The good news is that Derek Chauvin has been convicted for the murder of George Floyd. In this instance, the justice system has worked. A white police
Derek Chauvin
officer is being held accountable for his excessive use of force against an unarmed black man. Something that very rarely happens.
But this is also the bad news.
At this point in America’s history, Derek Chauvin’s conviction is a “black swan event.” Recall Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestselling book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2010), reminding us that incredibly improbable events (like a black swan) may have considerable influence while remaining very rare.
Notice the two provisos: first, the transformative event is very rare; and two, it MAY have significant consequences. In other words, the possible results are far from assured, and the event itself may never be repeated.
Krystal Ball
Krystal Ball (yes, that’s her real name) reminded her viewers on “Rising” this morning of the extraordinary efforts that created the context for Chauvin’s successful conviction.
First, is Darnella Frasier, the teenage girl who had the presence of mind and the courage to pull out her cell phone and film the 9 minute video of officer Chauvin kneeling of Mr. Floyd’s neck.
Second, is the largest, most sustained protest movement in US history, which spread around the world.
Were it not for these two momentous actions, George Floyd would have been just another anonymous victim of police brutality. And Derek Chauvin would have gotten away with murder.
Hardly encouraging news.
Think about that. Let it sink in. It hardly indicates that this is the beginning of a new day in prosecuting police misconduct, let alone altering police behavior nationwide.
[Krystal’s remarks begin at about the 30 second mark.
Now is the time to keep the celebrations brief.
Because now is the time to insist that our legislators pass H.R. 1280, The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021. Though this piece of legislation is inadequate on its own, it may serve as a piece of the larger police reform puzzle.
Now is also the time to continue campaigning for local Defund the Police programs across the country. Numerous cities are testing these ideas now and the preliminary reports are very encouraging in places like Denver and Colorado Springs (see here, here, here, and here).
Now is also the time for Christian leaders to continue speaking out about justice and equality for all people, regardless of race, color, ethnicity, or class.
Do not swallow the Fox News cool-aid insisting that this trial was only about one bad apple who did one bad thing, and that his conviction proves the reliability of our glorious criminal justice system.
That predictably conservative framing of the issues is a recipe for going back to sleep and maintaining the status quo. A status quo that ignores the larger context of US policing and police training which allows police brutality to continue unabated.
No. Now is the time to keep the pressure on, to continue protesting, to insist that the culture of American policing is in dire need of regeneration.
Now is also the time for the evangelical church to break ranks with the Republican party, Fox News, and the politics of fear.
It will mean wanting to become more like Jesus, releasing our vice-like grip on worries over personal security and caring more for those who suffer than we care for ourselves.
Last summer David Leonhardt, a writer at the New York Times, published the
David Leonhardt
results of several recent studies examining the historic rates of wage increases (or decreases) among white and black workers in America.
He states that “recent research indicates little progress since the Truman administration.”
Since the Truman administration!!!
The results of these studies point to two culprits.
One, the long-term effects of institutional racism.
And two, the growing income gap between the upper- and lower-classesof our society.
Here is Mr. Leonhardt’s article. (All emphases are mine). The original contains a number of important charts and graphs that will not copy to this post. (Probably because I am technologically impaired.)
If you can read the NYT online, I highly recommend checking it out. The charts make the raw data jump off the page.
Government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between black and white men is substantially smaller than it was 75 years ago. It shrunk in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s and has remained largely stable since then.
But these statistics are misleading. A more comprehensive look at the data, based on recent academic research, shows that the black-white wage gap is roughly as large today as it was in 1950.
That’s remarkable. Despite decades of political change — the end of enforced segregation across the South, the legalization of interracial marriage, the passage of multiple civil rights laws and more — the wages of black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president. That gap indicates that there have also been powerful forces pushing against racial equality.
Before getting into the causes, though, I want to explain the difference between the best-known wage statistics and the more accurate version. The traditional numbers are incomplete in a way that many people do not realize: They cover only workers. People who don’t work are ignored. This group includes students, full-time parents, people who have given up on finding work and people who are incarcerated.
Excluding them wouldn’t present a problem if the percentage of nonworkers had remained fairly stable over time. But it has not. “There’s been a tremendous run-up in non-work among prime-age men,” says Kerwin Kofi Charles, an economist and the dean of the Yale School of Management.
One reason is that many middle-aged men — of all races, although disproportionately black — have dropped out of the labor force, and are neither working nor looking for work. The shrinking number of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has left many people who didn’t attend college without good job opportunities, and they have responded by no longer actively looking for work.
A second reason that more men aren’t working is that vastly more of them are incarcerated. Incarceration rates are especially high for black men — about twice as high as those of Hispanic men, six times higher than those of white men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic women or white women.
People considered “unemployed” represent a small — and declining — share of those out of work.
The traditional statistics on the black-white wage gap ignore these trends, because they examine only people with earnings. As social scientists put it, the traditional numbers ignore the “zero values.”
This means that the statistics on the wage gap are looking at a shrinking share of the population over time. They overlook the roughly 30 percent of black men and 15 percent of white men between the ages of 25 and 54 who had not been working in a given week during recent years. (Those shares are even higher now, given the economic downturn.)
“It’s a weird hole,” Mr. Charles says.
He and another economist — Patrick Bayer of Duke — undertook a research project to fill that hole. They collected census data dating back to 1940 and constructed wage statistics that included men who were not working. They are also conducting a follow-up project about women, Mr. Bayer said. The gap between black and white women may have narrowed, but only modestly.
The research by Mr. Charles and Mr. Bayer shows that once all men — working and not working — are included, the picture changes.
The black-white wage gap shrunk substantially from 1950 to 1980, and especially during the 1960s. Civil-rights laws and a decline in legally sanctioned racism most likely played some role. But the main reasons, Mr. Charles said, appear to have been trends that benefited all blue-collar workers, like strong unions and a rising minimum wage. Because black workers were disproportionately in blue-collar jobs, the general rise of incomes for the poor and middle class shrank the racial wage gap.
One law was especially important: the 1966 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. When Congress passed the original law, during the New Deal, it deliberately exempted service and other industries with many black workers from the minimum wage. “Just expanding the minimum wage to those industries,” Ellora Derenoncourt, a University of California, Berkeley, economist, said, “boosted the relative wages of black workers substantially.”
Since 1980, however, the wage gap has increased again, and is now back roughly to where it was in 1950. The same economic forces are at work, only in the opposite direction: The minimum wage has stagnated in some states, unions have shrunk, tax rates on the wealthy have fallen more than they have for anyone else and incomes for the bottom 90 percent — and especially the bottom half — have trailed economic growth. Black workers, again, are disproportionately in these lower-income groups.
One nuance is that the racial wage gap has shrunk somewhat among higher-income men. That’s a sign that more African-Americans have broken into the upper middle class than was the case in prior decades.
This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged racism — especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class families, across races.
“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”
I will keep my fingers crossed and hope that president Biden follows through on his promise to withdraw all US ground forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.
But even if he does resist the pressure of DC warmongers now mounted against him, the senseless 20 year war in Afghanistan is bound to continue.
Investigative journalist, Norman Solomon
Journalist Norman Solomon’s article at SheerPost reminds us that we always have to read the fine print in any presidential statement.
There we will see that the air war will continue. US drones will not stop murdering anonymous Afghan civilians, including women and children.
The CIA and various special ops units will continue their clandestine operations.
The insanity of American foreign policy, which appears intent upon dominating the entire globe, has not changed. President Biden remains a neo-liberal, American imperialist.
The publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Washington Post — this generation’s equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth about the horrid, unwinnable war in Vietnam — has been ignored by the public and Congress, meaning that there is little public pressure to TRULY bring this war to an end.
Solomon’s piece is entitled, “The Fine Print on Biden’s Afghanistan Announcement.”
Here it is:
Contrary to what Joe Biden has said and corporate media has parroted, U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is set to continue well beyond September 11, 2021.
When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept
Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. [Photo by Reese Erlich]at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.
There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when — according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday — all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.
What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”
Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”
We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.
“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”
The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.
Canadian reporter David Doel of The Rational National shares the speech made by Dante Wright’s aunt at the family press conference held yesterday.
We all need to listen to her. Hear why she not only grieves the death of her nephew but is angry over the way he died. She points out details in the shooter’s actions that raised my eyebrows, too.
Afterwards, Mr. Doel goes on to provide excellent commentary, placing Mr. Wright’s murder in its historical context. His challenge must be taken seriously by everyone, please.
In the midst of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial for the death of George Floyd, a new wave of demonstrations has erupted protesting the death of another unarmed black man, 20 year old Daunte Wright.
Here is a video of Mr. Wright’s shooting:
Almost simultaneously, a Virginia state police video was released showing the unnecessary use of force, bullying, and intimidation against another unarmed man of color, Army second lieutenant Caron Nazario. Fortunately, though both officers had guns drawn at this traffic stop neither pulled the trigger.
Here is a video of lieutenant Nazario’s police encounter:
Naturally, each of these situations is unique in its own way. I won’t discuss those differences here. I will simply encourage you to follow these stories on your own if you aren’t already.
But all of these incidents have at least two traits in common.
First, notice how quickly the police begin to apply force (verbally, emotionally, and physically) against the black suspects. Yelling, threats, intimidation, grabbing, pulling, pushing, handcuffs, tasers, and guns are all on display almost immediately.
It looks as if the police have just received a dramatic, red-alert dispatch warning them that the man they are pulling over is a violent mass murderer transporting a nuclear bomb in the trunk of his car.
From my perspective — and I have been on the receiving end of such treatment — the police are needlessly escalating a situation that could have been handled much more calmly.
Why are they acting like marines on a search-and-destroy mission?
Second, a tipping point seems to occur when the black man refuses to get out of his car (or climbs back inside). The police are clearly angered by this display of personal autonomy, which they interpret as another act of lawlessness that requires physical restraint and arrest.
As best as I can determine (I am not a lawyer), citizens are legally obligated to comply with an officer’s “lawful orders” (emphasis on lawful). If a police officer orders a driver to get out of his/her car, for example, then the driver is supposed to obey (see here and here; for a detailed discussion in the Santa Clara Law Review, look here).
Unsurprisingly, conservative reactions to such arrests and shootings are typically straightforward. Just comply! Do what the officer says, and you will be fine. Or so says the white guy…
[I am reminded of an old joke. Question: What is a liberal? Answer: A liberal is a conservative who just got arrested.]
It is now well known that the increasing militarization of US police training encourages officers to view citizens (whether explicitly or implicitly) as “the enemy” and every engagement as a combat situation. Trainees are now taught to to think of themselves as “warriors” not as “guardians” or public servants.
Frankly, I can easily understand why black men and women are afraid to get out of their cars when pulled over by police. This country has a long history of unarmed black citizens winding up dead after meeting with the police.
Recent events show that little has changed.
I would be afraid to get out of my car, too, if I shared the same history and personal experiences of black Americans who are often mistreated, even terrorized, by our so-called peace officers.
Really now, how many more George Floyd type videos does white America need to see?
Of course, the naysayers have their come backs. Most commonly, we are told that police shoot more unarmed white people than black people every year.
That is true.
But what these conservative, racial apologists neglect to mention is that, according to the US Census Bureau, African-Americans make up only 13% of the US population.
It’s not surprising, then, to learn that a larger percentage shootings occur within the majority of the population. More white people means more police encounters which means more shootings. It only makes sense.,
But what is truly shocking, and often erased from the equation, is the dramatic increasein the percentage of police shootings against unarmed African-Americans given their minority status in our population.
Over 76% of the US population is white. 18.5% is Hispanic/Latino. 13% is black. Yet, when fatal police shootings are calculated as a percentage per million of the total population, incidents involving African-Americans jumps to the top of the list by a wide margin.
This more equitable calculation shows that of all (fatal) police shootings in this country, 14% of the victims are white, while 35% are black (Hispanics are 26%). In other words, black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by police than white Americans.
Predictably, many conservatives and others will suggest (if only behind closed doors) that perhaps African-Americans are 2.5 times more likely to behave like criminals.
If you were holding on to that opinion, let me say two things: first, it is demonstrably false, but that argument must wait for a future post; second, get down on your knees, confess your sins, and repent. Your white privilege and racism are showing.
Every American, but especially anyone with even a passing acquaintance with our God, should be outraged at that statistic. If anyone can produce as many videos of white men and women being strong-armed from their cars, pushed to the ground, punched, stepped on, handcuffed, arrested, and finally shot as we have of African-Americans suffering such treatment, please send them to me.
Produce the evidence and I will recant.
But I’m not holding my breath. The fact that the police ever treat anyone so shamefully, with such unwarranted brutality and violence, is more than enough reason to campaign with Defund the Police organizers.
The fact that America’s black citizens continue to live in fear; the fact that they have good reason to be afraid of an approaching police officer; to suspect that getting out of their car may be their first step into the morgue; to know that they are consistently handled with more violence and aggression than their white neighbors; all of this and more means that this country has a long, long ways to go in the fight for racial justice and equality before the law.
This is why the Black Lives Matter movement remains essential for our society.
This is why all God’s people must share in these same goals.
Matt Taibbi’s latest article on Joe Biden’s presidency — The Two Faces of Joe Biden — makes two important points with plenty of supporting evidence.
Matt Taibbi
First, all presidents and their administrations lie to us. It’s a fact of life and we all need to remember it.
It is certainly true that Donald Trump set a new bench mark for the volume of pathological lies spewed daily from the Oval Office. But his special gift for dishonesty was only unique in volume not in kind.
Second, now that political partisanship is baked into the DNA of American media outlets, pure propaganda (as opposed to actual investigative reporting) is the established norm in cable and network news.
No matter which stations or networks you watch, you are being lied to much of the time. That, too, is a fact of modern life.
Taibbi lays all of this out in black and white as he explains not only the two-facedness of Joe Biden’s policies, but the eagerness of so-called journalists at places like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to carry water for this Democratic administration.
Taibbi gives special attention to those lap-dog stenographers who are enthusiastically describing Biden as America’s new FDR.
Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article.
To read the entire piece requires a subscription, but it’s only $5/month and well worth the money:
. . . With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences.
In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the upscale, cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,” “transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years. The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against “purity” in politics about eight minutes ago.
In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularlylambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine F.D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal after proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general election.
Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect F.D.R. after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing, PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be a radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil Republicans. Is that even remotely true?
Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran in the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!):
Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts…
Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here…
The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.
Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand the surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort to reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just expressions of unrequited love?
Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would green-light drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of single-payer.
Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to going to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a year” at the lobbying group PhRMA.
“Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game‐playing.”
The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end up visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group, PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place.
Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the White House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned on paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most of the $.”
Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.
This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.”. . .
Click here and subscribe to read the entire piece.
Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.
Imagine that you live under military law.
You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.
Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.
Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.
Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.
Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.
Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.
This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.
Yesterday’s Consortium News had an illuminating article by Patrick Lawrence warning about the danger signs embedded in president Biden’s recent actions in Syria.
The US began to destroy Syria during the Obama administration as yet
Syrian school children meeting in front of their bombed out school building
another Democratic president initiated another attempted coup followed by incessant “regime change” operations in the Middle East.
It didn’t take long for American forces to ally themselves with al-Qaeda troops (yes, THAT al-Qaeda) in our imperial attempts to “rebuild” a “democratic” Syria. (You can’t make this stuff up…)
Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad is no saint. But America’s reckless,
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad
shortsighted, selfish interference makes Assad’s authoritarian nationalism look like an oasis of tranquility in the midst of Dante’s inferno.
Things have only gotten worse for the Syrian people since US interference in the country’s internal affairs. The Biden administration shows no sign of working to repair the damage we have done.
Below is an excerpt of this article. Read it and weep, oh ye citizens. For these are your tax dollars at work:
For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address the Syria question.
I do not think we will have to wonder about this much longer. It is early days yet, but one now detects the Biden’s administration’s Syria policy in faint outline. From what one can make out, it is bleak, it is vicious, it is unconscionably cruel to the Syrian people.
And it may prove yet worse than anything the Trump administration came up with, the Bible-banging Mike Pompeo in the lead as secretary of state.
Will Biden’s national security people drop the covert coup operation Barack Obama set it in motion nine years ago, its failure long evident? Or will they reinvigorate American support for savage jihadists in the name of “regime changing” the secular government in Damascus? What about the American troops still operating illegally on Syrian soil? What about the oilfields the Trump administration took to “protecting” from the nation that owns them? What about the brazen theft of crude from those fields?
And what, of course, about the murderous sanctions that various executive orders have escalated on numerous occasions since the Bush II administration imposed the first of them 17 long years ago?
What will Biden and his people do, in short, about the godawful mess the U.S. has made of the Syrian Arab Republic since it bastardized legitimate demonstrations against the Assad government in early 2012 (at the latest) by perverting them with Sunni extremists and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons?
These were the questions. Answers now begin to arrive.
Condemning Christian nationalism has become all the rage among certain members of the evangelical punditry. Even a few evangelical Republicans felt uncomfortable at the sight of Jesus flags and Christian paraphernalia on prominent display among the rioters who stormed Congress on January 6th.
In the immediate aftermath of those events, I saw a number of editorial condemnations on television and in print chastising any Christian’s involvement in violence or sedition. Each of them raised the same questions in my mind, for they all were morally tepid and intellectually shallow, ignoring the role those very media outlets had played in promoting president Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election.
I wholeheartedly agree with the reminder that Christians should not commit acts of violence, especially when those actions lead to others being
FILE – In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
killed and injured. However, I also found it very strange for right-wing, Christian, patriotic pundits, people who swear allegiance to a nation founded upon revolution, violence, and bloodshed, to suddenly clutch their pearls and faint at the sight of modern “patriots” doing what they believed needed to be done in order to save their nation and democracy.
I won’t even begin to address the hypocrisy on display when Religious-Right folks self-righteously condemn insurrection at home while heartily endorsing America’s many military coups and wars of aggression around the world! Apparently, Christians are only supposed to shun violence when the their fellow Americans become the enemy. Black and brown-skinned people around the world are always fair game.
All of this is very strange indeed unless we understand two crucial points:
First, these suddenly pacifistic, evangelical commentators were demonstrating how deeply embedded they are in the American, corporate establishment.
For all of their complaints about suffering as marginalized, Christian outsiders, none of them were willing to follow the logic of their messianic Trump-devotion to its logical conclusion. Why? Because they all had network executives telling them to toe a more establishment line or they would need to empty their desks and head for the unemployment line.
None of them were condemning police violence when BLM protesters were being assaulted by lines of militarized patrolmen wielding plexiglass shields and billy clubs.
Second, their exclusive focus on an anti-violence message exposed the consistent lack of self-awareness and intellectual rigor that characterizes so much of American evangelicalism today.
Of course, superficial critiques may be better than no critique at all, but if we only ever scratch the surface of a problem, then the underlying disease is allowed to deepen and spread. (On a side note, this was also my response to Mark Galli’s tepid critique of president Trump in his editorial at Christianity Today.” Only fellow evangelicals would interpret his words as shocking.)
Linking the errors of Christian nationalism to the dangers of patriotic violence (at home, mind you; violence abroad is always permissible for Christian America) is only the tip of the iceberg.
I recently began reading a book by the US historian, John W. Compton, entitled, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.
Child labor laws, worker safety regulations, the 6-day work week, the 8-hour work day, a living wage, plus much more were policies all implemented in response to massive Christian political pressure during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
But all of that changed in late 1970s-early 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the rise of his neo-liberal economic agenda. Nowadays, Christians concerned with things like social justice are regularly condemned for compromising the gospel. What happened?
I won’t answer that question here, but I will share a few thoughts from Compton’s introductory chapter where he begins to lay out his argument about the transformation that led to the wholesale conformity of American Christianity to the social/political/cultural status quo.
Concerning Christian political involvement:
Religious believers are on average much like similarly situated secular citizens when it comes to their behavior in the political realm. Like their secular neighbors, believers routinely base their political decisions on self-interest or ingrained prejudice rather than careful and disinterested study of sacred texts or deliberation about the will of a higher power. (4-5)
On the Christian vision for the church’s role in transforming society:
…from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, most non-Southern Protestants not only professed to believe that Christian principles, properly understood, favored government efforts to aid the downtrodden; they were also embedded in religious networks that were capable…of focusing attention on specific social problems and incentivizing the faithful to take responsibility for correcting them.
On the current state of American evangelicalism:
In the new age of personal autonomy, the leaders of the Religious Right flourished by reshaping the Christian message to comport with the prejudices and material self-interest of their target demographic.
I will probably review this book here when I have finished digesting all that it has to say.
But in short, nowadays the average Christian doesn’t work at thinking, and thus acting, differently in the light of God’s word. We conform to the ways of those around us, ignore the illuminating study of the holy scriptures, and are afraid to stand alone on behalf of those less fortunate than ourselves.
For now, I will only note a deeper description of the dangers that accompany Christian nationalism. The heart of that danger is cooption, conformity to the national status quo — which explains a lot about American evangelicalism and the Religious-Right in this country.
Once Christians begin to imagine that their country is God’s country; that its national history is a story written by and for Christians like themselves, then it is a very tiny step to confuse national interests with Christian interests. National norms become Christian norms (think of laisse faire capitalism) and Christian norms become national norms (think of the fight over equal rights for gay citizens).
Granted, this confusion may require a reimagined past that describes our current state of affairs as a gross deviation from historic norms (think of David Barton and Wallbuilders promoting a fictitious story of our “Christian” founding fathers and the Constitution’s adherence to the Bible). But modern diversions into sin cannot change America’s basic orientation as a “Christian nation” – at least, to the minds of Christian nationalists.
The identity between the one and the other is very simple for Christian nationalism and it goes far beyond a problem with violence. Christian values become America’s true, historic values. Thus, American true values are Christian values. This is where Christian nationalism becomes heretical.
Yet, this false identity between nation and church is ignored by pundits on the Religious-Right who now chastise Christian insurrectionists for colluding with violence.
The genuine danger for the church in this country is not that it would collude with violence but that it would continue to collude with American exceptionalism.
The greatest political danger facing evangelicalism today is our willingness to roll over and accept the economic and political status quo, embracing corporate, crony capitalism, labor exploitation, systemic racism, militarized policing, social Darwinism, and American exceptionalism as God’s preferred methods of directing a nation.
Where is the Christian voice of dissent to all these sins?
Where are the people who will not conform to their political surroundings and vote and think and act like their neighbors?
Where are the Christian activists willing to break away from the way things today are in order to pursue God’s vision of the way things ought to be tomorrow?
B’Tselem is an internationally recognized human rights organization located in Israel. Its original mission was monitoring the mistreatment of Palestinians by the Israeli army in both Gaza and the West Bank.
In January 2021, B’Tselem announced that its mission was expanding. The announcement came in the form of a public declaration describing both the Israeli nation-state and the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a single territory uniformly governed by a system of Jewish Supremacy.
Apartheid is defined as systemic discrimination based on race and/or ethnicity that is endorsed by state authorities and embedded in the nation’s legal system.
In Israel and the rest of Palestine, this means that all Palestinians are always second class “citizens” (though many can never attain citizenship), while Jews enjoy first class citizenship within a society created exclusively by and for Jews alone.
I have posted an excerpt from B’Tselem’s announcement below. Encourage your pro-Israel friends to read it and to investigate B’Tselem’s website. They will find a wealth of information documenting their claims.
To learn about the details explaining how and why Israel imposes Jewish supremacy upon the Palestinians, I encourage you to read the entire proclamation by clicking on the title above:
The Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire area. To that end, it has divided the area into several units, each with a different set of rights for Palestinians – always inferior to the rights of Jews. As part of this policy, Palestinians are denied many rights, including the right to self-determination.
This policy is advanced in several ways. Israel demographically engineers the space through laws and orders that allow any Jew in the world or their relatives to obtain Israeli citizenship, but almost completely deny Palestinians this possibility. It has physically engineered the entire area by taking over of millions of dunams of land and establishing Jewish-only communities, while driving Palestinians into small enclaves. Movement is engineered through restrictions on Palestinian subjects, and political engineering excludes millions of Palestinians from participating in the processes that determine their lives and futures while holding them under military occupation.
A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid, which promotes the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians, was not born in one day or of a single speech. It is a process that has gradually grown more institutionalized and explicit, with mechanisms introduced over time in law and practice to promote Jewish supremacy. These accumulated measures, their pervasiveness in legislation and political practice, and the public and judicial support they receive – all form the basis for our conclusion that the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met.
If this regime has developed over many years, why release this paper in 2021? What has changed? Recent years have seen a rise in the motivation and willingness of Israeli officials and institutions to enshrine Jewish supremacy in law and openly state their intentions. The enactment of Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People and the declared plan to formally annex parts of the West Bank have shattered the façade Israel worked for years to maintain. . .
The Israeli regime’s rationale, and the measures used to implement it, are reminiscent of the South African regime that sought to preserve the supremacy of white citizens, in part through partitioning the population into classes and sub-classes and ascribing different rights to each. . .
As painful as it may be to look reality in the eye, it is more painful to live under a boot. The harsh reality described here may deteriorate further if new practices are introduced – with or without accompanying legislation. Nevertheless, people created this regime and people can make it worse – or work to replace it. That hope is the driving force behind this position paper. How can people fight injustice if it is unnamed? Apartheid is the organizing principle, yet recognizing this does not mean giving up. On the contrary: it is a call for change.
Fighting for a future based on human rights, liberty and justice is especially crucial now. There are various political paths to a just future here, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but all of us must first choose to say no to apartheid.
Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.
the Israeli army in both Gaza and the West Bank.