Blog

Enough Already with the Royal Family

The Harvard history professor, Maya Jasanoff, has written three books about the British Empire. Over at the Washington Post, she has published an

Professor Maya Jasanoff

article discussing the recent coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It is titled, “Mourn the Queen, Not the Empire.”

Similar articles can be written — actually, many have been written already — about the long history of the American Empire.

Below is an excerpt (all emphasis is mine):

“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted. . .

. . . What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011. Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.

Click here to read the entire article.

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.

American Efforts to Dominate the Globe are Helping to Kill Us All

A few weeks ago Marcy Winograd published an article in Common Dreams highlighting the extraordinary contribution the American military makes to global warming.

With approximately 800 military bases scattered around the world, not to mention our numerous ongoing military conflicts, the US military emits as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as a sizeable industrial nation.

Have you been paying attention to the number of major rivers in Europe and

Yangtze River going dry

Asia becoming nearly bone dry this summer? I have, and it’s scary.

Nowadays, I can’t help but wonder about the words in Revelation 16:8, “The sun was given power to scorch people with fire. They were seared by the intense heat…”

Below is an excerpt of the article “The Pentagon is Killing Us.”

The dog days of summer are upon us — and the record high temperatures killing hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and bringing 118 degree heat to Siberia serve as a harbinger of even hotter, more dangerous days unless we address the elephant in the room.

The Pentagon.

As the largest institutional consumer of oil and, therefore, the largest single U.S.

The Colorado River

emitter of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG’s), the Pentagon must reduce its carbon footprint of wars and weapons production as well as its boot print — including tens of thousands of troops deployed worldwide at 800 overseas military bases and one under construction on Okinawa.

To avoid the worst of the climate crisis, President Joe Biden, Congress and the public can reject an interventionist foreign policy fueled by the drive for full-spectrum dominance of the air, land, sea and space. Otherwise, we brace ourselves for ever rising sea levels: extreme weather, drought, famine — all of which, according to the World Bank, could result in 143-million climate refugees by 2050.

Brown University’s Cost of War Project reports the Pentagon’s GHG’s exceed those of many industrialized nations, such as Denmark, Sweden and Portugal, with the “War on Terror” alone producing 1,267 million metric tons of GHG’s, the carbon equivalent of a 12-million pound mountain of coal.

One B-52 Stratofortress, Boeing’s long-range bomber, consumes as much fuel in an hour as the average car driver uses in seven years, according to the National Priorities Project.

To read the entire article click here.

How Do You Identify a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? The Bling.

I’d say that $1 million in jewelry is the modern-day equivalent of a good sheep’s skin.

Any preacher wearing this much bling while delivering a Sunday sermon is not only flashing his wolfish fangs, he is begging for lightning to strike.

Well, lightning struck a few weeks ago for New York City’s Bishop Lamor Miller-Whitehead and his wife Asia, pastors of a Brooklyn City church, when several thieves invaded the Sunday morning service and relieved the two church leaders of their jewelry — all $1 million dollars worth.

There truly is no honor among thieves as the gold chains, diamond rings, and jeweled necklaces were quietly transferred from one pair of thieves to another.

(It reminds me of the time a Mormon bishop believed he could relieve me of my soul as I prayed for his salvation. But that is another story for another posting.)

Don’t worry about the Bishop or his wife, however, since they undoubtedly have millions worth of additional jewelry stashed away in their safe at home.

As the Bishop told the Religious News Service, “It’s not about me being flashy,” Miller-Whitehead said. “It’s about me, purchasing what I want to purchase. And it’s my prerogative to purchase what I want to purchase.”

Ok then. I feel so much better now about their so-called ministry.

At least we know where their hearts are really at. As Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and money. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Below is an excerpt of the article, “NYPD: Preacher, Wife Robbed of $1 Million in Jewelry During Sermon,” by Michael R. Sisak:

NEW YORK (AP) — A preacher known for his close friendship with New York City’s mayor was robbed of more than $1 million worth of jewelry Sunday by armed bandits who crashed his Brooklyn church service, just as he was sermonizing about keeping faith in the face of grave adversity, police said.

Bishop Lamor Miller-Whitehead, who embraces his flashy lifestyle and can often be seen driving around the Big Apple in his Rolls Royce, was delivering a sermon at his Leaders of Tomorrow International Ministries when police say three robbers walked in. They showed guns and demanded property from Miller-Whitehead and his wife, Asia K. DosReis-Whitehead, police said. . . .

. . . In a video posted to Instagram, Miller-Whitehead said he felt a “demonic force” enter the church and wasn’t sure if the gunmen “wanted to shoot the church up or if they were just coming for a robbery.” . . . 

Of all people, the good Bishop ought to be intimately familiar with the feel of an approaching demonic force.

Click here to read the complete article.

 

Inventing the Novel and Human Rights: What Happens When the Image of God Reads Compelling Fiction

Where did the belief in universal human rights come from?

Why did western societies ever begin to write documents proclaiming that “all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”?

What was the original spark of humanitarian instinct that eventually gave rise to a document like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The Judeao-Christian belief that all people are created as the Image of God certainly had an important role to play. But many “Christian” societies have embraced this biblical doctrine without any practical implementation towards eliminating torture, injustice, or discrimination.

So how did the broad-based, societal belief in establishing “human rights” for everyone equally as a matter of law spring into life?

Professor Lynn Hunt teaches modern European history, specializing in the French Revolution, at UCLA. She has written a fascinating book called Inventing Human Rights: A History (W. W. Norton, 2007) where she argues that the impetus towards universal human rights arose with the creation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century.

It is difficult today for us to imagine a time when the fictional novel was a new invention, a new form of literature. It is also difficult to understand the novel’s wild popularity among the masses.

Almost everyone who could read consumed them whole. And many who could not read had someone read the latest novel to them.

One of the major social benefits of this craze was the rise in empathy for others, especially others who were not like you, others whom the reader did not know personally, first hand.

An important question this book raises for me concerns the possible connection between American xenophobia, and our hard-heartedness towards warfare and the suffering of “foreigners” and the decline in American literacy.

Nearly 1/3 of American’s did not read a single book last year. Only 20% read

for pleasure on a daily basis. When we do read, it is on average for 17 minutes per day.

Below is an excerpt from Inventing Human Rights (emphasis mine):

(Novels) drew their readers into identifying with ordinary characters, who were by definition unknown to the reader personally. Readers empathized with the characters, especially their heroine or hero, thanks to the workings of the narrative form itself. Through the fictional exchange of letters [the epistolary form of novel was especially popular] taught their readers nothing less than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and political order. . . Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative. Can it be coincidental that the three greatest novels of psychological identification of the eighteenth century – Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761) – were all published in the period that immediately preceded the appearance of the concept of “the rights of man”?

. . . Empathy only develops through social interaction; therefore, the forms of that interaction configure empathy in important ways. In the eighteenth century, readers of novels learned to extend their purview of empathy. In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women. As a consequence, they came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them, as having the same kinds of inner emotions. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning and in particular no political consequence. The equality of souls in heaven is not the same thing as equal rights here on earth. Before the eighteenth century, Christians readily accepted the former without granting the latter.

 

Professor Hunt’s observations raise troubling questions about the demise of literacy and the liberal arts in American education.

I fear that the increasing turn towards “professionalization” as opposed to cultural literacy in education will pave the way for a harsher, more xenophobic, aggressive, inhumane vision of the world for American society.

But, then, maybe we are already there…

Listen to Sensible Voices Address the Israel-Palestine Bloodshed

I just finished participating in another political action campaign with Jewish Voice for Peace focused on the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Below is a collection of reasonable testimonies from both Jewish and Palestinian young people addressing this tragedy of non-stop violence.

Please check it out:

 

 

Trump Said It Out Loud: Take Syria’s Oil

I hope that no one still imagines that the US has military forces in Syria because we want to bring the people democracy.

The real story in such foreign interventions is always about American hegemony, American power, American exploitation of other nations’ resources.

That simple fact has always been apparent in Syria, but now it is undeniable.

The Washington Post recently published a major story detailing America’s permanent occupation of Syria’s oil fields. The article, written by Liz Sly, is titled “America’s Hidden War in Syria.”

Below is an excerpt:

U.S. troops will now stay in Syria
indefinitely, controlling a third of the
country and facing peril on many fronts.

RAQQA, Syria — This ruined, fearful city was once the Islamic State’s capital, the showcase of its caliphate and a magnet for foreign fighters from around the globe.

Now it lies at the heart of the United States’ newest commitment to a Middle East war.

The commitment is small, a few thousand troops who were first sent to Syria three years ago to help the Syrian Kurds fight the Islamic State. President Trump indicated in March that the troops would be brought home once the battle is won, and the latest military push to eject the group from its final pocket of territory recently got underway.

In September, however, the administration switched course, saying the troops will stay in Syria pending an overall settlement to the Syrian war and with a new mission: to act as a bulwark against Iran’s expanding influence. 

That decision puts U.S. troops in overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria, a vast expanse of mostly desert terrain roughly the size of Louisiana.

The Pentagon does not say how many troops are there. Officially, they number 503, but earlier this year an official let slip that the true number may be closer to 4,000. Most are Special Operations forces, and their footprint is light. Their vehicles and convoys rumble by from time to time along the empty desert roads, but it is rare to see U.S. soldiers in towns and cities.

The new mission raises new questions, about the role they will play and whether their presence will risk becoming a magnet for regional conflict and insurgency.

Read the entire article here.

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew

FRANCE – JULY 02: Albert Memmi, author, at home in Paris, France on July 02, 2004. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.

In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.

The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.

That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.

Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.

Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.

I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.

And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?

Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:

Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.

How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…

With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…

He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…

Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.

What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…

It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.

Israel Mows Gaza’s Grass, Again

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 on the Israeli military policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.

Of course, no one living in Gaza has an actual lawn. Instead, this is Israel’s not-so-clever euphemism for its periodic military attacks against the human beings living in Gaza.

Yes, the Israeli military actually thinks it’s clever to describe the way they periodically mow down innocent Palestinian civilians as a public service in lawn care.

Ha ha…

Mowing Gaza’s grass accomplishes several goals for Israel.

First, as I explain in my book Like Birds in a Cage, regular Israeli airstrikes and bombings, causing mayhem, death, and destruction is intended to remind the Palestinian people of who their Master is.

Thus, mowing the grass gives Israel yet another opportunity to sear the Palestinian conscience, to quote the military’s own description of this policy goal.

Like random electrical shocks administered to a caged dog, the Palestinians are supposed to surrender their will, abandon all resistance, and lapse into a state of learned helplessness.

Fortunately, however, the Palestinian people are refusing to learn Israel’s intended lesson.

Here is the sequence of events for the most recent exercise in Israel’s deadly conscience searing:

It began on August 1st when Israeli commandos captured a leader of the rebel organization called Islamic Jihad (IJ) who was living in the West Bank.

Several days later Israel followed up on that raid by launching an airstrike on Gaza in order to assassinate another IJ leader in his home. He was killed with several others.

Then Israel announced that it was launching a “preemptive strike” against Gaza in response to intelligence reports detailing IJ’s plans to use heavy artillery against Israel. Of course, as usual, Israel never provided any details about this supposed intelligence. The world is expected to simply take Israel’s word at face value.

What followed was another merciless blood-letting.

At last count, as best I can discover, hundreds of Gazans have been injured, approximately 65 people were killed, 15 of them being children. The total damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure has yet to be determined.

The IJ forces launched almost 1,000 rockets against Israel. Yet, Israel did not suffer a single casualty. Some of these rockets did not even make it outside of Gaza, landing short and killing Palestinians instead.

These statistics tell us everything we need to know about the grotesque asymmetry characteristic of this “conflict.” A nuclear power is using state-of-the-art weaponry to mow down people living under military occupation whose weapons are like children’s toys in comparison.

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the (imaginary) heavy artillery that IJ was supposedly preparing to fire against Israel. Such rockets never made an appearance among the 1,000-or-so homemade IJ missiles that traced their wobbly, white streaks erratically across the Gazan sky this past week.

So, there you have it. The entire Israel-Palestine situation in a nut shell.

Israel continues its military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank, and they continue to get away with it.

Israel mows down hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, and gets away with it. Again, Israel will not suffer a single negative consequence from the outside world.

Palestinians make a feeble attempt to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, and they are vilified by Israel and its allies.

Which all raises a vital question: Whose conscience is being seared by this perpetual savagery?

 

Israel’s Settler Colonialism Continues at a Steady Pace

(I will write a post about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza later today.)

Israel is a settler-colonial state, much like the USA, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

One of the defining goals of every settler-colonial state is the elimination of the native. Israel has created a massive state apparatus that works to accomplish this goal, whether through annexing Palestinian territory, building separation walls, home demolitions, zoning restrictions, or travel restrictions, to name only a few.

Continuing efforts to erase both the history and the contemporary existence of the Palestinian people appears, again, in the videos below.

I could post multiple videos like these every week, but I choose to limit them in order to cover a wider range of topics. However, the historical erasure of any group of human beings is always a story deserving of our attention.