Middleboro Review 2: CC News Letter 13 July - ‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

CC News Letter 13 July - ‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it

Dear Friend,

An open letter published by Harper’s magazine, and signed by 150 prominent writers and public figures, has focused attention on the apparent dangers of what has been termed a new “cancel culture”. The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.

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Binu Mathew

Editor

Countercurrents.org

‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling

free speech, not protecting it

by Jonathan Cook

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/cancel-culture-letter-is-about-stifling-free-speech-not-protecting-it/

The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.

Although the letter doesn’t explicitly use the term “cancel culture”, it is clearly what is meant in the complaint about a “stifling” cultural climate that is imposing “ideological conformity” and weakening “norms of open debate and toleration of differences”.

It is easy to agree with the letter’s generalised argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their deeds.

Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech, not protect it.

To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinise the motives, rather than the substance, of the letter.

A new ‘illiberalism’

“Cancel culture” started as the shaming, often on social media, of people who were seen to have said offensive things. But of late, cancel culture has on occasion become more tangible, as the letter notes, with individuals fired or denied the chance to speak at a public venue or to publish their work.

The letter denounces this supposedly new type of “illiberalism”:

“We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. …

“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; … The result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”

Tricky identity politics

The array of signatories is actually more troubling than reassuring. If we lived in a more just world, some of those signing – like Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US State Department official – would be facing a reckoning before a Hague war crimes tribunal for their roles in promoting “interventions” in Iraq and Libya respectively, not being held up as champions of free speech.

That is one clue that these various individuals have signed the letter for very different reasons.

Chomsky signed because he has been a lifelong and consistent defender of the right to free speech, even for those with appalling opinions such as Holocaust denial.

Frum, who coined the term “axis of evil” that rationalised the invasion of Iraq, and Weiss, a New York Times columnist, signed because they have found their lives getting tougher. True, it is easy for them to dominate platforms in the corporate media while advocating for criminal wars abroad, and they have paid no career price when their analyses and predictions have turned out to be so much dangerous hokum. But they are now feeling the backlash on university campuses and social media.

Meanwhile, centrists like Buruma and Rowling have discovered that it is getting ever harder to navigate the tricky terrain of identity politics without tripping up. The reputational damage can have serious consequences.

Buruma famously lost his job as editor of the New York Review of Books two years ago after after he published and defended an article that violated the new spirit of the #MeToo movement. And Rowling made the mistake of thinking her followers would be as fascinated by her traditional views on transgender issues as they are by her Harry Potter books.

‘Fake news, Russian trolls’

But the fact that all of these writers and intellectuals agree that there is a price to be paid in the new, more culturally sensitive climate does not mean that they are all equally interested in protecting the right to be controversial or outspoken.

Chomsky, importantly, is defending free speech for all, because he correctly understands that the powerful are only too keen to find justifications to silence those who challenge their power. Elites protect free speech only in so far as it serves their interests in dominating the public space.

If those on the progressive left do not defend the speech rights of everyone, even their political opponents, then any restrictions will soon be turned against them. The establishment will always tolerate the hate speech of a Trump or a Bolsonaro over the justice speech of a Sanders or a Corbyn.

By contrast, most of the rest of those who signed – the rightwingers and the centrists – are interested in free speech for themselves and those like them. They care about protecting free speech only in so far as it allows them to continue dominating the public space with their views – something they were only too used to until a few years ago, before social media started to level the playing field a little.

The centre and the right have been fighting back ever since with claims that anyone who seriously challenges the neoliberal status quo at home and the neoconservative one abroad is promoting “fake news” or is a “Russian troll”. This updating of the charge of being “un-American” embodies cancel culture at its very worst.

Social media accountability

In other words, apart from in the case of a few progressives, the letter is simply special pleading – for a return to the status quo. And for that reason, as we shall see, Chomsky might have been better advised not to have added his name, however much he agrees with the letter’s vague, ostensibly pro-free speech sentiments.

What is striking about a significant proportion of those who signed is their self-identification as ardent supporters of Israel. And as Israel’s critics know only too well, advocates for Israel have been at the forefront of the cancel culture – from long before the term was even coined.

For decades, pro-Israel activists have sought to silence anyone seen to be seriously critiquing this small, highly militarised state, sponsored by the colonial powers, that was implanted in a region rich with a natural resource, oil, needed to lubricate the global economy, and at a terrible cost to its native, Palestinian population.

Nothing should encourage us to believe that zealous defenders of Israel among those signing the letter have now seen the error of their ways. Their newfound concern for free speech is simply evidence that they have begun to suffer from the very same cancel culture they have always promoted in relation to Israel.

They have lost control of the “cancel culture” because of two recent developments: a rapid growth in identity politics among liberals and leftists, and a new popular demand for “accountability” spawned by the rise of social media.

Cancelling Israel’s critics

In fact, despite their professions of concern, the evidence suggests that some of those signing the letter have been intensifying their own contribution to cancel culture in relation to Israel, rather than contesting it.

That is hardly surprising. The need to counter criticism of Israel has grown more pressing as Israel has more obviously become a pariah state. Israel has refused to countenance peace talks with the Palestinians and it has intensified its efforts to realise long-harboured plans to annex swaths of the West Bank in violation of international law.

Rather than allow “robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters” on Israel, Israel’s supporters have preferred the tactics of those identified in the letter as enemies of free speech: “swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”.

Just ask Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party who was reviled, along with his supporters, as an antisemite – one of the worst smears imaginable – by several people on the Harper’s list, including Rowling and Weiss. Such claims were promoted even though his critics could produce no actual evidence of an antisemitism problem in the Labour party.

Similarly, think of the treatment of Palestinian solidarity activists who support a boycott of Israel (BDS), modelled on the one that helped push South Africa’s leaders into renouncing apartheid. BDS activists too have been smeared as antisemites – and Weiss again has been a prime offender.

The incidents highlighted in the Harper’s letter in which individuals have supposedly been cancelled is trivial compared to the cancelling of a major political party and of a movement that stands in solidarity with a people who have been oppressed for decades.

And yet how many of these free speech warriors have come forward to denounce the fact that leftists – including many Jewish anti-Zionists – have been pilloried as antisemites to prevent them from engaging in debates about Israel’s behaviour and its abuses of Palestinian rights?

How many of them have decried the imposition of a new definition of antisemitism, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that has been rapidly gaining ground in western countries?

That definition is designed to silence a large section of the left by prioritising the safety of Israel from being criticised before the safety of Jews from being vilified and attacked – something that even the lawyer who authored the definition has come to regret.

Why has none of this “cancel culture” provoked an open letter to Harper’s from these champions of free speech?

Double-edge sword

The truth is that many of those who signed the letter are defending not free speech but their right to continue dominating the public square – and their right to do so without being held accountable.

Bari Weiss, before she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, spent her student years trying to get Muslim professors fired from her university – cancelling them – because of their criticism of Israel. And she explicitly did so under the banner of “academic freedom”, claiming pro-Israel students felt intimidated in the classroom.

The New York Civil Liberties Union concluded that it was Weiss, not the professors, who was the real threat to academic freedom. This was not some youthful indiscretion. In a book last year Weiss cited her efforts to rid Columbia university of these professors as a formative experience on which she still draws.

Weiss and many of the others listed under the letter are angry that the rhetorical tools they used for so long to stifle the free speech of others have now been turned against them. Those who lived for so long by the sword of identity politics – on Israel, for example – are worried that their reputations may die by that very same sword – on issues of race, sex and gender.

Narcissistic concern

To understand how the cancel culture is central to the worldview of many of these writers and intellectuals, and how blind they are to their own complicity in that culture, consider the case of Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with the supposedly liberal-left British newspaper the Guardian. Although Freedland is not among those signing the letter, he is very much aligned with the centrists among them and, of course, supported the letter in an article published in the Guardian.

Freedland, we should note, led the “cancel culture” campaign against the Labour party referenced above. He was one of the key figures in Britain’s Jewish community who breathed life into the antisemitism smears against Corbyn and his supporters.

But note the brief clip below. In it, Freedland’s voice can be heard cracking as he explains how he has been a victim of the cancel culture himself: he confesses that he has suffered verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Israel’s most extreme apologists – those who are even more unapologetically pro-Israel than he is.

He reports that he has been called a “kapo”, the term for Jewish collaborators in the Nazi concentration camps, and a “sonderkommando”, the Jews who disposed of the bodies of fellow Jews killed in the gas chambers. He admits such abuse “burrows under your skin” and “hurts tremendously”.

And yet, despite the personal pain he has experienced of being unfairly accused, of being cancelled by a section of his own community, Freedland has been at the forefront of the campaign to tar critics of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews, as antisemites on the flimsiest of evidence.

He is entirely oblivious to the ugly nature of the cancel culture –unless it applies to himself. His concern is purely narcissistic. And so it is with the majority of those who signed the letter.

Conducting a monologue

The letter’s main conceit is the pretence that “illiberalism” is a new phenomenon, that free speech is under threat, and that the cancel culture only arrived at the moment it was given a name.

That is simply nonsense. Anyone over the age of 35 can easily remember a time when newspapers and websites did not have a talkback section, when blogs were few in number and rarely read, and when there was no social media on which to challenge or hold to account “the great and the good”.

Writers and columnists like those who signed the letter were then able to conduct a monologue in which they revealed their opinions to the rest of us as if they were Moses bringing down the tablets from the mountaintop.

In those days, no one noticed the cancel culture – or was allowed to remark on it. And that was because only those who held approved opinions were ever given a media platform from which to present those opinions.

Before the digital revolution, if you dissented from the narrow consensus imposed by the billionaire owners of the corporate media, all you could do was print your own primitive newsletter and send it by post to the handful of people who had heard of you.

That was the real cancel culture. And the proof is in the fact that many of those formerly obscure writers quickly found they could amass tens of thousands of followers – with no help from the traditional corporate media – when they had access to blogs and social media.

Silencing the left

Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of the open letter in Harper’s. Under cover of calls for tolerance, given credibility by Chomsky’s name, a proportion of those signing actually want to restrict the free speech of one section of the population – the part influenced by Chomsky.

They are not against the big cancel culture from which they have benefited for so long. They are against the small cancel culture – the new more chaotic, and more democratic, media environment we currently enjoy – in which they are for the first time being held to account for their views, on a range of issues including Israel.

Just as Weiss tried to get professors fired under the claim of academic freedom, many of these writers and public figures are using the banner of free speech to discredit speech they don’t like, speech that exposes the hollowness of their own positions.

Their criticisms of “cancel culture” are really about prioritising “responsible” speech, defined as speech shared by centrists and the right that shores up the status quo. They want a return to a time when the progressive left – those who seek to disrupt a manufactured consensus, who challenge the presumed verities of neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxy – had no real voice.

The new attacks on “cancel culture” echo the attacks on Bernie Sanders’ supporters, who were framed as “Bernie Bros” – the evidence-free allegation that he attracted a rabble of aggressive, women-hating men who tried to bully others into silence on social media.

Just as this claim was used to discredit Sanders’ policies, so the centre and the right now want to discredit the left more generally by implying that, without curbs, they too will bully everyone else into silence and submission through their “cancel culture”.

If this conclusion sounds unconvincing, consider that President Donald Trump could easily have added his name to the letter alongside Chomsky’s. Trump used his recent Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore to make similar points to the Harper’s letter. He at least was explicit in equating “cancel culture” with what he called “far-left fascism”:

“One of [the left’s] political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’ – driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism … This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly.”

Trump, in all his vulgarity, makes plain what the Harper’s letter, in all its cultural finery, obscures. That attacks on the new “cancel culture” are simply another front – alongside supposed concerns about “fake news” and “Russian trolls” – in the establishment’s efforts to limit speech by the left.

Attention redirected

This is not to deny that there is fake news on social media or that there are trolls, some of them even Russian. Rather, it is to point out that our attention is being redirected, and our concerns manipulated by a political agenda.

Despite the way it has been presented in the corporate media, fake news on social media has been mostly a problem of the right. And the worst examples of fake news – and the most influential – are found not on social media at all, but on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

What genuinely fake news on Facebook has ever rivalled the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that were knowingly peddled by a political elite and their stenographers in the corporate media. Those lies led directly to more than a million Iraqi deaths, turned millions more into refugees, destroyed an entire country, and fuelled a new type of nihilistic Islamic extremism whose effects we are still feeling.

Most of the worst lies from the current period – those that have obscured or justified US interference in Syria and Venezuela, or rationalised war crimes against Iran, or approved the continuing imprisonment of Julian Assange for exposing war crimes – can only be understood by turning our backs on the corporate media and looking to experts who can rarely find a platform outside of social media.

Algorithms changed

I say this as someone who has concerns about the fashionable focus on identity politics rather than class politics. I say it also as someone who rejects all forms of cancel culture – whether it is the old-style, “liberal” cancel culture that imposes on us a narrow “consensus” politics (the Overton window), or the new “leftwing” cancel culture that too often prefers to focus on easy cultural targets like Rowling than the structural corruption of western political systems.

But those who are impressed by the letter simply because Chomsky’s name is attached should beware. Just as “fake news” has provided the pretext for Google and social media platforms to change their algorithms to vanish leftwingers from searches and threads, just as “antisemitism” has been redefined to demonise the left, so too the supposed threat of “cancel culture” will be exploited to silence the left.

Protecting Bari Weiss and J K Rowling from a baying leftwing “mob” – a mob that that claims a right to challenge their views on Israel or trans issues – will become the new rallying cry from the establishment for action against “irresponsible” or “intimidating” speech.

Progressive leftists who join these calls out of irritation with the current focus on identity politics, or because they fear being labelled an antisemite, or because they mistakenly assume that the issue really is about free speech, will quickly find that they are the main targets.

In defending free speech, they will end up being the very ones who are silenced.

UPDATE:

You don’t criticise Chomsky however tangentially and respectfully – at least not from a left perspective – without expecting a whirlwind of opposition. But one issue that keeps being raised on my social media feeds in his defence is just plain wrong-headed, so I want to quickly address it. Here’s one my followers expressing the point succinctly:

“The sentiments in the letter stand or fall on their own merits, not on the characters or histories of some of the signatories, nor their future plans.”

The problem, as I’m sure Chomsky would explain in any other context, is that this letter fails not just because of the other people who signed it but on its merit too. And that’s because, as I explain above, it ignores the most oppressive and most established forms of cancel culture, as Chomsky should have been the first to notice.

Highlighting the small cancel culture, while ignoring the much larger, establishment-backed cancel culture, distorts our understanding of what is at stake and who wields power.

Chomsky unwittingly just helped a group of mostly establishment stooges skew our perceptions of free speech problems so that we side with them against ourselves. There is no way that can be a good thing.

UPDATE 2:

There are still people holding out against the idea that it harmed the left to have Chomsky sign this letter. And rather than address their points individually, let me try another way of explaining my argument:

Why has Chomsky not signed a letter backing the furore over “fake news”, even though there is some fake news on social media? Why has he not endorsed the “Bernie Bros” narrative, even though doubtless there are some bullying Sanders supporters on social media? Why has he not supported the campaign claiming the Labour party has an antisemitism problem, even though there are some antisemites in the Labour party (as there are everywhere)?

He hasn’t joined any of those campaigns for a very obvious reason – because he understands how power works, and that on the left you hit up, not down. You certainly don’t cheerlead those who are up as they hit down.

Chomsky understands this principle only too well because here he is setting it out in relation to Iran:

“Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.”

For exactly the same reason he has not joined those pillorying Iran – because his support would be used for nefarious ends – he shouldn’t have joined this campaign. He made a mistake. He’s fallible.

Also, this isn’t about the left eating itself. Really, Chomsky shouldn’t be the issue. The issue should be that a bunch of centrists and right-wingers used this letter to try to reinforce a narrative designed to harm the left, and lay the groundwork for further curbs on its access to social media. But because Chomsky signed the letter, many more leftists are now buying into that narrative – a narrative intended to harm them. That’s why Chomsky’s role cannot be ignored, nor his mistake glossed over.

UPDATE 3:

I had not anticipated how many ways people on the left might find to justify this letter.

Here’s the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech by the left when we are threatened with being “cancelled” – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.

I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won’t help the left because “cancel culture” is being framed – by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a “loony left” problem. It is a new iteration of the “politically correct gone mad” discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.

It won’t help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party’s record on being anti-racist.

The “cancel culture” furore isn’t interested in the fact that they were “cancelled”. Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling Israel and Jews.

Israel’s supporters will continue to win this battle by claiming that criticism of Israel “cancels” that country (“wipes it off the map”), “cancels” Israel’s Jewish population (“drives them into the sea”), and “cancels” Jews more generally (“denies a central component of modern Jewish identity”).

Greater awareness of “cancel culture” would not have saved Corbyn from the antisemitism smears because the kind of cancel culture that smeared Corbyn is never going to be defined as “cancelling”.

For anyone who wishes to see how this works in practice, watch Guardian columnist Owen Jones cave in – as he has done so often – to the power dynamics of the “cancel culture” discourse in this interview with Sky News. I actually agree with almost everything Jones says in this clip, apart from his joining yet again in the witch-hunt against Labour’s anti-Zionists. He doesn’t see that witch-hunt as “cancel culture”, and neither will anyone else with a large platform like his to protect:

This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

‘Cancel Culture’ Cannot Erase a Strong Argument

by Robert Jensen

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/cancel-culture-cannot-erase-a-strong-argument/

In the current squabble on the liberal/progressive/left side of the fence over so-called “cancel culture”—in which one open letter in favor of freedom of expression led to a rebuttal open letter in favor of a different

approach to freedom of expression—I can offer a report on the experience of being canceled.

Several times over the past few years I’ve been asked to speak by university or community groups, only to see those events canceled by organizers after someone complained that I am transphobic. At a couple of events that drew complaints but weren’t canceled, including one in a church, critics tried to disrupt my talk. None of the events was actually a talk on transgender issues. The complaint was that I should not be allowed to speak in progressive settings—about other feminist issues, the ecological crises, or anything else—because what I’ve written about the ideology of the transgender movement is said to be bigoted. A local radical bookstore that denounced me publicly went so far as to no longer carry my books, which I had given them free copies of for years.

If I were, in fact, a bigot, these cancelations would be easy to understand. I have never invited a bigot to speak in a class I taught or at an event I helped organize. I have invited people to speak who held some political views with which I did not agree (after all, if I only invited people who agreed with me on everything, I would be bored and lonely), but I have no interest in giving bigots a public platform.

The curious thing about these canceled/disrupted events is that no one ever pointed to anything I have written or said in public that is, in fact, bigoted. If transphobia is the fear or hatred of people who identify as transgender, nothing I have written or said is transphobic. Most of my critics simply assert that because I support the radical feminist critique of transgender ideology, I am by definition a bigot and transphobe.

Let me be clear: I’m not whining or asking for sympathy. I am a white man and a retired university professor with a stable income and a network of friends and comrades who offer support. I continue to do political and intellectual work I find rewarding and can find places to publish my work. While I don’t enjoy being insulted, these verbal attacks don’t have much effect on my life. I’m not concerned about myself but about the progressive community’s capacity for critical thinking and respectful debate.

In that spirit, here’s my contribution to that debate on transgenderism and the value of open discussion.

One of the basic points that radical feminists—along with many other writers—have made is that biological sex categories are real and exist outside of any particular cultural understanding of those categories. The terms “male” and “female” refer to those biological sex categories, while social norms about “masculinity” and “femininity” reflect how any particular society expects males and females to behave. That may seem obvious to many readers, but in some progressive and feminist circles it’s routine for people to say that those sex categories themselves are a “social construction.” I have been told that because I assert that biological sex categories are immutable, I am transphobic.

Is that claim defensible? Are sex categories a social construction?

Let’s think about reproduction. Some creatures reproduce asexually, through such processes as fission and budding, and some animals lay eggs. Most mammals, including all humans, reproduce sexually through the combination of a sperm and an egg (the two types of gamete cells) that leads to live birth.

Now, let’s think about respiration. Most aquatic creatures (whales and dolphins, which are mammals, are an exception) take in oxygen through gills. Mammals, including all humans, get oxygen by taking air into our lungs.

These descriptions of creatures’ reproduction and respiration are the result of a social process we call science, but they are not social constructions. We describe the world with human language, but what we describe doesn’t change just because we might change the language we use.

The term “social construction” implies that a reality can change through social processes. An example is marriage. What is a marriage? That depends on how a particular society constructs the concept. Change the definition—to include same-sex couples, for example—and the reality of who can get married changes.

But again, at the risk of seeming simplistic, these descriptions of reproduction and respiration systems cannot be changed by human action. We cannot socially construct ourselves into reproducing asexually or by laying eggs instead of reproducing sexually through fertilization of egg by sperm, any more than we could socially construct ourselves into breathing through gills instead of lungs.

When it comes to respiration, no one suggests that “lung-based respiration is a social construction.” If someone made such a claim most of us would say, “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.” Yet when it comes to reproduction, some people argue that “biological sex is a social construction,” which makes no more sense than claiming respiration is a social construction.

To be clear: Humans do create cultural meaning about sex differences. Humans who have a genetic makeup to produce sperm (males) and humans who have a genetic makeup to produce eggs (females) are treated differently in a variety of ways that go beyond roles in reproduction. [Note: A small percentage of the human population is born “intersex,” a term to mark those who do not fit clearly into male/female categories in terms of reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, and chromosomal structure. But the existence of intersex people does not change the realities of sexual reproduction, and they are not a third sex.]

In the struggle for women’s liberation, feminists in the 1970s began to use the term “gender” to describe the social construction of meaning around the differences in biological sex. When men would say, “Women are just not suited for political leadership,” for example, feminists would point out that this was not a biological fact to be accepted but a cultural norm to be resisted.

To state the obvious: Biological sex categories exist outside of human action. Social gender categories are a product of human action.

This observation leads to reasonable questions, which aren’t bigoted or transphobic: When those in the transgender movement assert that “trans women are women,” what do they mean? If they mean that a male human can somehow transform into a female human, the claim is incoherent because humans cannot change biological sex categories. If they mean that a male human can feel uncomfortable in the social gender category of “man” and prefer to live in a society’s gender category of “woman,” that is easy to understand. But it begs a question: Is the problem that one is assigned to the wrong category? Or is the problem that society has imposed gender categories that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary on everyone? And if the problem is in society’s gender categories, then is not the solution to analyze the system of patriarchy—institutionalized male dominance—that generates those rigid categories? Should we not seek to dismantle that system? Radical feminists argue for such a radical change in society.

These are the kinds of questions I have asked and the kinds of arguments I have made in writing and speaking. If I am wrong, then critics should point out mistakes and inaccuracies in my work. But if this radical feminist analysis is a strong one, then how can an accurate description of biological realities be evidence of bigotry or transphobia?

When I challenge the ideology of the transgender movement from a radical feminist perspective—which is sometimes referred to as “gender-critical,” critical of the way our culture socially constructs gender norms—I am not attacking people who identify as transgender. Instead, I am offering an alternative approach, one rooted in a collective struggle against patriarchal ideologies, institutions, and practices rather than a medicalized approach rooted in liberal individualism.

That’s why the label “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) is inaccurate. Radical feminists don’t exclude people who identify as transgender but rather offer what we believe is a more productive way to deal with the distress that people feel about gender norms that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary. That is not bigotry but politics. Our arguments are relevant to the ongoing debate about public policies, such as who is granted access to female-only spaces or who can compete in girls’ and women’s sports. They are relevant to concerns about the safety of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions. And radical feminism is grounded in compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria—instead of turning away from reality, we are suggesting ways to cope that we believe to be more productive for everyone.

Now, a final prediction. I expect that some people in the transgender movement will suggest that my reproduction/respiration analogy mocks people who identify as transgender by suggesting that they are ignorant. Let me state clearly: I do not think that. The analogy is offered to point out that an argument relevant to public policy doesn’t hold up. To critique a political position in good faith is not to mock the people who hold it but rather to take seriously one’s obligation to participate in democratic dialogue.

In a cancel culture, people who disagree with me may find it easy to ignore the argument and simply label me a bigot, on the reasoning that because I think the ideology of the transgender movement is open to critique, I obviously am transphobic.

But I want to make one final plea that people not do that, with two questions: If my argument is cogent—and there certainly are good reasons to reach that conclusion—why is it in the interests of anyone—including people who identify as transgender—to ignore such an argument? And how can people determine whether my argument is cogent if it is not part of the public conversation?

Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of several books, including The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men and Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully. His 2007 book, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, is available as a free PDF online at http://robertwjensen.org/articles/by-topic/gender-sexuality-and-pornography/getting-off-pornography-and-the-end-of-masculinity/

He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu or online at http://robertwjensen.org/.

Japan is furious at the U.S. after coronavirus outbreak at Marine bases in Okinawa

by Countercurrents Collective

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/japan-is-furious-at-the-u-s-after-coronavirus-outbreak-at-marine-bases-in-okinawa/

Japanese authorities have demanded answers from the U.S. after a large scale COVID-19 outbreak among U.S. Marines stationed in Japan’s southern prefecture of Okinawa. The U.S. military officials told the two bases have since been put in lockdown.

In recent days, 61 U.S. Marines have been infected with the virus, spread across two bases in the archipelago — which has long been a US military stronghold in the eastern Pacific.

At the Futenma Marine air station, 38 of the reported cases are. Another 23 occurred at Camp Hansen, a base that is home to around 6,000 U.S. Marines.

It was previously unknown exactly how many U.S. service personnel had contracted COVID-19, but the figures were released publicly after significant pressure on U.S. authorities by Tamaki.

Previously, the U.S. Marine Corps had vaguely referred to two “localized clusters” of infections, without giving a precise number of cases.

“After months with no confirmed COVID-19 infections on Okinawa, this week the Marine Corps experienced two localized clusters of individuals who tested positive for the virus,” a post on the official Marine Corps Installations Pacific Facebook page said.

All those infected are in isolation, the page added.

Okinawa prefecture has reported 145 cases of the virus with seven deaths.

The cluster of islands is home to 26,000 U.S. service personnel.

News of the outbreak among Marines comes as back home the US battles record or near-record numbers of new cases of the virus virtually every day and remains the pandemic’s global center.

Okinawa’s connection to the US military stems from the 1945-Allied invasion of the area in the final months of the Second World War. After an invasion was launched in April 1945, more than 100,000 people were killed during nearly two months of fighting on Okinawa Island, the prefecture’s largest island.

Okinawa is home to more than half of about 50,000 American troops based in Japan under a bilateral security pact, and the residents are sensitive to U.S. base-related problems. Many Okinawans have long complained about pollution, noise and crime.

Okinawans also oppose a planned relocation of Futenma Air Base from the current site in a densely populated area in the south to a less populated area on the east coast.

Denny Tamaki, the governor of Okinawa, has demanded a top U.S. military commander take tougher prevention measures and more transparency hours after officials were told about the coronavirus cases.

Denny Tamaki, in telephone talks late Saturday with Lt. Gen. H. Stacy Clardy, commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, demanded the U.S military increase disease prevention measures to maximum levels, stop sending personnel from the mainland U.S. to Okinawa and seal the bases, as well as provide more transparency.

“Okinawans are shocked by what we were told (by the U.S. military),” Tamaki told a news conference Saturday. “It is extremely regrettable that the infections are rapidly spreading among U.S. personnel when we Okinawans are doing our utmost to contain the infections.”

“We now have strong doubts that the U.S. military has taken adequate disease prevention measures,” he added.

“It is extremely regrettable that the infections are rapidly spreading among U.S. personnel when we Okinawans are doing our utmost to contain the infections,” Okinawa’s governor, Denny Tamaki, said at a press conference.

He has demanded an explanation after dozens of U.S. Marines were infected with the coronavirus.

Tamaki is half American, being born to a father in the U.S. military and a Japanese mother. He is the first American-Asian to take a seat in the Japanese House of Representatives.

Tamaki said he wants more talks with the U.S. military.

Okinawan officials also asked the Japanese government to pressure the U.S. side to provide details including the number of cases, seal off Futenma and Camp Hansen, and step up preventive measures.

Adding to their concern is quarantining of an unidentified number of U.S. service members arriving from the mainland U.S. for ongoing staff rotations at an off-base hotel due to shortage of space on base, officials said.

Okinawa has had about 150 cases of the coronavirus. In all, Japan has had about 21,000 cases and 1,000 deaths, with Tokyo reporting more than 200 new cases for a third straight day Saturday.

He has called for an immediate phone conference with U.S. military officials to discuss the number of infections and what anti-prevention measures were being taken.

“We have also received reports that people linked to the U.S. military have ventured out into the downtown area or participated in beach parties before and after the July 4th celebrations,” Tamaki added, urging those who had attended such gatherings to call a hotline number to be tracked and traced.

The Japanese central government is yet to comment.

The news follows an outbreak earlier this week of an unspecified number of people at Camp Butler, also in Okinawa.

Japan has seen a spike in coronavirus cases this week after managing to keep the increase in new cases to double digits through much of May and June.

Additional restrictions are also in place at the seven other Marine bases in the region after the spike in cases.

Those measures include closing non-essential facilities on-base, banning off-base activities and encouraging telework.

Foreign Policy Is Not An Easy Cake

by Haider Abbas

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/foreign-policy-is-not-an-easy-cake/

In BJP led NDA-1 Narendra Modi was quite much on a whirlwind tour of the world. It is estimated that by July 2020 he had visited 60 countries with many countries a couple of times 1 , US being the exception where he visited 6 times, the place where once he was banned to enter and he visited China 5 times. Now India stands sandwiched between the two. So overt Modi had become towards US that in Bishkek (June 13, 2019) , Kyrgystan capital, all the guests to the SCO conference stayed in Al Archa Presidential Palace and Modi stayed 30 kms away from it at Orion Hotel 2 . How detestable it must have been to India, when during the on-going stand-off at Ladakh, China refused to talk to Foreign Minister S Jaishanker pointing him to be a US man and instead to Ajit Doval on July 5, the same way China had refused to talk to Sushma Swaraj-during the Doklam face-off in 2017 3 , which had led to the present so-called de-escalation of Indian and Chinese troops.

The latest acrimony between India-China had started in May and very soon it became clear that China has intruded inside Indian territory. Why would then Modi government not enact a Balakot-2 and kill at least 300 Chinese forces the same way it had done then 4 ? If at all that had happened? Or was Balakot (Feb 2019) just a baton to stigmatise Muslims, by way as an extension of Pakistan and communalise the Hindus to win the elections (May 2019). The principle opposition parties like Congress, SP, BSP or RLD do not tend to ask such questions. The situation is very starkly hard as India lost its 20 soldiers at Galwan valley in Ladakh on June 15 and Modi, who had always advocated to take-on China with a ‘red-eye’ 5 visited Nimmu, Leh on July 3, around 250 kms from where soldiers had died 6 , where he addressed the wounded soldiers, who betrayed any signs of fatigue. Such shabby tactics work only in elections which are a distant 2024.It is ironic that Russia, despite defense minister Rajnath Singh visit to Moscow(June 25 ) refused to intervene between India-China (July 3)7 and China on the same day warned-India against making a ‘strategic-miscalculation’ 8 . Interestingly, on June 19, Modi in the all-party meeting has said that ‘no one had entered Indian territory or captured any military post. 9 Who briefed him so wrongly? The China state owned media CCTV on July 6 10, showed Indian army building bridge, helipad and tents, which ultimately led to a bloody-showdown (June 15) and this puts to a piquant situation as Modi had said that no one had intruded into our territory? So, isn’t it that China entered our area or does China considered it their area, which our government has so readily agreed to leave! Ironically, the voices are coming that China has made India to abdicate Ladakh and the new LAC is not the one agreed-upon in 1993 but of 1959. Hence, our forces which had been patrolling and building structures from the past 27 years have all been dislodged in a single one go, that too, with China not firing a single-bullet. Everyone in India is gaga that China has gone back to its LAC, whereas, the fact is that China has taken our ‘Galwan, Depsang, Hot Springs and Pangong Tso in Ladakh’ 11 . The picture of Chinese Army in total control of Pangong Tso where the last scene of the film Three-Idiots was shot is by itself quite telling.

The three landmark steps which changed India’s foreign policy quite dramatically is the opening of Israel embassy, Indo-US nuclear-civilian deal and voting against Iran at IAEA. India has long shrugged-off its NAM days and is with US for all purposes. Later on Modi’s much acclaimed Chabahar (Iran) project is now lying subdued. China, the rival to India from the day-one is now eyeing Gwador port ( Pakistan) more keenly, particularly in the wake of US deploying three-aircraft carriers in South China sea amid threats that US with India’s help would cut Malacca straits to choke China shipping routes 12. China has decided to upgrade Pakistan railways and link it from Kashgar(China) to Gwador by an investment of 7.2 billion USD 13 . China has also announced to invest 400 billion USD in Iran as a Bilateral-Cooperation Plan which prompted Iranian Foreign Minister Javed Zarif to tweet in Chinese.

Courtesy: https://en.mfa.ir/portal/newsview/600344/zarif-tweets-in-chinese

China has increased its military presence by leaps and bounds in Tibet as even during COVID-19 pandemic there were huge military exercises in Tibet. These exercises were done alongside when Doklam crisis was on stage. ‘ PLA ( in Feb 2020) Tibet Military Command had deployed helicopters, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and anti-aircraft missiles across the region, from Lhasa, which has an elevation of around 3,700 meters, to border defense frontlines at an altitude higher than 4,000 meters.’ 14 . The irredentist Nepal with a new-map, passed through its parliament on June 18 15, to the consternation of New Delhi is what can be called as the biggest surprise to Modi as Nepal being a Hindu country ( therefore a pocket-borough) has also stuck-off India’s big brother hegemony. Bangladesh is also trying to come out of India’s shadow as China has offered 97% tariff exemptions to Dhaka on its exports to China. Shiekh Hasina, the DU product, will be find it hard in the wake-up of new proposal 16 . Srilankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has ordered to ‘review’ its agreement signed with India and Japan in 2019, signalling strains in ties with India-courtesy China 17 . Srilanka turned to China as India had put on ‘hold’ its ‘debt- freeze’ request 18 . Bhutan the only ally to India is also under fire as China has claimed over its wildlife-sanctuary of 650 sg kms , an area close to Siliguri or Chicken Neck Corridor , close to the state of Arunachal Pradesh which China has claimed in its entirety. The move has obviously irked New Delhi more 19 as it is well aware of the ‘Palm and Five Fingers of Tibet ’ doctrine of Mao whose call ‘then’ has romanticised China right ‘now’. Mao had referred to Tibet as China’s right hand palm and Ladakh, Nepal, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Bhutan as finally to encircle India. 20 .

India now is left to look for US only and thereafter to Israel for intelligence-sharing 21 and has therefore invited Australia 22, Japan, Taiwan into South China sea to jointly take-on China. Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia are already feeling the heat as the entire region is to be disrupted, if the war, which is quite likely to take place, as Donald Trump is to put his stake into the polls by November. It may be recalled here that India has been playing host to Dalai Lama since 1959, 23 whom China is ‘looking for’ and by latest the Indian step of August 5, 2019 making Ladakh a UT and later Amit Shah calling to snatch Aksai Chin from China 24 seem to have got the ball-rolling in China. War-drums are beating as India, with its own long subdued sentiment to settle scores with China, after its debacle of 1962, has well-taken by byte of US and has made it to become a part of this ensuing tussle.

Meanwhile, US sponsored Ashraf Ghani government has refused to set-free 600 Taliban prisoners, as US has reneged the agreement it signed with Taliban, as this will finally make US to stay in Afghanistan, 25 so as to keep an everlasting eye on Russia and China too. There are reports that US might recognise Tibet as an independent country 26 which made China to slap visa-restrictions on US 27, and US in its place has also taken measures to evict 3,70,000 Chinese students 28 studying in US, a move which would prove detrimental to Indian students as well.

China and India have both respectively started to show a growing military activity in the Himalayan region. While India stands on a lower-ground, as defense minister Rajnath Singh running to place orders for S-400 missile system from Russia showed, which are to come by late 2021 29, there is a report published in US, a 14-page document, on June 22 2020 30 so as to warn US over the impeding China Electro Magnetic Pulse attack which would have the capacity to paralyse the whole of USA.

Modi and Amit Shah, however, have desisted to make birthday-wishes to the 85 years Dalai Lama 31, something which they both did last year. The duo are to find that foreign-policy is not an easy cake.

The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner. He is also a lawyer based in Lucknow.

References:

President Erdogan declares

Hagia Sophia a mosque after Turkish court ruling

by Abdus Sattar Ghazali

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/president-erdogan-declares-hagia-sophia-a-mosque-after-turkish-court-ruling/

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan declared Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia a mosque on Friday hours after a top court ruled the ancient building’s conversion to a museum by modern Turkey’s founding statesman was illegal.

The curious case of Sharjeel Usmani and Psychological Cognitive Distortion Disorder of islamophobic crowd

by Tarafdar Zaman

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/the-curious-case-of-sharjeel-usmani-and-psychological-cognitive-distortion-disorder-of-islamophobic-crowd/

Human right activist Sharjeel Usmani was picked by Uttar Pradesh police from his Azamgarh home on Wednesday evening. His brother says that around 5 p.m, five unknown people dressed in plain clothes came to their house and claimed to be from the Crime Branch. When they were asked who they are! “you don’t need to

know why we are here, Sharjeel knows why we are here. They pointed to Sharjeel, whose hand was tied. Sharjeel usmani was already arrested while he was out for a walk to drink tea

Battle Lines Drawn And Ready

by Vidyarthy Chatterjee

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/battle-lines-drawn-and-ready/

Debanjan Chakraborty’s recollection of the day when extreme rightists were heard issuing threats that they would replicate Indonesia (of 1965) on the JNU campus, should fill us with dread about what perhaps awaits not just this great seat of learning and questioning, but all of us who cherish the values that make for our secular democracy, and take pride in our Republican Constitution.

President Trump’s Potential Re-Election: Corporate Press, Wall Street And Shadowy Fascist Collusions

by Irwin Jerome

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/president-trumps-potential-re-election-corporate-press-wall-street-and-shadowy-fascist-collusions/

What this one now understands, at a deeper

emotional gut level, is why, in 2020, thousands more Americans are now attempting to emigrate to places like New Zealand, Australia, or anywhere else where they can breathe the air of whatever modicum of true democracy that still exists in a world that grows ever more plutocratic and authoritarian

48 years ago this American Ex-Pat fled to Canada in search of emotional, spiritual and political solace following the election of Richard Milhous Nixon as America’s 37th President. The shocking potentially-possible re-election of Donald Trump in 2020, eight Presidents later, has once more thrust into this ex-Pat’s conscious recall the many reasons why he chose Canada as the closest, most logical place of safety away from the crypto-fascism that Richard Nixon and his cronies of the world’s then budding radically anti-democratic neo-liberal movement first became manifest.

What this one now understands, at a deeper emotional gut level, is why, in 2020, thousands more Americans are now attempting to emigrate to places like New Zealand, Australia, or anywhere else where they can breathe the air of whatever modicum of true democracy that still exists in a world that grows ever more plutocratic and authoritarian.

Even the nightmarish statistical possibility that Trump could be re-elected in 2020, not by the American people themselves but once again by a handful of Electoral College rubber stampers or Supreme Court Justice’s, as the Republican Party similarly so deviously obviated and negated the previous clearly democratic elections of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, reveals the advanced degree to which America’s ever-deepening, ever-widening ideological drift has deteriorated over the years, away from a more truthful democracy towards a continuing progressively wrong-headed direction.

As the November date of another elections draws ever-nearer, the abject fear and apprehension elicited by the possible re-election of Donald Trump to another term continues to grow in the minds and hearts of too many of the American people as the on-going deterioration of their one-time democratic way of life, and lack of concern for the basic welfare of their fellow men and women have shown, as noted by the lack of PPE’s worn by of the citizenry for the protection of others and recent tepid political responses to the Corona virus Pandemic have shown. The reality of the United States drifting towards becoming a proto-fascist state now is never more palpable.

Given the abomination of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, this drift in America, and recent murder of George Floyd, as well as so many other innocent peoples of color, that ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, events have been gradually inching ever-closer towards yet another period of disastrous Civil War in its history. This time, instead of the civil war being fought between the ‘Blue Army of The Potomac’ in the North and the ‘Grey Army of The Confederacy’ in the South, it now is a fight between the political ‘Blues’ and ‘Reds’ in every hamlet, city and state who may live side by side one another yet who adhere to radically different visions for what the future of America and the world should look like in the future.

NATIVE AMERICANS ARE A SYMBOL OF DEFIANCE AGAINST TOTALITARIAN OPPRESSION

A line that was drawn in the sand and the gauntlet cast down with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and those shadow government figures like the Koch Brothers, and others of the same ilk behind the scenes who gather once again to coalesce around Trump’s re-election, will, if successful, indeed pull off perhaps the biggest corporate coup d’etat of all times in American history, far bigger than Wall Street’s gross financial thievery of 2008 ever dreamt of being. If all the levers and mechanisms of government are again tripped in their favor the future rape and pillage of the earth and all its rich resources that this blood-less coup represents, will radically accelerate more so the same neo-liberalism and internal warfare in American society that has been fomenting for years or; perhaps, one could even argue, since the nation’s very inception.

Unless somehow obviated, this drift will only accelerate to the point that brother will eventually end up being pitted against, brothers and sisters against brothers and sisters again, until finally the entire ‘State of the Union’ is violently rent apart. This could end up an epic struggle on a much grander, nation-wide scale between Corporate America, the World’s Cyber-Police State and those citizen patriots prepared, at all costs, to try to never allow this ideological take-over to ever continue.

Yet, four years ago, as a microcosm of this civil war that already was being played out by such a terrible ‘David vs Goliath’ reality, is what happened to the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and all their allies in North Dakota in 2016.

The Sioux, historically, already have planted deep within their psyche’s memories like the first time the latest high-tech-Gatling Machine Gun was used against them at Wounded Knee in 1890. They minds and hearts still ache from the U.S. Government, with President Lincoln in office, who approved the ceremonially ‘lynching’ of 38 of their most revered tribal elders, picked at random, because they had had the temerity to resist the U.S. Government’s desire to give their revered Minnesota homelands to incoming White settlers before ‘death marching’ the surviving Dakotah farther west into new territories. Yet, once again, with the support of the seven tribes of the Sioux Nation, nearly 300 other indigenous nations worldwide, and tens of thousands of their allies from a cross-section of non-indigenous environmental, labor and civil society movements, the Standing Rock Sioux once again pressed their defiant #NODAPL stand against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

They continued to persist in spite of being opposed by Energy Transfer Partners, one of Wall Street’s and Goldman Sach’s most powerful investment firms, who count among their investors none other than America’s new Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump himself who had a significant financial investment in Energy Transfer Partners. This serious conflict of interests, coupled with Trump’s already avowed support for: oil pipelines, the expansion of coal and other fossil fuel industries, and his denial of climate change that he then referred to as a Chinese Hoax; much in the same way he now has dismissed the Carona Pandemic as the Kung Flu, both of which became gross racial slurs if not criminally mishandled, potentially impeachable offenses.

The recent important landmark decision made in 2020, by US. District Court of the District of Columbia’s Judge Jesse Boasberg, finally declared the #NODAPL Sioux Uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline was correct, and judged the Army Corp of Engineer’s NEPA approval of the construction of the pipeline was in serious error and so adjudicated its shut down. This no doubt will again become one of the core issues of the 2020 Presidential election over what to ultimately do about the continued construction of Fossil Fuel Industry oil and gas pipelines, and what to do about the over-arching issue of Climate Change, that continues to embody one of the great issues of the day that still must be debated at great length between the candidates and yet still hasn’t been debated to any meaningful degree any more than has Universal Health Care For All.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the corporate-environmental-political deniers of climate change have successfully avoided putting the issue front and center before the American voter. It’s also not surprising that, just as during the 2016 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans alike also successfully avoided any real discussion of the specifics of exactly how, when or even a big IF they ever intend to opt for a Universal Medical Insurance System for All or truly convert America, any day soon, from a fossil-fuel based way of life to one totally reliant on renewable energy systems.

Of course this also would naturally entail a full-blown debate on how to create such human and natural systems that will create such things as a Liveable Hourly Wage or Guaranteed Monthly/Annually wage and a corollary self-sustaining way of life predicated upon the protection and preservation in perpetuity of the clean water, air and earth of America’s ecosystems; all of which would be very costly and bad for the profits and business of all the 1%’ers and those who are more interested in endlessly-expanding the American Empire at the expense of everyone else except themselves.

America’s State, Federal and military authorities have long known that all these issues one day will turn into an endless series of volatile, explosive flash points, like the #DAPL Uprising of 2016 and George Floyd riots of 2020, that will only serve as precursors of even more severe social unrest to quell that will require similar draconian measures of police state violence and impositions of Martial Law. For years, reactionary elements in government have been methodically, calculatingly, cunningly, devising operational contingency plans to quickly and effectively thwart whatever uprisings and revolts will arise.

The nation-wide spontaneous reaction to the murder of George Floyd and movement to remove offensive racist statues in America are two cases in point. The fascist, reactionary responses employed in both cases by state governments, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. the U.S. military and responses of its militarized state and local police forces, were essentially no different in the way these forces were aligned in 2016 against the Sioux and their allies when they resolutely stood against the illegal construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that was being perpetrated, out-of-sight, on the distant, isolated prairie lands and plains of North Dakota, where war-like military checkpoints and heavily-armed blockades sealed off admittance to any and all who were not officially authorized to enter the pipeline construction zone. It was as if what all was happening were actions against a top secret base, essential to national security. Such are the all-encompassing powers now of indifferent Corporate America and Wall Street interests.

HIGH-TECH AMERICAN MILITARY WEAPONRY USED AGAINST CIVILIAN PROTESTORS

American voters in 2020, before they vote for the Presidential candidate of their choice, should recall what President Trump and his Republican North Dakota political cronies authorized at the time in the way of the huge over-kill of the latest high-tech U.S. military weaponry.

Weaponry such as: MRAP’s (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected Armored military fighting vehicles), designed specifically to defend against improvised explosive (IED) attacks and ambushes, were all used as if North Dakota’s farmlands were somehow another reconstituted Iraq or Afghanistan, this time aligned against otherwise peaceful, unarmed, prayer groups of Sioux men women, children and elders, shaking nothing more at them than sacred rattles or eagle feather wands and smudge sticks as they chanted songs of healing.

Also standing at the ready were the Water Cannons that, if used indiscriminately, can cause severe injury, such as permanent damage to the eyes and retinas that can lead to complete loss of eyesight, or even death, or death by pneumonia, if used in the then freezing winter conditions of North Dakota. Other weaponry amassed by Trump and his allies included Long-Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD’s) and ultra-sonic grenades that can injure, incapacitate, or kill protestors. The ultra-high frequency blasts of these weapons typically used against teenage youth who are especially susceptible and suffer extreme discomfort whenever employed against them. The bio-effects of these acoustic weapons on the internal organs and central nervous system able to cause severe auditory reactions in the inner-ear and cardio-vascular system that can produce hypothermic and tissue-shearing reactions. Tests done on mice have shown significant lung and liver damage, as well, that increases rapidly as intensity is increased.

Other amassed weaponry and ammunition that were commonly used against these peaceful Sioux back in 2016, and even against their defenseless, much-beloved horses, included: plastic bullets and bean bag projectiles that can seriously injure or indiscriminately kill whomever they hit. Chemical Mace (tear gas) and Capsicum pepper spray were also extensively used at the time against DAPL protestors at dangerously-close ranges that caused temporary blindness among the protestors and, when used in large amounts created even more dangerous toxic effects. But, of course, as American history has shown, no military preparations are ever too strong or too excessive to be amassed when it comes to Native Americans or left-wing protestors who always have been deemed to be among America’s most dangerous, much feared wild-eyed citizens.

DNA SAMPLES & RETINA BIOMETRICS USED TO CREATE A DATA BASE OF PROTESTORS

Another strategy deviously devised by Trump and his fascist allies was North Dakota’s state police, and the huge entourage of assembled law enforcement pressed into service from at least four surrounding states, along with a mass of activated National Guard troops and U.S. Army personnel dressed in battle fatigues and full riot gear, who intimidated the protestors by forcing them to give DNA samples. When they refused they were then charged with a felony crime. Such a felony crime punitively required those so charged to remain in the area, at their own expense and inconvenience, for several months while awaiting a court appearance or suffer an arrest warrant being issued and extradition proceedings undertaken against them. No authorities ever admitted to taking such DNA samples from the protestors or why, in the first place, they are creating elaborate DNA profiles and a data base for innocent, Native Americans and their non-native allies that included Retina & Iris Biometric identification technology.

Trump and his amassed political, law enforcement and military forces never acknowledged at the time that, according to the letter of the law, if an individual isn’t charged with a serious offence they’re not required to ever give such samples. But State and Federal authorities cynically made every act around the DAPL construction zone a felony offense which allowed the authorities to use any force they deemed “reasonable” to obtain these samples. This DNA/Retinal Biometric identification data base now will be kept forever and made available to police, governmental security officials and intelligence agencies around the country.

By way of further harassment to dissuade protesters from supporting the Sioux people, those who are arrested, whether men or women, young or old, were forced to undergo humiliating strip searches and then ordered to squat and cough, ostensibly to check for hidden objects in their bodies cavities. Such indignities were perpetrated against even gentle, beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers and fathers alike before they were then shipped off to far-flung locations around the state, kept in solitary confinement or held in animal facilities unfit for humans; while their confiscated personal belonging, bedding, eagle feathers, rattles were commonly dumped along the roadside in isolated locations, left to the vagaries of the harsh North Dakota prairie winter weather.

A MOCKERY OF THE AMERICAN ETHOS & BILL OF RIGHTS

All this occurred in America – the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave – while few facts about such flagrant Civil-Human-First Amendment right violations were ever as widely reported as they should have been by the mainstream media. Of course, as American history has shown pesky, dissident Indians are best when kept out of mind and out of sight!

This thumbnail sketch of American Justice in such critical moments of societal tension is exactly when the true American ethos and mockery of its Bill of Rights is most self-evident. One of the chief safeguards and bulwarks of any democracy is the extent to which its free press is called upon to bear witness and expose such gross abuses and injustices from ever continuing to happen. That is the essence that separates free, democratic societies from the barbarity of totalitarian and other closed systems of governments and their less than humane ways of life.

Yet, whether it’s a case of the treatment of the Sioux and their allies, or those Americans of all races, colors and creeds who protested the murder of George Floyd and other innocent citizenry under the watch of President Trump, this was and never has been the case until too late in the day and even then primarily left up to whatever lone, courageous freelance journalist or independent/alternative news source made the supreme effort to put their boots on the ground to document and report all the atrocities. Yet even they are ever prevented from getting too close to observe what was actually occurring at the time or, if they did, were quickly arrested, their camera equipment seized and they were charged with some trumped up (pun intended) felonious trespass or inciting-a-riot charge simply for trying to document the news as journalists are trained to do.

A PRELUDE TO AMERICA’S NEXT CIVIL WAR

If Trump is re-elected President of the United States in 2020, the debacles that civil protests like those of the Sioux and Black Lives Matter represent will only continue to be the microcosm of the macrocosm of America’s eventual full-blown civil war that one day will occur over so many similar issues as America continues to decline as a nation. Eventually, the already much avowed penchant by the new Trump administration and its proposed Cabinet to use authoritarian Law & Order means to address, whatever severe civil unrest or world crisis occurs, will, in turn, only lead to still more widespread insurrections.

In the end, as more and more members among the progressive ‘Blue’ citizenry continue in search of harbors of peace, safety and real democracy elsewhere in the world, those prepared to stay and fight for the tenets of real democracy within the continental limits of the United States may finally become so fed-up with all the regressive antics of the ‘Red’ citizenry, and vice-versa, that both sides will feel they have no other choice but to both attempt to succeed from the union! Then hold onto your hats! That’s when the real fireworks will start!

Jerome Irwin is a freelance writer and author of “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a three volume account of his travels as a spiritual sojourner, during the 1960’s, 70’s & 80’s, among Native American & First Nation peoples in North America. It encompasses the Indigenous Spiritual Renaissance & Liberation Movements that emerged throughout North America during the civil rights era. In addition to being a long-time political activist and organizer, Irwin has authored over the years a number of environmental, political, cultural, spiritual articles with special emphasis on Native Americans, First Nations, Australian aboriginals, native peoples of Israel, Gaza, Palestine and Syria and especially Black Americans where Irwin retired as a special education teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Secondary where he worked with Black & Brown students from San Francisco’s Bayview and Hunter’s Point/Candlestick Park Districts. Irwin also is the publisher of The Wild Gentle Press. Email: jerome_irwin@yahoo.com

The Vet Conundrum and America’s Wars

by Nan Levinson

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/the-vet-conundrum-and-americas-wars/

If you still follow the mainstream media, you’re probably part of the 38% of registered voters who knew something about the op-ed Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) published in the New York Times early in June, exhorting the president to use the Insurrection Act to “restore order to our streets.” This was in response to what he called “anarchy” but others saw as peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. And yet that op-ed was actually less incendiary than an earlier tweet of Cotton’s demanding “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and

looters” or his Fox News call to send the 101st Airborne onto the streets of America.

If you still follow the mainstream media, you’re probably part of the 38% of registered voters who knew something about the op-ed Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) published in the New York Times early in June, exhorting the president to use the Insurrection Act to “restore order to our streets.” This was in response to what he called “anarchy” but others saw as peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. And yet that op-ed was actually less incendiary than an earlier tweet of Cotton’s demanding “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” or his Fox News call to send the 101st Airborne onto the streets of America.

Well!

Anger at the decision to run that op-ed exploded at the Times. While there are certainly grounds for umbrage over giving Cotton’s screed such blue-chip journalistic real estate, the take-away for me was that a senator and military veteran who had sworn to uphold the Constitution in both capacities was demanding that soldiers patrol American streets in that protest moment. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. Cotton doesn’t seem to have met a fight he doesn’t relish. Still, it got me thinking about what difference, if any, veterans make in Congress when it comes to whether (and how) the U.S. military is sent into battle.

The answer matters now, as many veterans will be on the ballot in November, including the challenger to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And veterans, we were told, are just what the doctor ordered. Back in 2018, in a Baltimore Sun op-ed promoting the idea of veterans running for Congress, retired four-star Army General Wesley Clark wrote that, because veterans “know the same sense of duty, commitment to results, and the integrity and discipline they have been trained to live by,” they are “uniquely well-positioned to fix” a broken Washington.

High on the list of brokens is American war-making, so I’d like to think that veteran-legislators, when in a position to do something about it, would use those qualities Clark extols to push Congress — and the White House — toward a less belligerent foreign policy. Veterans bring with them the authority of having been there. They know what it means to live with the consequences of congressional actions. They know the costs of war, especially the senseless wars of this century. And, increasingly, they’re fed up. Yet Congress, including its veteran-members, has allowed the U.S. military to stay mired in those conflicts, which continue largely off-stage as if propelled by some mysterious force everyone is powerless to stop.

What, then, has been the actual influence of the veterans now in Congress on this country’s war policy? For the twenty-first century, remarkably enough, the simple answer is: not much. It hasn’t always been this way, though, and could change again. Predicting history in the making is a fool’s errand.

The Veteran Effect

For much of our history, a stint in the military, preferably as an officer, was a useful, even necessary, starting point for a political career. Mitch McConnell, for instance, has acknowledged that he joined the Army Reserve early in his career because “it was smart politically.” (He lasted five weeks before being discharged for an eye condition and possibly thanks to political pull.)

In the military, young men, and more recently young women, practiced leadership skills, engaged in public service, made common cause with people of different backgrounds, and burnished their patriotic résumés, all of which was assumed to prepare them well for political life. That’s changed in recent years as the number of veterans in Congress has fallen significantly, but a change back may be coming as increasing numbers of Americans who fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan run for office, while the opinions of veterans more generally have taken a distinctly negative turn on America’s forever wars.

While voters don’t elect veterans just because they’re veterans, polls consistently find that the public has more confidence in the military than in any other American institution. Not everyone who’s been in that military thinks the same way, of course, and veteran status is but one determinant in a politician’s point of view. But a military usually has a powerful influence on its members, shaping their political, social, and decision-making attitudes and their ideas about the use of force as a means of achieving foreign-policy goals. Or so argue political scientists Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi who, in their influential book Choosing Your Battles, examined the impact of military experience on this country’s use of force abroad between 1816 and 1992, finding that it made a difference, sometimes a profound one. They concluded that the greater the proportion of veterans in the federal legislative and executive branches — what they termed “the policymaking elite” — the less likely the United States was to initiate wars of aggression. This “veteran effect,” however, was anything but straightforward. While civilian elites were more likely to go to war for ideological, imperial, or moral imperatives, military elites leaned more toward pragmatism and a clearer examination of the situation on the ground as reasons for sending the military into battle.

Both groups, however, were convinced that force works and that the United States goes to war only when provoked (never by being provocative). Moreover, the authors found that, once a war started, the more veterans in leadership roles, the bloodier and longer the use of force, while civilian elites were more willing to place constraints on how the military was used. No surprise there: no military likes civilians telling it how to fight “its” wars, a tension that has appeared in the conflicts launched or supported by every recent administration.

Bear with me now because the research only gets more intriguing. An international study demonstrated that, as the number of women in a national legislature increases, countries are more likely to intervene militarily for humanitarian reasons, but not for other ones. Research also has confirmed that American presidents raised in the South have been twice as likely as other presidents to use force in international conflicts, were less likely to back down militarily, and were more likely to win.

These days, the American public apparently doesn’t care much about veterans in the White House. Not counting George W. Bush’s questionable turn in the Texas National Guard, the last executive who did active military service was Vice President Al Gore. The last two presidential candidates who were veterans — John Kerry and John McCain — lost to civilians and, of the four veterans who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, only Pete Buttigieg got any traction through referring to his military experience (often). For the record, Joe Biden, whose two sons enlisted, avoided the draft via student deferments and asthma, while Donald Trump, who appointed more recent active-duty military officers to senior policy positions than at any time since World War II — before he fired most of them — side-stepped military service with the world’s most famous bone spurs.

Authorizing War

While the president as commander-in-chief is empowered to determine how wars are conducted, the Constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress, which has made a formal declaration in only five wars throughout American history. At the end of the (never formally declared) Vietnam War, heated debate over the president’s role in deploying troops led to the passage of the War Powers Act of 1973. Theoretically, it restricts a president from launching a military excursion abroad without informing Congress and getting congressional consent within 60 days. In this century, however, presidents have easily skirted such limitations. (Examples: Barack Obama in his Libyan intervention, Donald Trump in his bombing of Syria.) Meanwhile, Congress itself has funded any number of congressionally undeclared wars since 1973.

In this century, with that all-important power to fund wars, Congress has acted lavishly indeed. The current Pentagon budget, at almost $730 billion, is about 13 times the State Department’s, an indication of what’s truly central (and not) to U.S. foreign policy. Such budgets are authorized by the Armed Services Committees of both houses of Congress. At the moment, veterans make more than half of the Senate’s committee and more than one-third of the House’s.

Still, it’s tricky to judge the role and effect of the post-9/11 crop of veteran-legislators when it comes to influencing American war-making policies, since there are so relatively few of them. Their number has been in decline since the early 1970s, when nearly three-quarters of congressional representatives had been in the military, usually in combat. Now, that number is 17%: 17 veterans in the Senate (excluding five-week McConnell) and 75 in the House (including the nonvoting delegate from the Northern Mariana Islands). They come from 39 states, about two-thirds of them are Republicans, nearly all are white, most were officers, seven are women, and fewer than half were in combat. Small as their percentage may be, it’s still about twice that of veterans in the general population.

In a phone interview last month, Dan Caldwell, former executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-affiliated advocacy group, maintained that, while military service informs politicians’ views of war, it’s not a good indicator of their stance on foreign policy. I’ve thought that a better test might be voting patterns on authorizing war — if only such votes existed in recent years. Unfortunately, they’ve been rare indeed.

On September 18, 2001, Congress overwhelmingly approved an authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, against those the president might determine responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which turned out to mean an invasion of, and never-ending war in, Afghanistan. (Never mind that most of the hijackers who carried out the attacks that day were Saudis.) Everyone in Congress voted for that AUMF except the prescient Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), who had never served in the military and was concerned that the resolution would offer a blank check for limitless war, just as it proved to do.

The vote in October 2002 for a second AUMF, this one functionally preparing the way for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq the following spring, was at least modestly more controversial, passing the Senate by a vote of 77 to 23. Of the 38 then-senators who were veterans, 31 supported it. According to the Congressional Research Service, those two authorizations have been invoked ever since to cover at least 41 military actions across significant parts of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. The United States military has not won a sustained peace, nor achieved any of its long-term goals, through a single one of those conflicts.

Tracking congressional action on AUMFs, troop levels, arms sales, and escalating tensions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and other countries in Africa and elsewhere requires a finely tuned political GPS, which Congress has hardly had in these years. (Remember when members of the Senate were stunned to discover that this country even had troops in Niger after four of them died in a clash with a terror group there?) In the Trump years, Congress has seemed to grow more active on the subject of America’s global conflicts mainly when annoyed at being openly and insultingly bypassed or slighted. For example, when the administration glossed over the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 or when it didn’t alert Congress before the president ordered the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in a drone strike early this year.

In April 2019, in a rare bipartisan rebuke to President Trump, both houses of Congress invoked the War Powers Act to end U.S. support for the Saudi military and involvement in the ongoing war in Yemen. The president, however, vetoed the resolution and a Republican-controlled Senate failed to override him. As it turned out, none of that really mattered since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act to allow American companies to sell $8.1 billion in arms primarily to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. According to the New York Times, Congress has never successfully blocked an arms sale, but that didn’t keep it from trying again that July, sometimes with veteran-members like Ted Lieu (D-CA) in the lead. That resolution was vetoed, too. Steve Linick, until May the Inspector General at the State Department, was said to be investigating that huge arms sale when Trump fired him, reportedly at Pompeo’s urging.

Strange Bedfellows

On these and other issues of war, nearly all the veterans in Congress simply voted with their party. Yet, in the future, questions of how long to continue this country’s never-ending wars have the potential to forge unexpected alliances among them. That could be true even if they arrive at the same position for different reasons, as I discovered in conversations with some independent-minded veterans.

For instance, Warren Davidson, a West Point graduate, former Army Ranger, and the congressman from a solidly Republican district in Ohio, is one of the few veterans who, contrary to his party, voted consistently in 2019 to end U.S. association with the war in Yemen. He also took a stand this year against a future war with Iran. To understand his reasoning, you need to look at his personal history. He retired from the Army in 2000, in part, he told me, because the lack of a coherent strategy in Kosovo, along with Congress’s refusal to vote on U.S. involvement there, seemed all wrong to him. He cited costly and, to his mind, unnecessary projects, while the troops sent to fight that incursion went in ill-prepared. “I was like, can’t we just focus on what the military exists for? Which is fighting wars.”

Almost two decades later, a war he’s definitely done supporting is the one that started with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and continues without, as far as he’s concerned, either resolution or a strategy to end it. “I don’t know if we’re going to eventually vote on Afghani statehood,” he jokes to me, before turning serious and adding, “If we’re not going to leave, what are we still doing there?”

I talked as well to Will Goodwin, director of government relations at VoteVets, a political action committee for progressive veteran-candidates who believes that “there’s near universal agreement that the executive branch has far exceeded the intent of the 2002 AUMF.” Yet, to our shared frustration, nothing changes. Last year, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America joined in a startling alliance across the right-left divide in veteran politics to push for a rethinking of Washington’s foreign and military policies, beginning with the removal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria. Echoing the findings of scholars Feaver and Gelpi, Concerned Vets argues on its website for a new realism and restraint in deploying American military power globally and concludes: “As the greatest nation in the world, America shouldn’t fight endless wars.”

Goodwin and Caldwell each cite a recent Concerned Vets national poll that found 57% of veterans believe this country should be less militarily engaged in conflicts around the world. For a while now, majorities of them have felt that neither the Afghan nor Iraq wars were worth fighting. Among such vets, “interventionist” and “restrained” may be replacing “hawk” and “dove” as the terms du jour, but Caldwell agrees when I suggest that Congress — including many of its veteran-members — is now generally out-hawking the U.S. military. Think of it as the veteran conundrum.

While a voting record tells us something, it can be a reductive way of assessing a politician’s thinking. It doesn’t allow for the long (or, in the case of America’s wars, even longer) game. Much of the reluctance of veteran-politicians to buck their parties on war-making arises from the increasingly divisive partisan politics of this country. Republican politicians, in particular, may fear that an antiwar vote could come back to haunt them and representatives in both parties have loyalties to military contractors who support their campaigns or do business in their districts.

For all that, it’s hard not to add lack of courage to the mix — not exactly the greatest compliment you can pay a military veteran. Coming to terms with the role of war in foreign policy requires serious and sustained attention to a subject many politicians and voters have shown themselves eager to ignore for years now. The reasons for the current state of perpetual war are complex, but they’re not inexplicable. If veteran-legislators were to use their capacity for leadership, Congress could take on its true constitutional responsibility as the custodian of war — and peace — and life in this country could change accordingly.

Nan Levinson’s most recent book is War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built. A TomDispatch regular, she teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Originally published in TomDispatch

Freedom to Kill. Freedom to be Killed

by Dan Lieberman

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/freedom-to-kill-freedom-to-be-killed/

The coronavirus epidemic has made it obvious that the American government cannot care for its own citizens. Free enterprise comes ahead of enterprising solutions to an epidemic. Spurious and misinterpreted individual freedom comes ahead of duty to all. Political survival comes ahead of citizen survival. No attention to the observation that the dead cannot be revived, but economies can be reborn. Freedom to kill. Freedom to be killed.

United States governments have sent their children to kill and to be killed in many wars. Freely using mendacious stories, such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where Vietnam torpedo boats (motorboats) supposedly attacked U.S. warships close to the Vietnam shores, and the false allegation that Saddam Hussein was ready to manufacture nuclear weapons and wreak havoc on the United States, U.S. presidents have recklessly caused deaths to U.S. service personnel and to innocents from other nations. The COVID-19 epidemic is another example of the U.S. government exercising its freedom to kill, and the U.S. people exercising their freedom to be killed.

Except for World War II and the 1918 flu epidemic, no war has seen as many casualties in the United States as the war against the SARS CoV-2. The former claimed 416,800 Americans; the latter had deaths estimated to be about 675,000 occurring in the United States. As of July 9, the U.S. had 135,822 deaths from SARS CoV-2, as much as the major western European nations combined. With the entire world now infected by the Coronavirus, the United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s infected and 25 percent of the world’s deaths.

Statistics describe the magnitude of the U.S. military killing machine.

Vietnam War estimates of North Vietnam/Viet Cong military and civilian deaths range between 533,000 and 1,489,000. Most researchers agree on the figure of 65,000 civilians killed by American bombing. Guenter Lewy, an apologist for American intervention, America in Vietnam, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978, cites a figure of 666,000 North Vietnamese military and Viet Cong deaths.

Investigations of casualties in the Iraq 2003 war and the ongoing Afghanistan War appear in Body Count Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, First international edition – Washington DC, Berlin, Ottawa – March 2015, Population and Development Review, Volume 21, Issue 4 (Dec., 1995), 783-812

This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.

Add the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo War, Libyan War, and the Central American incursions — Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Dominican Public, Dominica, Cuba — and the number of foreign persons killed by U.S. forces is huge; not huge is the number of Americans who seem to care.

The useless wars and their body counts, foreign and American, are enough to label Americans and their leaders as insensitive violators of human life. The Coronavirus epidemic has accentuated that description, brought out the worst in America – lies, deceit, cowardice, sycophantism, sinecures, misguided loyalties, placing politics ahead of people, placing manufacturing product ahead of maintaining human life — freedom to kill and freedom to be killed.

Coronavirus Task Force

Briefings by the Coronavirus Task force, portrayed as an opportunity to inform the American public of the progress being made to defeat the virus, serve to hide the administration’s ineptness in the war against COVID-19. A public relations stunt and theater of the absurd, it acts as a first line of defense against those who might criticize the handling of the epidemic. The Task Force has not portrayed a well-coordinated national strategy and its members do not give the impression they communicate well with one another. Results dictate its effectiveness, and the results are that the United States, which has 4-5 percent of the world’s population, has 25% of the world’s COVID-19 cases and 25% of the world’s deaths.

Donald J. Trump heads the cast of characters who, like all actors, have a mission to refocus the audience from the real world to what is being staged. Trump started the farce by forcibly remarking that everyone who wants a novel coronavirus test can have one, and saying this one day after Vice President Mike Pence, the Task Force leader, said, “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”

Trying to present a good face, Trump stood next to arranged posters that characterized the United States as the leader in virus testing. “Way ahead of everyone,” proudly proclaimed Trump. When confronted with the fact that the U.S. is not ahead in testing/capita, Trump replied. “Lots of per capitas.” Then murmured, “We’re number one in everything.” Lies and deceit.

Vice-president, Mike Pence, appointed on January 29 to chair the Task Force, stays in the background and uses public meetings to praise his boss. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the efforts of the American people, we’ve saved lives, slowed the spread, and states are opening up again,” said Vice President Pence on May 15. Not so sure on June 30, when the VP cancelled trips to Arizona and Florida due to the virus upsurge. Accentuating the positive, Pence does not explain why two months after being appointed, the U.S. could only perform 100,000 daily tests. He boasts that the falling death rate from 2700 in one day to 260 in one day is a sign of tremendous progress without considering that before everyone dies a falling death rate has to happen and that the high figure of 2700 deaths in one day occurred to a lack of preparedness. Germany, with ¼ U.S. population had only 300 deaths on its worst day or 1/9 that of the U.S. worst days. Deceit and placing politics above people.

US health secretary Alex Azar, in one of his presentations, started with commending the Congo for halting a new Ebola contagion, a maneuver designed to slip into his discourse how the achievement was aided by the United States under the direction of President Trump — a slight massaging of the American psyche before massaging the bad news. Sycophancy.

Trump’s principal method of distracting from the incompetence in halting the epidemic is to state that the U.S. is number one in testing and has rising cases because it has more testing. Having the third largest population in the world demands more testing and testing/per capita is the important figure. Several of the world’s major nations — Russia, United kingdom, Spain — show more tests/capita. Italy and others had more tests/capita, but their testing has been slowed because of the decrease in their epidemics, while the U.S. tests/capita increases due to the increase in the contagions. Naturally, cases increase as testing increases, just as more innings pitched means more runs scored against the pitcher. Earned run average – runs earned divided by innings pitched and multiplied by nine, which makes it runs scored per game – determines a pitcher’s effectiveness. The ratio of new positive cases divided by a constant number of tests determines if the epidemic is continuing and spreading. The number of daily tests has been relatively constant the last few weeks, oscillating between 550 and 650 daily tests, while the percentage of positive tests has increased monotonically and dramatically, from a low of 4.4 percent on June 14 to 8.0 percent on July 8.

The following curve, from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states, tells the story.

The early testing was not random and focused on probable positive cases. The daily cases (bottom and darker bars and left numbers) rose with the number of tests (upper bars and numbers on left). Because most tests were dedicated to probable positive cases, the percentage of positive cases rose rapidly (numbers on the right). After sufficient testing became available to achieve more random sampling, the percentage of positive cases began to fall.

When testing reached 500,000 daily, the data inclined to more random sampling but not entirely – many tests favored possibly infected persons. After three months of epidemic, the number of infected persons appeared to be declining – not dramatically but slowly. On about June 15, the pattern changed and the number of infections and their percentages rose swiftly. The elevated number of new cases was not due to any elevated testing – number of daily tests were relatively constant; the increasing number of daily cases was due to more widespread contagion, with the percentage of positive tests going from 4.4 percent to 8.0 percent. Trump either does not understand the data or interprets it in his own beneficial manner, both serious conditions. The fact that nobody in his Task Force corrects him and informs the American people with the accurate information tells the real story behind this punishing farce.

Daily cases in Germany and Italy compared to those in the United States tell more of the story.

In Italy and Germany (right graph), the daily number of cases rose sharply to a peak of 6,000 daily and then declined monotonically to about 500 for Germany and 200 for Italy within three months. Daily testing remained at about the same levels for the last three months, and the ratio of new cases to new tests was about .8 percent for Germany, only 11 percent of the U.S. ratio, and .4 percent for Italy, only 5.5 percent of the U.S. ratio.

In the United States, the number of cases rose sharply to 35,000 daily, dropped slowly to 20,000 cases daily, and then rose again sharply to unimagined levels of 50,000-60,000 daily. The uptick contrasts sharply with Italy and Germany’s natural and steady decline in the number of cases. The difference in the curves is directly related to the difference in handling the situations. Italian and German authorities handled the situation well; U.S. authorities mishandled the situation.

The curve of the number of deaths in each of these nations completes the story.

Italy’s confirmed deaths (right graph) have levelled off at about 36,000. After four months of epidemic, its death rate has declined from about 900 deaths at its peak to about 20 deaths daily.

Germany’s confirmed deaths have levelled off at about 10,000. After almost four months of epidemic, its death rate has declined from about 300 deaths at its peak to about 10 deaths daily.

The U.S. confirmed deaths have surpassed 135,000 and are still rising; the second week of July has had days of almost 1000 deaths. After almost four months of epidemic, its death rate declined from about 2700 deaths at its peak to an average of about 600 deaths daily.

More important is that the German and Italian curves have become relatively flat, signifying that new deaths are scarcely occurring, while the U.S. curve is still on the upswing and has a ways to go before daily deaths are reduced to nil. Due to the careless actions of the American administrations, local, state and federal, and the inattention of the American public, Americans are dying daily and needlessly by the hundreds.

Careless actions leading to needless deaths are reflected by Trump constantly searching for a means to distract the American public from the ravages of the epidemic. He heralds, “The nation’s death rate from coronavirus is down despite the surge in new cases.” Well, it could not stay at previous high levels without everybody in the nation dying, and the shortages of testing services, hospital equipment and hospital beds, all of which contributed to a high death fate, could not remain as shortages forever. Why were there shortages and why was the daily death rate elevated in a nation that prides itself on its health care? Trump claims the medical supply cupboard was empty when he took office; if so, why did he not immediately correct the problem?

Trump’s latest weird departure from reality is that the U.S. has the lowest death rate. The U.S. has a lower number of deaths/million population than the five west European nations, except Germany, and magnitudes higher deaths/million population than more than 200 other nations. As previously shown, the U.S. death numbers remain high and are falling slower than that of the other major western nations. After falling to a low of 262 deaths on July 5, the number of deaths rose to 995 on July 8. The war has ended and we have 1000 killed in one day. The important statistic is that the United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s infected and 25 percent of the world’s deaths.

The Economy

Just as U.S. presidents have fought wars for economic reasons, and permitted U.S, soldiers to kill and be killed to assure economic superiority, the epidemic’s effects on the economy guide Trump’s battle plan for CoVid-19. He never says we had a healthy populace and now it is being ravished by the coronavirus; he often states, “We had this marvelous economy, the best in the world, the best ever, and the virus came and….”

Strange that this falsehood is not adequately countered. Since the late 1800s, the United States, except for some recessions, has had the most productive world economy. During the roaring twenties, the US had half of world production, and has only 1/8 of the same during the Trump administration. Almost every U.S. President has seen a substantial rise in the stock market during his administration. The Trump administration has only added to existing trends — nothing unusual or extraordinary. Trump’s claim of achieving “the best economy that the world has ever had” is a meaningless and self-aggrandizing play on words. When a multitude of factors, rather than a few handpicked factors, is considered, during his term in office, U.S. economic progress has been meager.

Trump’s boasts use the Gross Domestic product (GDP) and low employment figures to signify the ultimate greatness of the economy during his administration. These figures owe their stature to the service industry, which has become the more prominent aspect of the economy, the GDP, and employment. A great economy is a productive economy and not a service, or consumptive economy. Flipping hamburgers may decrease the unemployment; digesting hamburgers will increase the GDP. Trump’s economy runs on hamburgers.

Do U.S. presidents play much of a role in directing the economy, or is that more a function of the Federal Reserve and congressional budgets? The real GDP increased by $2.7 trillion during Trump’s first three years in office. During the time, the Federal Reserve reversed its decline in balance sheet to reach close to pre-Trump levels and the government deficit increased by $3.2 trillion. Free money buys a lot of GDP.

His program for returning the U.S. economic machine to normal indicates his lack of economic knowledge and business acumen. Opening service industries, such as restaurants and sports events employs low wage people who cannot afford the spending. Service customers are middle class wage earners who must first get back to work for a few weeks before having sufficient surplus funds to spend on leisure activities.

Trump’s discouraging attitude to wearing masks has economic damage.

National Mask Mandate Could Save up to 5 Percent of GDP
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/goldman-sachs-says-a-national-mask-mandate-could-slash-infections-and-save-economy-from-a-5percent-hit.html

According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, a national mask mandate could save 5 percent of the United States’ GDP amid surging coronavirus cases (WaPo). The analysis states, “A face mask mandate could potentially substitute for lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP.

Conclusion

Covid-19 has exposed faults in the American system. Operating well on the offense, the U.S, government has not adequately defended its citizens from the epidemic. Self-serving agendas and political expediency have been the administration’s guides to resolving the epidemic. Missing from U.S. response to SARS CoV-2 are an effective assimilation and interpretation of data, national coordination of activities, bipartisanship, and responding in a rapid and consistent manner.

Lack of knowledge and incoherent use of information comes from President Trump’s lips, “Cut the testing in half, and the number of cases will be halved.” By Trump’s logic, cut testing to zero and the problem is solved. An exact opposite to Trump’s thinking has occurred. While number of tests/day have remained relatively constant at about 600,000/day the number of cases have doubled from 25,000 to 50,000/day.

Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, who has a PhD from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, reveals in her recently released memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,”

His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently.

If Trump was manager of a baseball team that lost a game by 23 to zero and committed 15 errors, he would say, “The fans say we are terrific, that I m a terrific manager. Our players are incredible. Incredible. Great guys. Amazing, amazing people.”

Rolling Stone at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/covid-19-test-trump-admin-failed-disaster-995930/, long before the greater disaster unfolded, realized the disaster back in May.

Academic research from Imperial College in London, modeling the U.S. response, estimates that up to 90 percent of COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented had the U.S. moved to shut down by March 2nd. Instead, administration leaders dragged their feet for another two weeks, as the virus continued a silent, exponential assault. By early May, more than 75,000 Americans were dead.

By mid-July, almost 136,000 Americans were dead.

Dan Lieberman is DC based editor of Alternative Insight, a commentary on foreign policy and politics. He is author of the book A Third Party Can Succeed in America and a Kindle: The Artistry of a Dog.

India Needs High Jump, Not Yoga To Win War With China

by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/india-needs-high-jump-not-yoga-to-win-war-with-china/

Their promotion of pure vegetarianism and yoga among young population will not make our army match the Chinese army. Our young students are not meant to become

sanayasis or only the white colour employees but meant to become educated kisans and and well built jawans. That is the first condition for building a Aatmanirbhar India.

PUCL Demands immediate transfer of Varavara Rao to specialised Hospital!

by People's Union For Civil Liberties

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/pucl-demands-immediate-transfer-of-varavara-rao-to-specialised-hospital/

This statement is being issued in the present context of serious life threatening health condition of Varavara Rao. Varavara Rao who is 80 years old, has been suffering from various ailments including piles, prostate enlargement, coronary artery disease, oedema, hypertension and vertigo.

Kerala, Moplah Rebellion and Communalization

by Dr Ram Puniyani

https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/kerala-moplah-rebellion-and-communalization/

As such the deeper issue of the rebellion was the severe oppression of the poor peasants. The rebellion of peasantry had a long history in the area prior to

1921. As the Janmi landlords, backed by the police, the law courts and the revenue officials became more oppressive on the subordinate classes, the Moplah peasantry in its turn started to revolt against them. There were series of these uprisings first such outbreak took place in 1836 and later between 1836 and 1854, 22 similar uprisings occurred, of which the one of 1841 and 1849 were very serious.

Middleboro Review 2

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

CC News Letter 13 July - ‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it

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