young Palestinian gays adopt some Western liberal ideas delivered to the region by an Israeli gay ideologist, an American Jewish lesbian activist, or even George Soros’ Open Society only proves that Massad is actually correct—the ‘universalization’ of marginal thought is in itself a form of crude cultural intervention.
Queer International and George Soros
A year ago I was shocked to discover that the BDS National Committee in Ramallah had made a crucial change to its goal statement. It changed the wording of its original (June 2005) mission statement from “demanding that Israel end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands”[3] to demanding that Israel end “its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967.”[4]
The BDS National Committee thus basically abandoned the most precious Palestinian right—it drifted away from the commitment to 1948 and limited its struggle to the liberation of lands occupied in 1967. An attempt to clarify who exactly made the change and what process was involved revealed that this significant change was made in a clandestine manner—it appeared only in English. It has never appeared in Arabic or any other language. It didn’t take long before it became evident that the change took place behind the back of the Palestinian people. Despite BDS’ claim to be a ‘civil society’ representing more than 170 Palestinian organizations, Palestinians are still unaware of the BDS National Committee’s compromise on their behalf.
Being an expert on Jewish marginal politics, it was clear to me that the radical change in the BDS goal statement and the non-democratic way in which it was introduced was meant to appease BDS’ Jewish adherents. Further investigation revealed that BDS—like most Palestinian NGOs—is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Yet, for obvious reasons, BDS National Committee (BNC) remained silent on the topic. It has never revealed its finances or the identity of its funders. The only reference to Soros’ links with BDS was made available by the Israeli right-wing NGO Monitor.
Now, however, thanks to Schulman’s book, this issue has been resolved. In her search for funding for a young Palestinian Queer USA tour in support of BDS, Schulman writes that she was advised to approach George Soros’ Open Society institute. The following account may leave you flabbergasted, as it did me:
“A former ACT UP staffer who worked for the Open Society Institute, George Soros’ foundation, suggested that I file an application there for funding for the tour. When I did so it turned out that the person on the other end had known me from when we both attended Hunter [College] High School in New York in the 1970s. He forwarded the application to the institutes’s office in Amman, Jordan, and I had an amazing one-hour conversation with Hanan Rabani, its director of the Women’s and Gender program for the Middle East region. Hanan told me that this tour would give great visibility to autonomous queer organizations in the region. That it would inspire queer Arabs—especially in Egypt and Iran…for that reason, she said, funding for the tour should come from the Amman office” (p. 108).
What we see here is clear and embarrassing evidence of a blunt intervention made by George Soros’ institute in an attempt to shape Arab culture and political life. We also learn about the manner in which Soros’ Open Society Institute introduces gay and queer politics to the region. Apparently money for a tour promoting Palestine and BDS is traveling from Soros’ Open Society to Jordan and then back to the USA with the hope that such a maneuver would “inspire” gays in Iran. At least now we know who stands behind the Arab gay revolution.
The moral is very clear: BDS had a very “good reason” to remain silent regarding its funding sources. After all, being funded directly or indirectly by a liberal Zionist philanthropy, a man who also funds the openly Zionist JStreet, is indeed slightly embarrassing. Furthermore, it seems as if this new evidence of Western intervention presented as a “Jordanian queer initiative” proves that Joseph Massed was more than correct— Queer International is a farce. In practice it is a network of proxy operations attempting to introduce liberal ideas to Arabs and Muslims in an attempt to undermine their culture.
Intellectual Integrity vs. Materialism
Since she is not a philosopher, Schulman is not interested in arguments or any kind of theoretical depth. Instead she specializes in marginal campaigns and Queer International activism. She is obviously very good at forming alliances and making things happen. When Schulman realizes, for instance, that Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT film festival, is funded by the Israeli Consulate, she offers to “fund-raise to replace the (Israeli) money.” This isn’t exactly an intellectual approach, yet it provides us with precious and intimate information about marginal politics and the way in which it operates behind the scenes. We are dealing here with a little solidarity industry. Sometimes it is Israel and Zionists who pay the bill, other times it is Soros and other liberal Zionists who fund the “opposition.”
Schulman’s personal journey toward BDS and Justice throws light on the path taken by the BDS in Ramallah toward the Jewish crowd, the queer movement and especially liberal Zionist money.
While during the early stage of Schulman’s campaign BDS leader Omar Barghouti was clearly reluctant to openly support or integrate queer politics into BDS, by the time the book ends Schulman is convinced by Barghouti’s “liberal credentials.” “Omar and I,” she says, “had both been motivated by love and need for justice to transform ourselves so that we were now reaching each other.” And, she continues, “now I know that there is a significant Palestinian ‘civil society’ that supports a nonviolent strategy for change and is feminist and now pro-gay.”
Mazal Tov is probably the most appropriate way to congratulate Barghouti, BDS, Soros—and Sarah Schulman, of course.
I am very impressed with this revelation about a leading Palestinian civil society becoming ‘pro-gay’ and ‘feminist.I guess that Soros and his institutions indeed have reason to be optimistic about their chance to change the face of the Arab society.
However, I would really like to know whether the Palestinians are aware of all this. For some reason I have a feeling that, as in the case of BDS surreptitiously changing its goals statement, the same Palestinian civil society now has become ‘pro-gay’ and ‘feminist’ without anyone in Palestine knowing about it. I can only say that I hope I am wrong.
The Vietnam War seems to be drawing attention increasingly from researchers born during or after the tumultuous decade in which that deadly drama played out. One sees mostly this generation’s higher profile works, like Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War; The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History, and Nick Turse’sKill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. More in the academic shadows, but perhaps suggestive of a wider trend in the making, is a new study by Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, rich in the vistas it surveys, and a seed bed for future scholars to expand on.
A reader will scan this book’s quirky title in vain for a quick fix on what the work undertakes to present. Lewis, an assistant professor at City University in New York, and active in contemporary Labor and antiwar movements, devotes much of her book’s narrative to the project of sharpening an outmoded analysis of the American working class, accomplished in part by locating the class historically within what the late New York Times columnist Tom Whicker once called “a very broad spectrum” of public opposition to the Vietnam War, some of it organized, some of it not.
The distinction is critical, with the organized spheres of Vietnam War opposition, as highlighted in the book’s subtitle, easier to pin down and label. Lewis comes to her interest in the Vietnam antiwar narrative through disappointing efforts in the last decade to mobilize public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a movement that promised much in its early stages, then, she dryly notes, “faded.” Serving as a representative of her union within a Labor movement far more sympathetic to an antiwar message in 2003 than it was in 1965, Lewis, “staffing tables, working on resolutions, organizing protests… spoke with fellow labor activists about their experiences within the Vietnam antiwar movement.”
Digging through this “buried history,” the author subsequently confirmed that antiwar forces in the US during Vietnam were every bit as “massive” and “dynamic” as the accounts she was hearing from her older comrades. How, then, could a post-Vietnam generation individual with Penny Lewis’ credentials, a committed peace activist, a leader in her union, a solidly grounded career-bound academic, have missed that story? Apparently because, growing up, what she had absorbed about that war and those times, as “fleshed out in numerous movies, TV shows, textbooks, journalist’s renderings, histories, memoirs, political speeches, and personal recollections,” exposed her to what she now accurately identifies as “half truths and, overall … is a falsehood.”
Myth holds sway in the “renderings” of this history earmarked for storage in the “collective memory,” and doled out with the greatest damage, as Lewis chillingly demonstrates, in the vast majority of text books that feed young minds through mainstream scholastic channels with “[h]ostile treatments of the movement… focused on the elite and out-of-touch nature of the protestors… as ‘spitters’ and ‘haters.’” In contrast, “war supporters” during that period “are often imagined as ordinary… people from Middle America… who supported God, country and our boys in Nam.”
Lewis sets about restoring some of the nuance to the record, framed by the sociological ground rules in force where such discussions occur in her branch of the scholarly manufactory. Fortunately she is sufficiently clear headed and graceful in expression, that the speed bumps of jargon, and occasional quoted infomercials from esteemed mentors and colleagues, shouldn’t deter a general reader drawn to this subject from reaping insight and satisfaction from Lewis’ summary, but deft, treatment of the twin themes she brings under investigation, class and protest.
Lewis frames correctly a chronology – too obvious to have been so often overlooked – that recognizes much attributed culturally and politically to the Sixties to have occurred or spread into the Seventies, a point of some significance when Lewis explores the demographic makeup of the opposition farther on. But the most spectacular relic rescued here by Lewis is a shining image of the Vietnam movement’s voluminous mobilization of “6 million” antiwar activists… with another 25 million close sympathizers.” Imagined visually, it’s a perfect snapshot of what sustained mass organizing looks like, and it cannot be over-emphasized by interested parties seeking to defend and replicate this history in the present. Let me put it this way, there wasn’t a corner of the land for a decade where an organizer couldn’t find a welcome crash pad, and a public forum for whatever on-going or up-coming antiwar action he or she had come to herald.
Examining the evolving Vietnam era antiwar movement over time, Lewis could see that, until the mid-60s, when the public was finally being drawn into the debate, most of the vocal opposition had been limited to well-known figures from the Fifties’ ban-the-bomb’ network, like Dr. Ben Spock and A.J. Muste, a leading pacifist. As the American combat role in Vietnam rapidly expanded, opposition soon spread to a vanguard of precocious students on several of the nation’s top campuses, and included, as well, their less privileged counterparts among young black civil rights workers in the South.
Initially, preoccupation with the war on campus was tangential to a rise in student involvement with civil rights, and demands for academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 was an act of defiance against in loco parentis that shocked college administrators who for years had expected nothing more rambunctious from their student bodies than cafeteria food fights and panty raids. Student leader Mario Savio’s name became a house hold word overnight, and the actions of the Berkeley students ignited a political charge throughout a budding youth culture that spawned a collective resistance to the draft, and militant opposition to an escalating war.
At the University of Michigan, where it had been discovered that a program to advise the South Vietnamese government served as a front for the CIA, a handful of leftwing students affiliated with the League For Industrial Democracy, broke with their timid work-within-the-system and red-baiting elders, and, in 1962, formed Students for a Democratic Society. Their impulse had a domestic focus, a desire to explore possibilities for what they called participatory democracy, which might in turn help strip some aggression from the nation’s foreign policy. Then, in 1965, SDS organized the first mass anti-Vietnam war demonstration, bringing 25 thousand protestors to Washington, D.C., and, till the end of the decade, the organization inspired independent political action for a draft age generation, mostly white, middle class college students, female and male, who, as a demographic, remained the backbone of the protest movement until the war’s end.
But where were working class youths not bound for college with its privileged four year deferment from conscription in this generational upheaval? The boys at least, or “proles,” as James Fallows once infamously described them, overwhelmingly filled the ranks of the armed services, where their own rebellion, in Lewis’ astute observation, “had as great, if not greater, an effect on the US military’s ability to fight the war than did the more typical protest actions” on the home front.
Lewis is understandably perplexed that an event of such powerful impact like the GI rebellion receives almost no attention in even the best historical accounts of the movement, like Charles DeBeneditti’s An American Ordeal. Lewis has to provide an academic explanation for this mysterious oversight, arguing that studies of “social movements” are too narrowly defined to accommodate anomalous structures that don’t fit this or that discipline’s analytic criteria, and so forth and so on. Lewis, of course, wants to expand the scholarly strike zone. But the fact remains that the bibliography of works addressing the GI movement is so tiny and obscure that even in the heat of the hunt Lewis has failed to cite among the rare treatments two contributions of seminal importance, Matthew Rinaldi’s 1974 essay for Radical America, “The Olive Drab Rebels,” and James Lewes’ Protest and Survive, a book length survey of the scores of underground GI newspapers that circulated during the war.
The GI Resistance combusted from many acts of spontaneous, individual defiance, although civilian organizers who recognized the importance of working with GIs provided indispensable political and logistical leadership through a network of GI coffee houses and counseling centers that sprang up outside virtually every major US military installation at home, and near many bases overseas as well. The movement in the military paralleled the civilian movement, but was in many ways dissimilar, not least in having erupted under the authoritarian environment of military discipline, and in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Then, home from the war and discharged from the service, ex-GIs rose up en mass in 1970, energized a flagging movement, and helped to further erode whatever lukewarm public support remained for the war. Never before had veterans anywhere opposed war in such numbers, and, even more unprecedented, did so while their war remained very much in progress, its outcome still in the balance. The antiwar veterans have been only slightly less studied by movement historians, Lewis comments, than the GI resisters.
What about the working class as a whole? Where did Middle America stand on the war? Stored in the distorted memory bank described by Lewis, a white male worker stands upon a pedestal on which the word “hardhat, ”is engraved. An unabashed flag waver and pro-war patriot, he appeared briefly in May 1970, and beat up some long hairs demonstrating against the war in the vicinity of Wall Street.
It does not matter that this prevailing caricature obscures the existence of female and minority workers, and fails to sum up fairly where white male production workers stood on the war overall – the antiwar vets and GIs providing the most glaring rebuttal of the hardhat thesis. The bullying behavior of a battalion of jerks from the pampered and manipulated New York building trades is held up as evidence of a false and inverted reality where only elites of a leisured middle class with too much time on their hands opposed the war, while tradition-bound Archie Bunkers expected their sons to serve when called, even at the cost of coming back from Nam in a body bag.
There’s no doubt that class polarization on the war existed, but leaving aside large segments of rebellious middle and upper middle class young people, the well-heeled parents who paid their college tuitions were more likely to support the war than their opposite numbers among the Greatest Generation in the blue collar neighborhoods. According to one comprehensive survey Lewis cites, “Opposition to the war was in fact higher among lower income than among higher income Americans.” By using the term “in-fact,” Lewis explains, this study’s author “acknowledges the common misconception that the opposite was true.” And yet, she muses, “no account… explains why such a misconception exists…”
Grappling with that conundrum, Lewis says, is the essential project of her book, and she casts the net widely. Her extensive exploration of the inadequacy of the tools of contemporary social science to distinguish the structural conditions that define working class realities from contingent forces that contradict leftist notions of objective class interests, and are often manifest by workers in conservative and individualist political behavior, is easier to read than to review. As the Dude would say, it’s complicated… lotta ins, lotta outs. So, around that task I invite the reader to follow Lewis first hand.
But to the degree that misconception erases the rejection of the Vietnam War by a majority of low income Americans, suffice it say that, generational differences notwithstanding, bluecollar opposition was seldom expressed or politicized in any manner resembling movement activism. Much working class skepticism of US military policy in SE Asia centered around the inability of the nation’s leaders to justify the burden in blood and treasure extracted disproportionately from their communities in pursuit of war objectives that could never be adequately explained to their satisfaction. Such attitudes in Middle America, communicated as vox populi, seldom translated into sympathy for the more flamboyant aspects of the protest movement.
In fact, “[t]he countercultural expression of many parts of the movement challenged core values of many workers,” Lewis acknowledges. Or as Notre Dame sociologist, Andrew Greeley, once quipped, “If the white ethnic is told in effect that to support peace he must also support the Black Panthers, women’s liberation, widespread use of drugs, free love, campus radicals, Dr. Spock, long hair and picketing clergymen,” you’re unlikely to find him in the peace movement.
Greeley’s observation, which echoes the witty pen of George Orwell describing eccentric Brit peaceniks of the Thirties, is likewise more parody than picture of a movement that was as eclectic as the society from which it was formed. But you don’t have to be intolerant of cultural diversity to share in a critique of the infinite contradictions that riddled the organized Vietnam antiwar opposition, those which apply personally being currently under display in my work-in-progress. “Useful knowledge,” Lewis proclaims , can be gained by those carrying a “desire for social change” into the future, who study the Vietnam antiwar movement for its “shortcomings” as well as its “achievements.”
In Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks Lewis underscores two constants that link the Vietnam conflict with contemporary US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. All are or were driven by similar “economic and political imperatives.” And, ultimately, all three were or are rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans. Only during Vietnam, however, did a people mobilized by an explicit antiwar agenda exercise a strong hand in bringing the war to an end. Obviously conditions differ from one epoch to the next, but it is still useful to emphasize what distinguishes a “faded” movement from a “dynamic” one.
Publication of What Lies Across the Water,Stephen Kimber’s book about Cuban anti-terrorists serving wildly extravagant terms in U.S. jails, is a remarkable event. Previously appearing as an e-book, this is the first full – length book published in English on the so-called Cuban Five. They were arrested in Miami on September 12, 1998, and a worldwide movement on their behalf is demanding their freedom. Many view them as political prisoners.
In comprehensive and convincing fashion the book explains how Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González came to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned. Its coverage of bias and legal failings that marred their prosecution and trial is adequate, but less detailed. Kimber devotes more attention to events and personalities directly affecting the Five than to early anti-Cuban terror attacks and the Cuban revolution.
Journalism professor Kimber (at Canada’s University of King’s College, in Halifax, Nova Scotia) drew upon news stories in the Florida, Central American, and Cuban media and read 20,000 pages of court transcripts. He interviewed officials and contacts in Florida, Cuba, and elsewhere, also family members of the Five and the prisoners themselves, via correspondence. The author’s clear, flowing, and often seat-gripping, even entertaining, narrative is an added plus. The book is highly recommended.
Kimber starts out by confessing he was no expert on the case initially. He was about to write a novel that touched upon Cuba. Then a Cuban friend with political and intelligence experience told him that, “nothing can really be resolved between Washington and Havana until they (the Five) are returned to Cuba.” So instead of writing a novel, Kimber began work on a story he realized was important and that “needed to be told by someone who didn’t already know which versions of which stories were true.”
The way Kimber’s report unfolds serves to highlight convoluted linkages of the prisoners’ experiences and their case to the many-faceted U.S. apparatus set up to undo the Cuban revolution. Implacable, non-stop U.S. enmity sets the stage for obfuscations, contradictions, intrigue, ambiguities, and strange twists. For Kimber, the resulting atmosphere was one where “Nothing, it seems, is ever as it seems.”
For example, Cuba’s “Wasp Network” included at least 22 agents, not just the Cuban Five, as is often assumed. Agents were posted throughout the United States, away from Florida. Some of those arrested in 1998 pled guilty and served only short sentences. Cuban agents served as FBI informants. Far from exclusively monitoring private paramilitary groups, as many assume, one Cuban Five agent did gather non – classified intelligence from a U.S. military installation. For years, the FBI monitored movements, contacts, and communications of the Five and other agents. The Cuban American Nation Foundation (CANF), darling of U.S. presidents, professed non-violence, yet operated a paramilitary wing. Even the Miami Herald, reviled by Cuba solidarity activists, gains points through its reporter Juan Tamayo, who linked Havana hotel bombings to the Cuban exile terrorist Luis Posada.
The book attests to difficulties attending intelligence gathering in the midst of all but open U.S. war against Cuba. Cuban agents were well prepared, and superior officers in Havana supervised them closely. “Compartmentalized,” they were unable usually to identify fellow agents in the United States. They relied on advanced technical skills, support from loved ones, fearlessness, their own resourcefulness, their sensitive understanding of hazardous situations, and very hard work.
Kimber’s “What Lies across the Water” has the potential for stimulating new thinking on the case of the Five. Information it provides and the book’s fact-based style of presentation ought to persuade readers, it seems, to move beyond viewing the prisoners’ fate as a sort of morality tale, one with U.S. over-reaction, prisoners’ revolutionary virtue, and suffering. The book would encourage them instead to develop a response built on considering the larger context of generalized U.S. bullying of Cuba. The book may or may not succeed in this, but in all respects it is essential reading for those either new or old to the case of the Five.
The book exerts an appeal through effective portrayals of characters so far out of the ordinary, with such bizarre purposes, as almost to defy belief. They include: Cuban agent Percy Alvarado Godoy, CANF infiltrator for years; terrorist honchos Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada; the opportunistic Brothers to the Rescue leader Jose Basulto; and even Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, message carrier to the Clinton White House. There is the flamboyant Wasp agent, pilot, unfaithful husband, and FBI informant Juan Pablo Roque, who returned to Cuba; CANF founder and Miami titan Jorge Mas Canosa; and not least, Francisco Avila Azcuy. That FBI informant, Cuban spy for 13 years, and chief of Miami’s Alpha 66 private military formation was unusual, even in a setting where double agents were, and undoubtedly are, routine.
This book tells the tragic story of the Cuban Five. But here’s hoping it also helps re-orient energies of justice-seeking activists toward joining or rejoining a necessary fight. Their task is to take on the century – long U.S. campaign to impose domination over a Caribbean island. The agenda presently is to end the U.S. economic blockade, end campaigns of internal subversion and international isolation, and, surely, free the Cuban Five.
W. T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.
The publication date of two different books, to be released on May 31 2013, is a coincidence that could turn out to be a fortuitous one for each, in that both deal with the same topic, the secret war in Laos that took place during the 1960’s, and whose geographical focus is the same area of northern Laos. One is a novel, The Plain of Jars, while the other is a reprint of a 1972 anthology of bombing survivor stories, Voices from the Plain of Jars.
It has been just about fifty years since undeclared war was waged in Laos, the tiny country sandwiched between Vietnam and Thailand. Although the roots of this war were entangled in the complex and reckless politics of US foreign policy at that time, the results are clearer: after nine years of war, seven billion dollars, three and a half million tons of bombs, a half-million dead, and 750,000 homeless, the US had failed to achieve any of the objectives it had aimed for.
There are several grave aspects of this war which still have relevance today. The most tragic was the bombing of unarmed civilians, the worst case of this having taken place in the plateau known as the Plain of Jars, its name derived from two thousand year old stone urns made by a forgotten civilization. Here, a scorched earth policy was carried out by the US Air Force, with the objective of population removal. Firsthand accounts of the horrors of the bombing campaigns are given in Voices from the Plain of Jars, where those who had made it to refugee camps told their stories to a young American volunteer, now a freelance columnist, Fred Branfman, who subsequently compiled the narratives and children’s drawings into this classic book.
As a consequence of the air war, there are still millions of live cluster munitions lying in the ground, which have caused more than 50,000 casualties, including 30,000 dead, and still continue to kill and maim 100 people each year. More than half of the victims are children who pick up the brightly colored, yet deadly little balls.
The Plain of Jars, a novel by N. Lombardi Jr., is an adventure story about a sixty-four year old widow trying to unravel the mystery of her son’s fate, a pilot who was shot down over Laos twenty two years earlier, and in the second part of the book, about a mysterious man who becomes a local legend as he clears the cluster bombs with the aid of an elephant and a self-designed flailer, a device that whips the ground and detonates the little ball-like grenades. The novel uses entertainment value to educate people about a military conflict that only few today know had ever occurred. Using action, suspense, even humor, and other fictional devices, the author has created a vehicle to convey a strong anti-war message without beating the reader over the head with it.
Does recalling the events of that time and place have any contemporary significance? Both authors feel that indeed it does, for the secret war in Laos had set the precedent for tactics used in making war today, such as aerial bombardment of civilian targets, CIA involvement in military operations, the use of proxy armies, and the testing of new aerial weapons in combat situations.
Both books are available at all major outlets, both online and many brick and mortar shops.
Voices of the Plain of Jars, Life under an Air War, Edited by Fred Branfman, University of Wisconsin Press
The Plain of Jars, by N. Lombardi Jr., Roundfire books
For more information on the history and culture of the Laotian people, and an introduction to the secret war, visit http://plainofjars.net.
In 2013 it is possible that Israel, backed by the United States, will launch an attack on Iran. This would be a catastrophic event, risking war, bloodshed and global economic collapse.
In this passionate, but rationally argued essay, the authors attempt to avert a potential global catastrophe by showing that the grounds for war do not exist, that there are no Iranian nuclear weapons, and that Iran would happily come to the table and strike a deal. They argue that the military threats aimed by the West against Iran contravene international law, and argue that Iran is a civilised country and a legitimate power across the Middle East.
For years Peter Oborne and David Morrison have, in their respective fields, examined the actions of our political classes and found them wanting. Now they have joined forces to make a poweful case against military action. In the wake of the Iraq war, will the politicians listen?
DUBAI, UAE – As we walked through the historical collections of books, manuscripts, periodicals, and rare reference materials at the Juma Al-Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in the growing Arab metropolis of Dubai (with the world’s second busiest airport), I kept thinking of a recent book written by my sister, Laura Nader, who teaches anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. A nuanced writing titled Culture and Dignity: Dialogues Between the Middle East and the West (Wiley-Blackwell), it differentiates between the stereotype and reality of East-West relations and how damaging and costly such filters have been since the Crusades.
Room after room at the Juma Al-Majid Center contains materials reflecting the cultural heritage of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. One room is filled with ancient and modern Persian books and tracts of poetry, art and maps. Another room is devoted to the stunning varieties of calligraphy. A third room is filled with workers silently preparing pages of fragile texts for digitalization. The Al-Majid Center’s reading rooms are open to scholars who can stay as long as they need and use these resources freely without prior application. There are about one million books and other literary selections in this remarkable gathering.
When I asked the founder of this institution and many other charities and schools, Juma Al Majid, whether there had been any mishandling of the materials at the Center due to the lack of restrictions on access to the collections, he replied that yes, a couple of times, but it is still better to keep things simple and open.
Mr. Al Majid, now over 80-years-young, seems to have achieved his many accomplishments as a very successful businessman, creating more than 40 companies in engineering, retail, automotive and investment sectors, and as a leading operational philanthropist by keeping things focused, simple and forthright.
For example, his reverence for books of ancient vintage highlighted the problem of deteriorating pages in the Center’s growing international collection. So he developed the Al-Majid Restoration Machine which he gave as a gift to 40 cultural institutions in numerous countries.
He has many librarians and restoration specialists who are kept busy by the 150 acquisition experts searching, especially the Islamic world, for collections. One room is devoted to the private collections that the Center has acquired. Pictures of the original owners adorn the walls of the private collection room with expressions of gratitude.
Mr. Al Majid’s charities revolve around educational facilities where girls far outnumber the boys (educate the ladies first, even before the men, he explained, as the best way to transmit education to a society). He makes sure the needy students receive free education. The number of students in his schools is close to 10,000. The degrees range all the way through college and doctorate (PhD) degrees. His other charities address emergencies ranging from regular assistance and schools for the impoverished Palestinians (eg. thousands of tons of bread are baked in Turkey and sent to the West Bank and Gaza). He housed Kuwaiti refugees during the first Gulf War, and he has established schools in Dubai and in other Arab and Islamic countries.
All these charities and more are funded by the profits from his diversified businesses, which are run by managers, thus freeing him to spend his time collecting, preserving and making available to scholars the literary production of the people of the book – meaning the three major religions that originated in the Arab world.
Repeatedly, he stressed that the fundamental generator of human possibilities was education. As the son of a pearl diver, raised in a very modest community near the Persian Gulf, Mr. Al Majid blends the past, present and future in his planned activities. No withered ancient manuscript nor any futuristic technology fazes him, as a tour of his cultural center demonstrates. But his conversation always comes back to books, to education, to the fundamental verities of life which is “to help humanity.”
Prominently displayed in one corridor of the Center is the Mark Twain observation that “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” The Center’s work servicing or cooperating with libraries at universities and other institutions in Europe, Asia and Africa is expanding in many dimensions. (See www.al-majid.com.)
As we departed from the Center, Mr. Al Majid spoke of his plans to build a new library to consolidate the sprawling premise that now houses the collections and outreach staff. He already has proven his talent for recruiting talent in Dubai and other countries and in connecting with many unsung charitable institutions in the medical, educational, cultural and emergency assistance areas.
By his dynamic humanitarian networking, Mr. Al Majid has illuminated the civic culture of the Arab and Islamic worlds from the past to the present. It is tragic that Western government and Western media are so occupied with the activities of empires that their people are given so little knowledge of such historic cultures and their strivings for justice, freedom and dignity.
(Unfree in Palestine. Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction by Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay, Pluto Press, London 2013, pp. 232, L 17.99.)
The latest visit by U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama to Israel has demonstrated to the world on which side the Empire stands. Obama promised an occupying power absolute support and eternal loyalty. Behind this background, the reader of “Unfree in Palestine” is befallen from a kind of bitterness when hearing Obama’s unrestricted support for a heinous form of total control of a whole population under occupation. A slap in the face for the Palestinians and for some critical Israeli intellectuals was Obama’s sentence that he admires Israel’s “core values”! Perhaps he did not know what he was talking about. Israel betrays all the “core values” the U. S. American civil rights movement was fighting for, not to speak of many laws that discriminate against non-Jews in Israel.
The authors, Nadia Abu-Zahra, Assistant Professor of Globalization and Development at the University of Ottawa, and Adah Kay, Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City University of London, describe the role played by identity documents in Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today. They show how millions of Palestinians have been denationalized through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration and a highly discriminatory pseudo-legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment.
In the book the authors provide a review of identity documentation and movement restrictions in Palestine from the 1800s till today. They focus on population and how it is divided and affected using bureaucratic instruments. In the introduction chapter terms such as “population registration”, “identity documentation”, and “movement restriction” are defined and explained by examples from other countries in order to demonstrate the power that such tools can have on denationalization, discrimination, displacement, dispossession, coercion, collaboration, and death.
The main part of the book deals with the history of the census, the population registry, denationalization, blacklists, coercion, collaboration and how movement restrictions of millions of Palestinians became possible. The authors exemplify on the health and education sectors, how the above mentioned policies affect the social life of the people. Both sectors are undermined through restricted access for patients, students and teachers. Despite all odds, the Palestinians resist inducements to leave their homeland.
Although international law declared denationalization illegal, the international community did not care about the forced displacement of Palestinians. Their “right of return” has been ignored by Israel, despite the fact that the United Nations has called for it since 1948, and it was a requirement for Israel’s entry into the UN. On the basis of denationalization, the Israeli occupier has striped the Palestinians of any personal security. Israel has been issuing over one hundred permits so far that curb the movement of the people in the occupied territories and abroad. Permits and identity cards can be revoked arbitrarily. Acquiring an ID card or granting permits became a bargaining chip for the Israeli authorities to recruit informants and collaborators among the Palestinians.
The book gives an excellent overview of a military and bureaucratic Kafkaesque system of control used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of their rights and freedoms. Perhaps Obama meant, inter alia, these “core values” the U. S. shares with the Israeli occupying regime. The Palestinian people want their rights and not charity from the international community. Despite having made the lives of the Palestinians unbearable, the people resisted and stayed to the chagrin of the Israeli colonizers. The great value of this book is that the authors have brought light into the fate of 1.4 million denationalized Palestinians.
In the late 1990s and early part of this century I worked as a researcher and writer for the journal Southland Prison News. This small journal usually ran about thirty pages and was sent out to prisoners incarcerated primarily in the US South. Edited by an inmate in Virginia, each issue contained a digest of articles concerning prisoners and prisons along with a feature or two, some book reviews, some prisoner poetry and art. I stopped working for the journal when the funding dried up. Before that work, I had never spent much time working on prison-related issues. Sure, I had attended forums and rallies supporting various political prisoners and prisoner rights ever since the uprising and massacre at Attica prison in 1971, but my political work usually did not involve prison issues. Perhaps this came from a distaste acquired through various brushes with the law and the subsequent days spent in jail here and there.
The same cannot be said for Nancy Kurshan and the people whose work she so artfully chronicles in the recently released book Out of Control: A Fifteen Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons. Kurshan, a lifelong political activist, (among other things, she is one of the founders of the Yippies) is an ardent opponent of the US prison system, especially those prisons known as control unit prisons. Her book tells of the genesis and growth of these units throughout the United States and of the battle to oppose them.
It is not a tale with a happy ending. According to the text’s introduction, over 80,000 prisoners are currently locked away in control unit prisons in the United States. What this means is that over 80,000 prisoners exist in a world controlled almost completely by prison architecture and the guards those prisons employ. Living in cells smaller than many suburban bathrooms, the walls are painted white, lights are on most of the day, no windows or even bars, hardly any exercise, no reading materials and no visitors; that is the life of most prisoners in these units. Sometimes there are even further restrictions. Rarely are there fewer. These units are constantly watched by prison video feeds and prisoners are often beaten at will by the guards. If this doesn’t bother you, then you probably shouldn’t bother reading the rest of this review.
There are over 2,000,000 people locked up in the United States. That is more than any other nation in the world. Furthermore, the rate of incarceration in the United States is higher than that of any other nation. According to the NAACP, African American and Latinos comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though they make up approximately one quarter of the US population. This is not because Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be criminals. It is because US laws and the police that enforce those laws target these demographic groups. This fact alone lends credence to the argument made by the activists in Out of Control that there is a calculated plan to imprison black and Latino men in the US. The history of the US is one that required control of its Black population, even after slavery. Indeed, even more so after slavery. Prisons are part of that plan. It is with this as a fundamental part of that understanding that Kurshan tells her story of a movement (Movement to End the Marion Lockdown) built to oppose that calculation.
The reader is presented with detailed descriptions of the meetings, protests, legal campaigns, and other work the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown undertook over the fifteen years of its existence. This group was composed of leftists, religious clergy and laity, families of prisoners and other concerned humans. There are small victories and many defeats, primarily because of the complete lack of regard for prisoners’ humanity displayed by the Bureau of Prisons, most politicians and other officials. There are also the small victories. After years of demanding a new water source be built for the Marion prison, headway was finally made. Occasionally, even a prisoner gets freed. Throughout, the narrative is told with a warmth and humanity that exists in direct contrast to the tales being told. Her description of the development of a friendship between her family and the Reverend Bruce Wright, whose book Black Robes, White Justice was one of the first books to discuss in plain terms the role the US justice system plays in continuing the racism of US society, is the story of a friendship between unsung warriors.
Many of the procedures used in control unit prisons began in the 1960s when the United States government started locking up leftist revolutionaries and others as part of its COINTELPRO program. This time period is also when leftists began to consciously focus on prisoner rights, in part because their leaders were being locked up. This work helped them to understand that prisons are the final point of confrontation between the state and those who act against it. Indeed, this is precisely why prisoner struggles for human rights are components of the greater struggle for those rights.
As pointed out before, there are now over 2,000,000 people incarcerated in the United States. Prison construction and maintenance is often one of the larger elements of government budgets. This is despite the fact that crime has consistently gone down in the past decade. These facts make it clear that prisons are not so much about fighting crime as they are about controlling segments of the population. As austerity takes a greater hold on the US economy, one can be certain that more working and poor men and women will be sent to prison while the real thieves run the country further into the ground.
Besides being a detailed and inspiring account of a group of human rights activists, Nancy Kurshan’s Out of Control is a useful resource for discussing the realities of prison in the twenty-first century United States. It is also the tale of a particular part of the movement opposed to that reality.
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.
Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with Iranian officials.
Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush administration to take the Iranian “roadmap” proposal for bilateral negotiations seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or powerless to influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a connection with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), having interned with that lobby group as a youth.
After leaving the U.S. government in disagreement with U.S. policy toward Iran, the Leveretts did not follow the normal pattern of settling into the jobs where they would support the broad outlines of the U.S. role in world politics in return for comfortable incomes and continued access to power.
Instead, they have chosen to take a firm stand in opposition to U.S. policy toward Iran, criticising the policy of the Barack Obama administration as far more aggressive than is generally recognised. They went even farther, however, contesting the consensus view in Washington among policy wonks, news media and Iran human rights activists that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2009 was fraudulent.
The Leveretts’ uncompromising posture toward the policymaking system and those outside the government who support U.S. policy has made them extremely unpopular in Washington foreign policy elite circles. After talking to some of their antagonists, The New Republic even passed on the rumor that the Leveretts had become shills for oil companies and others who wanted to do business with Iran.
The problem for the establishment, however, is that they turned out to be immune to the blandishments that normally keep former officials either safely supportive or quiet on national security issues that call for heated debate.
In “Going to Tehran”, the Leveretts elaborate on the contrarian analysis they have been making on their blog (formerly “The Race for Iran” and now “Going to Tehran”) They take to task those supporting U.S. systematic pressures on Iran for substituting wishful thinking that most Iranians long for secular democracy, and offer a hard analysis of the history of the Iranian revolution.
In an analysis of the roots of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime, they point to evidence that the single most important factor that swept the Khomeini movement into power in 1979 was “the Shah’s indifference to the religious sensibilities of Iranians”. That point, which conflicts with just about everything that has appeared in the mass media on Iran for decades, certainly has far-reaching analytical significance.
The Leveretts’ 56-page review of the evidence regarding the legitimacy of the 2009 election emphasises polls done by U.S.-based Terror Free Tomorrow and World Public Opinon and Canadian-based Globe Scan and 10 surveys by the University of Tehran. All of the polls were consistent with one another and with official election data on both a wide margin of victory by Ahmadinejad and turnout rates.
The Leveretts also point out that the leading opposition candidate, Hossein Mir Mousavi, did not produce “a single one of his 40,676 observers to claim that the count at his or her station had been incorrect, and none came forward independently”.
“Going to Tehran” has chapters analysing Iran’s “Grand Strategy” and on the role of negotiating with the United States that debunk much of which passes for expert opinion in Washington’s think tank world. They view Iran’s nuclear programme as aimed at achieving the same status as Japan, Canada and other “threshold nuclear states” which have the capability to become nuclear powers but forego that option.
The Leveretts also point out that it is a status that is not forbidden by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – much to the chagrin of the United States and its anti-Iran allies.
In a later chapter, they allude briefly to what is surely the best-kept secret about the Iranian nuclear programme and Iranian foreign policy: the Iranian leadership’s calculation that the enrichment programme is the only incentive the United States has to reach a strategic accommodation with Tehran. That one fact helps to explain most of the twists and turns in Iran’s nuclear programme and its nuclear diplomacy over the past decade.
One of the propaganda themes most popular inside the Washington beltway is that the Islamic regime in Iran cannot negotiate seriously with the United States because the survival of the regime depends on hostility toward the United States.
The Leveretts debunk that notion by detailing a series of episodes beginning with President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s effort to improve relations in 1991 and again in 1995 and Iran’s offer to cooperate against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, more generally after 9/11, about which Hillary Mann Leverett had personal experience.
Finally, they provide the most detailed analysis available on the 2003 Iranian proposal for a “roadmap” for negotiations with the United States, which the Bush administration gave the back of its hand.
The central message of “Going to Tehran” is that the United States has been unwilling to let go of the demand for Iran’s subordination to dominant U.S. power in the region. The Leveretts identify the decisive turning point in the U.S. “quest for dominance in the Middle East” as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they say “liberated the United States from balance of power constraints”.
They cite the recollection of senior advisers to Secretary of State James Baker that the George H. W. Bush administration considered engagement with Iran as part of a post-Gulf War strategy but decided in the aftermath of the Soviet adversary’s disappearance that “it didn’t need to”.
Subsequent U.S. policy in the region, including what former national security adviser Bent Scowcroft called “the nutty idea” of “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran, they argue, has flowed from the new incentive for Washington to maintain and enhance its dominance in the Middle East.
The authors offer a succinct analysis of the Clinton administration’s regional and Iran policies as precursors to Bush’s Iraq War and Iran regime change policy. Their account suggests that the role of Republican neoconservatives in those policies should not be exaggerated, and that more fundamental political-institutional interests were already pushing the U.S. national security state in that direction before 2001.
They analyse the Bush administration’s flirtation with regime change and the Obama administration’s less-than-half-hearted diplomatic engagement with Iran as both motivated by a refusal to budge from a stance of maintaining the status quo of U.S.-Israeli hegemony.
Consistent with but going beyond the Leveretts’ analysis is the Bush conviction that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had shaken the Iranians, and that there was no need to make the slightest concession to the regime. The Obama administration has apparently fallen into the same conceptual trap, believing that the United States and its allies have Iran by the throat because of its “crippling sanctions”.
Thanks to the Leveretts, opponents of U.S. policies of domination and intervention in the Middle East have a new and rich source of analysis to argue against those policies more effectively.
A new book by controversial American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has triggered a wave of protests among experts and Yanomami Indians:
Marshall Sahlins, ‘the world’s most respected anthropologist alive today’, has resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences in protest at Chagnon’s election to the Academy. Sahlins previously wrote a devastating critique of Chagnon’s work in the Washington Post.
Davi Kopenawa, a spokesman for Brazil’s Yanomami and President of the Yanomami association Hutukara, has spoken out about Chagnon’s work: ‘[Chagnon] said about us, ‘The Yanomami are savages!’ He teaches false things to young students. ‘Look, the Yanomami kill each other because of women.’ He keeps on saying this. But what do his leaders do? I believe that some years ago his leader waged a huge war – they killed thousands of children, they killed thousands of girls and boys. These big men killed almost everything. These are the fierce people, the true fierce people. They throw bombs, fire machine guns and finish off with the Earth. We don’t do this…’
A large group of anthropologists who have each worked with the Yanomami for many years have issued a statement challenging Chagnon’s assessment of the tribe as ‘fierce’ and ‘violent’. They describe the Yanomami as ‘generally peaceable.’
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry has said, ’Chagnon’s work is frequently used by writers, such as Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, who want to portray tribal peoples as ‘brutal savages’ – far more violent than ‘us’. But none of them acknowledge that his central findings about Yanomami ‘violence’ have long been discredited.’
Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography ‘Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists’, has just been published. His 1968 book ‘Yanomamö: The Fierce People’ portrayed the Yanomami as ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’, and claimed they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’. It is still a standard work in undergraduate anthropology.
The Yanomami live in Brazil and Venezuela and are the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America. Their territory is protected by law, but illegal goldminers and ranchers continue to invade their land, destroying their forest and spreading diseases which in the 1980s killed one out of five Brazilian Yanomami.
Most recently, Chagnon’s work was cited in Jared Diamond’s highly controversial book ‘The World Until Yesterday’, in which he states that most tribal peoples, including the Yanomami, are ’trapped in cycles of violence and warfare’ and calls for the imposition of state control in order to bring them peace.
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The greatest tragedy in this story is that the real Yanomami have largely been written out of it, as the media have chosen to focus only on the salacious details of the debate that rages between anthropologists or on Chagnon’s disputed characterizations. In fact, Yanomamö: The Fierce People had disastrous repercussions both for the Yanomami and tribal peoples in general. There’s no doubt it’s been used against them and it has brought the 19th century myth of the ‘Brutal Savage’ back into mainstream thinking.’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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Elias Davidsson’s book may provide an answer to this question. His book is a very thorough study of specific aspects of the 9/11 events that have hitherto been neglected. The strength of his book lies in its reliance on primary evidence, the sources for which are provided so that readers can check for themselves the accuracy and relevance of the evidence. Davidsson does not merely provide footnoted references to the sources but has actually posted a great number of source documents on his website, sparing readers tedious searches. This unusually user-friendly approach indicates the author’s willingness to subject him to the most exacting scrutiny by readers. What makes his study so compelling is his judicious use of official U.S. government documents to undermine the assertions of the U.S. government itself? A great part of his sources are FBI documents culled from the U.S. National Archives (NARA).
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The authors, Nadia Abu-Zahra, Assistant Professor of Globalization and Development at the University of Ottawa, and Adah Kay, Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City University of London, describe the role played by identity documents in Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today. They show how millions of Palestinians have been denationalized through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration and a highly discriminatory pseudo-legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment.
Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami spokesperson and shaman, has spoken out against Napoleon Chagnon’s new book ‘Noble Savages’.
Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited.
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