Lying and Looking Ridiculous

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by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels is generally thought to have said that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  In fact he didn’t state that, exactly, but based his marketing of malevolence largely on the premise that “credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false.”  What he did say, however, was “the English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

There is a problem, however, in that although lie-tellers are ridiculous in the eyes of those who know the facts, there are very many people who don’t know the facts because they are either deliberately kept in the dark or are so closed-minded as to be easy targets.

Not much has changed on the propaganda front in seventy-five years, and the malevolent Goebbels would feel familiar with modern developments as regards the Western Establishment’s campaign against President Putin and the movement towards Russia-America rapprochement, as seemingly signalled by President-elect Trump.

On December 16, for example, USA Today reported that “President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial soft spot for Russia is based on decades of courting wealthy Russians to buy condos in his luxury high-rises and invest in his other real estate ventures.”

This line of attack is intriguing because the high-circulation USA Today is owned by the Gannett Company, which “in 2010increased executive salaries and bonuses . . .  Bob Dickey, Gannett’s US newspapers division president, was paid $3.4 million in 2010, up from $1.9 million the previous year. The next year, the company laid off 700 U.S. employees to cut costs.”  No luxury high-rises for Gannett employees, then, unless they’re in the top echelon. And although Gannett looks ridiculous—and hypocritical—there aren’t many people who care.

In Britain the Guardian, usually an objective source of news and comment, went with the flow of anti-Russia overkill and warnedthat “Alarm over the rise of Donald Trump reached a new pitch early this week as officials in Washington worried that the United States has elected a leader who may be uniquely blind to threats posed by Russia.” It didn’t mention what the threats might be, but did have the honesty to end with the words of President Putin that “as I have repeatedly said, it’s not our fault that Russian-American relations are in such a poor state. But Russia wants and is ready to restore fully fledged relations with the United States.”

Of course Russia wants to have good relations with other countries.  Such a sensible approach results in commercial benefit and social harmony rather than disharmony and confrontation.  But in the period when Russia was trying to rebuild from the dire days of Soviet ideology the West expanded the US-NATO military alliance to 28 countries from 16, and recently deployed US-NATO forward tactical headquarters, thousands of troops, and flights of combat and intelligence-gathering aircraft to countries on Russia’s borders.

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, “In Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia the Alliance hasestablished  ‘NATO Force Integration Units’ which are advanced military headquarters whose Mission is ‘to improve cooperation and coordination between NATO and national forces, and prepare and support exercises and any deployments needed’.”

Then some governments and their media became agitated when Russia deployed defensive weapons within its own territory in order to counter the US-NATO movement of armed forces up to is borders.

As reported by Britain’s ultra-right Daily Telegraph, owned by the creepy twin Barclay brothers who own London’s Ritz Hotel and many luxury high-rises (and hate the European Union, whileliving in the haven of tax-relaxed Monaco), NATO “described Moscow’s decision to send state-of-the-art Bastion missile-launchers to Kaliningrad, which borders Nato members Poland and Lithuania, as ‘aggressive military posturing’.”  There was no mention made of President Putin’s explanation that Russia considers it important to take countermeasures against NATO’s expansion and “aim our missile systems at those facilities which we think pose a threat to us.”

As observed by Goebbels, the English propagandists “keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” But you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.

Consistent with the Goebbels line of sticking to skewed presentation, Britain’s defence minister, Michael Fallon, a public figure of mixed repute (he is known for alcoholic capers and was found guilty of drunken driving as well as having swindled the Parliamentary expenses system out of thousands of pounds over many years), was reported by Reuters as declaring that the West had “to be strong against Russian aggression towards NATO . . .  Russia is a strategic competitor to us in the West and we have to understand that.”

Fortunately, there are sounder and better informed people than the drunken fiddler Fallon, and one of these is the expert Peter Duncan of University College London whose more sober opinionis that “there is no reason for Russia to want to threaten the sovereignty of the Baltic states in the sense of trying to force them to leave NATO or still less to invade them . . . the Russian economy depends on a prosperous Western European economy.”

The Far-Right Western media ignored Professor Duncan’s balanced summation, just as it disregarded President Putin’s own assurance, given in a little-reported interview with Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera, that “I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO.”

But it’s lies that matter when false dogma is being spread.  The US-NATO military alliance doesn’t really believe that Russia is preparing to attack the Baltic States and on December 16 President Obama even informed the world media that in his opinion Russia is “a small country, they’re a weak country” which tends to contradict the propaganda line that Russia is a large country, a “strategic competitor” straining at the leash to invade the Baltic States and create mayhem around the world.

The fact that the US spends 596 billion dollars annually on armaments against Russia’s 66 billion is rarely mentioned (NATO as a whole spends 860 billion) except in reputable journals such as The Economist which on December 17, however, chose topronounce that Mr Trump’s choice of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State “is disconcerting” because Mr Tillerson actually displayed “opposition to the sanctions imposed on Russia.”

The Western propaganda line is that everything Russia does is reprehensible to the point of evil, and that any westerner attempting to propose dialogue rather than confrontation is “disconcerting” at best, and in the eyes of the tabloid papers a raving traitor to the values of the plutocrats who own them.

The policies and aspirations of President Putin are being presented by the US-NATO military alliance as contrary to the interests of the Western powers, but no attention has been paid to such as Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, the Russia specialist, Strobe Talbott, who stated the obvious when he observed that President Putin “basically wants to make Russia great again.”  And he won’t do that by invading the Baltic States or any other country, as he and the West well know.

It’s unlikely that the anti-Russia warniks will stop lying and being hypocritical and ridiculous, but unfortunately they’ll continue to be believed by a significant number of their targets. The irony is that, as Goebbels didn’t say, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

Upheaving the Fourth Estate

by JOSEPH NATOLI

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

— Oscar Wilde

In his contribution to The Nation’s special issue, The Obama Years, Christopher Hayes contrasts Obama “The Institutionalist,” or strong advocate of bolstering our faith in the authority of our public institutions,” with The Insurrectionists who “see the plummeting of trust in public institutions as a good thing if it can act as a spur for needed upheaval and change.”

The presidential election showed us no unambiguous victory for either side though those who have been served well by “the authority of public institutions” were astonished by the result. They were so astonished by the many who had nothing to lose by upheaving the resident order of things, and also by the sudden positioning of these many to an electoral dominance. It is rare in any severely economically lop-sided regime for the voices at the bottom to out shout the voices at the top.

Now the spurs will be put to a great deal, change and upheaval looming on the horizon, which of course is no longer a horizon in which many have faith in the authority of anything, especially anything bearing the word “public.” My focus here is on the authority of mainstream media, not cyberspace’s social media that covers the world after, according to Genesis, 11, God, in an act of punishing the presumptuous “confused the language of all the earth.” This confusion is not now called confusion and chaos but “democratization,” a total popularizing of language and meaning, representation and reality. What this upheaval will lead to may turn out best covered in Revelation/ Apocalypse.

A usable distinction here is to think of, say, our longstanding “newspaper of record,” The New York Times as representing what is going on without subjectivity attached. A pretentious and inherently impossible mission but yet commendable. Then think of social media, from any anonymous tweeting voice to videos and podcasts gone viral, as representing what is going on through the lens of personal subjectivity, a countless number of personal subjectivities, each liberated from the authority of everything but the authority of his or her own opinion. And in the game of change and upheaval, the old media has lost its position of outside authority and either must come into Babel as one voice among the millions or face extinction. Note that any position of outside authority in our post-truth clime is no more than a cultural authorizing. Now our changing is from a societal/public sense of cultural to an individual/personal sense of cultural, which is meaningless and absurd but the new normal.

What we know is that any authority external to our own perceptions has been spurred, upheaved and changed forever. Those living in that world cut loose from any assertion of authority, especially governmental, scientific, or Fourth Estate, found their unmoored leader in Donald Trump. The mainstream media has to either admit defeat and give the mission of the Fourth Estate to social media and its cyber discourse or try to represent as if we could report the world beyond our own individual subjectivities.

The voices of all those who voted for Donald Trump were and continue to remain difficult to represent by those in positions, via meritocratic success, paid to represent them. A great deal of voicing by those who felt cheated was to be found in social media by those unpaid and without agents as well as in the “Comments” section of every published article written by and expressing the reasoning of the meritocratically successful. The power of opinions expressed in 140 characters tweets did not lie in a discursive coherence but rather displayed a degeneracy of discourse, including lies and bullshit as equally authorized as any other tweet. Nevertheless, Trump found a following in a moshpit of voices, found a channel of transmission that worked and turned every argument against him into static.

The cultural fall of communication from voices of authority to just everybody’s voice was not created by Trump but he did and does make clever use of it. The authority of a traditional print media was weakened by a cultural assault on any authority beyond one’s own opinion. Trump’s ridiculing of such authority during the campaign plugged into a current that was already running hot. There is no reason to expect that he will cease mocking the Fourth Estate and turn from his twitter chats with the public, especially as the deterioration of interpretation and understanding we witness in social media enabled his victory and will continue to protect his inevitable incompetencies from incisive critique. This is a kind of reversal of Joseph Goebbels’ suppression of dissenting voices designed to protect the regime. A never ending tsunami of angry voices in cyberspace, the designated go-to place for news, seems to offer the same regime protection.

In the aftermath of the election, we can see that traditional media shared the comfortable womb of meritocratic success with the Democratic Party. Both seemed unable to see outside that space in which it was assumed that conditions had not solidified beyond an individual’s determination to succeed. For those successful by inheritance, merit or chance, the American Dream is always working. A great deal of the surprise of this election lies here, in this failure to recognize the inequitable conditions now shaping both a dream fulfilled and a dream denied. How is it possible to recognize and represent walls that you yourself have not run into or were able to jump over? Empathy requires, at the very least, some association, some affiliation with those who lie beyond your conceivable borders. Unfortunately, the nature of what success is now demands an un-affiliation with those who do not share our success.

What both the press and Liberals have offered in the place of empathy and affiliation, of a common good, is a blind extension of welcoming what is nonsense alongside what is rationally the case. This is a kind of appeasement that some Liberal moral sense requires but it has only transferred the clash and chaos of social media “discourse” to a critically discriminating discourse grounded on more than the criterion of “Like.”

The Fourth Estate’s response to an awareness that “the system was rigged” by those who had representing power was to “de-rig” it by disingenuously democratizing its critique, which itself has no mission to establish equivalency. The Fourth Estate’s role of bringing into the public gaze the workings of power has been replaced with a need to give equal amplification to all voices, ignoring the always unequal vulnerability of arguments to reason. In a similar fashion, the Democratic Party has long stood down from the power that FDR proposed with an Economic Bill of Rights, preferring to cast its gaze on those at the margins as if it was not the conditions at the center that shaped the margins. And Trump’s victory tells us that the condition with those at the center who had not been propelled in our meritocracy upward was one of high anxiety and an urge for change.

We are all at fault in assuming our lens of seeing is shared by others but our expectation of the Fourth Estate is that the lens is never narrowly focused, although FOX News has narrowed the focus to great success. Narrowness of view and thought is the upstart of a severely wealth divided society. In a society in which ways of being in the world are drastically divided so that it is almost impossible to represent what spans that divide, a middle ground of mutual understanding disappears. Every new story is received in divided camps, or sometimes reported in one and not in another.

If Donald Trump is about to launch an  illiberal regime — something more easily recognized by any other country in the world  — efforts to defame and discount critical reportage are already aided by a ready to hand incredulity regarding authority. We are at the end of a time when everyone was on “the same page,” at the end of a time when “fake” news could be exposed as fake in a courthouse of Reason. It is that this Reason has also been diminished as “your” reason as opposed to “my”reason, that an analog, back in the day authority has lost its credentializing power.

I do not know how that part of the media that has not been “democratized,” by which I mean everyone reports what they see and feel, can begin to represent this “democratized” reportage of their truths. Investigative reporting gathering facts which lead to explanation or present evidence supporting interpretation, all of which clarify an understanding cannot bring into any of this what ignores or denies all of this. A failure to represent the irrational alongside the rational as if there were no long standing consensus on how to distinguish what is the case from what is not the case can only be judged a failure when a Court of Irrationality prevails. It seems that court is now in session.

A market determination would eventually solve the problem by simple bankruptcy of all tribunals of reportage that did not allow a free range of blathering tweets to go on uncontested. It is undecided whether long respected members of the Fourth Estate can maintain their authorized voice, authorized because it adheres to a Western tradition of reason and reality, among the “democratized” voices in cyberspace. The transmission of such a voice would not itself be magnetically attracting but rather magnetically repelling among those who have little patience for what challenges or refutes their own “takes.”

However, a counter-upheaval may be inherent in the present upheaval, rather like the way a Trump presidency of less than two year duration may re-start the engines of change and upheaval. Think of a version of this: “E-books slip, Print is Far From Dead.” The rush to Twitter and Facebook to get the news may subside when it becomes quite clear that listening to your friends and the Anonymous online is like listening to La Comédie Humaine at the local bar — you get tired of the endless harangue of mis- and uninformed bullshit as well as the lines of spite and vitriol coming from dark holes in human nature.

We may settle down to respecting authorities beyond Donald Trump and our own opinions and at that time seek reliable representation in a liberal democracy while recognizing the difficulties of all that in a society already plutocratized long before Trump. It is difficult to conceive that there will be neither a legacy to be honored and followed after a Trump presidency nor an equal legacy after we fully immerse ourselves in the cacophony and chaos of our own cyberspace voices.

As Trump pushes the institutions of a liberal democracy and the functions of the Federal government toward a corporate concern for profit, we may get a chance to see whether Trump’s followers will find reliable representations of the workings of plutocracy. Whether a critical Fourth Estate can survive long enough to present this view is a future matter.

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Joseph Natoli has published books and articles, on and off line, on literature and literary theory, philosophy, postmodernity, politics, education, psychology, cultural studies, popular culture, including film, TV, music, sports, and food and farming. His most recent book is Travels of a New Gulliver.

Trump and Israel’s Anti-Semitic Zionists

by URI AVNERY

What really got me was the applause.

There they were sitting at the round table, the representatives of the entire world, applauding their own handiwork, the resolution they had just adopted unanimously. The Security Council, like the Knesset, is not used to applause or any other spontaneous outbursts. And yet they clapped their hands like children who had just received their Christmas gift.

(It was indeed a day before Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah, a coincidence that happens once in decades, since the Christians use the solar calendar and the Jews still use a modified lunar calendar.)

The delegates were deliriously happy. They had just achieved something that had eluded them for many years: the condemnation of a blatant breach of international law by the government of Israel.

Consecutive presidents of the US had used their anachronistic veto power to prevent the UN doing its duty. Now, President Barak Obama, at the very end of his presidency, dared to challenge the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, a person he detests with all his heart.

And so, after years of frustration, the highest international body could adopt a resolution on Israel according to its convictions. No wonder they behaved like schoolchildren let out for vacation. A vacation that may, alas, prove to be short.

On the face of it, the joy was exaggerated. The resolution has almost no practical meaning. It has no teeth. Netanyahu could use the old oriental adage: “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.”

But Netanyahu’s immediate reaction was very different. He acted like a wounded animal: running berserk, thrashing around, biting everyone in reach.

Some of his reactions bordered on the ridiculous. He could have belittled the resolution and made fun of it, as Israeli leaders have done many times before. Instead he recalled his ambassadors from Senegal and New Zealand (traditionally friendly nations), canceled visits of foreign statesmen, called in foreign ambassadors for a dressing-down on Christmas day,  threw around insults and especially besmirched President Obama.

This was obviously a stupid thing to do. The President still has 21 days to go, 21 long days in which to hurt Netanyahu. He could, for example, allow the passage of an irrevocable UN resolution to recognize the State of Palestine as a full member of the UN. At the moment, all of official Israel is in a state of panic in anticipation of such a move.

If Netanyahu had read Machiavelli, he would have known that you do not challenge a lion, unless you are able to kill him. Especially, I would add, a lion you have insulted and wounded many times before. Even lions do sometimes get angry.

But Netanyahu’s behavior may not be as stupid as it looks. Actually, it may be quite clever. Depends on his aim.

As a diplomatic strategy, it is disastrous. But as a strategy to win elections, it is quite sensible. Here is the great hero, the new King David, fighting for his people, facing down the entire world. Is there anyone in Israel who can compare with him?

In the bad old days of Golda Meir, one of the Israeli army’s entertainment bands sang a jolly song which started with the words: “The whole world is against us / But we don’t give a damn…” The band danced around to the tune.

For some reason, Jews derive satisfaction from a world-wide condemnation. It affirms what we have known all the time: that all the nations of the world hate us. It shows how special and superior we are. It has nothing to do with our own behavior, God forbid. It is just pure anti-Semitism.

Netanyahu is out-Golda-ing Golda. The old lady now looks down on him from heaven (or up to him from elsewhere?) with envy.

Zioinism was supposed to liberate Israel from these old Jewish complexes. We were supposed to become a normal nation, Israelis instead of “exile” Jews, admired by other nations. Seems we have not quite succeeded.

But there is a great hope. Actually, a giant hope. It has a name: Donald Trump.

He has already tweeted that after he assumes power, everything regarding the UN will change.

But will it? Does anyone – including himself – really know what he has in mind? Can Netanyahu be quite sure?

True, he is sending a rabid Jewish-American ultra-right Zionist as his ambassador to Tel Aviv (or to Jerusalem, we shall see.) A person so right-wing that he makes Netanyahu himself almost look like a leftist.

But at the same time Trump has appointed as his closest assistant a radical white racist with full anti-Semitic credentials.

Perhaps, as some believe, it depends entirely on Trump’s moods. Who knows what his mood will be on the morning of the first important UN vote on Israel? Will he be Trump the Zionist or Trump the anti-Semite?

Actually, he can be both. No problem, really.

The avowed aim of Zionism is to ingather all the Jews in the world in the Jewish State. The avowed aim of the anti-Semites is to expel the Jews from all their countries. Both sides want the same. No conflict.

Theodor Herzl, the Founding Father of Zionism, recognized this right from the beginning. He went to Czarist Russia, which was governed by anti-Semites, and offered a deal: we take the Jews off your hands, you help us to convince them to leave. That was  in the heyday of the murderous pogroms. But the Jews who left Russia went en masse to America, very few to Ottoman-ruled Palestine.

This was not a unique chapter. Throughout Zionist history, many attempts have been made to enlist anti-Semites to help in the implementation of the Zionist project.

Even before the Zionist movement was born, American and British evangelists preached the ingathering of the Jewish exiles in the holy land. They may have been Herzl’s inspiration. However, this message of redemption for the Jews had a secret clause. The return of the Jews to Palestine would allow for the second coming of Christ. But then, the Jews would convert to Christianity. Those who refused would be annihilated.

In 1939, when the Nazi danger became obvious, the extreme Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky called for a meeting of his followers in Poland. The leaders of the Irgun underground in Palestine attended. One of them was Abraham Stern, whose nom de guerre was Ya’ir.

The meeting decided to approach the anti-Semitic commanders of the Polish army and offer them a deal: you arm and train young Polish Jews, and we shall liberate Palestine and transport the Polish Jews there. The officers agreed and training camps were set up in Poland. World War II put an end to the plan.

With the outbreak of the war, Jabotinsky, an ardent Anglophile in spite of everything, ordered the Irgun to stop all such actions and cooperate with the British. Stern proposed the opposite approach. His credo was: our enemy is Britain. The war provides us an opportunity to drive them out. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Adolf Hitler is an anti-Semite, but now he is our potential ally.

Stern’s approach caused a split in the Irgun. A furious debate broke out in all the secret cells. As a 16-year old member, I took part. Being a refugee from Nazi Germany, I rejected Stern’s thesis.

Stern created his own group (later called Lehi, Hebrew initials of Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the “Stern gang”.) He sent an emissary to neutral Turkey, where he delivered the German ambassador a letter for “Mr. Hitler”, offering cooperation. The Fuehrer did not reply. That was, of course, before the Holocaust.

Stern was caught by the British and “shot while trying to escape”. When the war ended, and Soviet Russia became the enemy of Britain and the West, Stern’s heirs approached Stalin and offered cooperation. Stalin, whose anti-Semitism was becoming more pronounced at the time, ignored the offer.

During the war, one of the architects of the Holocaust was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who was in charge of organizing the transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In Budapest he established contact with a group of Zionists, led by Israel Kastner, with whom he made a deal. As a good-will gesture he allowed him to send a few hundred Jews to neutral Switzerland.

Eichmann sent one member of the group, Yoel Brand, to Istanbul, with a crazy-looking offer to the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem: if the allies provided the Nazis with a thousand trucks, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews would be stopped.

Contrary to his instructions, Brand crossed the border into British-occupied Syria and was arrested by the British. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews – ten thousand a day – went on.

What was the Nazis’ purpose in this bizarre affair? My own theory is that Heinrich Himmler was already determined to dethrone Hitler and make a separate peace with the Western allies. Eichmann served his plan to establish contact with the allies. As a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, Himmler was convinced that the Jews control the world.

Some time after the war, in Israeli captivity, Eichmann wrote down his memories. He stated that he believed that the Zionists were the “biologically positive” element of the Jewish race.

Mahmood Abbas, by the way, as a student at Moscow University, wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist cooperation.

Can Trump’s assistants now include rabid Zionists and rabid anti-Semites at the same time?

Of course they can.

This week, our far-right Minister of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman, condemned the French plan to convene (in Paris in a few days from now) a conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Israeli government fears that there, Secretary of State John Kerry will submit his detailed practical plan for a peace agreement, including the setting up of the State of Palestine. This plan would be adopted by the conference, and then by the UN Security Council.

This would be President Obama’s parting shot. No veto.

(By the way, Kerry’s plan is almost identical with a plan my friends and I published in 1957, 59 years ago, called “The Hebrew Manifesto”.)

Blazing with fury, Lieberman compared this to the Dreyfus Affair. Some 120 years ago, a Jewish captain in the French army was falsely convicted of espionage for Germany and sent to Devil’s Island off French Guiana. He was later acquitted. Zionist mythology has it that Theodor Herzl, then a Paris correspondent of a Viennese newspaper, was so shaken by the event that he was inspired with the Zionist idea.

The coming Paris conference, Lieberman asserted angrily, was the Dreyfus Affair all over again, only this time against the entire Jewish people.

But not to worry: Donald Trump and his anti-Semitic Zionists will put everything in order again.

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URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Why ‘White Genocide’ is Key to the Earth’s Survival: White Genocide From Baldwin to Ciccariello-Maher

by ROBERTO D. HERNÁNDEZ

White genocide would not only be good, it is necessary and even unavoidable; that is, if we are interested in the survival of the planet, humanity, and all life forms – though to be clear the phrase ‘white genocide’ is a bit of a misnomer.  Perhaps most accurate would be the concept of collective mass “white” ontological suicide or more simply put: the end of white supremacy. To clarify, a 140-character tweet cannot do justice to a necessary and timely analysis, so my intent is to do so here….  “White genocide” has little to do with violence or the physical death of actual living “white” people – or as renowned poet James Baldwin preferred to call them since 1979: “people who think they’re white” – but rather with the collective disinvestment amongst “people who think they’re white” from all forms of racial thinking and their own holding on to the benefits accrued directly and indirectly through a persistent global structure of white supremacy over the last 500 years.

In the 1984 essay, “On Being White,” James Baldwin also stated (as others before and after him have as well) that “no one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” That coercion was twofold: wreaked upon the bodies of indigenous inhabitants of these lands and the souls kidnapped, transported and enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade, on the one hand; but also through the legal and extralegal sanctioning and expectation that eastern and southern Europeans and Jews who were not initially recognized as “white” also buy into violence against those seen as “non-white” as the price for entry into whiteness. W.E.B. DuBois would refer to this emergent “racial” solidarity between “white” workers and the elite slave owning class as the wages of whiteness, premised upon stoking the fears of “black” insurgency and a concomitant impending white genocide.  Throughout the rest of his life, Baldwin would insist on this line of analysis by consistently speaking about “people who think they’re white,” so as to point to the historical construction of said racial categories.

Enter a recent tweet by Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher regarding his Christmas wish, and subsequent ones that pointed to “white genocide” as a “mythical figment of the ‘alt-right’ (a.k.a. white supremacist) imagination”. The first tweet garnered significant attention and even a national backlash amongst white supremacists who insisted that social media be a safe space to spew their racist garbage; a safe space free of the satirical mockery that the Ciccariello-Maher intended via the 140-character limit of twitter-landia…  The subsequent clarification using Haiti’s slave rebellion as an example was not enough to avoid condemnations from those, including his employer Drexel University, unfamiliar with the important genealogy and analysis that lies behind said phrase.

Through Baldwin, it becomes clear that the fiction here is not only the concept of “white genocide” (as a doomsday fantasy conspiracy of the alt-right grounded in contrived fear of a “black menace”) but moreover, the very construction of whiteness as a racial category, and other conceptions of race for that matter as biological fictions that have nevertheless had very real life and death social consequences in the forms of actual genocides against “non-white” peoples. For those of us who engage in the systematic study of the historical constructions of race for a living, who understand the role of racial fictions in shaping our society, and who draw from such history for the purposes of crafting cultural critique and social theory, the faux outrage of the alt-right is laughable at most, though itself also an illuminating example of the need for white genocide; that is, the end of investments in an imagined “white” identity and attendant white supremacy.

So how then are we to understand “white genocide” in the present? Is it the actual, physical killing of “white” people? If so, we must first define who are white people, and therein lies the erroneous foundational myth and premise of alt-right/white supremacists who maintain that there is a such a thing as a biological “white” race that is somehow at danger due to high rates of immigration to “white” countries, interracial marriage, and declining “white” birth rates.  The truth of the matter is that there is NO SUCH THING AS A WHITE RACE!!  The belief in such a biological fallacy, and the concomitant white supremacy as social/racial ideology is itself the problem that leads both to white supremacy as ideology and white genocide as conspiracy theory of the right. For there to be white genocide, there must be an actual white people.

It is Indigenous peoples of the territories now known as Africa and the Americas that experienced actual genocide at the hands of “people who think they’re white.” This is the case, as opposed to various diverse Euro-descended peoples who over time came to demarcate themselves as a collective white race through the actual genocide, colonization and enslavement of others.  That Jews, Italians, Irish and other South and Eastern European immigrants were not initially considered white is itself testament to the fiction of whiteness, for “whites” are the historical result of a political process and not an immutable fact of a biologically distinguishable genus/people. As Baldwin noted, “White men – from Norway, for example, where they are Norwegians – became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black Women.”  He further explained “this country is only white because it says it is” and during a 1979 speech in Berkeley, he elaborated, “insofar as you think you’re white, you’re irrelevant.”  That is to say that the very concept of whiteness was/is a “romance” that obfuscates reality and is the basis of all racial divides. To call for white genocide is to call for an end to white supremacy and the racial thinking that upholds it.

Baldwin would be explicit in stating that “whiteness” was a “state of mind”. It should thus be clear that, as with Baldwin, “when I say ‘white’ I’m not talking about the color of anybody’s skin. I’m not talking about race. It’s a curious country, a curious civilization, that thinks of it as race. I don’t believe any of that. White people are imagined. White people are white only because they want to be white.”  To call for white genocide is simply to call on the collective conscious of people to look at themselves in the mirror, for it is the racial thinking itself that makes “people who think they’re white” think that they are actually “white” and not the result of a history of violence through which they constructed themselves as white.

Lewis Gordon similarly reminds us that Richard Wright once hosted Jean-Paul Sartre in Harlem and in that visit Sartre remarked, “Richard, won’t you tell me about the Negro problem.”  Wright brilliantly responded that there was no Negro problem, but rather the problem was one of the White attitude towards Negroes. From this historic exchange Sartre would recognize that the problem in Europe during World War Two was not a “Jewish problem” but rather the problem of the Anti-Semites in their attitude towards the Jews and from said epiphany would go onto to write his 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew. This same analysis equally tells us that the problem of the 21^st Century is not that of anti-white sentiment, but rather the initial construction of self as White in relation to the so-called non-White that is now haunting “people who think they’re white.”

So while Christmas has come and gone, and I am tempted to say, ‘Well, we still have the Reyes Magos,’ instead the act of “white genocide” is not one that will come with any holiday, but rather one that must come from a collective mass ontological suicide amongst “people who think they’re white” who must actively divest themselves of all racial thinking…. Only this, perhaps utopian, reality – as opposed to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, which only led to the increase of unarmed Black men being killed by law enforcement officers – is something that must be actively fought for and arrived at by the conscious and willful acts of “people who think they’re white.”  Only then can we truly speak of a colorblind, post-racial society.  Until that time, the call for “white genocide” is not only justified, but rather an important call for a collective self-reflection on concepts of race that continue to demarcate and distinguish the value of life and death and access to justice.

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Roberto D. Hernández is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University. He is the program director for theDecolonizing Knowledge and Power summer school in Barcelona and recent co-editor of Decolonizing the Westernized University.  He can be reached at roberto (at) decolonialtranslation.com

Palestine, the World and Resolution 2334

by ROBERT FANTINA

Well, the sturm und drang caused by the passage of United Nations Resolution 2334, condemning Israeli settlements, is like the shot heard ‘round the world. From the apartheid nation of Israel, to the bought-and-paid-for-by-Israeli-lobbies halls of Congress, the cries of ‘foul’ are being heard loudly.  It is, indeed, as Macbeth might have said, much ‘sound and fury’, but it would be a mistake to say it signifies nothing.  However, what is signifies is not exactly what those shouting the loudest intended.

Let us look first at some of the provisions of the resolution. It demands, without any way of mandating adherence, that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem”. Further, it states that the establishment of the settlements have “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

This is nothing new; all settlement activity outside of the U.N. – decreed 1947 borders have always been considered illegal by the international community. The United States has always vetoed similar resolutions. In 2011, then Ambassador Susan Rice, when vetoing one such resolution, said that ‘…we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. Continued settlement activity violates Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace. “ She further stated that the U.S. felt that the U.N. was not the place to resolve these differences, but that that should be accomplished through negotiations.

Such negotiations have been ongoing, off and on, for decades, and all that has been accomplished is the further theft of Palestinian land, mass arrests of Palestinian men, women and children, and the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. Once again, allow this writer to state that negotiations can only occur between two parties, each of which has something the other wants, that can only be obtained by surrendering something it has. Palestine wants a nation of its own, with secure borders. But it has nothing that Israel cannot take from it with complete impunity.

So, the U.N. Security Council, with 14 members voting in favor and the U.S. abstaining, passed this resolution. Israeli Prime Murder Benjamin Netanyahu has reduced ties with most of the nations among those 14 with which Israel has diplomatic relations.  He has harshly criticized the U.S., although this writer has missed any news about refusing a dime of the $4 billion the U.S. gives Israel each year. Mr. Netanyahu looks forward to dealing with an ego as big as his own, when Donald Trump, of all people, becomes president of the United States in a few weeks. We’ll all look forward to seeing how that goes.

Senator Lindsay Graham (R- SC), has demanded the defunding of the United Nations, as a result of this vote. He let loose with these pearls of wisdom: “The Obama-Kerry foreign policy has gone from naïve and foolish to flat-out reckless. With friends like these, Israel doesn’t need any enemies. I anticipate this vote will create a backlash in Congress against the United Nations. The organization is increasingly viewed as anti-Semitic and seems to have lost all sense of proportionality.”

So, in the good senator’s view, endorsing international law and human rights is ‘naïve and foolish and flat-out reckless’. One wonders if his view of the situation might be just a tad distorted by the $516,715 that pro-Israeli lobbies have donated to his campaigns, $101,850 of it this year alone.

But he is not alone in his condemnation. Texas Republican Ted Cruz said this: “These acts are shameful. They are designed to secure a legacy, and indeed they have: history will record and the world will fully understand Obama and Kerry as relentless enemies of Israel.” One really has to wonder why the president would pledge $40 billion dollars to his ‘enemy’ over a ten-year period.

But Mr. Cruz, too, has been the beneficiary of Israel lobby largesse. In 2016, this amounted to a whopping $309,281.  Is it any wonder he is in an uproar about criticism of this golden goose?

It’s not just Republicans who are in such dismay. New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer ‘tweeted’ this, following the vote: “Extremely frustrating, disappointing & confounding that the Administration has failed to veto the UN resolution.” Mr. Schumer’s 2016 take from Israeli lobbies was $386,901.  His career total is $1,179,800. So it is not surprising that he is ‘frustrated, disappointed and confounded’.

Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton was equally disquieted. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, he described Palestine as an “…imaginary state with zero economic viability.” He seems not to recognize that the reason Palestine has ‘zero economic viability’ is partly the result of the Israeli occupation that this resolution condemned. The other part of Palestine’s economic problems is the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

He also said that passage of Resolution 2334 is “… a hunting license to ostracize Israel from the international economic system, exposing it and its citizens to incalculable personal and financial risk”. Well, when the United Nations condemns the actions of any nation, it is certainly a reasonable step for other nations to ostracize that nation from the international economic system. And does he not consider the ‘incalculable personal and financial risks’ to which Palestinians are exposed on a daily basis, and have been for decades?

Mr. Netanyahu and his bestie, Mr. Trump, proclaim that a new era in Israel-US relations will begin on January 21. Yet ‘undoing’ a U.N. resolution is next to impossible, and based on the fact that 14 members of the Security Council voted in favor of Resolution 2334, there does not seem to be much appetite to even try.

The Israeli Prime Murderer is all in an uproar, accusing the U.S. of colluding with Palestine to pass the resolution. Oh, that the U.S. would collude with Palestine to accomplish anything positive for that beleaguered nation! Yet he himself pressured Egypt, which was originally scheduled to introduce the legislation, successfully preventing it from doing so. Apparently, collusion is fine if Israel does it.

So what does it all signify? Nations around the world can now take steps against Israel. There can be national economic boycotts, and the various laws passed in the U.S. and some European countries banning the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) movement, now have no legal leg to stand on, if they ever did. Talk of the illegality of settlements can be included in any negotiations on any topic that other nations have with Israel. Agreements about weapons sales, academic exchanges, business partnerships, etc., all can tie in restrictions, due to Israeli’s illegal settlement activities.

So let the U.S. Congress defund the United Nations. Ignore Mr. Netanyahu’s tantrums against nations that endorse human rights and international law. This resolution is, of course, only a step in the long march towards the freedom of the Palestinian people, but it is a significant and necessary one. Other nations must now act; history is on the side of justice, and justice will prevail.

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Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).

Kerry’s Finest Hour: Obama Team Labels Israel an Outlaw Nation

by JOHN GRANT

Hallelujah!

As President Obama is about to fade from the White House forever to make way for the Twitter King’s juggernaut of furniture wreckers, his abstaining vote on a United Nations Security Counsel resolution to condemn Benjamin Netanyahu’s settlement policies in the West Bank and Jerusalem as “illegal” has rocked the leadership of that tiny nation. Naturally, Netanyahu and others in the Likudist pro-settlement camp went ballistic, since they’ve written Obama off as a loser and know what a coup the condemnation resolution is. To be so condemned as an outlaw faction will encourage further opposition to Likudist Israel in Europe, as it will put an international stain on products made in West Bank settlements. Many of those products are being exported illegally, a situation that will now be in the public eye.

One of the brightest spots in all this is that, in the last three yards of his two-term run, President Obama assumed some backbone vis-à-vis Netanyahu, a leader who dis’ed and humiliated him publicly on several occasions. The same with Secretary of State John Kerry, whose 70 minute speech at the State Department Wednesday showed glimmers of the young Vietnam veteran John Kerry who publicly wondered, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? … [W]e have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.”

To Netanyahu’s remark that “Friends do not take friends to the Security Counsel,” Kerry replied with the equivalent of the well-known public service line: “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” The runaway arrogance of the Israeli right can easily be seen as akin to being drunk at the wheel on one’s own exceptionalism and entitlement.

John Kerry has been a longtime insider in the very same American government that “used him in the worst fashion” as a young man. So for me, his remarks come not from a “friend” of Israel, but from the equivalent of a parent who birthed Israel in 1948 under President Harry Truman. That post-WWII moment in history, of course, was rich with profound Washington decisions that Americans were forced to live with in the years that followed. Some of those decisions went completely off the rails. This has a compelling poignancy for me, since as a “baby boomer” born in 1947, my life spans the same years. Some might say I’ve gone off the rails. I presume Kerry must feel some of this, too; he was born in 1943. In 1947, Truman and Congress established the National Security State; the CIA was officially born out of the OSS that year. President Truman and “the buck stops here” was ground zero. For the Vietnam War, 1945 was the fateful year. It’s when Truman decided to betray our WWII ally, the Viet Minh, and support the French desire to re-colonize Vietnam, a decision that led to 30 years of grotesque, unnecessary war on the people of Vietnam.

So, Mr. Kerry, welcome home, brother! If you follow the lead of your better-late-than-never, straight-talk censure of the Israel Likudists and don’t slip back into shameless, toad-eating political expediency I’m going to consider you in this case again part of the Peace Movement, a movement that has been slandered and marginalized for the entire 20th century and into this century. (Among reluctant Republicans in Washington, we’re told that toad is the gourmet meal-de-jour as the city prepares for the gala arrival of the Twitter King. Neo-con editor of the Atlantic David Frum reported it was “Toad for breakfast, toad for lunch and two toads for dinner.”)

The basic lines of history seem clear. West Bank settlements and the assumption of whole sections of Jerusalem, as we all know, began after the 1967 war in which Israel took the land from Jordan as spoils of war. It must be said, the Arabs are not without sin, here. The world consensus has always been that peace negotiations should have followed the conflict, the goal being a two-state arrangement that would help establish some semblance of peace and justice in the Middle East. That never happened. Instead, with overt and generous US military support, the Israeli occupation of would-be Palestine grew tighter by the year. Arial Sharon lumbered onto the scene as director of settlement policy and, then, as prime minister. The settlement movement grew steadily; settlers became more and more belligerent vis-a-vis the Palestinian people in the West Bank. Israeli rightists had visions of Israel stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. From the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009 to 2014, West Bank the Israeli settlement population went from 297,000 to 386,000; the East Jerusalem Israeli population grew from 193,000 to 208,000. This amounted to giving the finger to President Obama and others around the world working for a two-state peace deal. Israel’s Likud Party stoked hatred and fear and moved farther and farther to the right until it has become basically an expansionist party that feels entitled to everything.

Do these views make me an anti-semite? According to the Likud line, no doubt. But, you know, I really don’t care at this stage. The truth should be put on the record. It’s too late in the game for anything else.

I vividly remember the first time Israeli settlement policies entered my consciousness. Again, think baby boomer generation. I’m in a firebase along the Cambodian border in the mountainous Central Highlands of Vietnam; from the helicopter arriving at the firebase, it looks like a cigar burn in a shag carpet. We were smoking and joking between mortar attacks from the North Vietnamese regular unit in the woods outside the perimeter. I was a 19-year-old military occupier without a clue why I was one of 500,000 similarly clueless US soldiers occupying that peasant nation. It was 1967, and we had gotten the news that Israel had taken the West Bank from Jordan. A Jewish fellow in my unit was giddy with delight. I confess I didn’t then know much more about Israel/Palestine or the West Bank than I did about Vietnam. Kerry’s idea about being “used in the worst fashion” comes to mind. Being a miniscule part of that war was later a huge goad for my self-education on Vietnam and post-WWII US military policy. I began reading when I got home and have not stopped.

So this Jewish fellow went on and on how great the moment was. I recall wondering what it meant for the future. I thought aloud: wouldn’t holding that land lead to more violence and war in the future? Might it be better to sort it out and make peace? I see the seeds to my instinct for, and membership in, the peace movement sprouting at moments like these. But my fellow soldier was super confident . . . and I was not a Jew and, therefore, couldn’t understand.

There’s no question that Israel is a fact of life. National sovereignty is a matter of might-makes-right and the recognition of other nations in the world that you’re qualified to be accepted into the club of nations. The United States became a fact of life in the same way — after slaughtering Native Americans and corralling the survivors shamelessly into reservations. My ancestor was part of one of the original massacres, the attack on the Pequots in Connecticut. Fearful of the powerful Pequots, one morning at dawn my people attacked and slaughtered the 700 souls in the Pequot village; then they burned the village to the gorund. The male braves were off on a hunting expedition, so those killed were mostly women, children and old men. My people then hunted down the hunting parties and the Pequots weren’t heard of until they built a huge casino in the middle of Connecticut.

As Manifest Destiny moved west, we broke virtually every treaty we made with the Indians we had not killed. How did “Americans” get away with doing this? There was, of course, no United Nations then. It was the wild west, a lawless time and place. Protecting domestic settlements and the expanding railroad were the top priorities as the nation moved inexorably toward the Pacific Ocean. Domination was our destiny. The only way to peace for Native Americans was to accept they were losers and accept the terms of the winners — accept being emasculated and herded into reservations or be hunted down and killed.

Obviously, in the mid-1940s following a great world conflagration, the conditions for the founding of Israel were different. The United Nations had just been formed to basically put the world in order following that destructive conflagration that included the genocide of millions of Jews by Europeans. As we know, the devil is in the details. But somehow the US and European-dominated UN that followed on the ill-fated League Of Nations magnanimously handed over the League’s Palestine Mandate to Jews understandably fleeing Europe. Truman was the man in the White House where the buck stopped. In retrospect, the legal establishment of Israel became over time the creation of a wholly Jewish state with Palestinians seen as interlopers in their own land. Resentment and violence became part of the equation. Live and let live was not a founding mantra. Once violence is interjected into a situation like that emotions are raised, hatred and demonization prevails, wagons are circled and before you know it you have an expansionist ideology like that of the Likudists.

All because of a thoroughly inadequate decision over the fate of two peoples who claimed the same land. Much of it because of the guy with the sign on his desk: The Buck Stops Here. Which raises the unholy idea that maybe Truman wasn’t such a great president; and maybe his decisions should be re-considered. At least that’s how a good radical would see it.

In 20 days, the Twitter King will be seated in Harry Truman’s chair. The buck will stop with him. Mr. Trump is now Tweeting the traditional code phrases that could be said to characterize the pacification of Native American people. America First and Peace Through Strength. He doesn’t mention the phrase collateral damage. This is the marching orders in Likudist Israel. The only way Netanyahu’s right wing Israeli government will allow Palestinians even a remote semblance of self-rule and dignity is if they concede they have lost everything and, thus, have nothing left to lose by caving in to the Israeli juggernaut.

Mr. Trump has used similar rhetoric to try to convince poor, inner city African Americans to vote for him. Your inner cities are a disast, he’d say. There’s violence everywhere. You walk down the street and get shot. “What do you have to lose!?” What do you have to lose by throwing in the towel and kissing my pinkie ring? I’m only being partially satiric when I imagine his plan is to re-establish the Plantation System, using his charm to convince everyone it’ll work this time. You’ll see! Trust me.

The bottom line issue is dignity. Do you escalate and continue to break a people’s back to bring them to heel, or do you recognize the injustices that have occurred — that you may have committed — and create a structure that facilitates real justice and peaceful co-existence? Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu give no evidence that they see the latter as important for people they deem inconvenient and superfluous to their dreams of greatness.

If I heard him correctly, Mr. Netanyahu blamed the League of Nations for getting it all wrong from the beginning with its post-WWI Palestine Mandate. For Mr. Netanyahu, it’s always someone else’s fault. In this case, he’s saying it was the fault of British Colonialism and the world. It’s funny that, not unlike me, he’s suggesting it all went awry with decisions made in the first half of the 20th century. Instead of wronging the Palestinians, he says history wronged the Jews and Israel. We’ve learned a lot since those early days, and one thing we’ve learned is that there were a lot of moral crimes committed under the relentless drive of European Colonialism and it’s offspring, post-WWII American Imperialism. The reaction to much of the world learning these lessons is the disdain people like Netanyahu show for overarching moral bodies like the League Of Nations and the United Nations.

Referring to the Security Counsel resolution to condemn Likudist Israel, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer told The New York Times, “[The Palestinian’s] strategy is not to negotiate with Israel because a deal is give and take. They want take and take.” (Italics mine.) The spinning audacity of this statement is worth examining. As they expropriate land, it has been Israel’s policy to refuse any kind of negotiation until Palestinians accepted all the terms on the table to be negotiated. That’s right, demand that the people you’ve beaten down and run into refugee camps accept their occupation as legitimate before Israel will agree to sit down and negotiate post-occupation conditions. Those on the wrong end of Israeli oppression have always known it was two-faced nonsense — as those on the oppressor side of the equation knew the same. Wink. Wink. It was always Kafkaesque. Catch 22. That’s right: All Palestinians want is to “take and take” from Israel. The United States has been an accessory to this con game from the beginning.

If the two-state solution is finally dead, as was declared by ex-UN Ambassador John Bolten on Fox News recently, where does the Netanyahu line go in the future under Donald Trump? If Palestinian anger and indignation from the past 50 years is not respected, if dignity is not allowed, where can it go but more of the same getting worse and worse each year?

I have great empathy for the Israeli people under the yoke of fear fueled by the rightwing Likud government. But it’s time for some straight talk to open up the conversation.

I’m grateful to President Obama for having the courage to allow the Security Counsel condemnation to go on the record. He’s getting a lot of flak from both parties. Donald Trump and company will be scrambling to undo it, as they scramble to maneuver through Putin’s Russian thicket of intrigue. According to reports, it’s not going to be easy to overturn the Security Counsel resolution. It could take years, if it’s possible at all. Meanwhile, the condemnation is an international fait-accompli on the books, and Benjamin Netanyahu and the Twitter King will just have to deal with it.

It could even put a little juice back into the UN at a time that’s greatly needed.

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JOHN GRANT is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper.