In a recent article, I explored the influence of Freud’s Jewishness on the formation, reception and propagation of his psychoanalytical theory. I wish now to do the same for Karl Marx (1818-1883). In contrast to Freud’s, Marx’s Jewishness is seldom considered an important factor. If you type “Freud Jewish” as key-words on Amazon.com, you will be suggested a dozen books dealing specifically with Freud’s Jewishness, whereas “Marx Jewish” will yield no result except Marx’s own essays “On the Jewish Question”, and a discussion of them, with precious little about Marx’s own Jewish background and connections.
Even in the literature exposing the role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and other revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume 200 Years Together, a contextualized analysis of Marx’s Jewishness is lacking.
One obvious reason is that Marx was not Jewish: he had been baptized a Lutheran at the age of six. Yet to claim that baptism had washed away all traces of Jewishness would be absurd, and particularly ironic in the case of a person who insisted that religion was an inessential part of Jewishness (as we shall see).
My purpose here is to examine Marx’s contribution to Jewish empowerment, and, ultimately, to the historical movement toward Jewish global domination that made a major breakthrough a century exactly after the Communist Manifesto (1848).
I must say in preamble that the question is not: Did Marx deliberately conspire with other Jews to advance the Jewish global agenda, while pretending to emancipate Gentile proletarians? Jewishness doesn’t necessarily work that way. It could be defined as the inability to distinguish between the interest of peoples, and the interest of the chosen people, between what is good for mankind and what is good for the Jews. As a rule, Jews who believe they are working for the salvation of the world while thinking Jewishly are advancing Jewish power one way or another. This applies, of course, to Jewish thinkers who believe that Jews have a mission to guide mankind toward perpetual peace, like Theodore Kaufman, who in 1941 believed that the first step to that goal was to “sterilize all Germans” (his interview with the Canadian Jewish Chronicles), or like David Ben-Gurion, who in 1962 believed that the next step was to make Jerusalem the “seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[1] But it also applies to Jewish thinkers who do not publicly identify as Jews and are even critical of Jews, yet whose worldview is profoundly biblical, that is, both materialistic and prophetic. It is a question of inherited cognitive pattern, rather than deliberate intention. That being said, in Marx’s case, there is evidence of intellectual dishonesty, concealment and deception, as we shall see.
Marx’s prophecy and Bakunin’s foresight
According to Karl Popper, “the heart of the Marxian argument … consists of a historical prophecy, combined with an implicit appeal to the following moral law: Help to bring about the inevitable!”[2] There is no doubt that Marx’s prophecy of a messianic transformation of the world was profoundly Jewish in inspiration. What distinguishes Marx’s prophetic vision from the biblical project is that its explicit goal (as we shall see) is the international dictatorship of a cosmopolitan proletariat, not of Jewry. Yet, as Mikhail Bakunin warned in Statism and Anarchy (1873), Marx’s proletarian state “is a lie behind which the despotism of a ruling minority is concealed.” Behind the expression “scientific socialism”, Marx could only mean “the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scientists.”[3] That centralized state, according to Marxist doxa, will be a transitional stage before true socialism; it will “wither away”, according to Engels’ expression. To this, Bakunin replies “that no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.” Bakunin suspected that if Marx had his way, German Jews like him would end up ruling the communist state.
Bakunin photographed by Nadar
Indeed, Marx’s revolutionary prophecy appealed particularly to non-proletarian German Jews. Fritz Kahn hailed him as more than a prophet in Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (1920): “in 1848, for the second time, the star of Bethlehem was raised to the firmament … and it rose again above the rooftops of Judea: Marx.”[4]
If Marx was the Messiah in 1848, then Benjamin Disraeli could be called his prophet. In his novel Coningsby, published in 1844, the Jewish character Sidonia—“a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself,” according to Disraeli’s biographer[5]—declared:
“That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professorial chairs of Germany.”
Four years after these words were written, the Communist Manifesto was published and, almost simultaneously, the revolution broke out in Germany, as Disraeli had predicted . Jews did play a major role in the 1848 revolution, as Amos Elon has shown in his book The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743-1933. “80 percent of all Jewish journalists, doctors, and other professionals” supported the revolution. The most prominent were Ludwig Bamberger in Mainz, Ferdinand Lassalle in Dusseldorf, Gabriel Riesser in Hamburg, Johan Jacoby in Koeningsberg, Aron Bernstein in Berlin, Herman Jellinek in Vienna, Moritz Harmann in Prague, and Sigismund Asch in Breslau. “All over the country,” Elon writes, “rabbis in their sermons greeted the revolution as a truly messianic event.” The Jewish magazine Der Orient praised “the heroic Maccabean battle of our brethren on the barricades of Berlin,” and raved, “The savior from whom we have prayed has appeared. The fatherland has given him to us. The messiah is freedom.” The Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz, founder of academic Judaic Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums),
“described what was happening in specifically biblical terms shot through with the Messianic political view which saw revolutionary politics as the fulfillment of biblical promise. Haranguing the Berlin students from the barricades, Zunz portrayed Metternich [Chancellor of the Austrian Empire] as Haman and hoped that ‘perhaps by Purim, Amalek [meaning the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV] will be beaten.’”[6]
After the failure of the revolution, many revolutionaries exiled themselves to London, where they were known as the Forty-Eighters. Marx settled there for the rest of his life, “living encased in his own, largely German, world, formed by his family and a small group of intimate friends and political associates,” according to Isaac Berlin.[7] Apart from Engels, Marx’s friends and associates were, in fact, almost all Jewish. Marx’s influence, which had been small in the 1848 revolution, would then develop, thanks to what Bakunin would call in 1872, in an unpublished “Lettre au Journal La Liberté de Bruxelles,” his “remarkable genius of intrigue,” adding:
“he also has in his service a numerous corps of agents, hierarchically organized and acting secretly under his direct orders; a kind of socialist and literary freemasonry in which his compatriots, the German Jews and others, occupy a considerable place and deploy a zeal worthy of a better cause.”
Bakunin was particularly intrigued by Marx’s insistence on the centralization of all banking activity. The Communist Manifesto not only proclaims the abolition of private banks, but: “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” In another unpublished editorial of 1872, Bakunin wrote:
“this Jewish world is today, for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other. I am convinced that the Rothschilds, on their side, appreciate the merits of Marx and that Marx, on his side, feels an instinctual attraction and a great respect for the Rothschilds. / This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a major bank? The point is that Marx’s communism wants a strong centralization of the state, and where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic nation of the Jews, speculating with the Labour of the people, will always thrive.”[8]
Having succeeded to get Bakunin and his “anti-authoritarian” followers expelled from the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), Marx transferred its General Council from London to New York—the city that would soon become the Western capital of Jewry, where another German Jew, Leon Braunstein aka Trotsky, would be preparing the Bolshevik revolution, with the financial support of Wall Street Jewish bankers like Jacob Schiff.[9]
The Jewish Question in nineteenth-century Germany
In order to understand Marx’s hidden agenda, the best is to start with his first two significant articles, published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, four years before the Communist Manifesto. Their topic was the “Jewish Question”. Before we present what Marx had to say about it, we must recall the context.
The “Jewish Question” is the question of the possibility and means of Jewish assimilation. The problem, as it was commonly formulated from the end of the eighteenth century, was that Jews considered themselves, and were considered, as aliens in the European nations among which they lived. One solution was to transform Jewishness from a nationality into a religion compatible with the secular values of modern nations. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) paved the way in Germany for a “Reform Judaism” that defined itself as purely religious and renounced nationalist aspirations. On the basis of this new pact, Napoleon granted political emancipation to the Jews in France, and was hailed as a liberator by German Jews when he invaded the German principalities. Although Jewish emancipation underwent a setback in Prussia when he withdrew in defeat, it was complete by 1848.
However, the assumption that Jewishness was a matter of private religion created a new problem for the Jewish community, aggravated by residual forms of segregation: for many secular and educated Jews, Judaism had little appeal as a religion, and converting to Christianity seemed the logical continuation of their conversion to the Enlightenment. Half the Jews of Berlin converted to Protestantism or Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Karl Marx’s family falls in that category. His father Herschel Levi, though the son and brother of rabbis, became a Lutheran in order to practice law in the Prussian courts, and had his six children and his wife baptized in 1824, when Karl was six years old. Another famous case is Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who conceived of his baptism in 1825 (one year after Marx) as the “entrance ticket to European civilization.”[10] Marx met Heine, a generation his elder, shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1843, and the two men met frequently until Marx moved to London in 1849. It is believed that their conversations had a formative influence on both men. Heine may in fact have introduced Communism to Marx, for he wrote in 1842, one year before meeting Marx:
“Though Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on miserable straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to play a great, if transitory role in the modern tragedy… There will then be only one shepherd with an iron crook and one identically shorn, identically bleating human herd.”[11]
Heine with Marx and his wife Jenny
The dissolution of Jewish identity into a religious faith led to a reaction in the form of a Jewish nationalist movement that would ultimately morph into Zionism. It was the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891), almost the same age as Marx, who gave the first impetus to a new Jewish national consciousness with his multivolume History of the Jewish People, published in 1853 . Marx first met Heinrich Graetz in the summer 1874, while “taking the waters” at Carlsbad in Bohemia. The two following summers, they coordinated their vacations there. We do not know what they talked about, but, as Shlomo Avineri comments, “a more dramatic prefiguration of the encounter between Zion and Kremlin could not be imagined.”[12]
Graetz reawakened the national consciousness of European Jews such as Moses Hess (1812-1875), author in 1862 of Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, which in turn impressed Theodor Herzl. According to Hess, the efforts of the Jews to merge with a nationality other than their own are doomed to failure. “We shall always remain strangers among the nations,” for “the Jews are something more than mere ‘followers of a religion,’ namely, they are a race brotherhood, a nation.”[13]
Interestingly, before his conversion to Jewish nationalism, Moses Hess (originally Moritz) was a pre-Marxist communist. He was the founder of the Rheinische Zeitung, for which Marx served as Paris correspondent in 1842-43 . Hess had a strong influence on both Engels and Marx.[14] Marx borrowed from Hess’ 1845 essay on “The Essence of Money” his concept of economic alienation.[15] Hess always remained close to Marx; in 1869, at Marx’s request, he even penned an article slandering Bakunin, accusing him to be an “agent provocateur” of the Russian government.[16]
Marx’s response to Bruno Bauer
Marx’s essays on the Jewish Question were critical reviews of two works by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), a leading figure of the Young Hegelians: a book titled Die Judenfrage (1842), and a follow-up article on “The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free.”[17]
Bauer’s approach to the question of Jewish assimilation was innovative. For him, the religious nature of Judaism is the problem, not the solution. He argued that Jews cannot be emancipated politically without first being emancipated religiously, because the Jews’ resistance to assimilation is based on the commandment of the Torah to live permanently in separation from other people. The essence of their religion is their claim to be the chosen people, and that prevents them from even respecting other peoples.
“Jews as such can not amalgamate with peoples and associate their fate with theirs. As Jews, they must wait for a particular future, allotted to them alone, the chosen people, and assuring them the dominion of the world.”
Therefore, there can be no emancipation of the Jews. A Jew can emancipate himself only by ceasing to be a Jew, because his true alienation is his Jewishness.
Bauer was the first since Voltaire to point at the toxic influence of the Tanakh as the key to the Jewish Question. Christians could obviously never reach that conclusion, but even secular thinkers who subscribed to the new science of “higher criticism” (pioneered by David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, 1835) generally looked away from the xenophobia of the Tanakh. “One even screams at betrayal of the human race when the critics try to examine the essence of the Jew as a Jew,” noted Bauer.
In his critical reviews, Marx does not argue against Bauer’s point that Jewish religion is opposed to assimilation. Rather, he denies altogether that Jewishness is a matter of religion.
“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew—not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.”
Since Marx downplays the religious definition of Jewishness, it would be expected that he opt for the second term of the alternative and define Jewishness as a nationality, as will his friend Hess twenty years later. But he doesn’t. Instead, Marx posits, for the first time, his dogma that religion belongs to the cultural “superstructure” of society, while the real “infrastructure” is economic. The essence of the Jew, he writes, is not his religion, but his love of money:
“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”
Marx redefines Jewish religion as the cult of money: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.” He does the same for Jewish nationality, in one short sentence: “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.” It follows naturally, according to Marx, that if you abolish money you will solve the Jewish question:
“Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.”
Jews will be emancipated when all men will be emancipated, for there is no other emancipation than emancipation from money.
Marx makes the radical claim that love of money and economic alienation came to the world from the Jews. He equates economic alienation to Jewish influence:
“the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. … The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. … The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world”
And so, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” That sounds terribly anti-Semitic, from today’s standards. Because of these essays on the Jewish Question, Marx’s biographers have been more concerned by the question, “Was Marx an anti-Semite?” (see Edmund Silberner’s 1949 book of that title) than by the issue of his Jewish background, environment, and mindset. This is best illustrated by this article by Michael Ezra, “Karl Marx’s Radical Antisemitism.”
But in the context of the time, Marx’s view of the Jews as money worshippers was rather banal. It was almost unanimously shared among socialists, as Hal Draper reminds us in “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype.”[18] It was especially common among revolutionary Jews as well as among Zionists who were generally socialists. Moses Hess himself, for instance, wrote in “The Essence of Money”: “The Jews, who in the natural history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their mission’s work.”
What Marx did was to push the stereotype to its limit: he made the love of money not just an attribute of some Jews, but the very essence of the Jews. But by doing so, he was in effect dissolving the Jewish question into a socio-economic question: the Jew becomes the archetypal bourgeois. By this sleight of hand, Marx eliminated the Jewish question once and for all. He would never come back to it.[19]
In fact, never again would Marx target specifically Jewish financiers. Nesta Webster draws attention to that anomaly in her World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (1921):
“The period of 1820 onwards became, as Sombart [Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 1911)] calls it, ‘the age of the Rothschilds,’ so that by the middle of the century it was a common dictum, ‘There is only one power in Europe, and that is Rothschild.’ Now how is it conceivable that a man who set out honestly to denounce Capitalism should have avoided all reference to its principal authors? Yet even in the section of his book dealing with the origins of Industrial Capitalism, where Marx refers to the great financiers, the stock-jobbing and speculation in shares, and what he describes as ‘the modern sovereignty of finance,’ he never once indicates the Jews as the leading financiers, or the Rothschilds as the super-capitalists of the world.”[20]
Young Karl Marx
By reducing Jewishness to capitalism, Marx was also overlooking another side of Jewish influence in the world: the revolution. The strong involvement of Jews in revolutionary movements would not become fully apparent to the world before 1848, but Marx, being himself a German Jewish revolutionary, could not be unaware of it. He could not be ignorant of the fact that Jews loved not only money, but also the revolution. Jewish revolutionary activity is one form of resistance to assimilation, especially when it calls for the destruction of the nations in the name of internationalism. By simply ignoring it, Marx was, at the very least, concealing the role of his own Jewishness in his revolutionary enterprise, while at the same time removing in advance all suspicion of his Jewish sympathies.
I believe Marx’s treatment of the Jewish question set the standard of his subsequent method. First, Marx misrepresents the arguments of his adversaries, often turning them upside down before proceeding to criticize them. For example Marx pretends that Bauer sees Jewishness as a religious faith, but that was not Bauer’s point. Rather, Bauer showed that defining Jewishness as a religion or ethnicity makes no big difference, because either way, the essence of Jewishness is separateness. Being religious only worsens the xenophobic nature of Jewishness, because it makes separateness a divine commandment rather than simply an ancestral habit. Secondly, Marx dismisses the complexity of things, in order to focus exclusively on a single and often secondary aspect of reality, making it look two-dimensional. Defining Jewishness as the love of money is obviously inadequate for anyone who has reflected even superficially on the question. Either Marx believes what he says, and that tells a lot about his intellectual ability, or he doesn’t—which is more likely—, and that tells a lot about his intellectual honesty. With the same reductionism Marx will claim in 1848, in the Communist Manifesto (Engels credited this insight to Marx alone), that, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It is obvious to any (non-Marxist) historian that class struggles fall far behind ethnic struggles in the forces shaping history, even in modern times. Even an internationalist socialist like Bakunin could only be puzzled by Marx’s total ignorance of this fact:
“Marx completely ignores a most important element in the historic development of humanity, that is, the temperament and particular character of each race and each people, a temperament and a character which are themselves the natural product of a multitude of ethnological, climatological, economic, and historic causes, but which exercise, even apart from and independent of the economic conditions of each country, a considerable influence on its destinies and even on the development of its economic forces.”[21]
Coming from someone who grew up in a Jewish home and, despite his baptism, evolved in a mostly Jewish circle, counting among his friends zealot Jewish nationalists, I find it unbelievable that Marx’s ignorance of the national factor was sincere. Or perhaps, it must be considered very typical of Jewish discourse targeted at Gentiles. In that sense, Marx’s internationalism confirms Bauer’s remark that Jews consider only their own nationality as real:
“According to their fundamental representation, they wanted to be absolutely the people, the unique people, that is to say the people beside whom other peoples did not have the right to be a people. Any other people was, in comparison with them, not really a people; as the chosen people they were the only true people, the people who were to be All and take the world.”
Proudhon and the socialist movement before Marx
Having examined how Marx positioned himself on the background of the Jewish question, we can now do the same with the social question that occupied socialist thinkers.
At the time when Marx and Engels joined the movement, the most influential socialist theorist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), of nine years Marx’s elder. There is no better way to understand the originality of Marx’s economic ideas than by comparing them to Proudhon’s. (Proudhon’s work is accessible to English readers through Iain McKay’s anthology: Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, AK Press, 2011. McKay’s 82-page introductory chapters, including one on “Proudhon and Marx,” can be read here).
Proudhon’s book Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government) published in 1840, had a huge echo and became a cornerstone of the European socialist movement. Proudhon was the first to use the expression “scientific socialism”, meaning a society ruled by a scientific government, one whose sovereignty rests upon justice and reason, rather than sheer will. His book was a critic of previous theories of economy (then called “political economy”) developed in Great Britain by Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823). As explained by McKay, “It was Proudhon who first located surplus value production within the workplace, recognizing that the worker was hired by a capitalist who then appropriates their product in return for a less than equivalent amount of wages” (McKay 66).
A portrait of Proudhon by his friend Gustave Courbet (1865)
Proudhon’s thought was in constant evolution, and therefore not totally consistent from beginning to end, even in terminology. Nevertheless, if we want to summarize it, we shall say that Proudhon advocated a decentralized, self-managed, federal, bottom-up socialism, which he called “anarchism”. His vision was based on an organic model of society, the basic cell of which was the patriarchal family, while the “commune” was the fundamental unit of democratic sovereignty. In contrast, “governmental power is mechanical” and fundamentally inhuman (Confession of a Revolutionary, McKay 404).
Proudhon consistently spoke against projects of state socialism. For him, state ownership of the means of production was the continuation of capitalism with the state as the new boss. Nationalization would simply make a nation of wage-workers, and Proudhon viewed the condition of the wage-worker as little better than slavery. State control also kills competition, and Proudhon considered that “competition is as essential to labour as division”; it is “the vital force which animates the collective being” (System of Economic Contradictions, McKay 197 and 207).
Although he called himself a revolutionary, Proudhon was a reformist and a democrat. He recommended that workers gain political and economic emancipation by organizing themselves in “clubs”, cooperatives and associations for mutual credit, by electing representatives, and by exercising pressure and influence onto the state.
Proudhon’s central formula, “Property is theft,” is often misunderstood. Proudhon was attacking the capitalistic property of the means of production. Whereas the French constitution of 1793 defined property as “the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labor,” capitalist property is, according to Proudhon, “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of another’s goods—the fruit of another’s industry and labour” (What is Property? McKay 124). In fact, Proudhon formulates a thesis and an antithesis. While claiming that “property is theft,” he devotes long pages to the apology of the small owner, whether artisan or peasant, whose property is based on use, what he calls “possession”. “Individual possession is the condition of social life. … Suppress property while maintaining possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions” (What is Property? McKay 137). Proudhon encouraged mutualist forms of possession, but he condemned communism, which called for the complete abolition of private property: “Communism is oppression and slavery” (What is Property? McKay 132). Proudhon’s ideal was less the abolition of private property than its fair distribution.
Marx’s hijacking of the Proudhonian legacy
In The Holy Family, published in 1845, Marx and Engels praised Proudhon’s book What is Property?
“Proudhon makes a critical investigation — the first resolute, ruthless, and at the same time scientific investigation — of the basis of political economy, private property. This is the great scientific advance he made, an advance which revolutionizes political economy and for the first time makes a real science of political economy possible.”
“Proudhon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the sum of the wages of the individual workers, even if each individual labour be paid for completely, does not pay for the collective power objectified in its product, that therefore the worker is not paid as a part of the collective labour power.”
But the praises of Marx and Engels for Proudhon suddenly ceased in 1846. Two reasons can be conjectured. First, in 1846, Proudhon rejected Marx’s invitation to become his correspondent in Paris. In his answer, Proudhon criticizes Marx’s will to forge a unifying dogma:
“Let us seek together, if you will, for the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are manifested, the progress of our efforts to discover them. But for God’s sake, after having demolished all a priori dogmatisms, let us not in turn dream of making our own, of indoctrinating the people; … let us show the world an example of learned and insightful tolerance, but since we are in the lead, let us not set ourselves up as leaders of a new intolerance; let us not be the apostles of a new religion, one that makes itself a religion or reason, a religion of logic. We should welcome and encourage all protestations. Let us get rid of all divisiveness, all mysticism. Let us never consider a question exhausted, and when we do get down to our last argument, let’s start again, if need be, with wit and irony! I will join your organization on that condition—or else not!”
Proudhon also expressed reservations on the idea of violent revolution: “Our proletariat has a great thirst for science, which would be very poorly served if you only brought them blood to drink” (“Letter to Karl Marx,” McKay 163-165).
The second reason for Marx’s about-face regarding Proudhon was the Frenchman’s publication of Philosophie de la Misère (or System of Economic Contradictions), in which he developed new conceptual tools to understand the structure of the capitalist world. Marx, who had announced in 1846 a book of economy, was taken by surprise. He responded with a pamphlet in French, Misère de la philosophie, which Proudhon would describe as “a tissue of vulgarity, of calumny, of falsification and of plagiarism,” written by “the tapeworm of socialism” (McKay 70). McKay agrees:
“While, undoubtedly, Marx makes some valid criticisms of Proudhon, the book is full of distortions. His aim was to dismiss Proudhon as being the ideologist of the petit-bourgeois and he obviously thought all means were applicable to achieve that goal. So we find Marx arbitrarily arranging quotations from Proudhon’s book, often out of context and even tampered with, to confirm his own views. This allows him to impute to Proudhon ideas the Frenchman did not hold (often explicitly rejects!) in order to attack him. Marx even suggests that his own opinion is the opposite of Proudhon’s when, in fact, he is simply repeating the Frenchman’s thoughts. He takes the Frenchman’s sarcastic comments at face value, his metaphors and abstractions literally. And, above all else, Marx seeks to ridicule him.” (McKay 70-71)
Twenty years later, and two years after Proudhon’s death, the most essential concepts of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, would be borrowed from Proudhon, without any credit given him . When Marx writes that, “property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product” (Capital, vol. 1, quoted in McKay 66), he is repeating what Proudhon wrote 27 years earlier in What is Property?
In 1867, when Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital, Proudhon’s notoriety and influence still far exceeded Marx’s in Europe. The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) had been founded in 1864 by Proudhon’s followers, who called themselves mutualists and anti-authoritarians. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), who became Marx’s strongest opponent within the International after Proudhon’s death, considered his own ideas as “Proudhonism widely developed and pushed right to its final consequences” (as quoted in McKay 46), although he criticized the Proudhonians’ attachment to hereditary property. At the Geneva Congress of 1866, the Proudhonians prevailed and convinced the Congress to vote unanimously in favor of working towards the suppression of salaried status through the development of co-operatives. Marxism had almost no influence on the French Commune of 1871, which was predominantly inspired by Proudhon’s ideas of decentralized federations of communes and workers’ associations.
The intensity of Marx’s will to supplant Proudhon can be seen in a letter to Engels dated July 20, 1870, at the dawn of the Franco-Prussian War, a war in which Marx saw the opportunity to get the upper hand over his rival:
“The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also shift the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon’s, etc.”
The outcome of the war gave entire satisfaction to Marx.
The Communist Manifesto, a monopolist’s dream
Although Marx’s economic theory is largely plagiarized from Proudhon, his solutions are the exact opposite. That is because Marx’s project doesn’t proceed from his economic theories. According to Karl Jaspers, Marx’s approach “is one of vindication, not investigation, but it is a vindication of something proclaimed as the perfect truth with the conviction not of the scientist but of the believer.” British historian Paul Johnson concurs and, after quoting from the apocalyptic and “Luciferian” poetry of Marx’s youth, he concludes that,
“Marx’s concept of a Doomsday … was always in Marx’s mind, and as a political economist he worked backwards from it, seeking the evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it, from objectively examined data.”[22]
Therefore, Marx’s theoretical sum published in 1867, Das Kapital, is almost irrelevant to understand his program, laid out in 1848 with Friedrich Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. “The theory of the Communists,” we read there, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” As if responding to protests by the Proudhonians, they add:
“We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. / Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.”
Abolition of private property naturally includes “abolition of all rights of inheritance,” especially since the Manifesto also proclaims the “abolition of the family,” seen as a bourgeois institution “based … on capital, on private gain.” Nations will disappear too, because “the working men have no country”; capitalism “has stripped him of every trace of national character.”
The current epoch “has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” Engels adds in a footnote to the 1888 English edition that, “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour.” Marx and Engels await the complete disappearance of “the lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat.” The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, “has concentrated property in a few hands.”
Marx and Engels predict that this concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, and the corresponding increase in misery among the growing working class, will intensify class warfare, and lead inevitably to the violent revolution of the proletariat. The Communists “openly proclaim that their goals cannot be reached except through the violent overthrow of the entire social order of the past.” After the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany, Marx wrote that, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
The goal of the revolution is to establish the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as a transition toward the abolition of all classes. This stage is necessary for the proletariat to defend itself against a counter-revolution and to bring about the classless society. Although the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t appear until 1852, the idea is clearly stated in the Manifesto:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
The first thing to note is that Marx and Engels have no intention to appease the antagonism between the proletarians and the bourgeois, by improving the condition of workingmen. On the contrary, they hope that the conflict will intensify to the point of turning into a bloody civil war. For that, the misery of the working class must increase. We should remember here that tearing apart the social fabric of nations by exacerbating social, racial, generational or gender tensions is a strategy that Jewish intellectuals have used to this day.
Secondly, Marx and Engels have no intention to stop or even resist the progress of capitalism. On the contrary, they call for the total disappearance of the social and economic structures that preceded it, and look forward to its most extreme development, when all the means of production have fallen into a few hands. For only then, they claim, the new world can be born. Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but capitalism must first reach its full maturity, which is the monopoly of a few billionaires.
Obviously, monopolists can support wholeheartedly that goal. Should they fear the next step, the revolution and the appropriation of all capitals and all means of production by the state? Not necessarily, as Bakunin argued in 1872, and as Antony Sutton explained in more detail in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (2001):
“one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists — to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians — with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia [or Germany] to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?”
Marx being congratulated by Wall Street bankers (1911 cartoon reproduced by Sutton)
Sutton sees no Jewish conspiracy in this collusion between the Bank and the Revolution. But documents relative to the failed Russian revolution of 1905 show that there is another dimension to that unnatural alliance, as explained in this article by Alexandros Papagoergiou. In 1904, Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte was tasked to secure a huge foreign loan to stabilize Russian public finances. He tells in his memoirs that, after turning down the offer of the Jewish banks headed by the Rothschilds, because it was conditioned on “legal measures tending to improve the conditions of the Jews in Russia,” he was able to raise the enormous amount of 2,250,000,000 francs via “Christian Banks”.[23] Revolutionary riots started soon after. A report of the Russian Foreign Minister to Tsar Nicholas II notes that it happened “just at the time when our government tried to realize a considerable foreign loan without the participation of the Rothschilds and just in time for preventing the carrying out of this financial operation; the panic provoked among the buyers and holders of Russian loans could not fail to give additional advantages to the Jewish bankers and capitalists who openly and knowingly speculated upon the fall of the Russian rates.” According to the report, the revolutionaries “are in possession of great quantities of arms which are imported from abroad, and of very considerable financial means,” which had been collected by Anglo-Jewish capitalists “under the leadership of Lord Rothschild, … for the officially alleged purpose of helping Russian Jews who suffered from pogroms.”[24]
Marxism vs Zionism: the dialectical pliers
Jewish movements seem to be working history through dialectical antagonisms that ultimately advance the Big Project. The capacity of the Jewish community to present itself either as a religion or as a nationality, depending on the circumstances, is the prime example. After gaining political emancipation in the name of religious freedom in the first part of the 19th century, European Jews were in the position to reclaim their special nationhood. For a few decades, reformed rabbis would ostensibly oppose Jewish nationalism, proclaiming in the 1885 Pittsburgh Conference: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religion community.”[25] Yet the same Pittsburgh Conference saw no contradiction in adopting the theory of German rabbi Kaufman Kohler, that “Israel, the suffering Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the nations,”[26] which amounts to say that Israel is not an ordinary nation, but the super-nation. In the 20th century, any trace of a contradiction between Reformed Judaism and Zionism was removed.
The early collaboration between Marx and Hess and the late encounter between Marx and Graetz both prefigure another dialectical opposition between Communism (the International revolution aimed at destroying Christian nations) and Zionism (the national project aimed at building the Jewish nation). Both movements developed in the same milieu. Chaim Weizmann recounts in his autobiography (Trial and Error, 1949) that in early twentieth-century Russia, revolutionary communists and revolutionary Zionists belonged to the same milieu. Weizmann’s brother Schmuel was a communist, and that was not a source of family discord. These divisions were relative and changeable; many Zionists were Marxists, and vice versa. The borderline was all the more vague that the Communist Bund, born the same year as Zionism (1897), inscribed in its revolutionary agenda the right of the Jews to found a secular Yiddish-speaking nation. As Gilad Atzmon recently wrote, the Bund was “also an attempt to prevent Jews from joining the ‘Hellenic’ route by offering Jews a tribal path within the context of a future Soviet revolution.”
But the most important thing to note is that, from the early days, Jewish revolutionary activity provided Zionists with a diplomatic argument in favor of their alternative program for the Jews. Herzl mentions in his diary (June 4, 1900) that “intensifying Jewish Socialist activities” was a way to “stir up the desire among the European governments to exert pressure on Turkey to take in the Jews” (Palestine was then under Ottoman control). He hawked Zionism as a solution to the problem of Jewish revolutionary subversion when meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898, and again when meeting Russian ministers in St. Petersburg in 1903.[27] The next generation of Zionists continued the stratagem. Churchill, who spoke with one voice with Chaim Weizmann,[28] dramatized the opposition between the “good Jews” (Zionists) and the “bad Jews” (communists) in his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” He referred to Bolshevism as “this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization” and to Zionism as the solution “especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” (Churchill’s later alliance with Stalin proves that his Zionism was stronger than his anti-communism.)
In the aftermath of World War II, the rivalry between the Communist and the Capitalist worlds remained the indispensable context for the creation and expansion of Israel. That explains why Roosevelt’s administration, largely controlled by Jews, helped Stalin conquer half of Europe and thwarted all attempts to stop him. Curtis Dall, Roosevelt’s son-in-law, has revealed a secret diplomatic channel demonstrating that the White House went out of its way to give the USSR all the time and the armament necessary to invade Central Europe.[29] Thus the Second World War was completed with the determined aim of laying the foundations for the Cold War, that is, a highly explosive polarization of the world that would prove crucial for Project Zion. In fact, during this whole period, it is almost impossible to distinguish, among the Jewish advisors of Roosevelt and Truman on foreign policy, the pro-Communists from the pro-Zionists, as David Martin remarks in The Assassination of James Forrestal. A case in point is David Niles (Neyhus), who was guilty of spying for the Soviets while advising Roosevelt, but then played a key role in Truman’s support of the U.N. Partition Plan and the recognition of Israel.[30]
The Cold War proved instrumental when Nasser, Israel’s most formidable enemy, was pushed into the communist camp in 1955, setting off an intense Zionist campaign to present him as a danger to the stability of the Middle East, and to present Israel, by contrast, as the only reliable ally in the region. The Cold War was also the crucial context for Israel’s defeat of Egypt in 1967 and Israel’s annexation of territories stolen from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
Yahweh’s dialectical machinery
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., has recently edited some of his Unz Review articles in book form, under the title Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us: Essays on Jewish Power. He is also the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014.
Notes
[1] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116. Ben-Gurion’s prophecy appeared in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, reproductions of which can be found on Internet.
[2] Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), Routledge, 2002, books.google.com
[3] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall S. Shatz, Cambridge UP, 1990, pp. 538-545.
[4] Quoted in Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Deux siècles ensemble (1795–1995), tome I: Juifs et Russes avant la Révolution, Fayard, 2003, tome 1, p. 269.
[5] Robert Blake, Disraeli (1966), Faber Finds, 2010, p. 202.
[6] Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743-1933, Metropolitan Books, 2002, pp. 153, 157, 163-164.
[7] Isaac Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 1939, 2nd ed, 1948, p. 17.
[8] Aux compagnons de la Fédération des sections internationales du Jura, quoted in Henri Arvon, Les Juifs et l’Idéologie, PUF, 1978, p. 50. Partial quote in Francis Wheen , Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, 1999, p. 340.
[9] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1976), Clairview Books, 2011.
[10] Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, k. 4732–4877.
[11] Amos Elon, The Pity of It All, op; cit., p. 146.
[12] Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, Yale UP, 2019, pp. 171-172.
[13] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 1918 (archive.org).
[14] Sydney Hook, “Karl Marx and Moses Hess,” 1934.
[15] Shlomo Avineri , Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, 1985.
[16] Read Bakunin’s response to Hess’s article, “Aux citoyens rédacteurs du Réveil”
[17] French translation, Bruno Bauer, La Question juive (1843), Union générale d’Éditions, 1968, on
[18] Hal Draper, “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype,” from Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol.1: State and Bureaucracy, Monthly Review, New York 1977, pp. 591-608. Read also Gary Ruchwarger, “Marx and the Jewish Question: A Response to Julius Carlebach,” Marxist Perspectives, Fall 1979, pp. 19-38.
[19] I am aware that another “anti-Semitic” article, unsigned and titled “The Russian Loan” (New York Daily Tribune, January 4, 1856), has been attributed to Marx by his daughter, but I find Marx’s authorship dubious. See the discussion on its authenticity here.
[20] Nesta Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, 1921 , on archive.org, pp. 95-96.
[21] “Lettre au Journal La Liberté de Bruxelles,” October 5, 1872.
[22] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1990), HarperCollins, 2007.
[23] The Memoirs of Count Witte, Doubleday, Page & Co, 1921, on archive.org, pp. 292-294.
[24] Quoted in Boris Brasol, The World at the Cross Roads, 1923, on archive.org, pp. 74-78.
[25] Quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 14.
[26] Kaufmnann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918 (www.gutenberg.org), p. 290.
[27] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1 , pp. 362–363, 378–379, and vol. 3, p. 960.
[28] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt & Company, 2007.
[29] Curtis Dall, FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, Christian Crusade Publications, 1968 , pp. 146–157.
[30] David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal, McCabe Publishing, 2017, pp. 57-65. On Nile’s influence in the U.N. vote, see Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel ? (1953), 50th Anniversary Edition, Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 50.
February 17, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Judaism, Zionism |
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Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. NASA satellite data shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
Credits: NASA Earth Observatory
NASA | February 11, 2019
The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.
The greening phenomenon was first detected using satellite data in the mid-1990s by Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues, but they did not know whether human activity was one of its chief, direct causes. This new insight was made possible by a nearly 20-year-long data record from a NASA instrument orbiting the Earth on two satellites. It’s called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, and its high-resolution data provides very accurate information, helping researchers work out details of what’s happening with Earth’s vegetation, down to the level of 500 meters, or about 1,600 feet, on the ground.
The world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago, as shown on this map, where areas with the greatest increase in foliage are indicated in dark green. Data from a NASA instrument orbiting Earth aboard two satellites show that human activity in China and India dominate this greening of the planet.
Taken all together, the greening of the planet over the last two decades represents an increase in leaf area on plants and trees equivalent to the area covered by all the Amazon rainforests. There are now more than two million square miles of extra green leaf area per year, compared to the early 2000s – a 5% increase.
“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation – a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation,” said Chi Chen of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, in Massachusetts, and lead author of the study.
An advantage of the MODIS satellite sensor is the intensive coverage it provides, both in space and time: MODIS has captured as many as four shots of every place on Earth, every day for the last 20 years.
“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley, and a co-author of the new work. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance. Now, with the MODIS data that lets us understand the phenomenon at really small scales, we see that humans are also contributing.”
China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part (42%) from programs to conserve and expand forests. These were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution and climate change. Another 32% there – and 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops.
Land area used to grow crops is comparable in China and India – more than 770,000 square miles – and has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet these regions have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production. This was achieved through multiple cropping practices, where a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by about 35-40% since 2000 to feed their large populations.
How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors, both on a global scale and the local human level. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change.
“But, now that we know direct human influence is a key driver of the greening Earth, we need to factor this into our climate models,” Nemani said. “This will help scientists make better predictions about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action.”
The researchers point out that the gain in greenness seen around the world and dominated by India and China does not offset the damage from loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions, such as Brazil and Indonesia. The consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems remain.
Overall, Nemani sees a positive message in the new findings. “Once people realize there’s a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 70s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss wasn’t good; in the 90s, people realized it; and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”
This research was published online, Feb. 11, 2019, in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Credits: NASA Earth Observatory
February 15, 2020
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Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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A negotiated solution to the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’, at least the way envisaged by successive US administrations, has failed. Now, Palestinians and their allies would have to explore a whole new path of liberation that does not go through Washington.
It is easy to place all the blame on the current US administration, setting apart dodgy characters such as the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the man who has single-handedly diminished any real chances for a just peace in Palestine and Israel.
The truth, however, greatly differs from conveniently molded assumptions. The US-championed ‘peace process’ has been in a hiatus since the last negotiations in 2014. For years prior to the announcement of Donald Trump’s ‘Middle East Plan’ on January 28, Israel did everything in its power to ensure Palestinians can never have a state of their own. Not only did Israeli officials openly speak of their desire to illegally annex much of the occupied territories, but the Israeli government has taken numerous steps to ensure the constant expansion of illegal Jewish settlements.
One would have to be politically naive and morally blind to assume that the Israeli government, at any point in the past, had an iota of interest in a just peace that would guarantee the Palestinian people a minimum amount of dignity, freedom and justice.
Yet, everyone has played along: Israel complained that it has no peace partner while simultaneously entrenching its military occupation and expanding its colonial regime; the Palestinian Authority (PA) of President Mahmoud Abbas ceaselessly waved empty threats, which ultimately amounted to nothing; the Americans urged both parties to return to ‘unconditional negotiations’, all the while funding, to the amount of $3.8 billion [annually], the Israeli military and economy; the United Nations and the European Union followed a predictable political script that was seen as more ‘moderate’ than that of Washington, yet failed to take a single meaningful action to discourage Israel from further violations of international law.
Meanwhile, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), who are arguably Palestine’s more solid and consistent allies, remained marginal and, by far, the least relevant of all parties. Their occasional statements in support of Palestinians and condemnation of the Israeli occupation became so predictable and ineffectual. Aside from Abbas and his Authority, ordinary Palestinians saw no value in verbal support that hardly ever translated into tangible action.
Somehow, this skewed paradigm sustained itself for many years, partly because it suited everyone except the Palestinian people, of course, whose subjugation and humiliation by Israel carried on unhindered.
Presently, there are two different currents fighting to define the situation in Palestine in the post-‘Deal of the Century’ era.
First, Israel and the United States, who are keen to translate the ‘Middle East plan’ into rapid and irreversible action. They are eager to annex the illegal settlements of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley (approximately 30% of the total size of the West Bank). Moreover, Washington would like to see its diligent, clandestine efforts aimed at normalization between Arabs and Israel translate into actual agreements and, eventually, full diplomatic ties.
Second, the Palestinian Authority, the EU, the UN, the Arab League and the OIC, want the ‘Deal of the Century’ defeated, but they have no alternative path to follow. They insist on respect for international law and remain die-hard supporters of the unfeasible two-state paradigm, but they have no actual strategy, let alone an enforcement mechanism to make that happen.
The pro-PA camp reeks with contradictions, that are no less obvious than that of Abbas’ Authority, which speaks of ‘popular resistance’ while, jointly with Israel, is suppressing any attempt aimed at challenging the Israeli occupation.
A perfect example of the contradictions in this camp is that only two days after the Arab League issued its statement rejecting the ‘Deal of the Century’, the head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, met with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Uganda. Burhan is hoping to swap normalization with Israel for Washington’s favors.
Another example is reflected in the behavior of Abbas himself, who, on February 1, declared that he would sever all contacts with Israel, including the so-called security coordination, a main pillar in the Oslo agreement, which practically employs PA security forces in the service of the Israeli occupation.
This is not the first time that Abbas has resorted to this lifeline, but he has never gone through with his promises. We have no reason to believe that this time is any different.
There is little hope that the pro-PA camp, as exemplified in the current political structure, can truly defeat the ‘Deal of the Century’.
The final statements resulting from the Arab League summit in Cairo and the OIC summit in Jeddah on February 1 and 3 respectively, is a repeat of numerous past conferences, where promises were made and condemnations were leveled, with no follow-up nor any action.
If Arabs and Muslims are, indeed, sincere in their desire to confront US-Israeli plotting, they ought to go beyond this stifling pattern of impractical politics. It is not enough to reject Washington’s stratagem and to denounce Israeli action. They ought to muster enough courage to turn their statements into an actual, unified strategy, and their strategy into action, using all means at their disposal.
Arab countries enjoy massive economic and political leverage in Washington and throughout the world. What’s the value of all of this leverage if not used in defense of Palestine and her people?
Washington and Tel Aviv are counting on the fact that anger at the ‘Deal of the Century’ among Arabs and Muslims will eventually peter out, exactly as happened after Trump recognized all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving his country’s embassy there in May 2018.
If Arabs and Muslims fail Palestine again, then, once more, the Palestinian people will find themselves alone in this desperate fight, which they have no other alternative but to undergo. And when Palestinians rise, as they surely will, their uprising will challenge not just Israel but the entire regional and international apparatus that allowed the Israeli occupation to go unchallenged for so many years.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).
February 12, 2020
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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A reiteration of the war on Palestine, on the Arab world, on the Muslim world, on international law and human rights. There is no other way to describe the Trump-Kushner-Netanyahu ‘deal.’
Media comment centers on the last opportunity for the Palestinians. Will they take the scraps they are offered, or will they miss yet another opportunity to have something taken away from them?
This was the line used over decades by the glib Irish-born Zionist ‘foreign minister,’ Aubrey (Abba) Eban. The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, he said many times.
In fact, if anyone has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity it is the Zionists. They could have chosen to live with the Palestinians instead. They could have accepted their return after 1948. They could have handed back the land they seized in 1967. They could have honestly engaged with the so-called ‘peace process.’ They could have ended the blockade of Gaza. They could have stopped seizing and settling the land of another people. They could have agreed to share Al Quds. They could have stopped their murders and assassination.
What they could have done they never did. Instead, they headed in the opposite direction, financed, armed, protected and encouraged by the most powerful nation in the world.
A vulgarian property developer who once made ads for Pizza Hut has now told his zionist settler sidekick that he can have Palestine with the lot. Nothing is missed out, not Jerusalem, not the Jordan Valley and not the illegal settlements – the ‘outposts’ – as well as the legal ones, so says Netanyahu. All are completely illegal, of course, as is the presence of every settler on occupied land.
This demented agreement was put together by the plastic-faced Jared Kushner, who said, seriously apparently, that he read all of 25 books to get a handle on the situation. By comparison, Trump is unlikely to have read one so no wonder that he thinks his son-in-law is a genius.
This ‘deal’ – a deal without wheels – is being taken seriously in the mainstream media. In a way, of course, it has to be taken seriously as the Zionists have the weaponry to do whatever they want, no matter how mad, rapacious or destructive of their own interests in the long term.
And this is something the media seems to have missed. For whom, really, is this plan the last opportunity? The assumption is that it is the Palestinians but have Trump and Kushner noticed that while the Palestinians do not have the weapons, they have the numbers, that already the Muslim-Christian population of Palestine between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river is already greater than the Jewish population.
Silly to ask, but have either of these two taken into account the Muslim hinterland, the Muslim population of the Middle East and North Africa (close to 600 million) and the world Muslim population (about 1.8 billion)?
By comparison, the Jewish population of occupied Palestine is less than seven million. Far from trying to settle into the Muslim world, over more than seven decades it has done nothing but antagonize it. Like a spoilt child, it then complains that no one likes it, that the real reason for Muslim loathing of the Zionist state is anti-semitism, and not its racist, murderous and thieving behavior.
This is the game played endlessly by the Zionist lobby around the world. It hides behind the symbols of the religion it has hijacked. The Star of David flies from the pennants of the tanks that shell apartment buildings in Gaza and is inscribed on the wings of the planes that destroy entire families with missiles.
It is scrawled triumphantly on the walls of the West Bank. This is the Israel that the lobbyists and the rabbis defended behind their accusations against Jeremy Corbyn. It is he who wanted to end these horrors and they, behind their lies and false accusations of antisemitism against Corbyn and the entire Labor Party wanted to leave the Zionist state free to continue them. It is they who are the racists and anti-Arab Semites, not Jeremy Corbyn.
Palestine remains part of Arab and Islamic history and identity and remains an Arab and Muslim cause whatever the exasperation felt at Arab governments and the bungled and/or collaborationist policies of the Palestinian leadership.
By themselves, the Palestinians had no hope of resisting the Zionist takeover of their land. Zionism was an imperial project and the Zionist state was sequentially backed by the two mightiest empires on the planet, first Britain and then the United States. No small group of people anywhere would have been able to resist their power.
The greater danger to Israel always lay in the surrounding Arab and Muslim world. George Habash, the founder of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) was writing in the 1950s that the road to the liberation of Palestine ran through the Arab world and this remains as true today as it was then, although the statement has to be qualified by adding “and the Muslim world.”
Israel understood this just as well as George Habash and knew that if it were to survive in the long term, the Arab world had to be fragmented, subverted, dominated and kept off balance permanently. This was the sine qua non of Israel’s existence. The ties that bound states together, that bound the region together and connected it with the wider Islamic world had to be broken.
It was not just armies and states that had to be broken but the Arab national idea and the Arab world as a presence in history and a place on the map. It would have to be what Israel and the US wanted it to be. It would have to be remade.
Towards this end, the zionists were looking for weak links in the chain of Arab states even in the 1930s. They thought they had found the weakest in Lebanon, where they hoped to set up a puppet Christian government. Not only did this not work but since the rise of Hezb0llah, the weakest link in the chain has turned into one of the strongest.
The Yinon Plan of the 1980s set out the strategy in full. All Middle Eastern states were to be subjected to ethnoreligious or tribal division. This broad script was fine-tuned by Netanyahu and the Zionists inside the US administration in the 1990s.
Iraq was the first of seven states targeted for destruction. The destruction through two wars and a decade of sanctions was enormous but the political strategy failed. The Kurdish state-in-being, planned by the US and Israel as a new center for strategic operations in the Middle East, has collapsed. The Shia-dominated government in Baghdad maintains good relations with Iran and following the assassination of Qasim Soleimani the Iraqi parliament demanded the complete withdrawal of US forces. Millions of people marched through the streets of Iraq’s cities as they did in Iran to mourn the murder of this outstanding military commander. Anti-American feeling in Iraq is at an all-time high.
The war in Syria was designed to bring down the axis of resistance (Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah) at its central arch but that has failed, too. Syria, its people, and its military have resisted the most determined attempt ever made to destroy an Arab government.
Always popular, Bashar al Assad is now more popular than ever, as the army, backed by Russian airpower, drives the takfiri terrorists from their last redoubt in Idlib province. Syrian cities have been shattered, perhaps half a million people have been killed but the US-Israeli political strategy in Syria has failed too.
For anyone who has been watching closely enough, the wheel of history, once turning in Israel’s favor, has been slowly turning against it for decades. Israel came close to defeat in the first week of the 1973 war. It drove the PLO out of Lebanon only to awaken a far more powerful enemy, Hezbollah. In every war it has fought or operation it has launched, the remorseless use of airpower has been critical. Nevertheless, even with air cover its foot soldiers were driven out of southern Lebanon in 2000 and, outfought by Hezbollah’s part-time soldiers, humiliated again when they returned in 2006.
Hezbollah and Iran have been working for decades on how to neutralize Israel’s air power. If – or once – they succeed in doing this, Israel is going to be in deep trouble on the battlefield.
Threatened repeatedly with destruction by the US and Israel, Iran has had to develop a new range of missiles capable of causing devastation to US bases, aircraft and warships in the region. The retaliation which followed the murder of Qasim Soleimani was an example. The Americans failed to stop even one of the Iranian missiles directed against two of its bases in Iraq.
Aircraft were destroyed in their hangars and while no soldiers were killed – so the US government says – dozens suffered severe brain injuries, apparently from concussion, with a number being flown to Germany for emergency treatment. Iran says the casualties were far greater than the US is prepared to admit.
Hezbollah has its own stocks of missiles, far greater in number and sophistication than in 2006, and has its targets already worked out for when the next war comes. As Israel’s military commanders are making clear, the next war is a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if.’ They are warning the civilian population to be prepared for the unprecedented scale of the casualties they are going to suffer.
So, for whom is the bell really tolling now, the Palestinians or the Zionists? Gideon Levy writes that the Kushner-Trump deal is likely to trigger a third nakba. This is incorrect, as there has only been one nakba, continuing now for more than seven decades.
David Hearst, writing in Middle East Eye, thinks all the Palestinians have to sit tight, because, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, they are going to win the war of numbers, if they haven’t won it already. By implication, once the war of numbers is won, the war itself is won. The Zionist state will see reason and turn itself into the secular democratic state the Palestinians always wanted, with equal rights for all. Given that they would be the majority, they would have to be the dominant element in any freely-elected government. The Zionist dream-nightmare would be over.
This is not likely to happen. Zionism is an extreme ideology and the politicians running the Zionist state now are the most extreme since its foundation. They are not going to surrender because of demographics. They will simply try harder to overcome the problem. They still want all the Palestinians out of Palestine or at the very least reduced to an inconsequential ethnic remnant. Between the apartheid state and the democratic state, this is their preferred solution.
What they need is another war enabling them to strike down their external enemies and simultaneously solve the ‘Palestine problem’ once and for all. If (or rather when) such a war does break out, Hezbollah will swamp the Zionist state with missiles in such numbers as to overwhelm its defense systems.
The Palestinians will be determined to stay put but in the fog of war, while the world is looking elsewhere, at missile attacks on US bases and soaring oil prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps they can again be terrorized into leaving. Even the most steadfast Palestinians have families to protect and if they won’t go then the level of terror only has to be increased until they do. This is the evil calculus applied before and likely to be applied again once the opportunity arises or, more accurately, can be created.
Who wants such a war? Not the Palestinians, and not Hezbollah or Iran although they have had no option but to prepare for it. Who has set up the conditions for such a war, decade after decade to the point where it has to be regarded as inevitable unless ‘the Arabs’ and the Muslims really are the useless orientals of the western imagination, there to be kicked around endlessly? Israel has, by its disgraceful behavior.
So has the US and so has the ‘west’ in general, its governments, its media and its institutions (where has the UN Secretary-General, the moral guardian of peace in the world, been during the eight atrocious years of war on Syria? Hiding in a cupboard?). It is ‘the west’ generically which created Israel, and has allowed it to get away with wars, ethnic cleansing, massacres, assassination and occupation generation after generation.
Perhaps a shattering setback is all that will bring this utterly dangerous state to its senses. Of course, there is always the possibility that it will go completely off the edge and use its nuclear weapons, turning the central lands of the Middle East into a wasteland but at least taking its enemies down with it in the most pyrrhic of victories. These are grim possibilities but they have to be taken seriously.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
February 12, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Hezbollah, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Syria, Zionism |
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“This book is a delightful provocation and invitation: to imagine a world without humans and to think of what we can do to get there. It is an urgent call for action.”
― Christine Daigle, Professor of Philosophy, Brock University, Canada
Here you go: the “final solution” to climate change. This book is a glimpse of where the climate road to serfdom ends. (And it is not, I repeat not, a Babylon Bee satire.)
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene” by Patricia MacCormack (Bloomsbury Academic: 2020) is self-described as follows:
We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of “human” into question.
It is against this context that Patricia MacCormack delivers her expert justification for the “ahuman.” An alternative to “posthuman” thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn’t dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.
In order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in the world, this book explores five key contemporary themes:
· Identity
· Spirituality
· Art
· Death
· The apocalypse
Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas and addressing specifically modern phenomena like death cults, intersectional identity politics and capitalist enslavement of human and nonhuman organisms to the point of ‘zombiedom’, The Ahuman Manifesto navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is so that we can actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), and with passion and grace, toward a new world.
Four positive pre-publication reviews are shared:
“Patricia MacCormack goes relentessly beyond ‘just’ deconstructing anthropocentrism and dismantling multispecies extinction caused by human dominance in the Anthropocene. The manifesto is not only theorizing, but compassionately calling for direct abolitionist action for the other at the expense of the (human) self. Trembling with joyful energy and critically affirmative insights, this manifesto encourages us to engage in ahuman arts & activist practices, inspired by queer feminist (secular) spirituality, and death activism.” ―Nina Lykke, Professor of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
“This beautiful book is both a passionate, insightful meditation on the world we actually live in, and a radical call to action. Is it even possible for us to stop being human, to let multiple beings flourish without reducing them to means for our own selfish ends? Reading this book, thinking with it and about it, and responding openly to it, is absolutely essential.” ―Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA
“Patricia MacCormack’s splendid refusal to nuance her intent in The Ahuman Manifesto will both intrigue and infuriate. As a vegan abolitionist/extinctionist, she provides an unrelenting and exacting take down of the violent self-interest of the human species, and offers a call to ethical action best described as eating the Anthropocene.” ―Margrit Shildrick, Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Stockholm University, Sweden
“This book is a delightful provocation and invitation: to imagine a world without humans and to think of what we can do to get there. It is an urgent call for action. A joyful, lucid, fiercely intelligent call to readers to hope and work for a future not for themselves, but for the thriving of all nonhuman life. Engaging with this book will be a transformative experience. One cannot see the world or oneself in the same way after reading it.” ―Christine Daigle, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute, Brock University, Canada
A writeup by Alisair Ryder in Cambridge News, “‘The only solution for climate change is letting the human race become extinct,’” describes the book and author as follows:
Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, has just released her new book The Ahuman Manifesto, which will officially be launched in Cambridge today (Wednesday, February 5).
The book argues that due to the damage done to other living creatures on Earth, we should start gradually phasing out reproduction. But rather than offering a bleak look at the future of humanity, it has generated discussion due to its joyful and optimistic tone, as it sets out a positive view for the future of Earth – without mankind.
It also touches on several hot-button topics, from religion and veganism to the concept of identity politics, tying these into how the creation of a hierarchal world among humans has left us blind to the destruction we are causing to our habitat and other forms of life.
Speaking to CambridgeshireLive, Professor MacCormack outlined how she came to this point of view, and how these ideas are not as provocative as they may initially sound.
She said: “I arrived at this idea from a couple of directions. I was introduced to philosophy due to my interest in feminism and queer theory, so reproductive rights have long been an interest to me – this led me to learn more about animal rights, which is when I became vegan.
“The basic premise of the book is that we’re in the age of the Anthropocene, humanity has caused mass problems and one of them is creating this hierarchal world where white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied people are succeeding, and people of different races, genders, sexualities and those with disabilities are struggling to get that.
“This is where the idea of dismantling identity politics comes in – they deserve rights not because of what they are, but because they are.
“The book also argues that we need to dismantle religion, and other overriding powers like the church of capitalism or the cult of self, as it makes people act upon enforced rules rather than respond thoughtfully to the situations in front of them.”
The central argument in The Ahuman Manifesto can be boiled down to this: mankind is already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” by capitalism, and because of the damage this has caused, phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world.
Additionally, humanity has to see it isn’t the single living dominant force – but first, it needs to dismantle an established hierarchy amongst itself. This argument has not received as much disagreement as you might expect.
Professor MacCormack continued: “Everyone’s okay with the ideas in the book until they’re told they’d have to act on it. There is a lot of agreement that these changes might work for the world, but when it imposes on people, it becomes proactive.
“Many people are surprised it’s so joyful and it has this radical compassion, which cares for the world. It’s not about our death, so much as it’s about celebrating the tools that exist to care for a decelerating Earth.
“People wonder why I don’t think humans are exceptional, dominant beings – but when I ask them why they think that, I never get a good answer back. The way we perceive the world isn’t the only one, we never think about animal life.
“Even Extinction Rebellion only focus on the effect this will have on human life when climate change is something that will affect every living being on the planet.
This worldview of hopelessness, victimization, and human-hate is truly the end of the road to serfdom. It is the final solution with all of humankind, not just one race or creed, in the balance.
February 11, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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With human populations already on the decline in the West, climate-conscious academics have now taken aim at carnivorous pets. But even if ditching canine and feline companionship helps save the planet, is the loneliness worth it?
A Swedish agricultural studies professor has joined the growing chorus of environmentally-conscious academics scolding pet owners about their four-legged friends’ carbon pawprints. Cats and dogs eat meat, which produces significant emissions, and therefore should be replaced with herbivorous pets when possible, Sigrid Agenäs recently told Swedish outlet Expressen. While Agenäs does not join her more militant colleagues in insisting cat and dog owners attempt to feed their pets a vegan diet – a death sentence for cats, and a risk to dogs’ health for the uninitiated in canine nutrition – anyone who owns a carnivorous pet can testify that it is not as simple as trading in Fluffy for a goat or rabbit. They aren’t called “fur babies” for nothing – cats and dogs are increasingly the only living things keeping humans company in ever-more-atomized industrial societies.
Why are the climate militia setting their sights on pets? Birth rates are plummeting in Europe and the US, where record low fertility has long since dipped past the rate needed for the population to replace itself. While this trend was underway long before the climate brigade came along demanding women put off childbearing to save the planet, enough celebrities have taken up that line of argument that they can claim it as a victory and move on to people’s four-legged children.
But if pets are one of the last things standing between an increasingly large slice of humanity and utter alienation – and if, as medical experts are saying, loneliness is truly worse than obesity in predicting future health problems – those who would replace our cats with goats are asking us to make a very difficult choice.
As we get used to the lonely green future without our furry friends, we can take comfort in the fact that we’ve kept planet-wide warming to a manageable level, though, right? Not quite – the carbon footprint of the world’s domesticated cats and dogs pales in comparison to that of the US military, for example, which produces more emissions than most countries. Why, with elephants like this in the room, is the environmental movement setting its sights on dogs and cats? Aren’t we already lonely enough?
It’s not an idle question when nearly four out of five members of Generation Z report that they are lonely, more even than their notoriously disaffected older siblings the millennials (“only” seven in 10 of whom report feeling loneliness). More than any other issue, Generation Z is concerned with climate change, according to a December survey conducted across 22 countries in which 41 percent named the phenomenon as their chief concern; a further 36 percent named pollution. But while “eco-anxiety” likely contributes to the spike in depression and anxiety witnessed in Generation Z, the future presented as climate-friendly living, with no children, no pets, and an ascetic lifestyle that frowns on any form of carbon-emitting leisure, is liable to overwhelm them with feelings of loneliness.
But the misery that accompanies climate-change doomsaying is probably part of the attraction for some. Extinction Rebellion rallies have all the trappings of religious revivals – some play host to actual religious rituals – and the climate-change-obsessed preaching their low-consumption lifestyles can be likened to medieval devotees wearing hair shirts and whipping themselves in the public square. Guilt-stricken children of privilege can rush to absolve themselves in the eyes of some hypothetical Gaia by eating bugs, gluing themselves to trains, and renouncing the creature comforts their peers take for granted.
And with no children, no pets, and – apparently – no real-life friends to distract today’s young adults from the all-consuming quest to save the planet, environmental groups have never had more fertile recruiting grounds. Political movements the world over have long known that alienation is a feature, not a bug, when it comes to filling their ranks with soon-to-be ideological zealots.
If ditching cats and dogs fails to save the planet, there’s always a silver lining. Before our pets’ carnivorous diets heat Earth beyond habitability, Big Business stands to make a killing in psychiatric medication. After all, loneliness kills – kills worse than smoking, if the experts are to be believed. Generation Z is going to need medical intervention on a grand scale when they come out the other side of this green ‘phase.’
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
February 10, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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There is no evidence that climate change has ever been a top concern for most Americans.
Recently I reported on a poll that Gallup has conducted in America every month of every year since 2001. Admirably, it makes no attempt to prompt or influence. It asks people to name the most important problem facing the country, then it records their answers.
If one seeks honest, genuine insight into ordinary people’s lives, that’s a great approach.
Pew Research Center, another American polling outfit, conducts a different kind of survey. For 25 years (from 1994 to 2019 inclusive), it has read members of the public a long list of pre-selected topics in random order. People have been asked to attach a label to each one.
Should it be a ‘top priority’ for the President and Congress this year? Should it be a lower priority? Is it unimportant? Does it deserve no attention at all?
In 2007, Pew added ‘global warming’ to this list of potential top priorities. In 2016, it started calling it ‘climate change’ instead.
Last year, 44% of respondents told Pew that ‘Dealing with global climate change’ should be a top priority. That sounds significant until you notice that every single item on the list received at least 39% support.
In such cases, raw percentages are meaningless. What matters is how a topic ranks compared to its fellows. Those results couldn’t be clearer. In 2019, climate change ended up in 17th place out of 18.
70% of people said strengthening the economy should be a top priority.
69% said reducing health care costs should be.
68% said the education system needs attention.
Those are very strong numbers, involving more than than two-thirds of the population. What came next?
4. ‘Defending the country from future terrorist attacks’ – 67%
5. ‘Taking steps to make the Social Security system financially sound’ – 67%
6. ‘Taking steps to make the Medicare system financially sound’ – 67%
7. ‘Dealing with the problems of poor and needy people’ – 60%
8. ‘Protecting the environment’ – 56%
9. ‘Dealing with the issue of immigration’ – 51%
10. ‘Improving the job situation’ – 50%
11. ‘Reducing crime’ – 50%
12. ‘Dealing with drug addiction’ – 49%
13. ‘Reducing the budget deficit’ – 48%
14. ‘Addressing race relations in this country’ – 46%
15. ‘Strengthening the US military’ – 45%
16. ‘Improving the country’s roads, bridges and public transportation systems’ – 45%
17. ‘Dealing with global climate change’ – 44%
18. ‘Dealing with global trade issues’ – 39%
In other words, another long-running US poll tells us the public’s climate concerns are weak. Ask people if they care about it, and many will say ‘yes.’ But they feel more urgency about a long list of other issues.
‘Dealing with global warming’ ended up in second last place in 2007. Between 2008 and 2013, it ranked last (select a year and then ‘Overall’ here). Here’s what happened after that:
2014: second last
2015 second last
2016 third last (the first year Pew began calling it ‘global climate change’)
2017: second last (see bottom of the page)
2018: second last
2019 second last
Moral of the story: There has never been any evidence that climate change is a top concern for most Americans. This is not a crowd pleaser or a vote getter.
February 10, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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UK governments routinely claim to uphold national and international law. But the reality of British policies is quite different, especially when it comes to foreign policy and so-called ‘national security’. This explainer summarises 17 long-running government policies which violate UK domestic or international law.
British foreign secretary Dominic Raab recently described the “rule of international law” as one of the “guiding lights” of UK foreign policy. By contrast, the government regularly chides states it opposes, such as Russia or Iran, as violators of international law. These governments are often consequently termed “rogue states” in the mainstream media, the supposed antithesis of how “we” operate.
The following list of 17 policies may not be exhaustive, but it suggests that the term “rogue state” is not sensationalist or misplaced when it comes to describing Britain’s own foreign and “security” policies.
These serial violations suggest that parliamentary and public oversight over executive policy-making in the UK is not fit for purpose and that new mechanisms are needed to restrain the excesses of the British state.
The Royal Air Force’s drone war
Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) operates a drone programme in support of the US involving a fleet of British “Reaper” drones operating since 2007. They have been used by the UK to strike targets in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Four RAF bases in the UK support the US drone war. The joint UK and US spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, northern England, facilitates US drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. US drone strikes, involving an assassination programme begun by president Barack Obama, are widely regarded as illegal under international law, breaching fundamental human rights. Up to 1,700 civilian adults and children have been killed in so-called “targeted killings”.
Amnesty International notes that British backing is “absolutely crucial to the US lethal drones programme, providing support for various US surveillance programmes, vital intelligence exchanges and in some cases direct involvement from UK personnel in identifying and tracking targets for US lethal operations, including drone strikes that may have been unlawful”.
Chagos Islands
Britain has violated international law in the case of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean since it expelled the inhabitants in the 1960s to make way for a US military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island.
Harold Wilson’s Labour government separated the islands from then British colony Mauritius in 1965 in breach of a UN resolution banning the breakup of colonies before independence. London then formed a new colonial entity, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is now an Overseas Territory.
In 2015, a UN Tribunal ruled that the UK’s proposed “marine protected area” around the islands — shown by Wikileaks publications to be a ruse to keep the islanders from returning — was unlawful since it undermined the rights of Mauritius.
Then in February 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in an advisory opinion that Britain must end its administration of the Chagos islands “as rapidly as possible”. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in May 2019 welcoming the ICJ ruling and “demanding that the United Kingdom unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from the area within six months”. The UK government has rejected the calls.
Defying the UN over the Falklands
The UN’s 24-country Special Committee on Decolonisation — its principal body addressing issues concerning decolonisation — has repeatedly called on the UK government to negotiate a resolution to the dispute over the status of the Falklands. In its latest call, in June 2019, the committee approved a draft resolution “reiterating that the only way to end the special and particular colonial situation of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) is through a peaceful and negotiated settlement of the sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom”.
The British government consistently rejects these demands. Last year, it stated:
“The Decolonisation Committee no longer has a relevant role to play with respect to British Overseas Territories. They all have a large measure of self government, have chosen to retain their links with the UK, and therefore should have been delisted a long time ago.”
In 2016, the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf issued a report finding that the Falkland Islands are located in Argentina’s territorial waters.
Israel and settlement goods
Although Britain regularly condemns Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, in line with international law, it permits trade in goods produced on those settlements. It also does not keep a record of imports that come from the settlements — which include wine, olive oil and dates — into the UK.
UN Security Council resolutions require all states to “distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”. The UK is failing to do this.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza
Israel’s blockade of Gaza, imposed in 2007 following the territory’s takeover by Hamas, is widely regarded as illegal. Senior UN officials, a UN independent panel of experts, and Amnesty International all agree that the infliction of “collective punishment” on the population of Gaza contravenes international human rights and humanitarian law.
Gaza has about 1.8 million inhabitants who remain “locked in” and denied free access to the remainder of putative Palestine (the West Bank) and the outside world. It has poverty and unemployment rates that reached nearly 75% in 2019.
Through its naval blockade, the Israeli navy restricts Palestinians’ fishing rights, fires on local fishermen and has intercepted ships delivering humanitarian aid. Britain, and all states, have an obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law” in Gaza.
However, instead of doing so, the UK regularly collaborates with the navy enforcing the blockade. In August 2019, Britain’s Royal Navy took part in the largest international naval exercise ever held by Israel, off the country’s Mediterranean shore. In November 2016 and December 2017, British warships conducted military exercises with their Israeli allies.
Exports of surveillance equipment
Declassified revealed that the UK recently exported telecommunications interception equipment or software to 13 countries, including authoritarian regimes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Oman. Such technology can enable security forces to monitor the private activities of groups or individuals and crack down on political opponents.
The UAE has been involved in programmes monitoring domestic activists using spyware. In 2017 and 2018, British exporters were given four licences to export telecommunications interception equipment, components or software to the UAE.
UK arms export guidelines state that the government will “not grant a licence if there is a clear risk that the items might be used for internal repression”. Reports by Amnesty International document human rights abuses in the cases of UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, suggesting that British approval of such exports to these countries is prima facie unlawful.
Arms exports to Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has been accused by the UN and others of violating international humanitarian law and committing war crimes in its war in Yemen, which began in March 2015. The UK has licensed nearly £5-billion worth of arms to the Saudi regime during this time. In addition, the RAF is helping to maintain Saudi warplanes at key operating bases and stores and issues bombs for use in Yemen.
Following legal action brought by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the UK Court of Appeal ruled in June 2019 that ministers had illegally signed off on arms exports without properly assessing the risk to civilians. The court ruled that the government must reconsider the export licences in accordance with the correct legal approach.
The ruling followed a report by a cross-party House of Lords committee, published earlier in 2019, which concluded that Britain is breaking international law by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and should suspend some export licences immediately.
Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention and torture
In the case of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange — currently held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London — the UK is defying repeated opinions of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) and the UN special rapporteur on torture.
The latter, Nils Melzer, has called on the UK government to release Assange on the grounds that officials are contributing to his psychological torture and ill treatment. Melzer has also called for UK officials to be investigated for possible “criminal conduct” as government policy “severely undermines the credibility of [its] commitment to the prohibition of torture… as well as to the rule of law more generally”.
The WGAD — the supreme international body scrutinising this issue — has repeatedly demanded that the UK government end Assange’s “arbitrary detention”. Although the UN states that WGAD determinations are legally binding, its calls have been consistently rejected by the UK government.
Covert wars
Covert military operations to subvert foreign governments, such as Britain’s years-long operation in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime, are unlawful. As a House of Commons briefing notes, “forcible assistance to opposition forces is illegal”.
A precedent was set in the Nicaragua case in the 1980s, when US-backed covert forces (the “Contras”) sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. The International Court of Justice held that a third state may not forcibly help the opposition to overthrow a government since it breached the principles of non-intervention and prohibition on the use of force.
As Declassified has shown, the UK is currently engaged in seven covert wars, including in Syria, with minimal parliamentary oversight. Government policy is “not to comment” on the activities of its special forces “because of the security implications”. The public’s ability to scrutinise policy is also restricted since the UK’s Freedom of Information Act applies an “absolute exemption” to special forces. This is not the case for allied powers such as the US and Canada.
Torture and the refusal to hold an inquiry
In 2018 a report by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found that the UK had been complicit in cases of torture and other ill treatment of detainees in the so-called “war on terror”. The inquiry examined the participation of MI6 (the secret intelligence service), MI5 (the domestic security service) and Ministry of Defence (MOD) personnel in interrogating detainees held primarily by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay during 2001-10.
The report found that there were 232 cases where UK personnel supplied questions or intelligence to foreign intelligence agents after they knew or suspected that a detainee was being mistreated. It also found 198 cases where UK personnel received intelligence from foreign agents obtained from detainees whom they knew or suspected to have been mistreated.
In one case, MI6 “sought and obtained authorisation from the foreign secretary” (then Jack Straw, in Tony Blair’s government) for the costs of funding a plane which was involved in rendering a suspect.
After the report was published, the government announced it was refusing to hold a judge-led, independent inquiry into the UK’s role in rendition and torture as it had previously promised to do. In 2019, human rights group Reprieve, together with Conservative and Labour MPs, instigated a legal challenge to the government over this refusal–which the High Court has agreed to hear.
The UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has formally warned the UK that its refusal to launch a judicial inquiry into torture and rendition breaches international law, specifically the UN Convention Against Torture. He has written a private “intervention” letter to the UK foreign secretary stating that the government has “a legal obligation to investigate and to prosecute”.
Melzer accuses the government of engaging in a “conscious policy” of co-operating with torture since 9/11, saying it is “impossible” the practice was not approved or at least tolerated by top officials.
UK’s secret torture policy
The MOD was revealed in 2019 to be operating a secret policy allowing ministers to approve actions which could lead to the torture of detainees. The policy, contained in an internal MOD document dated November 2018, allows ministers to approve passing information to allies even if there is a risk of torture, if “the potential benefits justify accepting the risk and legal consequences”.
This policy also provides for ministers to approve lists of individuals about whom information may be shared despite a serious risk they could face mistreatment. One leading lawyer has said that domestic and international legislation on the prohibition of torture is clear and that the MOD policy supports breaking of the law by ministers.
Amnesty for crimes committed by soldiers
There is a long history of British soldiers committing crimes during wars. In 2019 the government outlined plans to grant immunity for offences by soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland that were committed more than 10 years before.
These plans have been condemned by the UN Committee Against Torture, which has called on the government to “refrain from enacting legislation that would grant amnesty or pardon where torture is concerned. It should also ensure that all victims of such torture and ill-treatment obtain redress”.
The committee has specifically urged the UK to “establish responsibility and ensure accountability for any torture and ill-treatment committed by UK personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, specifically by establishing a single, independent, public inquiry to investigate allegations of such conduct.”
The government’s proposals are also likely to breach UK obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, which obliges states to investigate breaches of the right to life or the prohibition on torture.
GCHQ’s mass surveillance
Files revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 show that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ had been secretly intercepting, processing and storing data concerning millions of people’s private communications, including people of no intelligence interest — in a programme named Tempora. Snowden also revealed that the British government was accessing personal communications and data collected by the US National Security Agency and other countries’ intelligence agencies.
All of this was taking place without public consent or awareness, with no basis in law and with no proper safeguards. Since these revelations, there has been a long-running legal battle over the UK’s unlawful use of these previously secret surveillance powers.
In September 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that UK laws enabling mass surveillance were unlawful, violating rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The court observed that the UK’s regime for authorising bulk interception was incapable of keeping “interference” to what is “necessary in a democratic society”.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the body which considers complaints against the security services, also found that UK intelligence agencies had unlawfully spied on the communications of Amnesty International and the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.
In 2014, revelations also confirmed that GCHQ had been granted authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged lawyer-client communications, and that MI5 and MI6 adopted similar policies. The guidelines appeared to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions” handling confidential information.
MI5 personal data
In 2019, MI5 was found to have for years unlawfully retained innocent British people’s online location data, calls, messages and web browsing history without proper protections, according to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office which upholds British privacy protections. MI5 had also failed to give senior judges accurate information about repeated breaches of its duty to delete bulk surveillance data, and was criticised for mishandling sensitive legally privileged material.
The commissioner concluded that the way MI5 was holding and handling people’s data was “undoubtedly unlawful”. Warrants for MI5’s bulk surveillance were issued by senior judges on the understanding that the agency’s legal data handling obligations were being met — when they were not.
“MI5 have been holding on to people’s data—ordinary people’s data, your data, my data — illegally for many years,” said Megan Goulding, a lawyer for rights organisation Liberty, which brought the case. “Not only that, they’ve been trying to keep their really serious errors secret — secret from the security services watchdog, who’s supposed to know about them, secret from the Home Office, secret from the prime minister and secret from the public.”
Intelligence agencies committing criminal offences
MI5 has been operating under a secret policy that allows its agents to commit serious crimes during counter-terrorism operations in the UK, according to lawyers for human rights organisations brin
ging a case to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
The policy, referred to as the “third direction”, allows MI5 officers to permit the people they have recruited as agents to commit crimes in order to secure access to information that could be used to prevent other offences being committed. The crimes potentially include murder, kidnap and torture and have operated for decades. MI5 officers are, meanwhile, immune from prosecution.
A lawyer for the human rights organisations argues that the issues raised by the case are “not hypothetical”, submitting that “in the past, authorisation of agent participation in criminality appears to have led to grave breaches of fundamental rights”. He points to the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, an attack carried out by loyalist paramilitaries, including some agents working for the British state.
The ‘James Bond clause’
British intelligence officers can be authorised to commit crimes outside the UK. Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act vacates UK criminal and civil law as long as a senior government minister has signed a written authorisation that committing a criminal act overseas is permissible. This is sometimes known as the “James Bond clause”.
British spies were reportedly given authority to break the law overseas on 13 occasions in 2014 under this clause. GCHQ was given five authorisations “removing liability for activities including those associated with certain types of intelligence gathering and interference with computers, mobile phones and other types of electronic equipment”. MI6, meanwhile, was given eight such authorisations in 2014.
Underage soldiers
Britain is the only country in Europe and Nato to allow direct enlistment into the army at the age of 16. One in four UK army recruits is now under the age of 18. According to the editors of the British Medical Journal, “there is no justification for this state policy, which is harmful to teen health and should be stopped”. Child recruits are more likely than adult recruits to end up in frontline combat, they add.
It was revealed in 2019 that the UK continued to send child soldiers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan despite pledging to end the practice. The UK says it does not send under-18s to warzones, as required by the UN Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, known as the “child soldiers treaty”.
The UK, however, deployed five 17-year-olds to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2007 and 2010: it claims to have done so mistakenly. Previous to this, a minister admitted that teenagers had also erroneously been sent into battle between 2003 and 2005, insisting it would not happen again.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern at the UK’s recruitment policy in 2008 and 2016, and recommended that the government “raise the minimum age for recruitment into the armed forces to 18 years in order to promote the protection of children through an overall higher legal standard”. Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, the children’s commissioners for the four jurisdictions of the UK, along with children’s rights organisations, all support this call. DM
Mark Curtis is editor of Declassified UK and tweets at @markcurtis30
February 9, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | GCHQ, Israel, MI6, Middle East, Pakistan, Palestine, RAF, Somalia, UK, Yemen |
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Much of the new Senate report about ‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 election consists of Obama administration officials covering their posteriors – but is also unwittingly revealing about its (false) premises, sources and methods.
A day after its members voted along party lines in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee joined forces to publish yet another fan-fiction in the ‘Russian meddling in 2016 US presidential election’ saga, this time focusing on the Obama administration’s responses.
The problem obvious right from the start is that the committee presupposes the existence of said meddling, citing the intelligence community assessment commissioned by Obama and Mueller indictments as evidence rather than unproven assertions. The “geopolitical context” of events in the report is a perfect example of how rotten assumptions and circular reasoning lead to garbage conclusions.
That said, there are a few revelations in the report that deserve attention. First of all, even while the entire section on page 11 is redacted, a footnote left up reveals that the first to raise the alarm about “Russian meddling” was John Brennan, CIA director at the time. In what must be a remarkable coincidence, he has since become an outspoken TV and Twitter pundit, specializing in accusing President Trump and Republican senators of treason.
Brennan is the one that briefed the congressional “Gang of Eight” over the course of August 2016 – starting with House Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The Republicans were all briefed “individually” on September 6, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) who sat on the Intel Committee. No notes about any of the meetings exist, of course.
Three weeks later, on September 22, Feinstein and Schiff issued a statement that they both “concluded that Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the US election” (p. 33). The report does not record the administration’s reaction to Schiff and Feinstein getting ahead of the White House, which was supposedly still hoping to address the whole thing with a bipartisan statement.
Schiff then went on to become the leading figure in the Democrats’ efforts to impeach Trump – first citing “Russian collusion” then latching on to the Ukraine phone call.
The report also reveals that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) colluded with the Washington Post to publish the story on June 14, 2016 about the “hacking” of their network (p.5). That is supposedly the first time anyone in the Obama administration found out about the DNC “hack.” This DNC behavior – running to the media before informing the government, which was run by Democrats! – ought to raise eyebrows, but the committee just moves on.
Here is another gem: The official ODNI-DHS statement about “Russian interference” was published at 3:30 PM on October 7, 2016 – a Friday, when news tends to get buried. Exactly 33 minutes later, the Post (them again!) publishes the Access Hollywood tape, intended to be the “October surprise” that sinks Trump’s candidacy. About half an hour later, WikiLeaks drops the first batch of emails from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. The rest is history.
Speaking of WikiLeaks, the section pertaining to them is entirely redacted in the Senate report. Earlier, the committee concluded that WikiLeaks was a “Russian cutout” – again, an assertion without evidence.
Keep in mind that this is the same committee whose understanding of “Russia’s social media-predicated attack against our democracy” was “significantly informed” by, among others, New Knowledge – the very outfit that masterminded an entirely fake ‘Russian meddling’ disinformation campaign during the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama.
Another thing that stands out in the report is how the Obama administration perceived the whole affair. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and UN Ambassador Samantha Power both compared it to secret meetings prior to the raid on Osama bin Laden, while Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates described it as “very cloak and dagger” (p.13).
Secretary of State John Kerry even wrote a memo proposing a sequel to the Warren Commission (which investigated the JFK assassination) to tackle Russian “attempts” at interference (p.42). Instead, Obama chose to create the handpicked working group that would produce the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
Curiously, the report does not mention at all the FBI’s efforts to spy on the Trump campaign, using FISA warrants predicated on the Clinton-commissioned dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele. One would think it ought to, given that it’s a very specific “response” to alleged Russian meddling. Perhaps that’s somewhere in the redacted parts?
In all seriousness, by now it should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that “Russian meddling” has been a lie all along, foisted on the American people by political operatives and hyper-partisan spies, and that its use in an attempt to de-legitimize a presidency may have done more actual harm to US institutions and the political system than anything any external actor could have hoped to achieve.
That the Senate Intel Committee insists on flogging this particular dead horse even after the impeachment hoax fell on its face suggests that the phantom “Russian” menace is still being used to pursue some other sinister political objective.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
February 7, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, DNC, Obama, United States |
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![Women in Gaza come together to protest against Trump's 'peace deal' on 5 February 2020 [Mohammad Asad/Middle East Monitor]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Women-in-Gaza-protest-against-US-peace-deal2.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1)
Women in Gaza come together to protest against Trump’s ‘peace deal’ on 5 February 2020 [Mohammad Asad/Middle East Monitor]
Israelis of all political persuasions welcomed the Trump “peace plan”, but the Palestinian citizens of the self-styled Jewish state are angry because the deal refers to land and population swaps between Israel and Palestinian Authority territory. This confirms that Israel wants to displace them, fulfilling right wing aspirations.
Arab members of the Israeli parliament have said that they will not agree to the deal of the century and its explicit annexation proposal. Nevertheless, the right-wing Israeli government now has a green light to strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the “Triangle” in northern Israel.
It is clear that Trump’s plan is not just about taking more of the Palestinian land occupied in 1967, but that it also wants to “transfer” Palestinians from the areas occupied in 1948. Israel wants to “swap” the area with the PA; protests against this are not, therefore, simply in solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the refugees in the diaspora. There is also a conspiracy against their existence in Israel.
The Palestinians in Israel have held crisis talks about the implications of the deal, especially for those in the Triangle, which is a predominantly Arab area in Israel, near the West Bank, divided into the Northern Triangle and the towns of Kafr Qara, Ar’ara, Baqa Al-Gharbiyye and Umm Al-Fahm, and the Southern Triangle, which includes Qalansawe, Tayibe, Kafr Qasim, Tira, Kafr Bara and Jaljulia. It is a stronghold of the Islamic movement in Israel, led by Sheikh Raed Salah.
The part of the Triangle mentioned in the Trump plan covers 350 square kilometres. The area threatened by the swap proposal covers more than 42,000 acres, inhabited by 300,000 Palestinians, who make up 20 per cent of the total Palestinian population inside Israel and have Israeli citizenship. These villages are thus a source of demographic concern for Israel due to the steadily increasing population, which is expected to reach 500,000 in the next five years, tipping the demographic balance in favour of the Palestinian Arabs.
The Triangle is more conservative in nature than the more integrated Arab regions in Israel. Swapping the land and population out of Israel will see the loss of those who best preserve traditional Palestinian identity. Local political groups believe that the land and population swap is an extension of previous efforts by Israel to liquidate the Palestinian issue; Israel wants more land but without the people of Palestine on it. It is not the first time that the Israelis have sought to transfer the largest number of Triangle residents and the least amount of land. Such a move will not only hit the Palestinians directly involved, but also their extended families and social connections, many of which will be severed.
Efforts to Judaise the Triangle areas to provide Israel with some strategic depth have included a belt of settlements on the outskirts of the Arab towns. This has caused anxiety among the Palestinians, with almost daily attacks by settlers against them and their properties. There is also a fear that another massacre like that at Kafr Qasem in 1956 is on the cards in order to make the local population leave of their own accord.
A plan developed by the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, called the “Seven Stars” project, tried to change the demographic nature of the Triangle. A Jewish majority was to be created by establishing religious centres, hemming-in Umm Al-Fahm so that it could not be developed further, and linking the area to settlements in the West Bank. This would also have seen the removal of the so-called Green “Armistice” Line of 1949 dividing the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948 from those occupied in 1967. The latter were supposed to form the “State of Palestine” according to the international consensus. Sharon’s project did not get beyond the discussion stage.
It is clear that Israel is seeking to buy enough time to impose a fait accompli on the ground by getting Knesset approval for the deal. Although the Arab MKs have the third largest coalition with 12 seats, their chances of thwarting the vote on the plan are almost non-existent in light of the general agreement within Israel to implement Trump’s plan.
Israelis have declared the Palestinian-Israeli population growth as a “demographic time bomb”. With a falling birth rate among Israeli Jews, the fear is that Palestinians will outnumber them across historic Palestine within the next ten years.
Land swaps to defuse this “threat” to the “Jewishness” of the state of Israel have been mooted before, of course. Post-1967, Israel’s policies in the newly-occupied territories have included the annexation of Jerusalem, still unrecognised by most countries in the world; land confiscation; house demolitions and the removal of residency rights.
In 1982 a secret document called for the Interior Ministry to crack down on the Palestinians and push them to leave their land. This was picked up by the racist General Rehavam Ze’evi in 1988, and notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane, who called for Umm Al-Fahm to be attacked as a means of provoking its residents.
By 2004, former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman was proposing the swap of minor Israeli settlements in the West Bank with Arab villages and towns in the Triangle, based on similar agreements made post-World War Two in different parts of the world. Donald Trump’s “peace plan” is in many ways simply a US-endorsed Judaisation project giving Israel everything that it wants, for now. Its aims and objectives mirror those of earlier schemes.
Israeli security agencies are also concerned about the growing influence and activities of the Islamic movement within the “Jewish state”, particularly in the Triangle, as its ideas are similar to those of the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement also mobilises volunteers against Israeli violations at Al-Aqsa Mosque. The fear is that the conflict will spill over into serious clashes between Palestinian Muslims and religious Jews.
The timing of the release of the deal of the century helped Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces yet another general election next month — the third in less than a year — as well as indictments for corruption. The deal is a bit of a lifeline for the Israeli Prime Minister. Nevertheless, approval and implementation of its terms may be postponed until after the election, giving the Arab MKs time to try to prevent the displacement of citizens from the Triangle.
Palestinians within Israel believe that the Trump “peace plan” is anything but peaceful, and will lead to violence. In fulfilling the aims and aspirations of the Israeli far-right, it looks set to entrench even further Israel’s status as an apartheid state, with the indigenous people facing ever more discriminatory legislation and displacement. It remains to be seen if they can prevent the implementation of the plan, at least the land swap clause, which seeks to rob so many people of their citizenship and transfer them against their will.
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The PA will opt for losing Palestine if it means keeping its ‘authority’
February 6, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Benjamin Netanyahu, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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So Trump’s ‘peace plan’ threatening to wipe out the Palestinians’ legitimate rights and reduce them to a fragmented vassal mini-state with restricted freedom and limited self-rule, to be forever at the mercy of their cruel and lawless neighbor, is a terror document. Right?
The US administration uses GW Bush’s Executive Order 13224, Section 3, to outlaw and crush any individual, any organisation or any nation that gets in its way. It deals with Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism. And for this purpose, the term ‘‘terrorism’’ means an activity that—
(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended—
(a) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(b) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(c) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.
The joke is that the US itself, and its special buddy Israel, fall straight in. It fits them like a glove. And they can’t see it.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is unhappy with the way the US State Department defines terrorism, pointing out that it only includes “violent acts carried out by non-state actors”. Where the Department, in its main report, does include “State Sponsors of Terrorism” it means only nations that sponsor non-state actors. Nowhere does it address the fact that states commit direct acts of terrorism or the extent to which non-state actors are simply reacting to such terrorism.
With America, it’s always the other guys who are terrorists. “For over a decade, Gaza has been ruled by Hamas, a terror organization, responsible for the murder and maiming of thousands of Israelis,” says Trump’s land-grab plan.
It adds: “Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza nearly 15 years ago was meant to advance peace. Instead, Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist group, gained control over the territory, and increased attacks on Israel, including the launching of thousands of rockets…. As a result of Hamas’ terror and misrule, the people of Gaza suffer from massive unemployment, widespread poverty, drastic shortages of electricity and potable water, and other problems that threaten to precipitate a wholesale humanitarian crisis.”
The White House and their Tel Aviv puppet masters still delude themselves that they can fool all the people all the time. But alternative media speaking truth to power is increasingly heard, so fewer people are swallowing their lies. The Trump plan claims the governance structure in Gaza is run by terrorists who provoke confrontations, therefore, Israel will only implement its obligations under the Peace Agreement if the Palestinian Authority or some other body acceptable to Israel is in full control of Gaza and Gaza is fully demilitarized. It threatens that Hamas, if it is to play a role in a Palestinian government, must adopt the Quartet principles, which include “unambiguously and explicitly recognizing the State of Israel, committing to non-violence, and accepting previous agreements and obligations between the parties, including the disarming of all terrorist groups”. There’s no similar obligation placed on Israel, no symmetry whatsoever.
At every opportunity, Hamas and Hezbollah, legitimate resisters to Israeli aggression, are demonized. It’s a bit rich for any ally of Israel to call Hamas terrorists. It would be very difficult objectively to classify Hamas as a terror government, given the context of decades of brutal military occupation, economic suffocation, ethnic cleansing and denial of human rights at the hands of a lawless intruder. And never mind the fact that Hamas was voted into power in full and fair elections.
In contrast, the state of Israel was founded on terror, which is well documented. Some years ago a colleague sent me a list of terror techniques in the Middle East “first used by Zionists”. They had appeared on several forums with requests for corrections. I’d seen evidence for some, but others were new to me. I mention them here only as claims and invite readers to point out any errors.
- Bombs in Cafés: first used by Zionists in Palestine on March 17, 1937 in Jaffa (actually grenades).
- Bombs on Buses: first used by Zionists in Palestine August 20-September 26, 1937
- Drive-by shootings with automatic weapons: IZL [Irgun] in 1937-38 and 1947-48 (Morris, Righteous Victims, p681.)
- Bombs in Market Places: first used by Zionists on July 6, 1938 in Haifa. (Delayed-action, electrically detonated)
- Bombing of a passenger ship: first used by the Zionists in Haifa on 25 November 1940, killing over 200 of their own fellows.
- Bombing of Hotels: first used by Zionists on July 22, 1946 in Jerusalem [the infamous attack by Irgun on the King David Hotel which served as the central offices of the British Mandatory authority of Palestine] Irgun’s leader, Menachem Begin, went on to become Prime Minister of Israel.
- Suitcase bombing: first used by Zionists on October 1, 1946 against British Embassy in Rome.
- Mining of Ambulances: First used by Zionists on October 31, 1946 in Petah Tikvah.
- Car-bomb: first used by Zionists against the British near Jaffa 5 December 1946.
- Letter Bombs: first used by Zionists in June 1947 against members of the British government, 20 of them.
- Parcel Bomb: first used by Zionists against the British in London 3 September 1947.
- Reprisal murder of hostages: first used by Zionists against the British in Netanya area on 29 July 1947.
- Truck-bombs: first used by Zionists 4 January 1948 in the centre of Jaffa, killing 26.
- Aircraft hijacking: world-first state hijack by Israeli jets Dec 1954 on a Syrian civilian airliner (random seizure of hostages to recover 5 spies).
- Biological Warfare: pathogens used by Zionists in 1948, prior to the seizure of Acre, putting typhus into the water supply.
- Chemical Warfare: nerve gas very likely used by Zionists in February/March 2001 in at least 8 attacks in Khan Younis and Gharbi refugee camps (Gaza) and the town of Al-Bireh (West Bank).
- Nuclear threats made by Zionists e.g. 2003: “We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.” – Remarks of Martin Van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, 1 Feb 2003.
We can probably add “sofa slaughter” with armed drones. The Israelis use this armchair technique extensively in Gaza, unleashing death and destruction on civilians by remote control at no personal risk to themselves. There are interesting variations too. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. According to eye-witnesses eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the armchair button-pushers and some by regular snipers.
Banned horror weapons spread terror
There’s also the use, suspected or real, of prohibited weapons to put Palestinians in a state of fear. In July 2006 doctors in Lebanon and Gaza were saying: “We never saw before wounds and corpses like those that arrive in the ward…” The majority of victims were women, children and elders caught in Israeli attacks in the street, in the market place and at home.
What doctors saw led them to believe that a new generation of weapons was being tested. Common to all victims was the lack of visible wounds, but they had serious internal edema and hemorrhage with loss of blood from all orifices. All the bodies had a covering of dark powder making them look black, but they were not burnt. Clothes and hair were not damaged or burnt.
Electron microscope scans showed the presence of phosphorous, iron and magnesium at below normally detectable levels. Elements that are used as additives to boost the blast of thermobaric (fuel-air energy) bombs and grenades were found on skin samples, but none of these could be seen by instruments normally used in hospitals and emergency wards.
The United States had developed thermobaric bombs and grenades for the war against “terror” in Afghanistan. “All enemy personnel within the effective radius will suffer lethal effects as opposed to the conventional fragmentation round.” These weapons produce a thermobaric overpressure blast and leave no fragments on or in the victims’ bodies, making it all the more difficult to provide proper care for the injured. “This fact already puts them outside established conventions of war, regardless of whether they are used against military or civilians,” say the doctors.
Thermobaric effects are devastating. “Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness. The destruction, death, and injury are caused by the blast wave,” says one report.
Another, in Defense Technology, says: “Each tissue type… is compressed, stretched, sheared or disintegrated by overload according to its material properties. Internal organs that contain air (sinuses, ears, lungs and intestines) are particularly vulnerable to blast.”
Is the US sure it hasn’t supplied its bosom-pal Israel with these horrendous items knowing perfectly well they’d use them against women and children packed like sardines in Gaza?
And let’s not forget the assassinations and extra-judicial executions. In the US there’s a presidential prohibition on assassination except in war situations, but if they can conjure up an intelligence ‘finding’ that enables them to label the target a ‘terrorist,’ and claim assassination is an act of self-defense in a war situation, they’re in the clear – as Trump demonstrated when ordering Soleimani killed.
But for Israel, there are no such restraints. Assassination became an official Israeli policy in 1999. Their preferred method is the air-strike, which is lazy and often messy, as demonstrated in 2002 when Israeli F-16 warplanes bombed the house of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military commander of Hamas, in Gaza City killing not just him but at least 11 other Palestinians including seven children, and wounding 120 others.
Which brings us back to Trump’s so-called peace deal designed to deny Palestinians their rights and put them in fear for their freedom, security, sovereignty, prosperity, dignity, and hopes for nation-building – now and forever.
It’s the very model of a vile terror document.
February 6, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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