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On plants and modernity - By - Darren Fleet

2/1/2015

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On plants and modernity
By - Darren Fleet
I thrust my hand into the dark earth …

and curl my fingers into a loose fist around a clump of soil. The rays of sun above me filter through the coverage of a heritage magnolia tree, its canopy blocking half of the potato bed below. In the wet days of spring the magnolia’s clumpy red roses, the size of tennis balls, blanketed the backyard for weeks. I’ve spent hours, if not days in total, tolerating this one tree alone, religiously clearing the wilting red petals while tiptoeing around the young seedlings the tree attempted to smother at my feet. Now that it’s July, the buds are mostly gone and the green foliage is thick along the scraggly chocolate-brown limbs. The light is still diffused in the branches, but the potatoes don’t seem to mind — their water-saturated stalks, with fuzzy green leaves, are two feet tall now. Months ago, my neighbor attempted to convince me to cut the magnolia down to save all of this extra work. I told him I wasn’t about to cut down a fifty-year-old tree for the sheer inconvenience of sweeping flowers — and now that I know how long it takes to grow one simple seed into a real edible thing, how could I? If there is a Zen to gardening it is this simple fact: it’s not about the food, it’s not about the politics, it’s not about the greater good, the health or the DIY collectives; it’s about recovering a piece of irrationality, living beyond the efficiency at the core of our civilization’s malaise.

Gardening is kind of a lame word. It invites images of leisurely grandmothers, flower print gloves and poor weekend fashion sense. And urban farming, though more correctly descriptive, doesn’t seem to capture what I see happening in the yards and community garden plots around my neighborhood. Urban farming is a subversive activity, but only when it crosses the threshold from pastime to lifestyle. When that happens, something in you changes. Like the religious experiences of youth or the rapture of love, suddenly an entire realm of imagination opens up. You begin to pay more attention to the wind, the temperature and the sunshine. Everything becomes relational to the growing seeds, away from the ego, away from the self, away from the paradigm that puts you at the center of everything worthwhile. You start moving slower through the streets, eyeing scrap wood in the alleyways for potential plant beds. You examine rogue wild flowers for clippings. You tear apart scavenged pallets with an old claw hammer for boards to make a planter; you straighten out rusty bent nails to fasten it together even though one-and-a-half-inch spikes are a dollar a dozen at the Home Depot down the road. Rainy days become more bearable. The burning ball of fire in the sky has more meaning. You scorn the glass towers and give cheers to wild lawns and old houses deteriorating under the pressure of nature and time. You pay mournful homage to the sad irony that the best farmland in the world is now under concrete.

When I was a smoker, logic told me that that $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes was a good deal and $3.00 for a fistful of organic fair trade kale was a rip-off. This is the type of reasoning that happens when market mechanisms of value disable one’s ability to make sound physiological decisions — when the cost of a thing (exchange value) becomes the price tag on the thing, and not the thing itself (use value). The distorted process that leads to deadly price points between carcinogens and vegetables is alive in the mental environment as well. In the same way the market teaches us to value pesticides over blemishes, packaging over content and teeth-rotting sodas over water, modernity teaches us to value urban over rural, machines over minds, individuality over community and growth over contentment. This psychosis affects the fabric of our dreams, the careers we aspire to and the way we conceive of the land in our culture and our economy and its relation to ourselves. Accordingly, two of the saddest intuitive lessons we learn growing up in this part of the world are that food has no worth and that meals have no purpose other than sustenance. Today, food, even organic food, is expected to be cheap. Not surprisingly, North American food costs are the cheapest on the planet. Single serving dinners and fast-food restaurants dominate the eating culture. Agricultural workers are the lowest-paid workers throughout the vast continental food chain.

Even those who have nostalgic ideas about what it means to farm don’t really want to be farmers. When was the last time you met someone who actually wanted to grow corn, beets, beans or pumpkins? Have you ever met a college dropout in Toronto or New York or London who moved to the bald Canadian prairies to reap canola? And if you did, what did you honestly think of their aspirations? Were they lowbrow? Were they selling themselves short? Were they limiting their unique individual potential? Who among you wants to be up from dawn to dusk, at the mercy of earth’s natural systems, living on faith amongst secular technologies, covered in mud all the time, no time for art, music or self-expression? These questions might be rude, but they’re essential to ask in order to get to the heart of the contradictory relationship we have with farming in the modern age — it’s the most basic building block of our existence, but it isn’t valued.

Aspiring to be “only” a farmer, to work the land, has been the bane of modernity’s existence since development theorists first began spinning tales of how to get to the future. When exposed to the glitz of modernity, most people desperately try to escape the fields, leaving only Monsanto in the countryside. The mass-migrations to mega slum cities in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Latin America are a testament to the continuous pull of “opportunity.” As Daniel Quinn argues, even the earliest folks tales of Western civilization, like the Bible’s Cain and Abel, pit the entrepreneurial proto-urbanite against the satisfied herdsman, the latter murdered by his forward-looking bother — our first modern superstar. Modern humankind is urban. Nature is a place to visit. Reading early development texts like Daniel Lerner’s 1958 The Passing of Traditional Society, you learn that working the land, the primary occupation in “traditional society,” is to economic progress what religion once was to the enlightenment — backward, irrational, unimaginative, slow, old:

Traditional society is non-participant — it deploys people by kinship into communities isolated from each other and from a center; without an urban-rural division of labor, it develops few needs requiring economic interdependence; lacking the bonds of interdependence, people’s horizons are limited by locale and their decisions involve only other known people in known institutions.

Today in the industrialized world, with the exception of a fraction of the agricultural economy, there are no more farms, only factories. And communities are defined as groups of individuals, a hopeful oxymoron at best. The impact of this detachment from our agrarian roots is as ecological and social as it is psychological. Removed from our billions-of-years-old evolutionary environment in a matter of a few millennia (and in some cases centuries and even decades), the loss of natural interaction has turned into a banal impulse to destroy — that is, as ecologist Bill Rees says, to turn everything around us into ourselves. In religious terms, you could say we’ve gained the world but lost our souls. In secular terms, we’ve reached modernity, but lost our minds. Mental health is now the most debilitating medical condition in the United States, responsible for more lost work hours than any other affliction. Not far behind are the complications related to overeating — diabetes, heart failure, cancer, etc. Just a few months ago the FDA approved an “obesity pill,” a last-ditch attempt to tackle America’s 35% obesity rate. When we moved from the fields we stopped creating living things. This has affected us in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Our materiality is without a pulse. We spend most of our time killing and working with the dead. Our greatest minds cannot be satisfied with natural mysteries. In this paradigm, trees become paper, houses and fences. Fields become streets and parking lots. Minerals become steel and computers. Waterways become highways and trash bins. Animals and plants become food, fuel and commodities. The natural world has no intrinsic value other than efficiency, and the most efficient use invented so far is to mulch it into something else. And now we are waking up to the reality that our proudest human achievement, modernity, could be an evolutionary dead end. Without the ability or desire to go backward to some pre-modern utopia, how do we go forward without killing ourselves?

I did my first inner-city garden story in Vancouver in 2008 as part of a group assignment during journalism school. When someone suggested “Green Revolution” as a title, I wanted to gag. A quarter-acre of green space in a city of ever-increasing high-rises hardly qualifies as the coming environmental insurrection — and if it does we all really do have a lot to worry about. If there’s a revolution happening in this plot it certainly isn’t green, I said. Urban gardening, city farming, is not about food at all; it’s about recovering people. It’s about our psychological link to the land, where all issues from social inequality to food security to environmentalism converge. Every one of us has a psychological heritage choking under the veneer of modernity. The instinct that makes you nervous to fly 30,000 feet in the air in a metal tube is the same instinct that desperately searches for meaning without finding it in iPods, addictions, televisions, cars, financial careers, electronic stimulation, endless consumption and hyper-rationality. Like the altruistic goodness that is unleashed in the wake of tragedy, turning enemies into brothers and sisters, and nations into allies, a simple crack of the earth can turn a once-dead biomass into a thriving stalk of singularity. As we filmed the first dirt being shoveled for the assignment that day, something unexpected happened. Neighborhood addicts, sex workers, police officers, social workers and other curious bystanders flocked to the gates as if they were seeing something for the very first time. Who among them could recall the last time they had thrust their naked hands into the earth and didn’t rush to the tap to wash it off? Who could remember the last time they felt the intoxicating spell of splitting the ground?

I put the dirt in my hand down and mound it up against the side of a rainbow chard that’s been knocked over by the wind. This early in the season, some plants grow too fast and topple under their own weight. I stand it up and use a twist-tie from a loaf of bread to fasten it to a busted broomstick handle I found in the alley. Each morning after a windstorm some plant needs fixing. I know that what I grow in this plot isn’t going to last the coming winter. It might not even last past November. But that doesn’t matter. Urban gardening isn’t about the yield. It’s not about beating the factory-farm system or the rotten financial apparatus that is defining our generation. Instead, it’s about living beyond the systems that shape us. It’s about action. It’s about spark. It’s about creation. It’s about recovering the self. For many of us, planting a seed and caring for it until fruition will be the first time in our lives that we give life instead of taking it, that we create food instead of just consuming it. When you pull your hands out of your wallet and put them into the earth, for a minute, for an hour, for days at a time, when you hover over a seedling for weeks on end wondering if it’s ever going to grow its legs, you’re no longer complying with modernity.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/103/plants-and-modernity.html

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The Leading Terrorist State by Noam Chomsky

11/15/2014

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Monday, 03 November 2014 10:25 By Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27201-the-leading-terrorist-state?tmpl=component&print=1

 (Image: USA flag via Shutterstock; Edited: JR/TO)


"It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it."

That should have been the headline for the lead story in The New York Times on Oct. 15, which was more politely titled "CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels."
 
The article reports on a CIA review of recent U.S. covert operations to determine their effectiveness. The White House concluded that unfortunately successes were so rare that some rethinking of the policy was in order.

The article quoted President Barack Obama as saying that he had asked the CIA to conduct the review to find cases of "financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much." So Obama has some reluctance about continuing such efforts.
 
The first paragraph of the Times article cites three major examples of "covert aid": Angola, Nicaragua and Cuba. In fact, each case was a major terrorist operation conducted by the U.S.  

Angola was invaded by South Africa, which, according to Washington, was defending itself from one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups" - Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. That was 1988.  

By then the Reagan administration was virtually alone in its support for the apartheid regime, even violating congressional sanctions to increase trade with its South African ally.  

Meanwhile Washington joined South Africa in providing crucial support for Jonas Savimbi's terrorist Unita army in Angola. Washington continued to do so even after Savimbi had been roundly defeated in a carefully monitored free election, and South Africa had withdrawn its support. Savimbi was a "monster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people," in the words of Marrack Goulding, British ambassador to Angola.  

The consequences were horrendous. A 1989 U.N. inquiry estimated that South African depredations led to 1.5 million deaths in neighboring countries, let alone what was happening within South Africa itself. Cuban forces finally beat back the South African aggressors and compelled them to withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia. The U.S. alone continued to support the monster Savimbi.  

In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and destructive campaign to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba - the words of Kennedy's close associate, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his semiofficial biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terrorist war.  

The atrocities against Cuba were severe. The plans were for the terrorism to culminate in an uprising in October 1962, which would lead to a U.S. invasion. By now, scholarship recognizes that this was one reason why Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, initiating a crisis that came perilously close to nuclear war. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later conceded that if he had been a Cuban leader, he "might have expected a U.S. invasion."  

American terrorist attacks against Cuba continued for more than 30 years. The cost to Cubans was of course harsh. The accounts of the victims, hardly ever heard in the U.S., were reported in detail for the first time in a study by Canadian scholar Keith Bolender, "Voices From the Other Side: an Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba," in 2010.  

The toll of the long terrorist war was amplified by a crushing embargo, which continues even today in defiance of the world. On Oct. 28, the U.N., for the 23rd time, endorsed "the necessity of ending the economic, commercial, financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba." The vote was 188 to 2 (U.S., Israel), with three U.S. Pacific Island dependencies abstaining.  

There is by now some opposition to the embargo in high places in the U.S., reports ABC News, because "it is no longer useful" (citing Hillary Clinton's new book "Hard Choices"). French scholar Salim Lamrani reviews the bitter costs to Cubans in his 2013 book "The Economic War Against Cuba."  

Nicaragua need hardly be mentioned. President Ronald Reagan's terrorist war was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the U.S. to terminate its "unlawful use of force" and to pay substantial reparations.  

Washington responded by escalating the war and vetoing a 1986 U.N. Security Council resolution calling on all states - meaning the U.S. - to observe international law.  

Another example of terrorism will be commemorated on Nov. 16, the 25th anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador by a terrorist unit of the Salvadoran army, armed and trained by the U.S. On the orders of the military high command, the soldiers broke into the Jesuit university to murder the priests and any witnesses - including their housekeeper and her daughter.  

This event culminated the U.S. terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s, though the effects are still on the front pages today in the reports of "illegal immigrants," fleeing in no small measure from the consequences of that carnage, and being deported from the U.S. to survive, if they can, in the ruins of their home countries.  

Washington has also emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the "resentment-generating impact of the U.S. strikes" in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward "repairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the U.S. intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam."  

That is by now a familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.  

Jihadism's most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.  

"I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization," reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. "The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS," he adds, "but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."  

To this we may add the world's greatest terrorist campaign: Obama's global project of assassination of "terrorists." The "resentment-generating impact" of those drone and special-forces strikes should be too well known to require further comment.  

This is a record to be contemplated with some awe.  

© 2014 Noam Chomsky

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate


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The Coming Climate Revolt By Chris Hedges

10/7/2014

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_coming_climate_revolt_20140921/

The Coming Climate Revolt  
By Chris  Hedges
Posted on Sep 21, 2014
 
More than 100,000 people march through midtown Manhattan as part of the People’s Climate March on
Sunday in New York. John Minchillo/AP Images for AVAAZ



Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The
Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?”The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi
Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian
Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For
a video of some of what the panelists said, click here. 
 
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a
corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy
endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and
incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the
senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph
Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health
Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with
labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated
military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been
lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to
transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this
is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major
social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin
means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to
electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a
free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has
in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of
economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified
liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of
liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton
administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get
corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion
of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the
FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of
FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from
speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It
forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane. 
 
By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game.
This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on
civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big
banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the
hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance
state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers. 

This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out
in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague,
titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report
chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of
carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of
self-interested libertarian billionaires.” 

The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon,
has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered
only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those
carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push
through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a
massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade
agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with
expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar
sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone
pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of
offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy. 

If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to
carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this
is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of
democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work
within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying
superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.


The Democratic Party speaks to us“rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties,
regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and
wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas,
and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the
citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner
that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement. 
 
To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate
change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better
equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one
constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing
to halt the ravaging of the planet.

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out
repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes
we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the
way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with
force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the
flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of
mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later
with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the
Occupy movement, reveal itself. 
 
If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our
tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We
will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to
genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will
have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and
foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will
not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And
this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves. 
  .

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Kingpins of Carbon - Greenpeace

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American Socrates

7/1/2014

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_socrates_20140615/

Posted on Jun 15, 2014
By Chris Hedges
 
Noam Chomsky speaks to the media at a friend’s house in Amman, Jordan, in 2010. AP/Nader Daoud 

  
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the
United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass
propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings
of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite
to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in
the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious
independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media
and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates
of our time.
 
We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the
late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued
that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because
higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time. 
  
“Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called ‘higher intelligence’ is very low,” Chomsky
said. “Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out
if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the
100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy
ourselves and many other life forms on the planet.”  

Climate change “may doom us all, and not in the distant future,” Chomsky said. “It may overwhelm
everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to
destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at
species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million
years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and
wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the
asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished.
There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global
catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at
whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward,
indigenous populations—the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in
Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most
privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”  
 
If Mayr was right, we are at the tail end of a binge, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution,
that is about to drive us over a cliff environmentally and economically. A
looming breakdown, in Chomsky’s eyes, offers us opportunity as well as danger.
He has warned repeatedly that if we are to adapt and survive we must overthrow
the corporate power elite through mass movements and return power to autonomous
collectives that are focused on sustaining communities rather than exploiting
them. Appealing to the established institutions and mechanisms of power will not work. 
 
“We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution,” he said.
“The Industrial Revolution took off right around here in eastern Massachusetts
in the mid-19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being
driven into the industrial system. Men and women—women left the farms to be
‘factory girls’—bitterly resented it. This was also a period of a very free
press, the freest in the history of the country. There were a wide variety of
journals. When you read them they are pretty fascinating. The people driven into
the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on
their rights as human beings. They were free human beings being forced into what
they called ‘wage labor,’ which they regarded as not very different from chattel
slavery. In fact this was such a popular mood it was a slogan of the Republican
Party—‘The only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that
working for the wage is supposed to be temporary.’
 
Chomsky said this shift, which forced agrarian workers off the land into the factories in urban
centers, was accompanied by a destruction of culture. Laborers, he said, had
once been part of the “high culture of the day.” 
  
“I remember this as late as the 1930s with my own family,” he said. “This was being taken away from
us. We were being forced to become something like slaves. They argued that if
you were a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell a product that you produce,
then as a wage earner what you are doing is selling yourself. And this was
deeply offensive. They condemned what they called ‘the new spirit of the age,’
‘gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.’ This sounds familiar.”
 
It is this radical consciousness, which took root in the mid-19th century among farmers and many
factory workers, that Chomsky says we must recover if we are to move forward as
a society and a civilization. In the late 19th century farmers, especially in
the Midwest, freed themselves from the bankers and capital markets by forming
their own banks and co-operatives. They understood the danger of falling victim
to a vicious debt peonage run by the capitalist class. The radical farmers made
alliances with the Knights of Labor, which believed that those who worked in
the mills should own them.
 
“By the 1890s workers were taking over towns and running them in eastern and western
Pennsylvania, such as Homestead,”Chomsky said. “But they were crushed by force.
It took some time. The final blow was Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare.”
 
“The idea should still be that of the Knights of Labor,” he said. “Those who work in the mills
should own them. There is plenty of manufacturing going on. There will be more.
Energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive
exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren. But
under the capitalist morality the calculus is profits tomorrow outweigh the
existence of your grandchildren. We are getting lower energy prices. They
[business leaders] are enthusiastic that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe
because we have lower energy prices. And we can undermine European efforts at
developing sustainable energy.” 
 
Chomsky hopes that those who work in the service industry and in manufacturing can organize to
begin to take control of their workplaces. He notes that in the Rust Belt,
including in states such as Ohio, there is a growth of worker-owned enterprises.
 
The rise of powerful populist movements in the early 20th century meant that the business class could
no longer keep workers subjugated purely through violence. Business interests
had to build systems of mass propaganda to control opinions and attitudes. The
rise of the public relations industry, initiated by President Wilson’s Committee
on Public Information to instill a pro-war sentiment in the population, ushered
in an era of not only permanent war but also permanent propaganda. Consumption
was instilled as an inner compulsion. The cult of the self became paramount. And
opinions and attitudes, as they are today, were crafted and shaped by the centers of power.
 
“A pacifist population was driven to become war-mongering fanatics,” Chomsky said. “It was
this experience that led the power elite to discover that through effective
propaganda they could, as Walter Lippmann wrote, employ “a new art in democracy,
manufacturing consent.’ ”
 
Democracy was eviscerated. Citizens became spectators rather than participants in power. The
few intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, who maintained their independence
and who refused to serve the power elite were pushed out of the mainstream, as
Chomsky has been. 
 
“Most of the intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause,”
Chomsky said of the First World War. “There were only a few fringe dissenters.
Bertrand Russell went to jail. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed.
Randolph Bourne was marginalized. Eugene Debs was in jail. They dared to
question the magnificence of the war.”
 
This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of
communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.
 
“The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves,” Chomsky said. “This is
not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to
us. Take Obama’s terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in
history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys
suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremburg judgments.
Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from
other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and
British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of
Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of
the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict.”
 
The conflict, which is now enflaming the region, is “a U.S. crime if we believe the validity of the
judgments against the Nazis. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the
[Nuremberg] tribunal, addressed the tribunal. He pointed out that we were giving
these defendants a poisoned chalice. He said that if we ever sipped from it we
had to be treated the same way or else the whole thing is a farce.”  
  
Today’s elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by
the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky
calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away
from MIT, “a deep indoctrination system.” 
  
“There is the understanding that there are certain things you do not say and do not think,”
Chomsky said. “This is very broad among the educated classes. It is why they
overwhelmingly support state power and state violence, with some qualifications.
Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought
it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as a Nazi
general who thought the second front was a strategic blunder. That’s what we call criticism.”
 
And yet, Chomsky does not discount a resurgent populism.
 
“In the 1920s the labor movement had been practically destroyed,” he said. “This had been a very
militant labor movement. In the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of
popular activism. There were circumstances [the Great Depression] that led to
the opportunity to do something. We are living with that constantly. Take the
last 30 years. For a majority of the population it has been stagnation or worse.
It is not the deep Depression, but it is a semi-permanent depression for most of
the population. There is plenty of kindling out there that can be lighted.” 
  
Chomsky believes that the propaganda used to manufacture consent, even in the age of digital
media, is losing its effectiveness as our reality bears less and less
resemblance to the portrayal of reality by the organs of mass media. While state
propaganda can still “drive the population into terror and fear and war
hysteria, as we saw before the invasion of Iraq,” it is failing to maintain an
unquestioned faith in the systems of power. Chomsky credits the Occupy movement,
which he describes as a tactic, with “lighting a spark” and, most important,
“breaking through the atomization of society.” 
  
“There are all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another,” he said. “The ideal social unit
[in the world of state propagandists] is you and your television screen. The
Occupy actions brought that down for a large part of the population. People
recognized that we could get together and do things for ourselves. We can have a
common kitchen. We can have a place for public discourse. We can form our ideas.
We can do something. This is an important attack on the core of the means by
which the public is controlled. You are not just an individual trying to
maximize consumption. You find there are other concerns in life. If those
attitudes and associations can be sustained and move in new directions, that
will be important.”


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The Politics of Red Lines: Putin's takeover of Crimea scares U.S. leaders because it challenges America's global dominance

5/17/2014

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http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20140501.htm

Noam Chomsky

In These Times, May 1, 2014  

The current Ukraine crisis is serious and threatening, so much so that some commentators even compare it to
the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. 

Columnist Thanassis Cambanis summarizes the core issue succinctly in The Boston Globe: "[President Vladimir
V.] Putin's annexation of the Crimea is a break in the order that America and its allies have come to rely on since the end of the Cold War -- namely, one in which major powers only intervene militarily when they have an international consensus on their side, or failing that, when they're not crossing a rival power's red lines." 

This era's most extreme international crime, the United States-United Kingdom invasion of Iraq, was therefore not a break in world order -- because, after failing to gain international support, the aggressors didn't cross Russian or Chinese red lines. 
  
In contrast, Putin's takeover of the Crimea and his ambitions in Ukraine cross American red lines. 
  
Therefore "Obama is focused on isolating Putin's Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state," Peter Baker reports in The New York Times. 
 
American red lines, in short, are firmly placed at Russia's borders. Therefore Russian ambitions "in its own neighborhood" violate world order and create crises. 
 
The point generalizes. Other countries are sometimes allowed to have red lines -- at their borders (where the United States' red lines are also located). But not Iraq, for example. Or Iran, which the U.S. continually threatens with attack ("no options are off the table"). 
 
Such threats violate not only the United Nations Charter but also the General Assembly resolution condemning Russia that the United States just signed. The resolution opened by stressing the U.N. Charter ban on "the threat or use of force" in international affairs.
  
The Cuban missile crisis also sharply revealed the great powers' red lines. The world came perilously close to nuclear war when President Kennedy rejected Premier Khrushchev's offer to end the crisis by simultaneous public withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles from Turkey. (The U.S. missiles were already scheduled to be replaced by far more lethal Polaris submarines, part of the massive system threatening Russia's destruction.) 
 
In this case too, the United States' red lines were at Russia's borders, and that was accepted on all sides.  
 
The U.S. invasion of Indochina, like the invasion of Iraq, crossed no red lines, nor have many other U.S. depredations worldwide. To repeat the crucial point: Adversaries are sometimes permitted to have red lines, but at their borders, where America's red lines are also located. If an adversary has "expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood," crossing U.S. red lines, the world faces a crisis. 
  
In the current issue of the Harvard-MIT journal International Security, Oxford University professor Yuen Foong Khong explains that there is a "long (and bipartisan) tradition in American strategic thinking: Successive administrations have emphasized that a vital interest of the United States is to prevent a hostile hegemon from dominating any of the major regions of the world." 
 
Furthermore, it is generally agreed that the United States must "maintain its predominance," because "it is U.S. hegemony that has upheld regional peace and stability" -- the latter a term of art referring to subordination to U.S. demands. 
 
As it happens, the world thinks differently and regards the United States as a "pariah state" and "the greatest threat to world peace," with no competitor even close in the polls. But what does the world know? 
 
Khong's article concerns the crisis in Asia, caused by the rise of China, which is moving toward "economic primacy in Asia" and, like Russia, has "expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood," thus crossing American red lines. 
 
President Obama's recent Asia trip was to affirm the "long (and bipartisan) tradition," in diplomatic language.
 
The near-universal Western condemnation of Putin includes citing the "emotional address" in which he complained bitterly that the U.S. and its allies had "cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: 'Well, this doesn't involve you.' " 
 
Putin's complaints are factually accurate. When President Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany as part of NATO -- an astonishing concession in the light of history -- there was a quid pro quo. Washington agreed that NATO would not move "one inch eastward," referring to East Germany. 
 
The promise was immediately broken, and when Gorbachev complained, he was instructed that it was only a verbal promise, so without force. 
 
President Clinton proceeded to expand NATO much farther to the east, to Russia's borders. Today there are calls to extend NATO even to Ukraine, deep into the historic Russian "neighborhood." But it "doesn't involve" the Russians, because its responsibility to "uphold peace and stability" requires that American red lines are at Russia's borders. 
  
Russia's annexation of Crimea was an illegal act, in violation of international law and specific treaties. It's not easy to find anything comparable in recent years -- the Iraq invasion is a vastly greater crime. 
 
But one comparable example comes to mind: U.S. control of Guantanamo Bay in southeastern Cuba. Guantanamo was
wrested from Cuba at gunpoint in 1903 and not relinquished despite Cuba's demands ever since it attained independence in 1959. 
 
To be sure, Russia has a far stronger case. Even apart from strong internal support for the annexation, Crimea is historically Russian; it has Russia's only warm-water port, the home of Russia's fleet; and has enormous strategic significance. The United States has no claim at all to Guantanamo, other than its monopoly of force. 
 
One reason why the United States refuses to return Guantanamo to Cuba, presumably, is that this is a major harbor and American control of the region severely hampers Cuban development. That has been a major U.S. policy goal for 50 years, including large-scale terror and economic warfare. 
 
The United States claims that it is shocked by Cuban human rights violations, overlooking the fact that the worst such violations are in Guantanamo; that valid charges against Cuba do not begin to compare with regular practices among Washington's Latin American clients; and that Cuba has been under severe, unremitting U.S. attack since its independence. 
 
But none of this crosses anyone's red lines or causes a crisis. It falls into the category of the U.S. invasions of Indochina and Iraq, the regular overthrow of parliamentary regimes and installation of vicious dictatorships, and our hideous record of other exercises of "upholding peace and stability."

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Israel’s War on American Universities

4/15/2014

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Picture










Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the AIPAC meeting on March 4 in Washington, D.C.
(AP/Carolyn Kaster)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/israels_war_on_american_universities_20140316/

Posted on Mar 16, 2014  By Chris  Hedges


 

The banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northeastern University in Boston on March 7, along with a university threat of disciplinary measures against some of its members, replicates sanctions being imposed against numerous student Palestinian rights groups across the country. The attacks, and the disturbingly similar
forms of punishment, appear to be part of a coordinated effort by the Israeli
government and the Israel lobby to blacklist all student groups that challenge
the official Israeli narrative.
 
Northeastern banned the SJP chapter after it posted on campus replicas of eviction notices that are routinely put up on Palestinian homes set for Israeli demolition. The university notice of suspension says that if the SJP petitions for reinstatement next year, “No current member of the Students for Justice in Palestine executive board may serve on the inaugural board of the new organization” and that representatives from the organization must attend university-sanctioned “trainings.” 
 
 In 2011 in California, 10 students who had disrupted a speech at UC Irvine by Michael Oren, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, were found guilty, put on informal probation and sentenced to perform community service. Oren, an Israeli citizen who has since been hired by CNN as a contributor, has called on Congress to
blacklist supporters of the campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS)
against Israel and to prosecute those who protest at appearances by Israeli
officials. Some activists at Florida Atlantic University were stripped of
student leadership positions after walking out of a talk by an Israeli army
officer, and they were ordered by school administrators to attend re-education
seminars designed by the Anti-Defamation League. Columbia Students for Justice
in Palestine (CSJP) was abruptly placed on suspension in the spring of 2011 and
barred from reserving rooms and hosting events on campus. The university
administration, before the ban, had a practice of notifying the campus Hillel in
advance of any CSJP event. The suspension was eventually lifted, after a protest
led by attorneys for the CSJP.
 
Max Geller, a law student and a SJP member at Northeastern whom I reached by phone in Boston, accused the university of responding “to outside pressures,” including that of alumnus Robert Shillman, who is the CEO of Cognex Corp., and hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman, both supporters of right-wing Israeli causes.
 
“To prohibit students from holding leadership roles and student groups simply because they engaged in a peaceful political protest is antithetical to the university’s mission to
educate students,” he said. “It erases any pedagogical value disciplinary process might seek.”
 
“In the last year,” Geller went on, “I have received death threats, been publicly and unfairly maligned, and have been threatened with disciplinary measures. This has made engaging in speech about an issue about which I care deeply, both as a Jew and an American, a fear- and anxiety-causing prospect.” 
 
Israel’s heavy-handed reaction to these campus organizations is symptomatic of its increasing isolation and concern about waning American support. The decades-long occupation and seizure of Palestinian land and the massive military assaults against a defenseless population in Gaza that has left hundreds dead, along with growing malnutrition among Palestinian children and enforced poverty, have alienated traditional supporters of Israel, including many young American Jews. Israel, at the same time, has turned into a pariah in the global community. If it were to become  devoid of American support, which it largely buys with political campaign contributions funneled through groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel would be adrift. There are a growing number of banks and other companies, especially in the European Union, joining the boycott movement, which refuses to do business with Israeli concerns in the occupied territories. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before AIPAC on March 4, surprisingly devoted much of his talk to attacking the nascent BDS movement, which he said stood for “Bigotry, Dishonesty and Shame.” He called for BDS supporters to “be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot.” He warned that “naive and ignorant” people are being recruited as “gullible fellow travelers” in an anti-Semitic campaign. 
 
Israeli officials are also apparently attempting to infiltrate the BDS movement and are using subterfuge to link it to Islamic extremism, according to The Times of London. The Israeli government in addition is pushing censorious, anti-democratic bills in the state legislatures of New York, Maryland and Illinois that would impose financial  sanctions on academic organizations that boycott Israeli institutions. Meanwhile, the United States and others enthusiastically impose sanctions on Russia for an occupation that is much less draconian than Israel’s long defiance of international law. 
 
The ADL-designed indoctrination classes for university activists are, according to those who have been required to take them, shabby attempts to equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
 
“Myself and two other members of SJP were forced to attend the ADL-sponsored ‘diversity training’ course or we would have violated the terms of our probation and in turn we would be suspended and/or expelled,” said Nadine Aly, a Florida Atlantic student activist who with other activists walked out of a lecture given at the university by an Israeli army officer, Col. Bentzi Gruber, who had helped devise the rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, the horrific attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. I reached her by phone at the Florida campus. “The very idea that the  administration is implying that it is racist to criticize Israeli policy is ludicrous. We were put on ‘indefinite probation,’ banning us from holding leadership positions in any recognized student organizations, including student government, at the university until our graduation. I was stripped of my position as president of SJP as well as a student senator, and the former vice president of the SJP lost her position as a Student House representative. It is a shame that this university, like most universities, bows to the pressure of the Zionist lobby and wealthy Zionist donors, when they should be protecting the rights of their students.” 
 
The persecution of scholars such as Joseph Massad and Norman Finkelstein who challenge the official Israeli narrative has long been a feature of Israeli intervention in American academic life. And the eagerness of university presidents to denounce the American Studies Association call for an academic boycott of Israel is a window into the insatiable hunger for money that seems to govern university policy. The current
effort to shut down student groups, however, raises traditional Israeli censorship and interference to a new level. Israel seeks now to openly silence free speech on American college campuses—all of these student groups have steadfastly engaged in nonviolent protests—and has enlisted our bankrupt liberal elites and college administrators as thought police. 
 
The failure among academics to stand up for the right of these student groups to express dissenting views and engage in political activism is a sad commentary on how irrelevant most academics have become. Where, in this fight, are the constitutional law
professors defending the right to free speech? Where are the professors of ethics, religion and philosophy reminding students about the right of all to a dignified life free of oppression? Where are the Middle Eastern studies professors explaining the historical consequences of Israel’s violent seizure of Palestinian land? Where are the journalism professors defending the right of dissidents and victims to a fair hearing in the press? Where are the professors of queer and gender studies, African-American studies, Native American studies or Chicano studies acting to protect the voices and dignity of the marginalized and oppressed?
 
This assault will not end with groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. The refusal to hear the cries of the Palestinian people, especially those 1.5 million—60 percent of them children—who are trapped by the Israeli military in Gaza, is part of the wider campaign by right-wing operatives like Lynne Cheney and billionaires such as  the Koch brothers to stamp out all programs and academic disciplines that give voice to the marginalized, especially those who are not privileged and white. Latinos, African-Americans, feminists, those in queer and gender studies also feel this pressure. Under a bill signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, books by leading Chicano authors have been banned from public schools in Tucson and elsewhere in Arizona on the ground that such ethnic studies promote “resentment toward a race or people.” It is language similar to what former Ambassador Oren has used to justify his call for criminal prosecutions of BDS activists—that they are advancing “bigotry.” The neoconservatism that grips Israel has its toxic counterpart within American culture. And if other marginalized groups within the university remain silent while Palestine solidarity activists are persecuted on campuses, there will be fewer allies when these right-wing forces come for them. And come they will. 
 
Those of us who denounce the suffering caused by Israel and its war crimes against the Palestinians and who support the BDS movement are accustomed to sleazy Israeli smear campaigns. I have been repeatedly branded as an anti-Semite by the Israeli lobby, including for my book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” That some of these dissident voices, such as Max Blumenthal, who wrote “Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel,” one of the best accounts of contemporary Israel, are Jewish does not seem to perturb right-wing Israeli propagandists who see any deviation from the Israeli government line as a form of religious heresy.
 
“I have been on tour discussing my book,‘Goliath,’ since October 2013,” said Blumenthal, with whom I spoke by phone.  “And on numerous occasions, Israel lobby groups and pro-Israel activists have attempted to pressure organizations into canceling my events before they took place. I have been slandered by teenage pro-Israel students, prominent magazine columnists and even Alan Dershowitz as an anti-Semite, and my family has been attacked in right-wing media simply for hosting a book party for me. The absurd lengths pro-Israel activists have gone to stop my journalism and analysis from reaching a wide audience perfectly illustrate their intellectual exhaustion and moral poverty. All they have left is loads of money to buy off politicians and the unlimited will to defend the only nuclearized apartheid state in the Middle  East. As young Arabs and Muslims assert their presence on campuses across the  country and Jewish Americans reel in disgust at Netanyahu’s Israel, we are witnessing pro-Israel forces wage a fighting retreat. The question is not whether they will win or lose, but how much damage they can do to free-speech rights on their way towards a reckoning with justice.”
 
“It would be heartening if prominent liberal intellectuals would agree with all of my clusions, or would accept the legitimacy of BDS,” Blumenthal went on. “But the only reasonable expectation we can hold for them is that they speak up in defense of those whose free-speech rights and rights to organize are being crushed by powerful forces. Unfortunately, when those forces are arrayed in defense of Israel, too many liberal intellectuals are silent or, as in the case of Michael Kazin, Eric Alterman, Cary Nelson and a who’s who of major university presidents, they actively collaborate with fellow elites determined to crush Palestine solidarity activism through anti-democratic means.”
 
Hillel chapters, sadly, often function as little more than Israeli government and AIPAC campus outposts. This is true at Northeastern as well as at schools such as Barnard College and Columbia. And university presidents such as Barnard’s Debora Spar see nothing wrong with accepting Israel-lobby tours of Israel while Palestinian students
must risk imprisonment and even death to study in the United States. The
launching of campuswide defamation campaigns from supposedly religious houses is
a sacrilege to the Jewish religion. In seminary I read enough of the great
Hebrew prophets, whose singular concern was for the oppressed and the poor, to
know that they would not be found today in Hillel centers but would instead be protesting with SJP activists. 

The campus Hillel centers, with lavish budgets and gleaming buildings on campuses often situated in centers of urban blight, offer running events, lectures and programs to promote official Israeli policy. They arrange free trips to Israel for Jewish students as part of the “Taglit Birthright” program, functioning as an Israeli government travel
agency. While Jewish students, often with no familial connection to Israel, are
escorted in these well-choreographed propaganda tours of Israel, hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians who remain trapped in squalid refugee camps cannot go
home although their families may have lived for centuries on what is now Israeli land. 
 
Israel has for decades been able to frame the discussion about the Palestinians. But its control of the narrative is coming to an end. As Israel loses ground it will viciously and irrationally attack all truth tellers, even if they are American students, and especially if they are Jews. There will come a day, and that day will come sooner than Israel and its paid lackeys expect, when the whole edifice will crumble, when even  students at Hillel will no longer have the stomach to defend the continuous dispossession and random murder of Palestinians. Israel, by ruthlessly silencing others, now risks silencing itself. 
 
Chris Hedges will deliver a lecture sponsored by the Northeastern University Political Economy Forum at 6 p.m. March 25 at West Village F, 20, 460 Parker St. in Boston.
 
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion Publisher, Zuade Kaufman  
Editor, Robert Scheer

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Edward Snowden’s Moral Courage

3/14/2014

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Picture




Posted on Feb 23,2014
 
By Chris Hedges
 
In this still image from video
footage released by WikiLeaks on Oct. 11, 2013, former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden speaks in Moscow during a presentation ceremony for the Sam Adams Award. (AP photo) 


  
Last Thursday Chris Hedges opened a
team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in
favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.” The
others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to
171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a
whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and
Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom. The
opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department
officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security
Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and
Oxford student Charles Vaughn.  
  
I have been to war. I have seen
physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of
even the bravest warriors have moral courage. For moral courage means to defy
the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating
embrace of comradeship, to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your
life, for a higher principle. And with moral courage comes persecution.
 
The American Army pilot Hugh
Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of U.S.
soldiers and 10 terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre. He
ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing U.S. soldiers if
they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson,
like Snowden, was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It
is always defined by the state as treason—the Army attempted to cover up the
  massacre and court-martial Thompson. It is the courage to act and to speak the
  truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King had it. What
  those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.  
 
“My country, right or wrong” is the moral equivalent of “my mother, drunk or sober,”
G.K. Chesterton reminded us. 
 
So let me speak to you about
those drunk with the power to sweep up all your email correspondence, your
tweets, your Web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live
chats, your financial data, your medical data, your criminal and civil court
records and your movements, those who are awash in billions upon billions of
taxpayer dollars, those who have banks of sophisticated computer systems, along
with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones,
those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy and, yes, your liberty. 
  
There is no free press without
the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have
the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals
inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance
have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. An omnipresent surveillance
state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia
and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the
ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.
It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today; it will use it,
history has shown, should it feel threatened or seek greater control. The goal
of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is not, in the end, to
discover crimes,“but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a
certain category of the population.” The relationship between those who are
constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the
relationship between masters and slaves. 
 
Those who wield this unchecked
power become delusional. Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National
Security Agency, hired a Hollywood set designer to turn his command center at
Fort Meade into a replica of the bridge of the starship Enterprise so he could
sit in the captain’s chair and pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard. James Clapper,
the director of national intelligence, had the audacity to lie under oath to
Congress. This spectacle was a rare glimpse into the absurdist theater that now
characterizes American political life. A congressional oversight committee holds
public hearings. It is lied to. It knows it is being lied to. The person who
lies knows the committee members know he is lying. And the committee, to protect
their security clearances, says and does nothing. 
 
These voyeurs listen to everyone
and everything. They bugged the conclave that elected the new pope. They bugged
the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They bugged most of the leaders of Europe.
They intercepted the talking points of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ahead
of a meeting with President Obama. Perhaps the esteemed opposition can
enlighten us as to the security threats posed by the conclave of Catholic
cardinals, the German chancellor and the U.N. secretary-general. They bugged
business like the Brazilian oil company Petrobras and American law firms
engaged in trade deals with Indochina for shrimp and clove cigarettes. They
carried out a major eavesdropping effort focused on the United Nations Climate
Change Conference in Bali in 2007. They bugged their ex-lovers, their wives and
their girlfriends. And the NSA stores our data in perpetuity. 
  
I was a plaintiff before the
Supreme Court in a case that challenged the warrantless wiretapping, a case
dismissed because the court believed the government’s assertion that our concern
about surveillance was “speculation.” We had, the court said, no standing ... no
right to bring the case. And we had no way to challenge this assertion—which we
now know to be a lie—until Snowden. 
 
In the United States the Fourth
Amendment limits the state’s ability to search and seize to a specific place,
time and event approved by a magistrate. And it is impossible to square the
bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all
our personal communications. Former Vice President Al Gore said, correctly, that
Snowden disclosed evidence of crimes against the United States Constitution.
 
We who have been fighting
against mass state surveillance for years—including my friend Bill Binney within
the NSA—made no headway by appealing to the traditional centers of power. It was
only after Snowden methodically leaked documents that disclosed crimes committed
by the state that genuine public debate began. Elected officials, for the first
time, promised reform. The president, who had previously dismissed our questions
about the extent of state surveillance by insisting there was strict
congressional and judicial oversight, appointed a panel to review intelligence.
Three judges have, since the Snowden revelations, ruled on the mass
surveillance, with two saying the NSA spying was unconstitutional and the third
backing it. None of this would have happened—none of it—without Snowden. 
 
Snowden had access to the full
roster of everyone working at the NSA. He could have made public the entire
intelligence community and undercover assets worldwide. He could have exposed
the locations of every clandestine station and their missions. He could have
shut down the surveillance system, as he has said, “in an afternoon.” But this
was never his intention. He wanted only to halt the wholesale surveillance,
which until he documented it was being carried out without our consent or knowledge. 
 
No doubt we will hear from the
opposition tonight all the ways Snowden should have made his grievances heard,
but I can tell you from personal experience, as can Bill, that this argument is
as cogent as the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea Party in “Alice
in Wonderland.”
 
“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. 
“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.
“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/edward_snowdens_moral_courage_20140223/

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/edward_snowdens_moral_courage_20140223/


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The Last Gasp of American Democracy

2/3/2014

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105/ Posted on Jan 5, 2014

By Chris Hedges

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.

The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d’état, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency’s spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations—a form of legalized bribery—are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying—under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation—as the people’s right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods—MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News—while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness.

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his essential book “Democracy Incorporated,” calls our system of corporate governance “inverted totalitarianism,” which represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security.

Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state’s ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting “democracy” in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror.

The Romanian poet Paul Celan captured the slow ingestion of an ideological poison—in his case fascism—in his poem “Death Fugue”:

Black milk of dawn we drink it at dusk

we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it

we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all

We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up—which is what the corporate state is counting upon—will see us enslaved. 
 

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