“With only rare exceptions,” Norman Solomon writes, “US news media and members of Congress continue to dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, normalizing atrocities on a mass scale.” How did we end up in this Orwellian situation, where the reality of genocide is so thoroughly denied by pundits and politicians even as that genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes? How do we combat this level of inhumane violence and propaganda? Solomon, co-founder of Roots Action, joins The Marc Steiner Show for an urgent discussion about Israel’s manufactured genocide of Palestinians and how the media manufactures consent to, at best, hide and, at worst, justify Israel’s heinous actions.

Guests:

• Norman Solomon is the cofounder of RootsAction.org, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and the author of numerous books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of the Military Machine.

Additional resources:

• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “In too much of the US, Israel’s Gaza genocide has been made invisible”
• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani? Billionaires”
• Norman Solomon, Common Dreams, “Bombing Iran Is part of the USA’s repetition compulsion for war, war, war”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Janine Jackson interviewed RootsAction’s Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon about Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Party for the July 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York (5/20/25)

Janine Jackson: In early June, Raina Lipsitz explained for FAIR.org how media can write about a political candidate in a way that sows doubt about their fitness without attacking them directly. “How to Subtly Undermine a Promising Left-Wing Candidate,” it was headlined.

Since then, Zohran Mamdani, who New York magazine described as “Crash[ing] the Party,” has won the Democratic mayoral primary here in New York City, and things have got a lot less subtle. We have billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman declaring that he will bankroll anyone—you hear that? anyone—who will keep Mamdani out of office. Breaking news as we record, Ackman has said current Mayor Eric Adams will be recipient of his riches—not, as he’s declared, due to any particular fitness on Adams’ part, but because he fills the brief of not being Zohran Mamdani.

Suffice to say, fissures are being revealed, lines are being drawn. And whatever you think of Mamdani or New York City in particular, the question of whether the Democratic Party, as it is, wants to be a part of the future or not is on the table.

And here’s the thing: Plenty of people are not being scared off by the idea that things could change. Elite media have no place in their brain for this concept, and we can expect to confront coverage reflecting that.

Joining me now to talk about this revealing, interesting moment are two people near and dear. Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, author of Cable News Confidential and many other things.

Norman Solomon, also in at FAIR’s founding, is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and author of numerous titles, including War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out in a new paperback edition.

They are, together, co-founders of the independent initiative RootsAction, where Jeff is policy director and Norman is national director. They both join me now by phone from wherever they are. Jeff and Norman, welcome back to CounterSpin.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Janine.

Jeff Cohen: Great to be with you.

New York Times (6/16/25)

JJ: They’re talking about Mamdani, but they’re telling us about themselves, and the values they represent all the time. I’m talking about news media.

So it’s worth taking a second to breathe in this New York Times editorial; I call it the “sniff heard round the world”: “He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.”

There’s just one sentence, but there’s a lot to unpack. The “trade-offs” for good governance: It’s hard to think of a clearer example of media’s transmission of the idea that somehow politics isn’t really for people. So, Jeff, Norman, why would anyone ask why people are disaffected with electoral politics, when this is the smart person’s explanation of how they work?

JC: It’s pretty revealing when you look at New York Times editorials, because I think middle-of-the-road news consumers, liberal news consumers, they know not to trust Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Murdoch’s New York Post. People understand that’s right-wing propaganda.

The moment we’re in, Janine, as you’re suggesting, it’s a teachable moment. Now people are realizing you can’t trust the New York Times, either. You can’t trust these corporate centrist news outlets.

You bring up a Times editorial. Last August, the Times said that they were no longer going to make endorsements in local or state races, but eight days before this primary election, they wrote an editorial that you would’ve thought they wrote so that the billionaires who were funding Cuomo, with this dark money Super PAC known as Fix the City, that was funded by Michael Bloomberg, it was funded by DoorDash, it was funded by Bill Ackman, the hedge fund guy….

It’s almost like the New York Times wrote an editorial attacking Mamdani, after they said they would no longer be making endorsements in local races, it’s almost like they were writing it so they could provide ad copy to Fix the City and attack ads.

Norman Solomon: “Chief Justice John Jay…said, ‘Those who own the country ought to govern it.’ And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media.” (Photo: Cheryl Higgins.)

And I watched the NBA, the pro basketball playoffs, on WABC, channel 7 New York City, and they kept quoting the editorial in the attack ads against Zohran Mamdani. And one of the quotes was, “He’s got an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Another quote, “He shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.” And then, “We do not believe Mr. Mandani deserves a spot on New Yorker’s ballots.” So you had quote after quote.

When the editorial writers of the New York Times are writing an attack on a mayoral candidate like Zohran Mamdani, and they know that there’s a dark money PAC that’s spending millions of dollars to attack him—basically, they were writing copy. And every time a coach during the NBA playoffs called a timeout, I cringed, because I knew there’d be another attack ad that I’d be watching against Mamdani.

NS: To get into the sports metaphor, in the news department, they’re supposed to be referees; they don’t have their hands on the scale. They’re simply reporting the news. But the tonality of coverage, not just in the New York Times, but elite media generally, has been skeptical to alarmed to setting off the sirens that something terrible might be about to happen if the New York City voters don’t wake up.

And when the New York Times editorials talk about something like trade-offs, what they mean is that there is a transactional world that they believe is about democracy, or should be, their version of democracy. I recalled the statement from the first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, who said, “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And that’s really the tacit assumption and belief from the huge media that, after all, have billions of dollars in assets. That’s what they are accustomed to trying to look out for and protect. I think it’s notable that there’s a long pattern, I mean this has been going for decades.

New York Times (6/24/20)

And, again, we’re talking about Fox News and so forth, we’re talking about the New York Times, and in its editorials, the wisdom of its handpicked and, we’re told, very well-informed, erudite editorial board—-a few years ago when Bernie Sanders was surging in the primaries, and it looked like he might be the Democratic presidential nominee, the New York Times went into overdrive of alarm. They published a very big editorial saying Bernie Sanders is just not qualified to be president. He’s dangerous. These socialistic ideas just won’t work.

And after that, years went by, and the New York Times ran a huge editorial about how horrible it is that there’s so much income inequality in the United States, and it’s getting worse and worse, the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class and the poor.

And I think that is really a replica of the split screen approach of the New York Times and the media establishment, which is, on the one hand, to make sure that progressive candidates don’t get very far, if they have anything to say about it as news media outlets. And on the other hand, it’s sort of victims without victimizers, the moaning that there’s poverty and there’s income inequality that’s become so extreme, but there are no victimizers, and certainly Wall Street should be protected rather than attacked.

JC: The beauty of the Mamdani campaign—multiethnic, multigenerational—is there were thousands and thousands of volunteers knocking on doors, and many of them are young. This reminds me of the Bernie Sanders campaign that Norman brought up. Many of them are getting a real education that you can’t trust the right-wing media, and you also can’t trust the media that sees itself as corporate center or corporate liberal.

I love, in the editorial of the Times, eight days before the primary: “Many New Yorkers are understandably disappointed by the Democratic field.” Well, there were some New Yorkers disappointed: It was the New York Times editorial board, which was blasting Mamdani, but they couldn’t, as they usually do, endorse the corporate centrist Cuomo, or be nice to him, because of all of his scandals.

But when it comes to New Yorkers as a whole, they were pretty enthused by the Democratic field, because voter turnout was the biggest in 36 years. So I think what we’re getting here is a real education about how the media spectrum is center-right, including from the New York Times to the New York Post, from the Washington Post to the Washington Times, from MSNBC to Fox News, it’s basically a center-right spectrum. And when a candidate is outside of that spectrum, proposing ideas that are rarely heard inside the center-right spectrum, and is popular, that’s when even the corporate liberal, the corporate centrist media, freak out.

Truthout (6/27/25)

JJ: The first tool in the quiver is blatant Islamophobia. Folks will have seen Senator Gillibrand’s unhinged rant. And we see the distortion and the weaponization of antisemitism. And I just wonder, Norman, Jeff, what you have to say about the idea of using antisemitism as somehow a go-to to attack a candidate who has made very clear—and I mean, again, it’s not about Mamdani, it’s just about the utility of this tool to pull out against anyone who’s trying to do anything different.

NS: It’s really a very strong, powerful and pernicious combination of the zeal to, at all costs, protect corporate power and to protect Israel, which, after all, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both unequivocally reported last December, continues to engage in genocide in Gaza. So this is a very powerful and I think dangerous confluence of the concentration of power in the United States.

And all you have to do is read the screed that was put out, hours after Zohran Mamdani won the primary, by Bill Ackman, whose net worth is upward of $9 billion. And the accusation, and I’m quoting here, was “socialism has no place in the economic capital of our country,” and also accusing Mamdani of being anti-Israel and antisemitic. And so that combination is really part of the—I won’t say witches brew, it’s a warlock’s brew of the power structure in the capital of capitalism in the United States, in New York City.

And we’re seeing this in so many different guises, certainly in media, it is pervasive, whether it is the New York Times or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal, that’s a part of the theme. And it’s also coming from the power structure of the Democratic Party. The two most prominent New Yorkers in Congress, both, as we speak, are refusing to endorse Zohran Mamdani, even though they are Democrats, he’s a Democrat.

And we’ve had, for instance, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, of course from New York City, saying that when he’s asked whether he’s going to endorse, the reply is, Well, Mamdani has to show New Yorkers that his Jewish residents of New York City are people who he wants to protect. Well, that’s preposterous, and it’s really a way of saying that if you are not supporting Israel with its genocide, then we have reasons to think that you wouldn’t protect Jews, which is an absurdity with an agenda. It’s part of a decades-long scam in media and politics in the United States that equates Israel with Judaism, and Israel with quote “the Jewish people.”

JJ: And that erases masses of New York Jewish people and Jewish people around the country; they’re completely erased in this conversation, as though they were not speaking their truth and their values and their opposition to Israeli actions.

New York Times (6/25/25)

JC: Janine, there was a New York Times news story the day after Mamdani won the primary, and it had this reference that Mamdani’s “running on a far-left agenda, including positions that once were politically risky in New York—like describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, calling for new taxes on business.”

Well, FAIR has pointed out that, for decades, the polls have shown that even though we have a very narrow debate in mainstream media between center and right, that on economic issues, the public is very progressive. So Pew did a poll in March, 63% of all US adults want taxes raised on large businesses and corporations. It’s been that way for decades. And the New York Times is telling us that’s “far-left” or “politically risky”?

And then, on the issue of Israel, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs did a poll of US Jews 14 months ago, May of last year, and found that back then, 30% of US Jews and 38% of US Jews under the age of 44, they were calling what Israel was doing in Gaza genocide. Those numbers are much huger now. So there are a couple million Jews in the US that are calling what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide.”

And yet in so many Mamdani articles, I see this comment, “He has emphatically denied accusations that he is antisemitic,” but yet the New York Times and other news coverage keeps emphasizing it.

We have evidence from Trump’s comments and Trump’s policies about his racism; but you don’t see, in every other article or every third article, “Mr. Trump has emphatically denied accusations that he is a racist.” But you keep hearing this in Mamdani coverage, and there’s no evidence at all that he’s antisemitic. He’s just critical of Israeli action in Gaza and elsewhere, as are millions of Jews in this country and around the world.

New York Times (3/18/25)

NS: And very much, this kind of media coverage and messaging, it’s a toxic combination of Islamophobia and willingness to promote Israel as some kind of paragon of virtue, even while the genocide continues. I think there’s no clearer incarnation of this mix than Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, the most powerful Democrat, arguably, in the country. And a few months ago, Chuck Schumer, in an interview with a very approving Bret Stephens, the columnist of the New York Times, said, and I quote, “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.” Well, if that’s Chuck Schumer’s job, he clearly is falling short; he’s falling down on the job. And there’s a real panic here.

And then the other clearer aspect of what Chuck Schumer is providing nationally, in terms of politics and media, is his well-earned nickname, “the senator from Wall Street.” And that has been a nickname that he got decades ago. It got new heights just after the financial crisis of 2008. By the following year, the fall of 2009, he had received more than 15% of all the year’s contributions to every senator, from Wall Street.

And when you look at the last year’s donations, when the Schumer campaign committee had to report to the FEC, the six-year donor total for Schumer was $43 million. And more than a quarter of that just came from the financial sector, the real estate interest and law firms and lawyers.

Well, clearly, the real estate interests are going crazy right now, because they’re afraid of a rent freeze. They’re afraid of social justice. They want their outlandish profits to be remaining in full force. So this is really a class war being waged, through media and politics, from the top down.

JJ: And the energy that we get is very much “let’s you and him fight,” you know? Racism, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism are all tools that powerful rich people take up to protect their power and riches. It’s much beyond Mamdani, it’s beyond Bernie Sanders. It’s beyond any individual candidate. They will pit us against one another, and then maybe we won’t notice that we’re being robbed blind. That’s the big picture, in some ways.

JC: Agreed. The threat of Mamdani is he’s such a unifier, and that people of various ethnicities, generations, they’ve united behind him. They heard his message, in spite of the millions of dollars of attack ads, and mainstream media seem to be freaking out, from right to center.

Rising Up (7/2/25)

JJ: I think it’s important to understand that he’s not a unicorn. Sonali Kolhatkar had a show the other day: Across the country, there are people, there are candidates, rising up. There are people who are unapologetic, and they’re resisting the nightmare that you can put Trump’s face on, but it’s not his alone. We know it’s a bigger systemic problem.

We’re talking about Mamdani. Mamdani is not alone. There are folks rising up.

And let me just say, finally, we’re talking about a void, in terms of public understanding and information and energy, and it’s a void that you both have long identified. And that’s why RootsAction exists, right? It’s like people are tired of “Democrat versus Republican,” and want a place to put their energy that is neither of those.

NS: Yeah. Well, the media and corporate power structures, that are so interlaced, to put it mildly, they see genuine democracy as a terrible danger, and any semblance of horizontal discourse in media and politics, and people organizing and communicating with each other, that’s just a terrible threat to the hold that the gazillionaires have on the political process.

Jeff Cohen: “These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas.)

JC: These billionaires believe that there should be only two choices, and they should both be acceptable to the billionaires.

So you had AIPAC, powerful Israel-right-or-wrong lobby, intervening in Democratic primaries with Republican money, and knocking out progressive congressmembers like Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri. And once you knock out the progressive candidate, and you’ve chosen the Democrat and you’re a right-wing lobby, AIPAC, which loves the Republicans, well, you have both candidates in the race, you cannot lose. That’s not democracy.

And mainstream media understands that’s not democracy when they’re always pointing out, accurately, that the supreme leader of Iran gets to choose and sanction who gets to run for president, who doesn’t. Well, if you’re these billionaires, they believe they should choose both choices for you, and limit those choices, and they freak out when there’s more than just the two choices that they like.

JJ: And then I would say, media make it their job to pretend that, actually, you’re choosing from all the available, reasonable options.

JC: Yeah, if ever there was a time for news media, and thank God we have independent news outlets in New York and elsewhere, and we have nonprofit news outlets in New York and elsewhere. This is a really educational moment about how flawed the democratic system is, how the democracy is so constrained by this money.

And who never complains about campaign finance? The television channels that get all the money from the billionaires to attack a Mamdani in favor of a Cuomo. And now we’re going to get millions of dollars of ads against Mamdani in favor of a very corrupt incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.

But, again, this should be an educational moment about how limited democracy is, and journalists should be explaining the problems of democracy, when the billionaires can have this much power over every aspect of the race.

NS: As we’ve been saying, this is a teachable moment, and it’s a learnable moment. And so many people are learning that the gazillionaires are freaking out.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with authors, activists, RootsAction’s co-founders Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. You can start with their work online at RootsAction.org. It will not end there. Thank you, both Jeff and Norman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JC: Thank you, Janine.

NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Forty years ago today, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

• READ MORE: David Robie: New Zealand must do more for Pacific and confront nuclear powers
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(photo: Jim Naureckas)

This week on CounterSpin: White supremacy, Islamophobia and antisemitism are irreducible dangers in themselves. They are also tools that powerful, wealthy people take up to protect their power and wealth, and to deflect everyone’s attention from who is, actually, day to day, threatening all of our well-being. That brazenness (everything is in peril!)—and that skullduggery (you know who’s the problem? your different-looking neighbor!)—are both in evidence in corporate media’s hellbent, throw-it-all-at-the-wall campaign against democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

We’ll talk about how elite news media are Trojan-horsing their hatred for any ideas that threaten their ill-gotten gains, via very deep, very serious “concerns” about Mamdani as a person, with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, longtime political activists, writers and co-founders of the emphatically nonpartisan group RootsAction.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Gaza massacres.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

Illusions of safety

On a Monday morning in March 2024, Professor Susan Levine, the head of the anthropology department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), received an email from a man who claimed to be “Benjy ‘Ben’ Steingold” of Tzfat, the famous “holy city” near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Levine, who had never met or even heard of Steingold, was wary — the events of the previous weekend, when it came to the actions of her colleagues and fellow Jews, had shaken her badly. As she read from the top, her fears were confirmed.

“This may be the most important email you have ever received in your life,” the message began. “Please read to the end as it could give you the opportunity to change your eternal future.”

That “eternal future”, according to Steingold — or whatever the sender’s real name happened to be — would, unless Levine altered course, involve a particularly biblical form of punishment. Because she had allegedly “vilified Israel” by spreading “untruths and lies”, she was destined “in this incarnation or another reincarnation” to live under one of four enemy regimes: Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis or the Ayatollah’s Iran.

For the next 10 paragraphs, as payback for the motion that Levine had brought before the UCT senate the previous Friday, Steingold quoted a potent mix of Torah and American literature. Through it all, an undercurrent of menace flowed in a steady and self-assured stream, as exemplified in a citation from the Midrash (ancient commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures): “If you are kind to the cruel, in the end, you will be cruel to the kind.”

Two days later, on 13 March 2024, Levine would include these details in a sworn statement for the South African Police Service. At around the same time, the UCT authorities would deem the threat to her life significant enough to warrant full-time private security.

In the third paragraph of her statement, Levine would succinctly explain the motion that she had proposed to the university senate on 8 March:

“The motion was one which urged UCT to cut ties with Israeli institutions of higher education until such a time that they acknowledge the value of Palestinian lives in Gaza and [call] for an end to what the International Court of Justice calls ‘plausible’ [genocide].”

As it turned out, despite her refusal to rescind — aside from the Steingold threat, there was an attempt by UCT staff to place pressure on members of Levine’s family, with one colleague even passing on the message that her life would be “ruined” — the motion for an academic boycott did not win the requisite votes.

Still, although she could not know it at the time, Levine’s experience was fated to form a core part of one of the most significant court cases in the 195-year history of UCT.

Lodged by Professor Adam Mendelsohn on 22 August 2024, the Western Cape Division of the High Court application would attempt to overturn a pair of momentous resolutions that had been passed by the UCT council, the university’s highest decision-making body, on 22 June of that same year: first, the resolution not to adopt the international definition of anti-Semitism that encompassed anti-Zionism; and, second, the resolution to prohibit collaboration with academics or research groups affiliated to the Israel Defense Forces or the broader Israeli military establishment.

In its 150-page answering affidavit, the UCT council — represented by its chairperson, Norman Arendse — would refer to these resolutions jointly as the “Gaza resolutions,” thereby making it plain that they were a direct response to Israel’s ongoing military offensive and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On page 17 of the affidavit, shortly after reiterating UCT’s “zero-tolerance attitude to anti-Semitism” and acknowledging that the Jewish people had in the past been “victims of gross atrocities and genocide” themselves, Levine’s experience was mentioned for the first time.

The context, as the UCT papers explicitly stated, was that “those who expressed views in support of the Gaza resolutions” were likely to face “threats, intimidation or reprisal” if their identities were revealed. Mendelsohn, the affidavit alleged, was “probably aware” of Levine’s experience, and therefore should not have disregarded the “safety and wellbeing” of council members by going public with the case.

As examples of Mendelsohn’s alleged breach, UCT cited the publication of his founding and supplementary affidavits on Politicsweb, “with council members’ identities disclosed … regardless of the request [for anonymity]”. Also cited was reporting on the case “in pro-Israel and right-wing media in the United States”, specifically an article in Breitbart Media by its senior editor Joel Pollak, dated 15 March 2025.

What was not cited was a lengthy feature published in Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, on 24 September 2024. Titled “‘Scary Time to Be a Zionist’: Is Africa’s Top University No Longer a Welcoming Place for Jews?”, the piece, authored by South African journalist Tali Feinberg, quoted Mendelsohn extensively.

With a link to the original founding affidavit, published on Politicsweb on 29 August 2024, Feinberg noted that the resolutions (which were — and are — yet to be implemented) “should be seen within the broader context of South Africa’s fraught relations with Israel”.

Here, while Feinberg failed to mention the exceptionally close relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between the Israeli establishment and the white supremacist apartheid regime, she did observe that “the ruling African National Congress has long backed the Palestinians”. Likewise, while she failed to acknowledge the threats directed at Levine, the fears of certain members of UCT’s Zionist student body  — most of whom would only speak to her on condition of anonymity — were the central focus of her piece.

As graduate student Esther (not her real name) told Feinberg: “If someone assaulted me for wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ [‘The people of Israel live’], it wouldn’t be seen as anti-Semitic. It would be ‘anti-Zionist.’ The overlap between the two is no longer allowed to exist.”

In these inherently contested words, by Daily Maverick’s reckoning, lay the essence of the case. Levine, who in the interests of academic freedom allowed us access to her story and her name, was for us an archetypal local representative of a deeply disturbing global phenomenon — the split in world Jewry, between Zionists and anti-Zionists, that was now violently shaking the foundations of some of the most prestigious universities on Earth.

What if Einstein was an anti-Semite? 

“I am an academic, writer and member of the organisation South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), currently residing in Cape Town,” Jared Sacks testified. “I do not disclose my residential address because SAJFP members are often subject to harassment and threats from individuals who support Israel and the ideology of Zionism.”

As the opening paragraph of the application for the admission of the SAJFP as amicus curiae (friends of the court) in the case of Mendelsohn versus the UCT council, an affidavit that Sacks deposed on behalf of his organisation on 9 June 2025, the assertion — like Levine’s story — was far from hyperbolic. A mere six weeks before, as reported, Sacks had been physically assaulted by an attendee of the Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town, for the apparent offence of protesting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The incident, it turned out, was nothing new to Sacks. As a PhD graduate in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University in New York, he had served as a teaching fellow on undergraduate courses that delved into the highly flammable terrain of Palestinian rights.

“I have first-hand knowledge of the current climate of political repression related to pro-Palestine activism at universities in the United States,” Sacks declared in his affidavit, “including at Columbia, where a number of former colleagues and former students have been subject to harassment, doxxing, assaults, institutional pressure, procedurally unfair disciplinary processes, and unjust termination of employment due to their research and speech on Palestine.”

By Daily Maverick’s understanding, this anchoring of the UCT case in the international context, a point that the affidavit would repeat from multiple angles, was one of the primary motivations for the SAJFP applying as amicus curiae — in disentangling the religion of Judaism from the ideology of Zionism, Sacks testified, his organisation aimed to “debunk the anti-Semitic notion” that there had ever been anything like a homogenous Jewish perspective, either globally or locally, on the actions of the State of Israel.

Clearly, in emphasising “the role that anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews have played in shaping discourse on [the UCT campus]”, the affidavit was not only rejecting the attempt by Mendelsohn — director of the university’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies — to speak on behalf of all Jewish students and staff; it was also affirming the SAJFP’s support for free speech and institutional autonomy, particularly in the form of the Gaza resolutions.

But as important, “with billionaire philanthropists and politicians running roughshod over protected speech” at universities in the United States, the SAJFP was drawing attention to the “distinct possibility” that what had been playing out “at places like Harvard and Columbia” would “become an issue at South African universities as well”.

The question for the Western Cape Division of the High Court, of course, would be whether the SAJFP was overstating its case. And here, to offset Mendelsohn’s opposition to the application, the organisation came armed with expert witnesses.

At the top end, aside from the testimonies of Professor Steven Friedman and Professor Isaac Kamola, two local academics with deep knowledge of the issues, the SAJFP submitted an expert affidavit from Professor Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey — the same institute that Albert Einstein had joined in the 1930s, after seeking refuge from Nazi Germany.

Scott, as Sacks well knew, had long been a leading global critic of the definition of anti-Semitism as laid down by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA — the very definition that the UCT council had rejected in its Gaza resolutions of June 2024, and the very definition, as articulated in his founding papers, that Mendelsohn appeared to be insisting upon.

In paragraph 14 of her supporting affidavit, somewhat remarkably, Scott invoked the spirit of Einstein himself.

“Under the IHRA definition,” she testified, “rejecting the idea of a Jewish state with borders and an army, as Einstein once did, could land even the most famous Jew of the 20th century in the position of being accused of anti-Semitism. Though he was sympathetic to Zionism, Einstein’s comparison of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party massacres during the Nakba to the Nazi Party would have fallen afoul of [the IHRA definition]. In today’s academic world, he could have been fired for making such a comparison.”

In other words, according to Scott, a celebrated Jewish scholar in her mid-80s who had witnessed — and commented upon — some of the worst anti-democratic impulses of 20th-century America, the Zionist radicals of 2025 would have burnt no less a luminary than Einstein.

It was for this reason, she continued in her affidavit, that one of the original authors of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, came to regret what he called the “weaponising” of the definition, arguing — in an opinion piece for the Guardian published in 2019 — that “its misuse undermines efforts to detect and combat real instances of anti-Semitism”.

In the same vein, Scott added, this was also why more than a hundred Israeli and international civil society organisations, in April of 2023 — as reported, again, in the Guardian — “urged the United Nations to reject this definition”.

Ultimately, for Scott — as for Friedman and Kamola — the IHRA definition had quickly become anathema to the very idea of academic freedom. Scott, however, had been watching its effects play out on US Ivy League campuses in real time. Republican politicians, she testified, “many of them anti-Semites themselves”, were now using the “expressions of discomfort” of Zionist students and faculty to foreground anti-Semitism at the expense of all other forms of racial discrimination.

“[Zionist] students express their discomfort in terms of feeling ‘unsafe’ or ‘threatened,’” she added, “when there is little or no evidence of any physical danger they have experienced.”

Was this also the reality of Zionist fears on the UCT campus, as reported by Feinberg in Haaretz? The answer, it appeared, would be for the Western Cape Division of the High Court to decide.

For the moment, what could not be disputed was how things were turning out in the US. “The IHRA definition is now a political test for enjoying rights of free speech and academic freedom,” Scott testified. “Those who support Israel have rights of free expression, those who criticise it are punished and banned.”

The money problem

On a Saturday morning in mid-March 2025, almost a year to the day after UCT had assigned full-time security to Professor Levine, the university council was asked to make a difficult decision. With the threat of US federal funding cuts looming, most likely in the form of an abrupt halt to grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the executive orders of President Donald Trump could no longer be ignored — for one thing, as the largest recipients of NIH grants outside of the US, the university’s medical researchers were now at serious risk.

For another thing, as every member of the council was keenly aware, pro-Israel donors had already withdrawn funding — and more were threatening to withdraw — on the back of the Gaza resolutions of the previous year.

Although it had not been placed on the agenda for discussion, a motion was therefore tabled that the university should rescind the resolutions and withdraw its opposition to Mendelsohn’s high court application. In a closely contested vote, the motion failed to pass.

A few short hours later, as stated in the council’s answering affidavit, Joel Pollak of the right-wing US outlet Breitbart Media ran an article under the title, “South African university votes to keep boycott of Israel despite losing two-thirds of donor funding”. Before the end of the following week, in a similarly alarmist piece in the local Jewish Report (authored, like the Haaretz feature, by Feinberg), Rolene Marks of the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) would also note her concerns.

“This self-inflicted crisis threatens vital resources and undermines UCT’s global standing,” Marks stated on behalf of the SAZF. “It exposes the ideological capture of its leadership at the direct expense of academic freedom, financial stability and student welfare. Council members have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the university, yet some are wilfully disregarding this obligation. Their hatred of Israel outweighs their responsibility for UCT’s future.”

By Daily Maverick’s reading, this was an uncanny summary of one of the principal arguments from Mendelsohn’s founding affidavit of August 2024 — the notion that, by failing to take account of “UCT’s finances, existing relationships … and reputation”, the council had acted in an “irrational” manner.

But if Mendelsohn was indeed the source of the leaks, as alleged in the UCT answering papers, he would not admit as much to us. In response to a series of questions sent on 12 June, in which Daily Maverick also sought clarification on the publication of the names of council members, he noted his “surprise” at our email — we should “surely know”, he wrote, that it would be “improper” for him to respond while legal proceedings were pending.

Given Mendelsohn’s extensive interviews with Feinberg, we noted, we too were surprised. Still, irrespective of the source, the tenor of the media campaign against the UCT council was unmistakable — the underlying message was that the university had been financially punished for taking on the Zionists.

The SAJFP, for its part, was unimpressed. Referring in a footnote to an attendant statement from Mendelsohn’s supplementary affidavit, the organisation pointed out the obvious: “The assumption that ‘Jewish connected’ donors would have a homogeneous reaction to resolutions against Israel’s actions in Palestine is not only incorrect … it also panders to historical anti-Semitic tropes of a Jewish cabal working in unison and employing financial power to promote its political agendas.”

Of course, if the SAJFP was implying that there was no such cabal, the optics weren’t working in its favour.

Further down in its application, the organisation got at the heart of the matter, noting that since 7 October 2023 the “risk to university autonomy and academic freedom” from private donor money had become extreme, “particularly at Ivy League universities” in the US.

“Wealthy donors (with the support of politicians) have drawn on the IHRA’s conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism to pressure universities like Harvard and Columbia to ban student groups like Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine,” Sacks testified. “Donor pressure has also forced the suspension and expulsion of students for peaceful protests, the militarisation of campuses by armed police and the resignation of university presidents that sought to push back on their demands.”

Unlike Harvard, the SAJFP noted, where philanthropic contributions “made up about 45 percent of all revenue in the 2024 financial year”, private donor funding made up “only ten percent” of UCT’s revenue in 2024. Still, with the overall trend in South Africa towards “increased reliance on such funding”, one of the dangers — as the SAJFP saw it — was that donors’ political views would soon play an outsized role at our universities too.

A major milestone, according to the SAJFP, had been passed in the signing of a contract between UCT and the Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) in 2023, wherein the latter had agreed to fund the creation of a neuroscience institute (at a cost of R200-million over a 10-year period) on the proviso that UCT’s “zero-tolerance attitude to anti-Semitism” was anchored in the IHRA definition.

As the UCT council’s answering affidavit made clear, on 6 August 2024 — around six weeks after it had passed the Gaza resolutions — the DGF informed the university of its “decision to cancel … the donor agreement”. In total, the council devoted all of 24 paragraphs to the contract’s background, arguing that the IHRA clause had never been used or intended as a dealbreaker and expressing the hope that the relationship with the DGF could be restored.

But Mendelsohn, in his own papers, had left no room for doubt — not only had the UCT council sacrificed the neuroscience institute on the altar of its Gaza resolutions, he testified, it had burnt the chances of a mooted “R400- to R500-million from the DGF” for a new academic hospital too.

And likewise for the SAJFP (although from the diametrically opposed stance), there was nothing ambiguous about the DGF contract.

“If the DGF donor agreement were to be enforced,” Sacks testified, “this would mean that Zionism’s adherents on campus would be protected by the IHRA in the same way as a racial group or religion. Meanwhile, the agreement would institutionalise discrimination against those who oppose Zionism by branding them with the false label of anti-Semitism.”

The Western Cape Division of the High Court, then, was being asked to pass judgment on one of the most heated and divisive topics of the modern era — a touchpoint that was pitching students against professors, voters against politicians, Jews against Jews. For anti-Zionists like Levine and Sacks, the violence that their brethren were capable of was hardly a joke; but for Mendelsohn too, who in September 2024 had requested additional security from the university, the stakes were sky-high.

On 23 and 24 October 2025, the matter would be heard before a full Bench. Arguing for the admission of the SAJFP as amicus curiae would be Geoffrey Budlender, a graduate of UCT and one of the most respected senior counsels in South Africa. According to Sacks, Budlender had agreed to take on the case pro bono.

Given that Budlender, himself a Jew, had recently been honoured with the George Bizos Human Rights Award, it was likely to be an uncompromising show, a battle worthy of the oldest university in the country.

Would South Africa, as in the ICJ case, offer the world a lesson in moral courage?

Daily Maverick, for one, wasn’t betting against it.

• First published at Daily Maverick.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Bloom.

For the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it has been waging imperialistic overseas wars for a long, long time, and using its soldiers as cannon fodder. Most families of dead soldiers find it impossible to admit that their loved ones died in vain, even if courageously.

Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. Business goes on as usual.

Remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, Remember me, why did it have to be?

“All warfare is ghostly,” writes the classical scholar Norman O. Brown, “every army an exercitus feralis (a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.”

The world is littered with the corpses of wars’ victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation – but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.”

But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do – that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us about World War I in Dulce et Decorum Est:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

But that was long ago. War’s victims still fall everywhere, every day they are stilled in deserts, mountains, jungles, cities, houses, hospitals, schools, on the open roads, in bedrooms, in woods, in alleyways, crouched  in basements, killed from the sky, the ground, directly, remotely, by their own desperate hands, slowly in despair. Why count the ways, why count the victims – the truth is countless?

But we must count, not to wave a flag and march down Main Street to the sound of a marching band behind a fire engine with little kids on bikes and old men with rifles on their shoulders, but to galvanize ourselves to stand and oppose the warmongers who run the government.

Who can not weep and scream in opposition as the U.S./Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians? Savage slaughter for all to see but ignore.

Who is so blind as not to see the wars waged from administration to administration as smoothly as the change of seasons?

Once the warmongers shot down the U.S.’s great antiwar leaders. Now they suck the population in with Memorial Day sales and dreams of cookouts.

But business goes on as usual, as the great Roberta Flack sang so mournfully, “except that my brother is dead.” George M. Cohan was right: “The Yanks are coming.” They are always coming, but he was wrong to think it is ever over. It’s not supposed to be ever over.

And “over there,” Maha Khalil, a one year old Iraqi girl, was killed in the first few months of America’s criminal war against Iraq.

Mrs. Ngugen Thi Tau was slaughtered by U. S. soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam.

Mohammed Nidal Hisham Attallah, Ahmad Shadi Talal Al-Haddad, and Masa Mohammed Youssef Nasr are a few of at least 16,500 Palestinian children killed by Israel/U.S. in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Who knows all the dead in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Chile, throughout Africa, and all the other countries where the American military and the CIA have been dispatched? Who can grasp it? Their names mean nothing to those who didn’t know them, just as the endless names of the U.S. military dead (most drafted into a war they didn’t want or understand) that line the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are a sad blur to those who come to look but didn’t know the fallen. The same is even truer for anyone who views the Holocaust memorial in Boston where all one sees are rows and rows of concentration camp numbers; for every number a real person, each one reduced by the Nazis to six-digits tattooed on arms.

When we try to name and count wars’ victims, we are overwhelmed and stunned. Yet the wars persist. Like the pawns conscripted to fight them, the anonymous ghosts of all the victims murmur in our ears: Why?

Dylan sings:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.

But not all of the wars’ victim’s die. Vast numbers become “living corpses,” also mostly anonymous and forsaken. Across the world and here at home wherever the American war machine has set its sights, the lame and crippled struggle on, victims of bombs and bullets, napalm and white phosphorous, nuclear radiation, torture, biological weapons – all the grotesque weapons the ghouls of the weapons’ industries have conjured up from hell for their paymasters. Countless living victims, yes, but the weapons industries carefully count their bloody profits, as do those who invest in these companies while turning a blind eye to their own complicity.

Many of the wounds of war are psychological and spiritual. And so many of the victims suffer silently. Wars’ terrors follow them everywhere down their nights and down their days, and they can often find no escape from the nightmare images that populate their minds, flashing in and out. It’s beyond imagining the living hell of children worldwide reliving the sight of the bloodied mangled bodies of their parents at their feet, victims of bombs or death squads or perhaps “collateral damage,” as if any words or reasons could undue their everlasting trauma or cover up the radical evil of those who killed them

We owe it the wounded, dead, and tormented war victims everywhere to memorialize them with the words:

War is a lie, and only truth will free us.

And to stop marching with the drums drumming and the flags flying as if we are proud of the U.S. killing machine.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

As calls mount for President Joe Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee over concerns surrounding his mental and physical capacity to lead, we host a debate between two longtime members of the Democratic Party: Wajahat Ali, who recently authored a column subtitled “Biden Is Very Old and Out of Touch, and Here’s Why You Should Vote for Him,” and Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org, which sponsors the Step Aside Joe campaign. At 81 years old, Biden is already the oldest person to ever serve as president of the United States. His recent public appearances, including a poor performance at his first presidential debate against presumptive Republican Party nominee Donald Trump — who, if reelected, would be the second-oldest person to ever serve as president — have renewed questions about his health and ability. Biden has thus far resisted pressure to suspend his reelection campaign, even as the U.S. liberal coalition fractures over his candidacy. Ali says that now is the time to unite over a candidate to prevent a second Trump presidency, and that without a clear alternative, only Biden can run a winnable campaign. Meanwhile, Solomon argues that Biden’s performance thus far has already critically weakened his chances of winning the election. “Uniting behind a losing candidate is a bad idea,” he says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

About 20,000 protesters marched through the heart of New Zealand’s largest city Auckland today demonstrating against the unpopular Fast Track Approvals Bill that critics fear will ruin the country’s environment, undermine the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with indigenous Māori, and open the door to corruption.

Holding placards declaring the coalition government is “on the fast track to hell”, “Greedy lying racists”, “Preserve our reserves”, “Kill the bill”, “Climate justice now”, “I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues”, and other slogans such as “Ministers’ corruption = Nature’s destruction”, the protesters stretched 2km from Aotea Square down Queen St to the harbourside Te Komititanga Square.

One of the biggest banners, on a stunning green background, said “Toitu Te Tiriti: Toitu Te Taiao” — “Honour the treaty: Save the planet”.

• READ MORE: Fast track bill – thousands of protesters gather in Auckland
• Other fast track bill reports

Speaker after speaker warned about the risks of the draft legislation placing unprecedented power in the hands of three cabinet ministers to fast track development proposals with limited review processes and political oversight.

The bill states that its purpose “is to provide a streamlined decision-making process to facilitate the delivery of infrastructure and development projects with significant regional or national benefits”.

A former Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman, who is currently Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director, said the the draft law would be damaging for the country’s environment. He called on the protesters to fight against it.

“We must stop those who would destroy nature for profit,” he said.

“The vast majority of New Zealanders — nine out of 10 people, when you survey them — say they do not want development that causes more destruction of nature.”

Other protesters on he march against the “War on Nature” included Forest and Bird chief executive Nicola Toki and actress Robyn Malcolm.

RNZ News reports that Norman said: “Expect resistance from the people of Aotearoa. There will be no seabed mining off the coast of Taranaki. There will be no new coal mines in pristine native forest.

“We will stop them — just like we stopped the oil exploration companies. We disrupted them until they gave up.”

The government would be on the wrong side of history if it ignored protesters, Norman said.

Public service job cuts ‘deeply distressing’
In Wellington, reports RNZ News, thousands of people congregated in the city to protest government cuts to public service jobs.

Protesters met at the Pukeahu National War Memorial for speeches before walking down to the waterfront.

Public Service Association spokesperson Fleur Fitzsimons told the crowd that everyone at the rally was sending a message of resistance, opposition and protest to the government.

She accused the coalition government of having an agenda against the public service, and said the union was seeing the destructive impact of government policies first hand.

“It is causing grief, anguish, stress, emotional collapse,” she said.

“It is deeply distressing to the workers who are losing their jobs. They are not only distressed for themselves, and their families, but they are deeply worried about what will happen to the important work they are doing on behalf of us all.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

(New Press, 2023)

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own.  If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy  “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012,  90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery.  In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

(New Press, 2023)

Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.

FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”

One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.

Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”

Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own.  If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars

Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).

As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy  “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling

Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”

As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012,  90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery.  In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths  appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Bryce Greene.

It’s the true believers — we who are schooled on republican virtues, democratic procedures, universal equality, and fair play that are said to be deeply embedded in the US experience — who become radical crusaders when their beliefs are shattered by the truth.

The true believers are cast as traitors to humanity, nation, race, or creed when they turn on those who foster a false loyalty or cheap patriotism based on lies or deception.

The late Daniel Ellsberg was one of these soldiers of truth. Once a handmaiden for US foreign policy, experience brought home the murderous, cynical, and false execution of that policy. At great risk — even physical risk — Ellsberg bravely cast aside his privileged, highly respected position and exposed the ugly, hypocritical US intervention in Southeast Asia, an engagement that led to and fueled the savage destruction wrought by the Indochinese war. Ellsberg devoted the rest of his life to opposing the abuse of his once deeply felt ideals.

Thinking of Ellsberg before his death while reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn that Bridge When I Get to It!, I could not help but see Finkelstein cast in a similar light. Certainly, they are different people, with different burdens, and different circumstances. But they are alike in important ways: both have shown uncommon courage and uncompromising idealism. Both have known the lash of ostracism.

Where Ellsberg’s idealism was violated by the US empire’s betrayal of his ideals, Finkelstein’s idealism forces him to stand almost alone against cherished beliefs that none dare challenge. Ellsberg confronted US power, Finkelstein attacks the sanctity of conventional, officially-protected thought.

Finkelstein’s new book is not easy to discuss. It is many things — not in a bad way, but in a personal, boldly eccentric way.  He is a remarkably good writer: a careful grammarian, a skilled wordsmith, with a keen, logical mind. No doubt the logical construction of his arguments inflames his foes even further.

The book is divided into two sections: 1.) an extensive argument against the latest fashions of the academic left, capped with an effective critique of their embodiment, Barack Obama, and 2.) an ambitious attempt to defend a John Stuart Mill-inspired account of academic freedom and academic responsibility.

In Part I (Identity Politics and Cancel Culture), Finkelstein effectively foregoes theoretical foreplay and leaps right into discussions of some of today’s more prominent, celebrated figures, locating them and their ideas within the framework of a purported remolding of anti-racism. With the writings and initiatives of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi, Finkelstein finds a bogus path to curing racism as a societal cancer, a path strikingly deviated from the tradition of his (and my) past heroes and heroines in the struggle against racism and racial inequality.

Finkelstein carefully, and in great detail, challenges the scholarship of the writers and the political weight of their ideas. His own scholarship is impeccable, though he favors the time-honored effectiveness of hitting the nail on its head until the head breaks off! He is relentless.

To many of the young, college-educated activists who have come to understand the scourge of racism though Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi, and their colleagues, the Finkelstein critique will itself appear as racially insensitive, an attack on identity that is truly worthy of cancellation.

Finkelstein counters this “Little Red Book” mob reaction by extensively and passionately quoting from his own anti-racist icons: Frederick Douglass, WEB DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King. His brilliant contraposing of DuBois against Kendi is a veritable seminar in deep and productive anti-racist thinking. The contrast alone diminishes Kendi’s thought. Shrewdly, Finkelstein lets the history of sacrifice, defiance, activism, and razor-sharp analysis by these giants of human advancement address the shallow bromides of smug, secure, petty-bourgeois academics.

From the perch of an insular, arid academic office, the question of racism is a question of manners and self-styled group recognition; from the path that Douglass, DuBois, Robeson, and King trod, the question of racism was a question of emancipation, ending exploitation, and achieving economic security.

If I had my preferences, the author would have broadened his attack beyond these mostly African-American intellectuals to include the vast body of US academics engaged in navel-gazing and supplicating before the ruling class. When leading philosophers are reduced to pondering the depth of “sentiments” and public intellectuals are selling the empty, emotive catch-all-that-we-hate concept of “authoritarianism,” the commodification of anti-racism earns no special place. Intellectual life as contained in academia in general is numbing.

Finkelstein expresses a well-earned contempt for Barack Obama, his hypocrisy, and his self-regard. In many ways, Obama gave agency to appearance over substance in a way similar to the scribblings of Crenshaw, Coates, DiAngelo, et al. Obama sold the appearance of change and delivered none.

By contrast, Finkelstein casts Bernie Sanders as an authentic agent of change shackled by the Democratic Party leadership. But surely Sanders knew about those shackles and did little to break them. In the end, he, too, sold the appearance of change and delivered none, though perhaps not as cynically as did Obama.

Finkelstein’s politics are influenced by his earlier immersion in Gang of Four Maoism. Forgoing his parents’ Popular Front leftism for REAL revolution, the author’s fingers were burnt. Like so many recovering Little Red Bookers, he now struggles to imagine any politics not going through the Democratic Party, despite his contempt for that party. Apparently, Marxist “orthodoxy” was never considered an option.

Which brings us quite naturally to the other part of Finkelstein’s book, Part II (Academic Freedom). Like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and a handful of other US commentators, Finkelstein is part of a dying breed — the true, classic liberal who believes passionately and deeply in freedom of speech, a free press, free academic inquiry, and many other freedoms associated with enlightenment values.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, history has shown these rights to be rights of convenience. The bourgeois state recognizes these rights when it is useful for propaganda purposes or when the state detects no threat, should they be exercised. Otherwise, when the state is made insecure by freedom of speech, assembly, movement, etc., these rights are squelched.

In political theory, rights of convenience are actually privileges, where privileges are the warrants granted capriciously by those in power. With the end of the Cold War and its propaganda function, the pretense of universal rights, of absolute freedoms, is just that — a pretense. The current tribalism around both red and blue allegiances demonstrates how shallow goes the popular commitment to the Bill of Rights.

Yet Finkelstein, like other true-believers — nineteenth-century liberals, their admirers, and a smattering of libertarians — still clings to these beliefs and attempts to support them in a world grown cynical.

He wrestles with the idea that a university or its educational counterparts should have freedom of inquiry and its necessary condition, freedom of speech. He relies almost exclusively on John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarian justification, citing the potential and actual good that comes from accepting these principles (rules).

At the same time, Finkelstein concedes the obvious counterexamples (e.g., advocating paedophilia) that nullify the universality of Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism. He and we are left with a principle neither absolute nor real-world operant.

For Finkelstein and other enlightenment liberals, academia should be a marketplace of ideas, when, in fact, it is a class war. More broadly, the battle for ideas is waged between classes.

Nonetheless, we should embrace the idealism of Finkelstein and the other doctrinaire liberals, but without illusions. Absent a measure of free speech, the little chance we have of getting radical ideas past the gatekeepers drops sharply.

My reservations aside, Finkelstein and his book are treasures. At a time of mind-numbing conformity and groveling before power, a figure who defies conventions and takes us where the thought police do not want us to go should be cherished.

I’m reminded of my teenage epiphany when I found and read Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Today, I would disagree with nearly everything in the book, but at a time of stifling Cold War conformity, it broke those chains for me.

Finkelstein, too, is a chain-breaker.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Godels.

The post The so-called “War on Terror” Featuring Norman Solomon / Lee Camp Discusses His Book “Dangerous Ideas” appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Fifty years ago 242 men left New Zealand on a mission to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia.

The crew of HMNZS Otago, and later the frigate Canterbury, were sent there to protest against French nuclear testing.

Little did they know that the fallout from the mission would continue decades later, with health problems and worries about the effects on their children and future generations.

• READ MORE: France has underestimated impact of nuclear tests iin French Polynesia, research finds
• Other French nuclear testing reports

Prime Minister Norman Kirk farewelled the Otago on 28 June 1973.

Twenty-year-old sailor Tony Cox was on board.

“I was standing on the deck along with a lot of other guys, and Norman Kirk was with the skipper, talking to various members of the crew.

“He said to me, ‘Don’t worry about anything, son. Nothing’s going to happen, but if it does, we will look after you’.”

Witnessed atmospheric test
A month later the Otago witnessed an atmospheric test just over 20 miles away.

The crew initially sheltered below deck.

“As soon as the flash had gone they said we could go up and have a look, so [we went] up the ladder and opened the door and out we went,” Cox said.

“It was a bit disappointing. It wasn’t like the movies. It was almost a straight line to start with, then it started to form into a mushroom. It had a pinky, grey colour to it.”

Fellow Otago crewman Ant Kennedy turned 20 at Moruroa.

“I got married at Honolulu. I didn’t know I was going to be married then. We were on the way to southeast Asia to be part of New Zealand’s deployment there.

“Then we were called back and it was jokingly called Norm’s Mystery Tour.”

Labour government opposed
France started nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1960s and Kirk’s Labour government was staunchly opposed.

Cabinet Minister Fraser Colman travelled there on the Otago, and transferred to the HMNZS Canterbury when it took over protest duties.

Aboard the Canterbury, Gavin Smith also witnessed a test.

“We were inside a gas-tight citadel for the explosion. We never thought about the consequences of it until much later, and then people started dying and getting crook.

“We realised that the seawater around there was contaminated. The seawater was used on board for washing vegetables. We washed in it, bathed in it.”

The water was desalinated, but that didn’t remove radiation, as Cox recalls.

“The water around us was contaminated. We didn’t know that,” he said.

‘No fish, no seabirds’
“There were no fish there, so that was a waste of time. There were no sea birds anywhere. They were well dead, gone. It was totally different to all the different oceans I’ve been through over the years.”

Kennedy said his health was okay, but he knew he was one of the lucky ones.

He remembers one fellow sailor needing surgery.

“He had this bad cancerous stuff on his face. And a guy called Cloggs. He was a signalman on Canterbury. He was at one of our reunions, and basically he came to that and that was that.

“He was younger than me.

“I thought, holy hell. This seems to be a bit out of the ordinary. You’d expect fit, young sailors to live into their 80s.”

About 20 years ago Cox’s oncologist told him he had a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Excessive doses of radiation
“[He said], ‘The only time you get this type of cancer is from excessive doses of radiation. Where would you have got that from?’

“I said, ‘I did go to a nuclear bomb test,’ and he said, ‘That’ll do it’.”

Veterans’ costs are covered for sickness arising from service.

But as Smith, the president of the Moruroa Nuclear Veterans group, said, there was concern about subsequent generations.

The group, formed in 2013, is active in trying to get recognition for possible effects on their families.

“Our children and grandchildren have oddball illnesses and we would like to know if that was a result of our service at Moruroa,” Smith said.

“Are we passing on bad genes or are we not?

Asking for DNA testing
“All we ask is for DNA testing to be done and when science can prove that fact one way or another we have an answer.

“If science does prove we have passed on bad genes we would simply like our children and grandchildren and the next generations to be looked after if they have an illness that’s related to our service.”

So far, that has not happened, despite regular lobbying of officials and ministers.

For Donna Weir, whose father Allan Hamilton was aboard the Canterbury, that concern was real.

Hamilton died in 2021 from aggressive cancer.

“I have had fertility problems, multiple miscarriages and things like that. We have kids who have problems that nobody can explain, if that makes sense.”

That included stomach and vision problems.

So much trouble
Weir said one older sister, who was conceived before 1973, had no such trouble.

The nuclear test veterans deserved greater recognition for their service, she said.

“They’re some of New Zealand’s most forgotten heroes, I think.

“I asked Dad if he knew then what we now know, would you have gone. His answer was quite simply, ‘I signed up to serve my country and that’s what I did.'”

French nuclear tests in the Pacific went underground from 1974, but continued until 1996. France conducted a total of 193 nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the Pacific, 41 of them atmospheric.

Veterans’ Affairs has been approached for comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In the same period, mainstream media sources have continually developed ways to make war appear normal –something necessary, justifiable, or in some cases, “humane.”

Norm Solomon’s War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war.

Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed. Then he traces the history of embedded reporters. He shows how the presence of “embeds” (journalists who live among and travel with units of the military) has changed the way wars are covered. The embeds are beholden not only to the military that protect them but also to corporate heads who collude with war profiteers and war planners.

Militarists’ justifications for wars often emphasize the terror wielded by insurgents using bloody tactics. Solomon points out the similarities between suicide bombers causing slaughter on the ground and sophisticated warplanes maiming and killing civilians from the air.

The legendary peace activist Phil Berrigan once likened racism and threats of nuclear war to the many faces of the hydra written of in Greek mythology. Cut off one head and another appears. The many-faced hydra of racism and war now turns to all corners of the globe. Any country refusing to subordinate itself to serving U.S. national interests risks being devastated by U.S. military and economic wars. Increasingly, war planners invoke the nuclear threat.

Authors and orators who challenge the status quo of glorifying and justifying wars face well organized opponents with deep pockets and a vice like grip on mainstream media. Astonishing past efforts, in U.S. history, to outlaw war and denounce the “merchants of death” reached millions of people after the industrial slaughter of World War I.

Eugene Debs, the indefatigable campaigner imprisoned for opposing U.S. foreign policy, ran for president from his jail cell and won nearly a million votes in 1920. The Kellogg Briand pact outlawing war was written into U.S. law in August of 1928. In April of 1935, the New York Times reported that over 60,000 students went on strike, declaring they would never enlist to fight in a foreign war. Former U.S. Representative Jeanette Rankin voted against entering both World War I and World War II.  Norm Solomon shares the moral compass and honorable intent of these heroic resisters. His highly worthwhile book invites readers to embrace his clarity, expose the military machine’s human toll, and campaign to end all wars.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kathy Kelly.

Dylan Wu, PGA Tour member, could be counted as one of them. He wondered why the PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, despite brimming hostility against LIV Golf had “basically got a promotion to CEO of all golf in the world by going back on everything he said in the past 2 years?” Having more or less answered his own question, Wu went on to express admiration for the LIV Golf renegade, Phil Mickelson, for whom he expressed gushing admiration. “He went up in flames in the media cuz of his brutal honesty and now everyone’s finally realizing he was right and the PGA Tour does whatever they feel like.”

Brandel Chamblee, a golf analyst, for they do exist, expressed his shock. “I can’t imagine that very many people outside the 2-3-4-5 people in the room and brought this merger to fruition would have known anything about it.” Perhaps he should have asked the functionaries in Riyadh for clues or had a closer look at the black heart of the PGA Tour.

In the first season of LIV Golf events, the PGA Tour knew it was facing a formidable competitor that potentially threatened its existence. Each regular-season event’s total came to $25 million; $20 million was set aside for the individual event; $5 million went towards the team competition component. The ultimate winner’s earnings came to $4 million; the wooden spooner got a not negligible $120,000 for just turning up.

Off the field, the sides did legal battle. Most prominent was an antitrust lawsuit originally filed against the Tour by such LIV Golf exiles as Phil Mickelson. It was subsequently commandeered by LIV Golf. The Tour then filed a countersuit against LIV, convincing the courts that it could also add Saudi Arabia’s PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, as co-defendants.

Given the House of Saud’s indecent record on human rights, and its programmatic determination to use sports as a vehicle to rinse and launder its misdeeds, this was not something the lawyers for LIV Golf were hoping for. They could only whine: to comply and supply any depositions in the case would amount to a violation of Saudi Arabian law.

In the US Northern District of California court, Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled in April that the PIF and Al-Rumayyan could both be the subject of discovery and depositions. The decision meant that first deposition subpoenas could be served on PIF and Al-Rumayyan at a location in New York City, as opposed to Riyadh itself. The US legal system was getting closer than ever to peering into the labyrinth of Saudi funding and what would have, effectively, been an anatomising effort. This, sadly, would not come to pass: the merger kills off any litigation.

In this disgraceful compromise, the PGA Tour has effectively ended a chance to expose the sordid arrangement at the heart of golf. Leaving aside how smug Norman will be feeling about this turn of events, the one true victor in all of this is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The PIF will now become the funding heart of world golf. It is all in keeping with attempts made by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s “Vision 2030”, a program that envisages the Kingdom’s commercial capture of a number of sports, all designed to advance the country’s supposedly benign ambitions. This has taken the form of the most monumental lashings of sportswashing, an exercise of mass distraction that serves to seduce the cerebrally soft and willingly gullible.

In 2022, the London-based human rights organisation Grant Liberty published a report revealing that $2.1 billion had been spent on a number of international sporting events and acquiring a number of prized assets, including the Newcastle United football team.

With sportswashing on such a scale, the Crown Prince continues to burnish his reputation as a reformer. This serves to conceal his more murderous tendencies as a petulant princeling who seized the House of Saud by the throat, cleansing the stables of any rivals along the way. The October 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 in Istanbul’s Saudi consulate was more in keeping with his sentiments.

The link between the audacious and clumsy killing of Khashoggi by a disproportionately large hit squad, and orders made by the Crown Prince, was confirmed by US intelligence officials in an unclassified report released in February 2021. Bin Salman was in “control of decision making in the Kingdom” and supported “violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi”.

Some parallels will be drawn with previous sporting disputes that eventually led to compromise. Cricket was shaken in the late 1970s by the breakaway World Series Cricket tournament, a measure that proved so successful traditional, lacklustre bureaucrats had to relent. But the players who participated in the tournament sponsored by the Australian press tycoon Kerry Packer had been previously paid a pittance to represent their country by the various cricketing boards. While Packer’s ego was colossal, along with his willingness to be chiselled into posterity, the players never forgot that post-World Series cricket enabled cricketers to earn a living from their craft.

The golfers, in sharp contrast, have shown themselves to be brazen mercenaries, ideologically conditioned by the pay packets they receive. Pay them a sum, and they are bound to say anything. Those behind the PIF, and the likes of Monahan, understand the rationale. The angered players have also shown themselves to be callow in spirit, regretting the money they might have gotten had they forfeited their loyalty. This merger shows that all the participants richly deserve each other.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This vulgar display of denial and indulgence was typified by the face of Australian golf, Greg Norman. After three days of competition at The Grange, The Advertiser ran with the painful headline: “LIV-ing the dream: Golf’s boom weekend for SA.” The South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, who scandalously threw his state’s money into a mix also funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (his government refuses to say how much), was also glowing. “To everyone who turned up and showed what Australia is about – thank you.”

When questioned about the Riyadh connection and its blotchy human rights record, the insufferable South Australian Tourism Minister, Zoe Bettison, proved to be a well of useless information. “I’m aware of the issues that people have raised,” she stated. “But each and every one of us here uses equipment [and] different businesses every day that the Saudis are invested in.” Presumably she does not mean hacksaws, which, in Saudi hands, have a habit of finding their way onto the necks of critical journalists.

Golfing professionals such as the unprincipled Mammon follower Dustin Johnson also expressed delight at the way the tournament had gone. “The support we’ve had from the fans and the city … awesome. Obviously, the crowds were unbelievable this week, so it was a lot of fun.”

Peter Uihlein dreamily speculated about future numbers, burgeoning in their promise: 90,000 attendees over three days in the 12th event would surely mean even greater numbers by the 40th or 50th? “People lose sight of that a little bit. This is literally the 12th event. The sky is the limit.”

There were efforts made by the organisers to mimic their PGA Tour rivals, who, to be fair, are also corrupt, but not in the capital punishment-killing journalists sense of the term. A ticket to the “Cellar Door” Marquee back of the 12th green, Guardian Australia reports, was called the “Watering Hole”; the PGA equivalent would have been the “Party Hole” in Arizona. The price of admission: $1200. For that price, those attending the sports wash session could also be bored by Norman, Premier Malinauskas, and former Australian Treasurer and US ambassador Joe Hockey, talk about golf as “a force for good”.

The Kingdom has made no secret of its use of sport in softening a cruel, barbaric image, rinsing it in the progressive tones of sporting improvement. Obscene amounts of cash have and are being put into sporting tournaments by Riyadh’s Public Investment Fund. And they have such charming ignoramuses as Norman to play the role of useful, distracting dolt, able to bring on board other dolts bedazzled by the dosh.

In the first season of LIV Golf events, each regular-season event’s total value was counted at $25 million, split between $20 million for the individual event, and $5 million for the team competition. The winner’s earnings came in at $4 million, with the last-placed participant getting $120,000.

There have also been the individual mercenaries, the condottieri of the golf circuit. They have taken the manna from Norman, and encouraged to forget the bloodthirsty, vicious tendencies of the medieval House of Saud; focus, instead, on a more tangible hatred golfers can understand: the PGA tour organisers. It is those stuffed shirts Norman has never forgiven in undermining his previous efforts to run a tournament, and it is an animosity that he has bred from.

In Adelaide, when asked about what the PGA boss Jay Monaghan might feel about the tournament, Johnson was instant in his reaction. “We don’t give a damn how he feels. We know how he feels about us, so it’s mutual.”

Others, like Bruce Koepka, focused on the golf-as-golf theme: players on the LIV circuit and the PGA tour were playing the same game. At the recent Masters, he could “run into 15 (PGA) Tour guys if [he] wanted to in a day and nobody really had any negative feedback, any negative thing to say – and that would be the time to say it.”

One can never accuse professional golfers of shaking the tree of knowledge, and 2020 US Open Winner and LIV participant Bryson DeChambeau proved that point. “We talked about that [Saudi sportswashing] last year, and we already kind of kicked that to the kerb. It’s something that I truthfully believe is inaccurate.”

When asked last week if he had ever had a conversation with bin Salman, the man US intelligence agencies are certain ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, nothing was forthcoming. “No, I have not,” he replied.

As to why such a meeting had never happened, the answer was childish, though far from endearingly so. “Because I’m the chairman and CEO of LIV Golf Investments, and that’s where I focus. I focus on golf. I’ve been involved with golf … as a player, as well as golf course design. I’ve built golf courses in third-world countries. I’ve built golf courses in Communist countries.” Here we have the Albert Speer of golf, dedicated to the building enterprises, riding high, and without fear. Speer, at the very least, faced a tribunal and received due punishment.

There have been a few indignant spoilsports. Human Rights Watch researcher Joey Shea made a few ripples in the ABC for noting that, “Saudi Arabia has experienced some of its worst periods for human rights in its modern history.” In March 2022, she reminds us, 81 people were executed in one day.

Strangely enough for a state Liberal opposition leader, David Speirs had also detected some principle in the tangle of sporting sponsorship. Why take “dirty money” from a “despotic”, fundamentalist government while condemning Russia?

Malinauskas had a reply for his sparring opponent: Speirs had supported the Harvest Rock Festival, run by Live Nation, yet another Public Investment Fund recipient. No matter, retorted Speirs. “We’re paying for print advertising, social media advertising … we’re normalising the Saudi regime.” That normalisation, at least at the State level in Australia, is nigh complete.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Roots Action’s Norman Solomon about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion for the March 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: So here we are, 20 years after the US war on Iraq, and, to speak broadly, the popular understanding is that Iraq wasn’t behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US, weapons whose immediate threat, yes, was the vehemently argued premise for a grave assault on a sovereign country.

Atlantic (3/13/23)

But somehow, in all of this talkity-talk, the idea of acknowledgement of wrong—forget compensation, forget apology—is nowhere in evidence.

The story has been made over such that the Iraq invasion was wrong, but still OK. Iraqis were harmed, but still helped. And all the advisors and experts that got it very wrong are still, somehow, right.

The 2003 war on Iraq is, most importantly, a story about imperialist violence. But it’s also about the web of lies and disinformation used to advance it, and the role that nominally independent journalists played—and play.

Norman Solomon has been thinking and working on these issues for decades. He’s been part of FAIR since the start. He’s co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His most recent book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out soon from the New Press.

He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon: Thanks, Janine.

JJ: There are so many places we could start. But I did want to stick a fork in one thing. Talking about media today, at the 20-year mark, the theme is missed signals, miscalculation, misunderstanding.

It’s hard to talk about what happened, and media’s role, without recognizing that the George W. Bush administration and its advisors wanted and intended to invade Iraq before the September 11, 2001, attacks. But that’s not a contention. That’s just a thing we know, based on evidence, right?

Guardian (2/24/06)

NS: Yes, Rumsfeld made a very clear statement in a memo, just in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that they were going after Iraq. It was their “eyes on the prize,” in a grotesque sort of way.

And when we look back 20 years, I think there’s a consistent thread that the media and the government excuses are basically intertwined. Which sort of makes sense, since the disinformation messaging after 9/11, before, during and after the invasion of Iraq—all that was also intertwined between government and mass media.

And we think of and sometimes notice the revolving door of personnel, where someone is a press secretary for the president, then goes to a cable news network, or vice versa. George Stephanopoulos, and many others who followed him, just had this career path that was basically recycling between those in government who often deceive, and those in media who have a follow-up career. And they’re just in a different part of the deception chain, as it turns out.

And so I think it’s fitting, unfortunately, that 20 years after so many of the government officials and media mavens and so-called journalists—quite often not deserving the name—that they were basically singing out of the same hymn book. And now they’re being exculpatory for each other and themselves at the 20th anniversary.

One example that I think is just so profoundly grotesque is that in the months before the invasion of Iraq, you had people who were recycling falsehoods out of government sources, or government-designated, -anointed sources, into news media, like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, onto the front pages of the New York Times.

Then you would have Dick Cheney, for instance, who would go on the Sunday talkshows, knowing that his own office had funneled the disinformation into the New York Times, then he would say, “Well, don’t just believe us. This is being reported by the New York Times.”

Intercept (3/15/23)

JJ: Right. And a number of folks have written recently—Jon Schwarz at the Intercept, Derek Seidman at Truthout, also Marjorie Cohn, Adam Johnson at Real News—about how these visible architects of the Iraq War, in government, but also in think tanks, and then also in media, they’ve all failed upward subsequently, haven’t they? Even knowing what we know, there’s been no comeuppance, no fallout, for those folks.

NS: That is something I think we could call a repetition compulsion disorder that completely gets a reward system to back it up. Whereas those who step out of line, who don’t conflate being pro-war with being objective, they are not going to find upward mobility in media anywhere near so smooth. And often they just hit a brick wall, forget glass ceiling, they hit a brick wall above their heads.

We have some examples that cry out for remembering and reminding people, that Phil Donahue, who had the temerity to actually have a variety of voices about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the months before in his primetime MSNBC program, we know because of a leaked memo that he was fired a few weeks before the invasion, precisely because people at the top of management—MSNBC, NBC News—they were worried that, as they put it in this, for a while, secret memo, that the flag-wavers at Fox and CNN would make MSNBC look bad because Donahue was allowing some anti-war voices onto the air.

And I know from having been reporting and visiting Iraq before the invasion a few times, and writing about this at the time, including for FAIR, that there was a tremendous amount of pressure going on from news media, and to the extent there was an opening for debate, say in the summer and early fall of 2002, the aperture continued to narrow, and so the more that a consensus was being promoted and forced, you might say, that a war and invasion was necessary, the less space there was.

Salon (3/19/23)

I know personally, because I was able to go to Iraq with some delegations, a former senator and current member of Congress, and then with Sean Penn, and then with a UN official. I found in the late part of 2002 what was first a bit of an opening, where I would be invited on to CNN or MSNBC or even Fox. By the end of the autumn, that opening had pretty much closed, and certainly by the end of the year.

And the explanation I was given was that in October of 2002, when the House and Senate voted that an invasion of Iraq would be authorized, that became official policy, and some of the bookers and so forth at the cable news networks would say, “Well, you know, now this is the US government stance that an invasion is in the cards; it’s officially authorized by the legislative branch. So there’s less controversy here.”

JJ: And so now we need to close up any window of debate in the public conversation, because officials have decided what’s going to happen. And I don’t think that’s maybe everybody’s understanding of the way journalism works, or should work.

NS: Yeah, it’s a sort of an ersatz, pseudo-journalism that sets the standard for professionalism. And we, I guess, ought to face it that when people move into the journalism profession, they’re out of college or whatever, what defines professional standards? It’s the ambience, the content, the style, the attitude that’s inherent in what people who have already made it in the profession are doing every day.

Norman Solomon: “High-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda.”

And so it’s an imitative quality that defines what journalism, or at least what passes for journalism, is. And part of that is not really apologizing, even later on. And I think this gets to what you were alluding to at the outset of our discussion, Janine, that when there’s an anniversary, or a look back, there’s really very little impetus for candor, least of all self-assessment or self-criticism, really, from these media institutions.

And so even in some of the most conspicuous, egregious cases like the New York Times distortions and serving up just bogus stories, the Washington Post as well, when they did sort of mea culpas, many, many weeks later, they were sort of equivocal. And they avoided really shedding harsh light on how it could be that these two purportedly most important, high-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda coming from the top of the US government.

JJ: To me, the fact that when you look at the architects and the folks who are most prominent in mouthpiecing for this invasion, the fact that they are all still in high-paid and prominent positions, it underscores the fact that corporate media’s “debate,” it has a patina of rationality and of debate, but it’s really kind of just a club, right?

There’s just certain folks that they listen to and whose ideas they promote. And it doesn’t matter if those folks are wrong or right, or if they’re reliable or not, or if they’re lying or ignorant, they’re just on the list. And then there are other people who are just not on the list, whether or not their predictions turn out to be right, or whether or not they’re reliable.

And with Iraq, that was historians and regional specialists and human rights researchers. They’re just never going to be let into the conversation, no matter how correct they were.

NS: There really are tacit media boundaries that I think are well-understood, however consciously or not, and when a misassessment was later shown to be egregiously wrong, with a war or peace at stake, there’s later on a sense of a clean slate, let’s wipe the record clean, because, eh, we all make mistakes, and so forth.

And that goes to individuals and also to media organizations. And we might want to think the ones that are really top quality, they will cop to their mistakes, distortions, errors, even, or especially, when the errors were extremely important.

And yet, that’s not the case. One example, which at least has to do with history—and we’re told that journalism is the first draft of history; OK, later on, there should be a better draft. Of course, one would hope that the first one was accurate, given that that is the most important, while these events are unfolding.

So one example that comes to mind is the New York Times reported, early on in this whole 20-year span, that the invasion came after Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN weapons inspectors from the country in 1998. So this was the New York Times telling all of its readers that, hey, those UN weapons inspectors were pulled out of the country several years before the invasion, they were kicked out, Saddam Hussein did not allow them to inspect anymore.

And FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, made the clear and accurate point, and mobilized some messaging to the New York Times, that that’s an interesting story which happens to be false, and that Saddam Hussein did not kick out the UN weapons inspectors in 1998.

They were withdrawn by the United Nations because the government of, under that point, President Bill Clinton had made clear it was about to bomb Iraq in what became known as Operation Desert Fox.

And so it was because the US government announced, essentially, it was about to bomb the country that the UN thought it was prudent to save the lives, perhaps, of the UN inspectors, to withdraw them.

And so that was something that FAIR activists were able to get the New York Times to publish a subsequent correction.

New York Times (3/18/23)

Fast forward many years, to the time of the 20th anniversary that we’ve just gone through, and the New York Times again publishes the falsehood that Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors from the country in 1998, which reminds me of something that George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.” And I think that’s a good cautionary note to anybody who thinks, well, this is just history, why talk about it now?

Because all of this is prefigurative; it is actually reinforcing mindsets. These distortions are messaging to people, subtly and not so subtly, that at the end of the day, I think as you put it at the beginning of our discussion, Janine: The US government can be wrong, but it’s still OK.

We can go into war and, OK, we made mistakes, etc., etc., which is easy for us to say, while other people experience it with more suffering by far than those in the US. But still the pretense, subtly or not, is it’s OK, because we mean well.

There was a short story written 100 years ago called “Editha,” and there’s a character in it, and this is in about 1905, when it’s published, which is in the aftermath, really, of the US slaughter of people in the Philippines. And there’s a character who says: what a wonderful thing it is to live in a country that might be wrong, but when it’s wrong, is right anyway.

JJ: And that’s the water that elite news media carry, and to folks who could think smarter, to a population that could handle reality, and react accordingly.

And I guess that’s what makes me so angry, is that people pick up the paper thinking that they’re being addressed as an intelligent person who’s trying to make decisions about what they support and what they don’t support. And it’s just not what they’re getting. It’s not what they’re getting.

And there were a few things that stand out to me, Norman, because I know that some of CounterSpin listeners weren’t born in 2003. And so they’ve only heard the remix, as it were. But there are things that stand out for those of us who were there.

And one of them is a massive demonstration in New York, with thousands of other people who were opposing an imminent invasion of Iraq, who were pulled out of their apartments, people who don’t usually go out in the street, who don’t usually demonstrate. But we were very aware that this was a war that was going to be called in our name, specifically, like, look at what happened to New York on September 11. And it was supposed to be in our name.

New York Times (10/30/02)

And as I’ve said many times before, the most prominent message here in New York City was “our grief is not a cry for war,” and the desire to not turn the horror and loss of September 11 into more horror and loss for other people.

And what I remember was coming home from this massive demonstration, and reading the New York Times saying, well, not a lot of people showed up, it wasn’t as many people as organizers thought, and so wrong, so wrong, that the Times had to go back and re-report the story later.

And so I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the erasing and the denigrating of anti-war voices was key in 2003, and it’s key in 2023.

NS: Absolutely. It’s the erasure of those who are either suffering under the US bombs, erasure from media coverage of substance and let alone empathy, and also erasure, as you say, of anti-war voices in our own communities in the United States, and the tremendous quantity, really, and depth of anti-war feeling and understanding. It is infuriating. It should be infuriating.

And often, when I read even the best, what we’re told are the best, mass media outlets in the United States, it seems that there’s an effort in effect to infantilize the readers, to almost like what was in school called the Weekly Reader, where things were really, if not dumbed-down, it’s just simplified, and the lens on the world, the window on the world, is so tinted red, white and blue. We’re being assumed to be either naive, gullible or simply blindly (what passes for) patriotic.

And the staying power of people who are in the upper reaches of editorial decision-making is really quite stunning. It’s hard to think of anyone who was in a major position 20 years ago, propagating and fomenting and spreading the lies to grease the path, the skids, for the war on Iraq, it’s hard to think of many who suffered at all from their careers. They simply did fine, the ones who did all that, just went right along, often rising into the profession’s upper reaches.

New Yorker (1/26/03)

I think, for instance, of David Remnick, who was already the editor of the New Yorker magazine during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, and he wrote a de facto editorial calling for the invasion of Iraq. It was quite vehement. And that was a couple of months before the invasion.

But even worse, under his editorial leadership, David Remnick ran a magazine, the New Yorker, that published one article after another that was absolute distortion, claiming without any evidence—and it certainly turned out to be false—that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government had ties to Al Qaeda, had ties to what happened during 9/11. These were very powerful messages.

And many people, naively, gullibly assumed, well, it’s in the New York Times, or it’s in the New Yorker, or it’s in the Washington Post, that these kinds of stories were true, or had credibility.

In fact, they were disinformation of the most dangerous and ultimately destructive kind.

JJ: And finally, and following from that, it’s work, isn’t it, to resist the confusion and the cognitive dissonance that elite media enforce, for a person who’s just trying to inform themselves about the world.

The messages you get—sovereignty matters, except when we say it doesn’t. Invasion is horrific, except when we do it. Look how they oppress their own people; that’s reason enough to force regime change. Oh, but don’t talk about that in the US, you freaking commie.

Forget your political stance—it just breaks your brain to try to pretend to follow elite media’s, what they call rationality. And I guess, above all, it makes you feel confused and alone.

And what I want to ask you is, what do you see as the antidotes to that? Where do you see the place for folks to go who recognize how brain-breaking and how wrong this is?

NS: As you say, the effort is so important, because if we’re simply passive and let it wash over us, that’s not going to work.

I think recognizing that the essence of propaganda is repetition, and that if we are immersed in this constant waterfall, this flood of corporate-driven media coverage and what passes for analysis and so forth, that we’re in the deluge, and that we need to swim, so to speak, in a very different direction.

And that includes, of course—I don’t mean this as a cliche—thinking for ourselves, and also availing ourselves and supporting media outlets that are very much willing to swim upstream to challenge the conventional media wisdom that is so driven by, among other things, the military industrial complex and corporate power.

And so that should mean including supporting FAIR, subscribing to the newsletter Extra!, going to FAIR.org, supporting CounterSpin; going to outlets like Truthout and Common Dreams and the Intercept and elsewhere, Democracy Now!

These are very important outlets, because if we don’t sustain them, we will simply be overwhelmed by the disinformation machine.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org and the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible, will be out soon from the New Press. Thank you so much, Norman Solomon, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.

The post ‘Media and Government Excuses Are Basically Intertwined’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

New York Times (3/18/23)

This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the September 1, 2001, attacks, a military official told the Washington Post of the newly minted “war on terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.” If reporters don’t evidence skepticism after a declaration like that, it says more about them than anyone or anything else.

But US elite news media did the opposite of what you would hope for from an independent press corps in a country launching an illegal and baseless invasion, whose leaders had announced in advance they would lie to support it. You can dig out the reality if you read, but if you rely on the same media you were looking at 2003, you will be equally misled, and in the same, frankly, boring ways you were before: The US is great and only wants democracy; other countries are bad, and if our reasons for invading them and replacing their leadership with folks we like better, and killing anyone who doesn’t agree with that, don’t add up, well, we’ll come up with others later, and you’ll swallow those too.

What passes for debate about why we must remain at some kind of war—cold, hot, corporate, stealth, acknowledged, denied—with Russia or China or whomever else is designated tomorrow, has roots worth studying in 2003. We’ll talk about it with author, critic and longtime friend of FAIR Norman Solomon.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of ex-FCC nominee Gigi Sohn.

The post Norman Solomon on the Iraq Invasion, 20 Years Later appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war. “In the mass media, being pro-war is portrayed as objective. Being antiwar is portrayed as being biased,” he says. Solomon is author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and the forthcoming War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I’ll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the “left” of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. “Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you.” (“You must be living an awfully precious life,” he goes on, “if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.”) If the book is not simply ignored, one can expect that it will elicit a flood of vituperation from leftists and liberals: “racist, misogynistic, transphobic, white supremacist, juvenile, incoherent, petty!” The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book’s substance, because it has important things to say.

It consists of two parts: in the first, Finkelstein “deconstructs” identity politics and the cancel culture it has given rise to, focusing on five figures whom he eviscerates: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama. In the second part, he considers a related subject with which he is intimately familiar: academic freedom. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic’s “offensive” speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? Is it wrong for universities to grant Holocaust deniers a platform? When teaching, should professors strive for “balance”—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective? What should we think of campus speech codes? Finkelstein addresses all such questions at length and in a spirit of uncommon seriousness.

One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx (“why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site?”). At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned “Western canon” (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time”), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish). The book’s kaleidoscopic nature and intimidating length might bewilder the reader, so in this review I propose to summarize and comment on several of its main arguments, to facilitate their diffusion.

Before doing so, however, I can’t resist quoting a few Finkelsteinian zingers, to preface the following heavy discussion with a bit of levity. On MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “living proof that not all yentas are Jewish and not all bovines are cows.” On Angela Davis: “Once upon a time she was on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List. Now she’s on Martha’s Vineyard’s Five Most Coveted List.” On Henry Louis Gates: “a virtuoso at crawling on the ground while typing on his keyboard.”¹ On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn’t name): “Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush.” On Ibram X. Kendi: “mallet-wielding grifter…preposterous poseur…[whose] ‘definitive history of racist ideas in America’ reduces to a compendium of prepubescent binary name-calling.” On Robin DiAngelo’s morbid obsession with diagnosing “racism”: “She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black… What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore!” On the widespread fascination with transgender people: “the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur to declare your sexual orientation. It’s only a matter of time before a student announces, ‘I’m she/her and I’m packing a thick, juicy nine-incher.’”

In an adaptation of Emma Goldman’s “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your Revolution,” Finkelstein declares: “If I can’t laugh, I don’t want your Revolution.” Political conservatives, too, have complained about the humorlessness of the woke crowd, but if you’re alienating even die-hard leftists, maybe it’s time to rethink your messaging.

Identity politics

Debates on the left over identity politics go back decades, and it is easy to be sick of them. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of their ending as long as identity politics and woke culture remain dominant on the left and in the Democratic Party—as they surely do today, at the expense of a class politics. Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn’t quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is.

Serious leftists, like Robin D. G. Kelley, have written competent defenses of identity politics, and Finkelstein certainly isn’t arguing against the necessity of incorporating anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and other such “woke” agendas into popular movements. What he objects to are the forms that identity politics often takes, and its tendency to devolve into celebration of an insular tribal identity. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the “oppressing” group—white vs. black, cis vs. trans, straight vs. gay, man vs. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. He quotes at great length some words of Frederick Douglass in 1894 that might well have gotten him “cancelled” today:

We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like… [But] I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color… We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died… It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black…or to draw race lines anywhere in the domain of liberty.

Moreover, the very idea of being “proud” of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. “[I]t perplexes why one should feel proud of one’s zoological difference,” Finkelstein writes. “[W]hat sense is there in making a ‘cult’ of that over which one has no choice…? Shouldn’t one aspire to transcend the ‘inevitable’ part—the color of one’s skin—so as to be judged by the ‘free part’—the content of one’s character?” Similarly, the idea of “loving one’s people” is odd, first in that it amounts to “loving one’s self writ large,” which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing. It easily becomes chauvinism. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute “one’s people.” Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would “love” many people belonging to a “different group.” Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces. Identity politics can be dangerous and destructive, not only on the right but even the left. “In their goodness and badness, there exist only persons, not peoples.”

The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its “great minds,” the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. For a really thorough demolition, Finkelstein would have had to review the record of various feminist and queer theorists too, but it’s a big enough task to critique the writers on race. Or, more precisely, that isn’t a difficult task—it’s so easy that Finkelstein is able to devote huge chunks of these chapters to sheer mockery—but it does require patience and a willingness to wade through endless intellectual muck. Take Crenshaw. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” “she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression.” It disturbs her that white feminists are presumptuous enough to speak for black women, but she “seems less concerned or, for that matter, even conscious that a high-achieving Black woman speaking for Black working-class women might also be problematic.”

Or take DiAngelo. She has a pathological obsession with racism and an utterly Manichean, paranoid view of the world. If you’re white, you’re a racist—whether you’re John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. Racism is ubiquitous, “immovably entrenched in our psyches and structures” (as Finkelstein paraphrases), “the air we breathe and the water we drink,” all-encompassing and constantly reproduced, she says, “automatically”—and therefore, evidently, ineradicable. At best, it can occasionally be “interrupted”—through the “diversity training” at which DiAngelo excels and for which she charges a hefty fee. Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy. “Whites,” says DiAngelo, “control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by.” Yes, whites are a homogeneous master-class: the billionaires and the working class, they’re all equally guilty, they’re all oppressors. And to blacks she says, as Finkelstein summarizes, “Beware! Don’t trust white people! They’re all racists, racists to the core! Every last one of them! They’re hard-wired for racism; it’s in their DNA.” This is a message perfectly calculated to pit workers against each other. No wonder the business class has so enthusiastically promoted her book!

What about Ibram X. Kendi? Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. It’s sad that a book review can’t communicate the verve or the slicing humor of this chapter (and others). Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, for example, whose “only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence…[is] less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that’s as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it.” One problem with Kendi’s and our culture’s promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label “racist” is that the concept becomes diluted: “to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K.K.K.?” The abolitionists were all racists, as were DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frasier, etc. etc.—while Kendi singles out for praise Harry Truman, Michelle Obama, Eldridge Cleaver, Pam Grier, Bo Derek, Kanye West, etc. “[T]he rigor of his taxonomy recalls not the Periodic Table but, on the contrary, Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, “African-Americans haven’t registered any progress in the struggle against racism. Each seeming stride forward has been attended by a step backward.” If anything, he implies, things have only gotten worse! Such an “analysis” recalls the flagrantly ahistorical, unabashedly gloomy academic school of Afro-pessimism, and, by reifying differences between “whites” and “blacks” and valorizing anti-white resentment among the latter, serves the same function of hindering the class solidarity necessary to achieve real progress in struggles over the distribution of wealth, working conditions, affordable housing, high levels of unemployment, expansion of public resources, abysmal healthcare, environmental destruction, hypertrophying militarism, and the like. (No wonder, again, Kendi has been fêted by the establishment and can charge $45,000 for his talks.² It helps, too, that his only real policy proposal is…affirmative action.)

After Finkelstein’s devastating exposure of Kendi’s countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi’s words) “striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference” even as he argues that the idea of race is a “mirage” that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e.g., he praises the “irrepressible Blackness” of his friend) at the same time as he says anti-racists see only individuals and not racial behavior (“there is no such thing as Black behavior”); his positing of a deep separation between so-called white culture and black culture; his arguing against the racist “assimilationist” urge to value white culture over black even as he manifestly values white culture over black (lecturing before white audiences, accepting a fellowship at Harvard University, presiding over a research center at Boston University, being proud of publishing in white journals like The Atlantic)—nothing remains but the empty husk of a social-climbing charlatan. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left.

For charlatanry, though, few can beat the next entry on Finkelstein’s shit list: Obama. “Barack Obama is the perfected and perfect instrument of identity politics, its summa summarum. He represents the cynical triumph of form over substance, color over character. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West’s words—‘mascot of Wall Street.’” Most leftists are hardly enamored of Obama, so I need not summarize the case against him. Nor would I even try, because I couldn’t possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama’s presidential coterie, a “revolting retinue of bootlickers.” Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the “Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.S. enemies.” One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein’s profound contempt for the “Elmer Gantry in blackface” at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can’t be gainsaid that it’s all well-deserved.

After six chapters and almost 400 pages on the subject, Finkelstein’s summary of identity politics is worth quoting:

Identity politics has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement [viz., Bernie Sanders’] that promised profound social change. It counsels Black people not to trust whites, as their racism is so entrenched and so omnipresent as to poison their every thought and action. It conveys to poor whites that they, no less than the white billionaire class, are beneficiaries of racism, so that it would be foolhardy of them to ally with Black people… Then, identity politics puts forth demands that either appear radical but are in fact politically inert—Defund the police, Abolition of prisons—as they have no practical possibility of achievement; or that leave the overall system intact while still enabling a handful, who purport to represent marginalized groups, to access—on a “parity” basis—the exclusive club of the “haves.” This, in effect, performance politics has spawned a disgusting den of thieves who brand themselves with radical-sounding hashtags, churn out radical-sounding tweets, and insinuate themselves into positions of prominence, as they rake in corporate donations, cash corporate paychecks, hang out at the watering holes of the rich and famous, and thence can be safely relied upon not to bite the hand that feeds them…

One might object that he’s painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn’t deny this. He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. “The human rights of a victimized group must, of course, be uncompromisingly defended.” More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group “pride”) in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong. “Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one’s head, clothes on one’s back, and food on one’s table.”

Whatever genuinely emancipatory political impulses exist in identity politics have long been, on the whole, coopted and buried under an avalanche of left-liberal virtue-signaling, preening and posing, careerism, and sabotage of a substantive left. Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to “cancel” Sanders for his being a “privileged white male” with a supposed blind-spot on race. His “economic reductionism,” according to Angela Davis, prevented him from “developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence.” (Note the pretentious academic language, as if you need a special “vocabulary” to talk about racism and violence—which Sanders, by the way, did.) As Finkelstein says, “When the ‘hour of serious danger’ to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders’ class-struggle insurgency, the ‘true nature’ of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile ‘radicals’ enlisted under the banner to stop him.” Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media’s cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut.

Cancel culture and academic freedom

“Cancel culture might be defined as the turning of a person into a non-person.” By that definition, it has been around for a very long time. Arguably, it is as old as civilization. The first and second Red Scares in the U.S. were instances of cancel culture; so is the corporate media’s treatment of virtually everyone on the left; so is the woke treatment of anyone who publicly strays from the party line. Even if such victims of woke defamation campaigns usually find their footing again or don’t always suffer career consequences in the first place, the mob’s impulse to censor and silence remains operative and ever-vigilant. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it.

His defense of a regime of nearly untrammeled free speech is rooted, first and foremost, in his conviction that this is the surest way to Truth. He quotes DuBois: when free speech is stifled, “the nation…becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions.” But John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion,” Mill writes, “is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth… The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.” As Finkelstein translates, “if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.” Your opponents can even be useful for prodding you to rethink weak points in your reasoning or evidentiary basis, exposing little errors in your arguments, giving you something to think about that you had overlooked, in general giving you the opportunity to more rationally ground your beliefs.

The mob’s desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you’re able to refute them. When a mob tries to prevent someone from talking because it feels threatened by his speech, it’s quite possible, often, that his speech has some truth in it. Suppressing it—unless it’s merely emotive speech like “fuck you!”—possibly allows his opponents to persist in having false or partially false views.

But someone might reply, “What if his speech is socially harmful? Isn’t that a legitimate reason to suppress it?” Well, the definition of “harmful” is, of course, contested, and it evolves over time. Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now eugenics is considered downright evil. Who is to say your definition of “socially harmful” is, in all cases, the right one, or that your application of it is always right? “When it comes to curbing speech,” Finkelstein says, “experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance.”

Moreover, if the “harmful” speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what’s the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? If, on the other hand, it’s not marginal but holds the assent of millions, letting someone express it presents an opportunity to argue against it and thus inoculate people. The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something “dangerously truthful” to it—“the establishment doesn’t want us to hear this because it’s threatened by its truth!”—and thus might contribute to its diffusion across the population. People might think they’re being “rebellious” or anti-establishmentarian by believing it, and furthermore that they’re upholding noble values of free speech against authoritarian censoring leftists (as the reactionary right thinks today). I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like.

The left has historically been in the vanguard of fights for free speech, from the abolitionists to the IWW (and most other unions, in fact) to the Socialists during World War I to the Civil Rights Movement. Its departure today from these honorable traditions is yet more evidence that it’s become a pseudo-left, a reactionary left—for the empowering of authorities to regulate speech is ultimately reactionary. It’s ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn’t.

Admittedly, it might have strengthened Finkelstein’s discussion to consider in more depth possible counterarguments. It is, after all, very unfortunate that media operatives like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and the whole stable of Fox News social arsonists have brainwashed millions of people. It is likely they couldn’t have had such a destructive impact had the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. Maybe it was right to repeal it, but a case can at least be made that it was wrong. Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn’t say much about these. The reason, it seems, is that he doesn’t think the internet has raised significantly new questions about free speech, and in any case there is already an extensive literature on web censorship.

Among the many excellent points he makes is one that cuts to the heart of wokeness: the collective obsession with pinning a label—racist or not, sexist or not, transphobic or not—on every thought passing through one’s head and every utterance one makes, and then cancelling all the thoughts that (and all the people who) stray an inch past what’s deemed “acceptable,” is ridiculous and paranoid. It’s also reactionary, because it makes solidarity vastly more difficult. One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture’s pathologies. Were she to speak before a group of workers, she might say something like this (italics in the original):

Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. You’re all, Black and white, trapped in dead-end jobs. You all earn poverty wages… [You have to] organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. You can’t eliminate every fleeting, non-p.c. thought passing through your head. The mind is a tricky business… You can’t wait until everyone’s thoughts are simon-pure. You don’t have the time, and they never will be. You cannot police your thoughts, and it’s probably better that way. Were it otherwise, you wouldn’t be human. You’re fallible, you’re imperfect vessels. You weren’t born, and your minds can’t be, immaculate… If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. It’s common struggle, common sacrifice, that produces mutual respect, even mutual love. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. You don’t become better persons by each of you, singly, struggling with your racist demons. You become better persons by all of you, together, struggling against an antihuman system…

Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.

“The fight against racism must focus…not on the intangible, impalpable, unchangeable, invisible, or unprovable, but, instead, on what’s substantive, meaningful, and corrigible. In the first place, securing economic opportunity and legal equality.” The Sanders program was far more substantively “anti-racist” than the puny liberal programs of most of his woke critics. (As for Sanders’ being constantly hounded to support “reparations” for blacks, I’ve explained elsewhere why that demand is anti-solidaristic, politically impossible, and ultimately a diversion from radical social transformation.)

The last chapter of I’ll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context? This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein’s own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged “incivility” or taking unpopular political stands. The chapter is tightly argued and has a more disciplined structure than others, consisting of analyses of four academic freedom cases (Bertrand Russell in 1940, Leo Koch in 1960, Angela Davis in 1969, and Steven Salaita in 2014) and then general reflections that conclude in a discussion of his own case. He endorses the American Association of University Professors’ standard that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve [i.e., to teach]”—which was surely not the case in the four instances he examines. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one’s scholarship (which Finkelstein didn’t when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz’s lies). Given all the invective in Marx’s Capital, for example, the book would never have been published by a university press today and Marx wouldn’t get a position at a top university. “But if the likes of Marx wouldn’t qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn’t that a reductio ad absurdum? Doesn’t it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language?”

One might connect Finkelstein’s lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book’s focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns. Academia insists on politeness, decorum, “neutral” language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others’ language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel “radical” by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. (No surprise that woke culture has largely emerged from the academy.) To do justice to Truth and Justice, though, requires more than this. In the case of scholarly writing and speaking,

There are moments that might positively require breaking free of the constraints imposed by polite public discourse in order to sound the tocsin that, as we indifferently carry on in a privileged sanctuary of peace and prosperity, innocent people are being butchered by our own state. The uncivil reality, not uncivil words, should be cause for reproach and excoriation, while uncivil words might be called for to bring home the uncivil reality.

It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.

The anti-academic

It should be clear from what has been said here that I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book. It requires a lot of patience to read, but I think the effort is worth it. It’s not a “polished” work, but in an academic and literary environment that sometimes seems to value polish above all else, including moral and intellectual substance, one appreciates something a little more raw. And someone with the courage to tear down—in order to build up.

Finkelstein is in the tradition of the great incorruptible truth-tellers. He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him. But then, in a meeting with Hertzberg, he was bluntly asked, “Are you in Chomsky’s stable?” Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. He never heard from the men again. Even so, “I was proud of myself,” he writes, “not to be tempted, at all, by the lure of fame and fortune, and I was grateful for this test of my fidelity to Truth (and Chomsky), so that I could prove in my own person dead wrong the cynics who imagine, or console themselves, that everyone has a price.”

That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. One hopes that his book and his example will inspire young idealists to follow in his path.

1. Incredibly, he called Obama a “post-modern Frederick Douglass.”
2. He is hardly alone in this sort of thing. Finkelstein reports that, according to local activists in Kerala, India whom he met, Naomi Klein had demanded $25,000 plus a round-trip first-class airline ticket to give a talk there.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.

As I was reading Norman Finkelstein's new book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, I thought early on of Obama's joke at the expense of Rahm Emanuel: "he's one of a kind, and thank god he's one of a kind." Finkelstein, too, is very much one of a kind. But the analogy with Emanuel fails, because in fact one Rahm Emanuel is far too many whereas one Finkelstein is not nearly enough. We need hundreds of him. That is to say, we need hundreds of left intellectuals with the courage and intelligence to think for themselves and never sell out, to refuse to compromise—even to risk alienating fellow leftists by publicly repudiating woke culture and the more vacuous forms of identity politics in favor of an unstinting adherence to class politics. Nor would it hurt to have more writers who are as eloquent and hilarious as him.

It is widely known on the left that Finkelstein is, as it were, a martyr to truth and justice, having been subject to outrageous calumniation and denied an academic career because of his relentless advocacy of the Palestinian cause. With I'll Burn That Bridge, he shows his willingness to burn bridges not only with the establishment but also with the "left" of today, for which he shows scarcely mitigated contempt. He considers it, or dominant tendencies within it, to have degenerated from soaring moral and intellectual heights with Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson into a censorious, narcissistic, morbidly navel-gazing culture preoccupied with subjectivist trivialities like personal pronouns at the expense of solidaristic struggle for a better world. "Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you." ("You must be living an awfully precious life," he goes on, "if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.") If the book is not simply ignored, one can expect that it will elicit a flood of vituperation from leftists and liberals: "racist, misogynistic, transphobic, white supremacist, juvenile, incoherent, petty!" The intelligent reader will not be tempted by such facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say.

It consists of two parts: in the first, Finkelstein "deconstructs" identity politics and the cancel culture it has given rise to, focusing on five figures whom he eviscerates: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Barack Obama. In the second part, he considers a related subject with which he is intimately familiar: academic freedom. To what extent should a regime of free speech reign on the university campus, and under what circumstances should an academic's "offensive" speech in the public square result in disciplinary action? Is it wrong for universities to grant Holocaust deniers a platform? When teaching, should professors strive for "balance"—presenting with equal force all sides of an issue so that students can make up their own minds—or should they teach only their own perspective? What should we think of campus speech codes? Finkelstein addresses all such questions at length and in a spirit of uncommon seriousness.

The intelligent reader will not be tempted by ... facile judgments but instead will engage with the book's substance, because it has important things to say.

One difficulty with the book is that it has a sprawling and meandering character, consisting variously of memoir, brutal polemic, dense argumentation, forensic dissection of texts, scores of long quotations, innumerable long footnotes, and very funny ridicule of everything and everyone from Michelle Obama to Bari Weiss, from the New York Times to woke terms like Latinx ("why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site?"). At its core, however, beneath the variegated surface, the book is an anguished cri de coeur against pervasive cultural, political, and intellectual rot—an unapologetic defense and exegesis of the heavily maligned "Western canon" (John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Kant, DuBois, Frederick Douglass, and the like), a sustained lamentation over how far the left has fallen, a furious denunciation of rampant philistinism and pusillanimous groupthink (quoting Mill: "That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time"), and a proudly unfashionable celebration of such quaint notions as Truth, Reason, and Justice (which Finkelstein capitalizes, in a consciously anti-postmodernist flourish). The book's kaleidoscopic nature and intimidating length might bewilder the reader, so in this review I propose to summarize and comment on several of its main arguments, to facilitate their diffusion.

Before doing so, however, I can't resist quoting a few Finkelsteinian zingers, to preface the following heavy discussion with a bit of levity. On MSNBC's Joy Reid: "living proof that not all yentas are Jewish and not all bovines are cows." On Angela Davis: "Once upon a time she was on the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted List. Now she's on Martha's Vineyard's Five Most Coveted List." On Henry Louis Gates: "a virtuoso at crawling on the ground while typing on his keyboard." On Amy Goodman (whom he doesn't name): "Goddess of Wokeness…a woke machine, churning out insipid clichés as her mental faculty degenerates to mush." On Ibram X. Kendi: "mallet-wielding grifter…preposterous poseur…[whose] 'definitive history of racist ideas in America' reduces to a compendium of prepubescent binary name-calling." On Robin DiAngelo's morbid obsession with diagnosing "racism": "She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black… What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore!" On the widespread fascination with transgender people: "the first day of a graduate seminar, students used to describe their intellectual interests. Nowadays, it's de rigueur to declare your sexual orientation. It's only a matter of time before a student announces, 'I'm she/her and I'm packing a thick, juicy nine-incher.'"

In an adaptation of Emma Goldman's "If I can't dance, I don't want your Revolution," Finkelstein declares: "If I can't laugh, I don't want your Revolution." Political conservatives, too, have complained about the humorlessness of the woke crowd, but if you're alienating even die-hard leftists, maybe it's time to rethink your messaging.

Identity politics

Debates on the left over identity politics go back decades, and it is easy to be sick of them. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of their ending as long as identity politics and woke culture remain dominant on the left and in the Democratic Party—as they surely do today, at the expense of a class politics. Finkelstein is aware that the identity politics of the left isn't quite the same as the identity politics of the Democrats, but he is right that they overlap, and that such a politics is more conducive to being neutered into empty symbolism (statues, token representation in the corporate class, electing a vapid con artist like Obama) than a Bernie Sanders-style—or more radical—class politics is.

Serious leftists, like Robin D. G. Kelley, have written competent defenses of identity politics, and Finkelstein certainly isn't arguing against the necessity of incorporating anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and other such "woke" agendas into popular movements. What he objects to are the forms that identity politics often takes, and its tendency to devolve into celebration of an insular tribal identity. The binary, balkanizing drawing of lines between groups and near-contempt for the "oppressing" group—white vs. black, cis vs. trans, straight vs. gay, man vs. woman—is, in its parochialism and vitiating of solidarity against capitalism, not what a real left politics looks like. He quotes at great length some words of Frederick Douglass in 1894 that might well have gotten him "cancelled" today:

We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like… [But] I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color… We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man's cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died… It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of any particular variety of the human family… I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black…or to draw race lines anywhere in the domain of liberty.

Moreover, the very idea of being "proud" of what group one happens to belong to—proud of being black or a woman or gay or trans—is puzzling. "[I]t perplexes why one should feel proud of one's zoological difference," Finkelstein writes. "[W]hat sense is there in making a 'cult' of that over which one has no choice…? Shouldn't one aspire to transcend the 'inevitable' part—the color of one's skin—so as to be judged by the 'free part'—the content of one's character?" Similarly, the idea of "loving one's people" is odd, first in that it amounts to "loving one's self writ large," which, in its narcissism, hardly seems like a noble thing. It easily becomes chauvinism. Second, one would certainly not love all the individuals who are alleged to constitute "one's people." Many or most of them one would likely personally despise—just as, on the other hand, one would "love" many people belonging to a "different group." Too much identification with some imposed identity such as race is exactly what leads to irrational racial hostility (including against whites), sexist hostility (also against men), and other divisive social forces. Identity politics can be dangerous and destructive, not only on the right but even the left. "In their goodness and badness, there exist only persons, not peoples."

The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its "great minds," the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos. For a really thorough demolition, Finkelstein would have had to review the record of various feminist and queer theorists too, but it's a big enough task to critique the writers on race. Or, more precisely, that isn't a difficult task—it's so easy that Finkelstein is able to devote huge chunks of these chapters to sheer mockery—but it does require patience and a willingness to wade through endless intellectual muck. Take Crenshaw. Unsurprisingly, in her seminal 1989 article on intersectionality "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," "she conspicuously omits class in her dissection of oppression." It disturbs her that white feminists are presumptuous enough to speak for black women, but she "seems less concerned or, for that matter, even conscious that a high-achieving Black woman speaking for Black working-class women might also be problematic."

The vacuousness of contemporary identity politics is best exposed by considering its "great minds," the Crenshaws, Coateses, Kendis, and DiAngelos.

Or take DiAngelo. She has a pathological obsession with racism and an utterly Manichean, paranoid view of the world. If you're white, you're a racist—whether you're John Brown or Jefferson Davis, a fascist or an anti-fascist. Racism is ubiquitous, "immovably entrenched in our psyches and structures" (as Finkelstein paraphrases), "the air we breathe and the water we drink," all-encompassing and constantly reproduced, she says, "automatically"—and therefore, evidently, ineradicable. At best, it can occasionally be "interrupted"—through the "diversity training" at which DiAngelo excels and for which she charges a hefty fee. Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy. "Whites," says DiAngelo, "control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by." Yes, whites are a homogeneous master-class: the billionaires and the working class, they're all equally guilty, they're all oppressors. And to blacks she says, as Finkelstein summarizes, "Beware! Don't trust white people! They're all racists, racists to the core! Every last one of them! They're hard-wired for racism; it's in their DNA." This is a message perfectly calculated to pit workers against each other. No wonder the business class has so enthusiastically promoted her book!

What about Ibram X. Kendi? Finkelstein seems to take particular pleasure in disemboweling this (as he says) non-scholar and non-activist, for his critique/massacre is a full 110 pages long and features withering juxtapositions with a titan, DuBois. It's sad that a book review can't communicate the verve or the slicing humor of this chapter (and others). Kendi's book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, for example, whose "only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence…[is] less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that's as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it." One problem with Kendi's and our culture's promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label "racist" is that the concept becomes diluted: "to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K.K.K.?" The abolitionists were all racists, as were DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frasier, etc. etc.—while Kendi singles out for praise Harry Truman, Michelle Obama, Eldridge Cleaver, Pam Grier, Bo Derek, Kanye West, etc. "[T]he rigor of his taxonomy recalls not the Periodic Table but, on the contrary, Pin the Tail on the Donkey."

As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, "African-Americans haven't registered any progress in the struggle against racism. Each seeming stride forward has been attended by a step backward." If anything, he implies, things have only gotten worse! Such an "analysis" recalls the flagrantly ahistorical, unabashedly gloomy academic school of Afro-pessimism, and, by reifying differences between "whites" and "blacks" and valorizing anti-white resentment among the latter, serves the same function of hindering the class solidarity necessary to achieve real progress in struggles over the distribution of wealth, working conditions, affordable housing, high levels of unemployment, expansion of public resources, abysmal healthcare, environmental destruction, hypertrophying militarism, and the like. (No wonder, again, Kendi has been fêted by the establishment and can charge $45,000 for his talks. It helps, too, that his only real policy proposal is…affirmative action.)

After Finkelstein's devastating exposure of Kendi's countless inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and idiocies—his woke dismissal of the Civil Rights Movement in favor of the macho Black Panthers (who, by comparison, achieved almost nothing); his (in Kendi's words) "striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference" even as he argues that the idea of race is a "mirage" that was invented to rationalize exploitation; his insistence that all racial disparities in society are purely a result of racism; his valorizing of racial differences (e.g., he praises the "irrepressible Blackness" of his friend) at the same time as he says anti-racists see only individuals and not racial behavior ("there is no such thing as Black behavior"); his positing of a deep separation between so-called white culture and black culture; his arguing against the racist "assimilationist" urge to value white culture over black even as he manifestly values white culture over black (lecturing before white audiences, accepting a fellowship at Harvard University, presiding over a research center at Boston University, being proud of publishing in white journals like The Atlantic)—nothing remains but the empty husk of a social-climbing charlatan. That such a person can be widely considered to be more or less on the left is a crushing indictment of the state of the left.

For charlatanry, though, few can beat the next entry on Finkelstein's shit list: Obama. "Barack Obama is the perfected and perfect instrument of identity politics, its summa summarum. He represents the cynical triumph of form over substance, color over character. He is the cool Black dude who is also the reliable—in Professor Cornel West's words—'mascot of Wall Street.'" Most leftists are hardly enamored of Obama, so I need not summarize the case against him. Nor would I even try, because I couldn't possibly reproduce the distinctive Finkelsteinian humor—and most of this very long chapter consists of (factually grounded) ridicule, directed at nearly everyone in Obama's presidential coterie, a "revolting retinue of bootlickers." Aside from Obama himself, the most satisfying skewering, I found, was of Samantha Power, the "Battleaxe from Hell…downright evil…[whose] conscience only bestirs at the suffering of victims of official U.S. enemies." One might argue that in this chapter Finkelstein's profound contempt for the "Elmer Gantry in blackface" at the head of this gaggle of amoral mediocrities gets the best of his prodigious literary gifts, since the ruthless mockery goes on and on and becomes somewhat tiresome, but it can't be gainsaid that it's all well-deserved.

After six chapters and almost 400 pages on the subject, Finkelstein's summary of identity politics is worth quoting:

Identity politics has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement [viz., Bernie Sanders'] that promised profound social change. It counsels Black people not to trust whites, as their racism is so entrenched and so omnipresent as to poison their every thought and action. It conveys to poor whites that they, no less than the white billionaire class, are beneficiaries of racism, so that it would be foolhardy of them to ally with Black people… Then, identity politics puts forth demands that either appear radical but are in fact politically inert—Defund the police, Abolition of prisons—as they have no practical possibility of achievement; or that leave the overall system intact while still enabling a handful, who purport to represent marginalized groups, to access—on a "parity" basis—the exclusive club of the "haves." This, in effect, performance politics has spawned a disgusting den of thieves who brand themselves with radical-sounding hashtags, churn out radical-sounding tweets, and insinuate themselves into positions of prominence, as they rake in corporate donations, cash corporate paychecks, hang out at the watering holes of the rich and famous, and thence can be safely relied upon not to bite the hand that feeds them…

One might object that he's painting with too broad a brush here, that advocacy of the interests of minorities and women can, depending on the context and the cause, indeed be an essential political program, but he wouldn't deny this. He has the highest regard for the Civil Rights Movement, after all—although he would deny that that was identity politics. "The human rights of a victimized group must, of course, be uncompromisingly defended." More problematic than such defense is to make a cult of group differences (group "pride") in the way of the woke, and to place class issues at the bottom of the heap rather than the top, where they belong. "Human dignity is not possible without the ability to pay for a roof over one's head, clothes on one's back, and food on one's table."

Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation...

Whatever genuinely emancipatory political impulses exist in identity politics have long been, on the whole, coopted and buried under an avalanche of left-liberal virtue-signaling, preening and posing, careerism, and sabotage of a substantive left. Just consider how the woke mob reacted to the Sanders campaign, the most serious challenge to the establishment in more than a generation: they tried to "cancel" Sanders for his being a "privileged white male" with a supposed blind-spot on race. His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence." As Finkelstein says, "When the 'hour of serious danger' to the status quo struck during Bernie Sanders' class-struggle insurgency, the 'true nature' of woke radicalism—not just its opportunism but, even more, its rancid, reactionary core—was exposed as each and all of these erstwhile 'radicals' enlisted under the banner to stop him." Woke cancel culture cooperated with the establishment media's cancel culture to stop the Sanders juggernaut.

Cancel culture and academic freedom

"Cancel culture might be defined as the turning of a person into a non-person." By that definition, it has been around for a very long time. Arguably, it is as old as civilization. The first and second Red Scares in the U.S. were instances of cancel culture; so is the corporate media's treatment of virtually everyone on the left; so is the woke treatment of anyone who publicly strays from the party line. Even if such victims of woke defamation campaigns usually find their footing again or don't always suffer career consequences in the first place, the mob's impulse to censor and silence remains operative and ever-vigilant. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it.

His defense of a regime of nearly untrammeled free speech is rooted, first and foremost, in his conviction that this is the surest way to Truth. He quotes DuBois: when free speech is stifled, "the nation…becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions." But John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. "Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion," Mill writes, "is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth… The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded." As Finkelstein translates, "if you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer." Your opponents can even be useful for prodding you to rethink weak points in your reasoning or evidentiary basis, exposing little errors in your arguments, giving you something to think about that you had overlooked, in general giving you the opportunity to more rationally ground your beliefs.

The mob's desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident. The latter attitudes are more likely to yield calm composure and willingness to give opponents a hearing because you know you're able to refute them. When a mob tries to prevent someone from talking because it feels threatened by his speech, it's quite possible, often, that his speech has some truth in it. Suppressing it—unless it's merely emotive speech like "fuck you!"—possibly allows his opponents to persist in having false or partially false views.

But someone might reply, "What if his speech is socially harmful? Isn't that a legitimate reason to suppress it?" Well, the definition of "harmful" is, of course, contested, and it evolves over time. Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Now eugenics is considered downright evil. Who is to say your definition of "socially harmful" is, in all cases, the right one, or that your application of it is always right? "When it comes to curbing speech," Finkelstein says, "experience thus confirms the general rule in human affairs: humility is to be preferred over arrogance."

The mob's desire to silence, attack, and destroy comes from feeling threatened, not from being rationally certain and confident.

Moreover, if the "harmful" speech is socially marginal such that hardly anyone believes it, what's the great danger in letting someone say it now and then? If, on the other hand, it's not marginal but holds the assent of millions, letting someone express it presents an opportunity to argue against it and thus inoculate people. The strategy of pure suppression is apt to lead many to think there might be something "dangerously truthful" to it—"the establishment doesn't want us to hear this because it's threatened by its truth!"—and thus might contribute to its diffusion across the population. People might think they're being "rebellious" or anti-establishmentarian by believing it, and furthermore that they're upholding noble values of free speech against authoritarian censoring leftists (as the reactionary right thinks today). I might also note that giving authorities the right to suppress or punish certain kinds of speech, and even encouraging them to do so, will soon lead to their suppressing speech you like.

The left has historically been in the vanguard of fights for free speech, from the abolitionists to the IWW (and most other unions, in fact) to the Socialists during World War I to the Civil Rights Movement. Its departure today from these honorable traditions is yet more evidence that it's become a pseudo-left, a reactionary left—for the empowering of authorities to regulate speech is ultimately reactionary. It's ironic that many self-styled anarchists advocate increasing the power of unaccountable bureaucrats to control what is said and what isn't.

Admittedly, it might have strengthened Finkelstein's discussion to consider in more depth possible counterarguments. It is, after all, very unfortunate that media operatives like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and the whole stable of Fox News social arsonists have brainwashed millions of people. It is likely they couldn't have had such a destructive impact had the FCC's Fairness Doctrine not been repealed in 1987. Maybe it was right to repeal it, but a case can at least be made that it was wrong. Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn't say much about these. The reason, it seems, is that he doesn't think the internet has raised significantly new questions about free speech, and in any case there is already an extensive literature on web censorship.

Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.

Among the many excellent points he makes is one that cuts to the heart of wokeness: the collective obsession with pinning a label—racist or not, sexist or not, transphobic or not—on every thought passing through one's head and every utterance one makes, and then cancelling all the thoughts that (and all the people who) stray an inch past what's deemed "acceptable," is ridiculous and paranoid. It's also reactionary, because it makes solidarity vastly more difficult. One of the more memorable passages in the book is when he imagines, in some alternate universe, a Robin DiAngelo who actually does care about fighting oppression of blacks and not only grifting off a culture's pathologies. Were she to speak before a group of workers, she might say something like this (italics in the original):

Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. You're all, Black and white, trapped in dead-end jobs. You all earn poverty wages… [You have to] organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. You can't eliminate every fleeting, non-p.c. thought passing through your head… You can't wait until everyone's thoughts are simon-pure. You don't have the time, and they never will be. You cannot police your thoughts, and it's probably better that way. Were it otherwise, you wouldn't be human. You're fallible, you're imperfect vessels… If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. It's common struggle, common sacrifice, that produces mutual respect, even mutual love. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. You don't become better persons by each of you, singly, struggling with your racist demons. You become better persons by all of you, together, struggling against an antihuman system…

Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the "left" adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.

"The fight against racism must focus…not on the intangible, impalpable, unchangeable, invisible, or unprovable, but, instead, on what's substantive, meaningful, and corrigible. In the first place, securing economic opportunity and legal equality." The Sanders program was far more substantively "anti-racist" than the puny liberal programs of most of his woke critics. (As for Sanders' being constantly hounded to support "reparations" for blacks, I've explained elsewhere why that demand is anti-solidaristic, politically impossible, and ultimately a diversion from radical social transformation.)

The last chapter of I'll Burn That Bridge delves into a specific dimension of cancel culture: when is it appropriate for a professor to be disciplined for his public behavior and statements, whether on social media or in some other context? This issue bears, of course, on Finkelstein's own career, but he is hardly the only academic to have been disciplined in recent decades for alleged "incivility" or taking unpopular political stands. The chapter is tightly argued and has a more disciplined structure than others, consisting of analyses of four academic freedom cases (Bertrand Russell in 1940, Leo Koch in 1960, Angela Davis in 1969, and Steven Salaita in 2014) and then general reflections that conclude in a discussion of his own case. He endorses the American Association of University Professors' standard that "a faculty member's expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member's unfitness to serve [i.e., to teach]"—which was surely not the case in the four instances he examines. But he goes much further and questions whether it should even be seen as a professional obligation that one always use civil language in one's scholarship (which Finkelstein didn't when writing about the Holocaust industry and Alan Dershowitz's lies). Given all the invective in Marx's Capital, for example, the book would never have been published by a university press today and Marx wouldn't get a position at a top university. "But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum? Doesn't it conclusively demonstrate the inanity of a standard commanding restrained and temperate language?"

It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.

One might connect Finkelstein's lengthy discussion of academic civility with his book's focus on woke politics by pointing to something his targets have in common: a preoccupation with policing language and thought at the expense of more substantive concerns. Academia insists on politeness, decorum, "neutral" language, which often serves to enforce conventions, emasculate dissent, and uphold power structures; wokeness insists on ceaselessly monitoring your own and others' language, in fact making that a priority, allowing people to feel "radical" by doing nothing that remotely challenges real power structures. (No surprise that woke culture has largely emerged from the academy.) To do justice to Truth and Justice, though, requires more than this. In the case of scholarly writing and speaking,

There are moments that might positively require breaking free of the constraints imposed by polite public discourse in order to sound the tocsin that, as we indifferently carry on in a privileged sanctuary of peace and prosperity, innocent people are being butchered by our own state. The uncivil reality, not uncivil words, should be cause for reproach and excoriation, while uncivil words might be called for to bring home the uncivil reality.

It can at least be said for Finkelstein that he practices what he preaches: his book, to put it mildly, does not shrink from uncivil words.

The anti-academic

It should be clear from what has been said here that I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It is an unusual book. It requires a lot of patience to read, but I think the effort is worth it. It's not a "polished" work, but in an academic and literary environment that sometimes seems to value polish above all else, including moral and intellectual substance, one appreciates something a little more raw. And someone with the courage to tear down—in order to build up.

Finkelstein is in the tradition of the great incorruptible truth-tellers. He relates an anecdote from when he was a graduate student at Princeton in 1984: his work exposing a bestselling scholarly hoax on the Israel-Palestine conflict had gotten the favorable attention of the editor of the New York Review of Books and his friend (Arthur Hertzberg) at Columbia University, and he sensed that career possibilities were opening up for him. But then, in a meeting with Hertzberg, he was bluntly asked, "Are you in Chomsky's stable?" Despite knowing the probable consequences of giving the wrong answer, he unhesitatingly said he deeply admired Chomsky and was grateful for his support—which, of course, was the wrong answer. He never heard from the men again. Even so, "I was proud of myself," he writes, "not to be tempted, at all, by the lure of fame and fortune, and I was grateful for this test of my fidelity to Truth (and Chomsky), so that I could prove in my own person dead wrong the cynics who imagine, or console themselves, that everyone has a price."

That unshakeable commitment, that willingness not to conform, combined with intellectual power, is chiefly what has set Finkelstein apart from most of his peers. One hopes that his book and his example will inspire young idealists to follow in his path.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Chris Wright.

The post An Objective Look at US Foreign Policy: an Interview With Norman Solomon appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Rachel.

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, activist, and former U.S. congressional candidate. He is a long time associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy which works to provide alternative sources for journalists, and serves as its executive director.  Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions, and is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2006) and Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (2007).

We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below are exactly as he provided.

Here is what Norman had to say.

John Rachel: We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”.  Not constitutionally. But de facto.

Norman Solomon: Setting the boundaries of dominant discourse — with reiteration and omission — is crucial to guiding and determining U.S. foreign policy as well as discouraging the spread of dissent. The very notion that U.S. military spending is “defense” spending gets any discussion off to a badly distorted start. I wouldn’t be against spending that is truly for defense, but right now only a small proportion of the Pentagon budget deserves to be in that category. The U.S. maintains about 750 military bases overseas and is currently engaged in military operations in 80 countries. As I put it in a recent article for Truthout, “Leaders of the U.S. government never tire of reasserting their commitment to human rights and democracy. At the same time, they insist that an inexhaustible supply of adversaries is bent on harming the United States, which must not run away from forceful engagement with the world. But the actual U.S. agenda is to run the world.” It’s an agenda propelled and implemented largely by corporate power, with tremendous profits being made — mostly by huge corporations; military contracting is a sacred cash cow for the oligarchy. The warfare state is a corporate state.

JR: We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. The U.S. apparently cannot be at peace. “Threats” against the homeland are allegedly increasing in number and severity. The trajectory of our relations with the rest of the world appears to be more confrontations, more enemies, more crises, more wars.

Is the world really that full of aggressors, bad actors, ruthless opponents? Or is there something in our own policies and attitudes toward other countries which put us at odds with them, thus making war inevitable and peace impossible?

NS: It’s been said that the United States is in search of enemies, and certainly there’s an unending supply — especially when trying to run the world as much as you can. Of course, the world is filled with many people and forces eager to concentrate undue power and oligarchic wealth in the hands of a few, and the United States is hardly responsible for that reality. That said, the U.S. government is the leading international lawbreaker and killer in this century — it’s really not a debatable fact, it’s a matter of looking at the numbers of deaths from the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq alone. “Do as we say, not as we do” has never been a very convincing message. What the world needs is a single standard of human rights and international law. Hypocrisy in Washington does not justify Russia’s murderous war on Ukraine, or vice versa.

JR: Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?

NS: Well, like capitalism itself, militarism is insatiable. The results of the drive for profits, however momentarily satisfying they might be, are never enough. It’s a kind of pathological gluttony. The greed for personal wealth and power is intertwined with similar institutional greed; when does a corporation say that the profits are too high or there’s no need to try to increase them in the future? Never. Meanwhile, people all over the world on a massive scale are suffering and dying from preventable diseases, lack of healthcare, malnutrition or outright starvation, and an environmental crisis including a climate emergency that keeps getting worse.

JR: It’s evident that you, and the many individuals who follow you and support your work, believe that America’s direction in both the diplomatic sphere and in the current conflict zones represents exercise of government power gone awry. Can you paint for us in broad strokes the specific changes in our national priorities and policies you view as necessary for the U.S. to peacefully coexist with other nations, at the same time keeping us safe from malicious attacks on our security and rightful place in the world community?

NS: Collective security among nations is the only hope for international peace and stability in the best sense of the word. The economic, environmental and health crises afflicting humanity right now truly know no borders. The U.S. government should practice what it preaches and stop asserting with action the prerogative to keep crossing borders and killing people. While vastly boosting expenditures to meet human needs with a wide array of social programs, the United States could cut its military budget in half right away and be not only just as secure but also more so. A good example is the U.S. ICBM force of 400 nuclear missiles in underground silos, on hair-trigger alert all the time. As Daniel Ellsberg explained this year, “No other strategic weapons besides ground-based ICBMs challenge a national leader to decide, absurdly within minutes, whether ‘to use them or lose them.’ They should not exist…. No other specific, concrete American action would go so far immediately to reduce the real risk of a false alarm in a crisis causing the near-extinction of humanity.”

JR: The general public, especially when it’s aware of the self-sabotaging results of our current foreign policies and military posturing, clearly wants less war and militarism, preferring more peaceful alternatives on the world stage and greater concentration on solving the problems at home. As peace activists, we are thus more in line with the majority of citizens on issues of war and peace, than those currently in power.

What happens if we determine that those shaping current U.S. policy don’t care what the citizenry thinks, are simply not listening to us? What if we conclude that our Congress, for example, is completely deaf to the voice of the people? What do we do? What are our options then? As a thought leader and advocate of comprehensive reform, what do you propose?

NS: Well, any thoughts that I or anyone else has, no matter how worthwhile, will be of limited value without the kind of grassroots organizing that can create meaningful change. Democracy has always been a combination of mirage and reality even in the best of times in the United States. Virtually every change for the better that we can be proud of in U.S. history came from the bottom up, not from the top down, of the existing power structures. The fight for democracy is never-ending. Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize!” There’s no better advice available in a few words. (I’m very glad to be working with colleagues at RootsAction, which now has 1.2 million online supporters, and I invite all readers to sign up for action alerts at RootsAction.org.) Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the imperative need for militant nonviolent action. Progressive social movements that organize effectively with such an approach have enormous potential to help create a truly better world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

Only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it. For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

I have spent decades of my life as a climate activist fighting various deliberate forms of climate science denial propagated by climate polluting companies and their allied political parties, politicians, lobby groups and commentators.

The good news is that we have mostly won that battle. The bad news is that they have a new tactic, greenwashing, which is now a major obstacle to progress on climate change. Greenwashing is when businesses or politicians give a false impression, or spin, on their products or policies to give the impression that they have a positive impact on the environment when they don’t.

We now face a new landscape in which even oil companies claim to be doing their bit for the climate with “carbon offsets” and “2050 net zero goals”. Their aim is to stop real action on climate by making people think it is all under control.

One of the jobs of the government is to sort out the real climate actions from the greenwashing, to hold industry to account. And of course, one of the jobs of the government is to not engage in greenwashing themselves.

The problem with some of the actions of the current Aotearoa New Zealand government is that rather than holding business to account for its greenwashing, on some vital climate issues the government is actually a proponent of greenwashing.

This greenwashing is closely linked to a wrong-headed theory of change which we hear repeatedly from this government — the idea that climate issues can only be solved through consensus, especially consensus with the polluters and their representatives. The idea that we can’t make real policy to cut climate pollution without the consent of the polluters and their representatives is dangerous and inconsistent with the history of making change.

There are fundamental conflicts in the climate policy space — some industries will not accept that they need to cut emissions. The attempt to gloss over these conflicts and seek consensus means the government adopts policies that the polluters will accept, and which consequently do not cut emissions. This policy outcome is then sold to the public as a great victory when in truth it is a defeat — it is greenwashed.

Before getting into the specifics of the problems I want to acknowledge that this government has done some good things on climate. The ban on new oil and gas exploration permits was a win, even though it excluded onshore Taranaki and allowed existing permits to be extended.

The cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser was a win, even though it is a very high cap which has yet to be enforced. Greenpeace publicly celebrated these wins and congratulated the government on making these decisions, even while pointing out their limitations.

I tried to provide a transparent assessment of the environmental performance of the Ardern government back in 2020. I spent a decade as Green Party co-leader and I know there are wins and losses in politics and that compromise is a reality of politics in a healthy democracy.

But honestly admitted compromise is one thing, and greenwashing is another.

There will always be arguments as to what is an acceptable political compromise. We need to separate the issue of what is an acceptable compromise to enter government from the issue of greenwashing. Determining what is an acceptable compromise for the Greens to join the Labour government is formally a matter of decision for the Green Party and the Labour Party rather than the climate movement.

People like me are entitled to our views of the compromise, but it is the Green Party and the Labour Party that have to decide if it’s worth it. I am not a member of the Green Party or the Labour Party.

The issue of greenwashing, however, is an issue which is of direct and immediate concern for the wider climate movement. This is because when the government sells their policies as great climate advances, when in reality they are not, it misleads the wider public and the climate movement.

People can think they don’t need to push hard on climate because it is under control, when it is not. We then need to spend our time highlighting and explaining why the claimed win is actually spin, rather than campaigning for meaningful action.

This undermines our ability to get more significant progress on climate policy because the power and leadership to get progress on climate (like all other progressive issues) comes from civil society and if civil society is disarmed by greenwashing then climate policy follows dead end paths, stalls or  stops.

But why is greenwashing the biggest challenge the climate movement faces at the moment. How did we get here?

Goals remain unchanged, but tactics evolve
As I mentioned above, the first thing to understand is that climate policy is unavoidably and irrevocably conflictual, and hence political. That is because on the one hand the enduring overarching goal of big climate polluters in the fossil fuel business and industrial agribusiness is to prevent government regulations that will force them to cut their climate emissions.

While on the other hand the climate movement aims for emission cuts to achieve a stable climate.

This is a fundamental conflict globally, and in Aotearoa, and no amount of pseudo consensus can wish this conflict away.

Big climate polluters believe, rightly, that government regulation and pricing to drive emissions reductions threatens their business models and profitability. Other sectors of the economy, such as IT, can more easily adapt to a low carbon future, but those businesses in the industries like coal and synthetic fertiliser can’t adapt, and they intend to fight efforts to cut emissions all the way.

While their goal of preventing government regulation to force reductions in emissions has remained consistent, their tactics to achieve this goal have changed. And it is understanding the way their tactics have evolved that it becomes clear just how problematic the current government’s climate policies have become.

At the beginning the tactic they used was to deny the compelling weight of scientific evidence supporting the theory of human induced climate change. Climate denial was stock in trade for many right wing parties and agribusiness and oil industry lobby groups from the 1990s through to the 2010s.

But after a while that stopped working so they changed tactics to stressing uncertainty especially in the 2000s. They said climate change might be a thing, but there is so much uncertainty so we shouldn’t do anything about it. They played up the nature of scientific inquiry — that theories are not beyond questioning because they are not religious texts — to emphasise uncertainty and the need for delay. It was really just another form of climate denialism.

Billions spent on climate denialism
The polluting industries spent billions promoting climate denialism and uncertainty in order to block government regulation to cut emissions. They bought politicians, public relations firms and sadly some scientists to promote these ideas to delay action on climate. Their ideas were reproduced widely by the conservative commentariat, and many still are.

I spent many years of my life fighting climate denialism and eventually through the efforts of millions of climate activists we (mostly) won the battle against climate denialism. There are now few major governments or corporations or industry lobby groups that rely on climate denialist arguments to block government regulation to cut emissions.

Straight out climate science deniers have been pushed to the margins like Groundswell or the Act Party.

But the goal of the fossil fuel and agribusiness polluters remains consistent — they still want to stop government regulation to cut emissions — so they need a new tactic. And that tactic is greenwashing.

These days the polluters and their representatives say, “yes climate change is a thing” and “yes we should do something about it and you will be happy to know that we are doing something about it.”

Hence, they argue, there is no need for government regulation. Even though they spent the last 30 years blocking every attempt to reduce emissions and even denying climate science, they argue that they now take it seriously and there is absolutely no need for the government to do anything.

And what they are doing is often nonsense like net carbon zero targets in 2050 or buying offshore carbon credits or an industry controlled pricing mechanism like He Waka Eke Noa, or nitrification inhibitors etc. They don’t actually cut emissions in any significant way.

The purpose of greenwashing may seem relatively retail when it is done by a single company to sell stuff to consumers, but at a systemic level the purpose of greenwashing is to head off government attempts to introduce regulations and pricing that will force emission reductions.

There are of course some corporations and governments taking significant actions to cut emissions, but there are also many corporate and government actions that are just greenwashing.

Separating out the genuine climate actions from greenwashing is something that defines the climate politics of our time. And this is why the approach taken by the New Zealand government is so very problematic. People assume that the Climate Minister, especially a Green Party Climate Minister, will not perpetuate greenwashing, and will call it out, but it has not always been the case with James Shaw, and that makes it all the more insidious.

Government greenwashes the biggest polluter: Agribusiness
Which brings us to the problem with the current New Zealand government climate policy. Climate policy in this country mostly boils down to what you are doing about agribusiness emissions (biogenic agriculture emissions alone are about 50 percent of emissions) and transport (20 percent). The rest matters too but if you aren’t tackling these two then you aren’t tackling climate change.

Transport policy has not been great from a climate perspective but here I want to focus on the bigger problem — agribusiness — particularly intensive dairy.

We have had the same Prime Minister and the same Climate Minister for the nearly five years of this government. There have been a plethora of nice sounding climate announcements — the PM said that climate was her generation’s “nuclear free moment”, we’ve had the so-called Zero Carbon Act, a climate emergency declaration, an independent climate commission established, emissions reductions plans, improved nationally determined targets for reduction, signed the global methane pledge etc.

But there is still no effective government policy to cut emissions from agribusiness, by far the biggest polluter.

The problem is not just that the government is doing virtually nothing to cut emissions from agribusiness, the problem is that it is saying that it is taking climate change seriously.

It is equivalent to the Australian government doing nothing about coal or the Canadian government doing nothing about tar sands oil — all while telling us how seriously they take climate change. This is greenwashing and it is dangerous because many people think climate action is happening.

When the claims of meaningful action are fronted by a “nuclear free-moment” Prime Minister and a Green Party Climate Minister – the general observer could be forgiven for trusting that those claims are true.

The evidence that this government has done very little to cut agribusiness emissions is bountiful but let me focus on just one central area — agriculture and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Taking government at its word
The government repeatedly tells us that the Emissions Trading Scheme is the most important tool to cut emissions. This is debatable but let us take them at their word.

If it is so important then why, 14 years after the ETS began in 2008, is the biggest polluting sector, agribusiness, still exempt from the ETS? For 14 years agribusiness lobbyists and industry groups such as Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ have successfully fought a battle of predatory delay to stop their sector facing a price on emissions, apparently the most important climate tool.

And every government (Clark, Key, Ardern) has given them exactly what they want — perpetual delay.

When the ETS was passed into law in 2008, the Labour government of the day delayed agriculture’s entry until 2013. A bad start.

At the time, myself and many others argued against the delay but the Clark government wouldn’t budge. The John Key-Bill English National government (2008-2017) that followed, delayed agriculture’s entry indefinitely. From the perspective of agribusiness, delaying is winning, and they were winning.

For a moment in 2017/2018 it looked like the newly elected Ardern government might have the courage of its convictions and that the agribusiness lobby would finally lose its battle to stop climate action.

The Labour-NZ First coalition agreement explicitly committed them to support agriculture’s entry into the ETS at 5 percent of its obligations. With NZ First’s vote secured, there was a Parliamentary majority to bring agriculture into the ETS. Finally.

Backed down under pressure
But then in 2019 the Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw backed down to agribusiness pressure and instead of agriculture facing a price on its emissions they adopted an industry proposal — He Waka Eke Noa.

He Waka Eke Noa was a proposal from agribusiness for a joint government-agribusiness initiative looking at pricing agribusiness climate pollution. In effect He Waka Eke Noa handed over to industry the design of the system to price their own pollution. New Zealand agribusiness was beside themselves with joy.

In time it would become clear that it was not just that industry would design the system, but they would design a system that they would control going forward.

And, the target date for starting pricing was 2025. That was two elections away — 2020 and 2023 —  and the chances of the current ministers still being there was remote. And if they did manage to win in 2020 and 2023, it was almost unheard of for a government to win a fourth term in 2026 so anything implemented in 2025 could be easily undone.

He Waka Eke Noa’s timelines left the industry partying. And as for the politicians, none of them were likely to be around to get the blame when nothing happened either.

In one of the defining moments of this government’s climate inaction, Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw stood next to Dairy NZ and Federated Farmers to launch the five year He Waka Eke Noa project, instead of implementing their own policy of immediately putting agriculture into the ETS.

James Shaw celebrated He Waka Eke Noa and went so far as to say “nothing about us without us” —  that is he used the slogan of the disability advocacy movement to infer that the agribusiness sector shouldn’t be regulated without their consent and agreement. That was a real low point I must say.

Predictably, three years of delay later, in 2022, the final report from He Waka Eke Noa was released detailing a complicated system that would cut agribusiness emissions by less than 1 percent. The headline reduction was higher but that is because it included the reductions that are supposed to come from technologies that don’t currently exist (magic bullets), the reductions that result from the unrelated freshwater regulations, and the reductions that come out of the waste sector.

Incidentally agribusiness has been saying those same magic bullets have been just around the corner for the last 20 years. If you strip out reductions projected to come from magic bullets, freshwater regulations and waste, the emissions reductions from the He Waka Eke Noa pricing mechanism are less than 1 percent. In addition, under the proposal industry would control the mechanism for regulating their own pollution — classic industry capture.

From the industry perspective He Waka Eke Noa was designed to stop government regulation i.e. stop agribusiness going into the ETS. Under criticism from Groundswell, both Federated Farmers and DairyNZ touted their achievement in keeping their industry out of the ETS.

The National Party also voiced its support for the final report. The Climate Minister was a little more muted.

Most people listening to the government talk about He Waka Eke Noa would think that it has been a tremendous success — after all doesn’t the government always say it wants consensus on climate? Whereas in fact its sole success has been to delay government regulation of agribusiness climate pollution — by three years so far — and, even if it were implemented, by its own calculations emissions would be reduced by less than 1 percent.

That is what consensus with polluters looks like and that is the corner that Ardern and Shaw have painted themselves into.

The purpose of greenwashing is to make us think industry is finally taking climate seriously and hence there is no need for government regulation, while in reality very little is happening to cut emissions.

He Waka Eke Noa is a perfect example of greenwashing:

• It looks like industry is taking climate change seriously with media coverage of all their hard work;
• The new scheme, if it is implemented, is controlled by industry, so full industry capture;
• The scheme has almost no impact on actually reducing emissions; and
• Even if, god forbid, the government were to reject He Waka Eke Noa and instead revert to putting agribusiness into the ETS when it makes a decision in late 2022, it is too late for that decision to be fully institutionalised before the next election, so it will be easily removed if there is a change of government in 2023 and not so hard even after the 2026 election. Predatory delay has been such a successful tactic so far for the industry, why change now?

The Glasgow target
The decisions by this government not to cut agribusiness emissions created cascading international problems of perception for the New Zealand government when it was required to offer a new target for emissions reductions at the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021.

The government wanted to look good with an ambitious target (known as a Nationally Determined Contribution) but had few policies to actually cut emissions. Other countries were raising doubts about the government’s climate commitment. The ETS was supposed to do the heavy lifting but, as the Climate Commission admitted recently, under current settings the “NZ ETS is likely to deliver mostly new plantation forestry rather than gross emission reductions”.

The answer was to use the potential future purchase of overseas carbon offsets to present a net target that looked ambitious.

The Climate Minister announced with great fanfare that New Zealand would commit to a 50 percent cut in net emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. NZ paraded its 50 percent target around the Glasgow climate conference. It sounds good until you realise not only does the target use tricky accounting to make it look much larger than it is, but that TWO THIRDS of the emissions reductions would come from buying offshore carbon offsets.

Sorry about the shouty capitals but nothing yells “greenwashing” quite like offshore carbon offsetting. Carbon offsets are notoriously corrupt, open to double counting, and are the carbon equivalent of papal indulgences. They are what you do when you don’t have policy to cut emissions but want to look good.

Yet this is the government’s plan to reach our international climate target — greenwashing. The Climate Commission has urged the government to contract the offsets fast: “It is essential that the government secure access to sources of offshore mitigation as soon as possible”. Instead of, you know, actually cutting emissions.

And just to show the government is not without a sense of humour they signed up to the global methane pledge to cut methane emissions — without a plan to cut methane emissions! In fact, in case industry was worried, when Shaw returned from Glasgow he confirmed that the government would not introduce any new policies to cut methane. Moooo.

But what about the giant climate bureaucratic superstructure?
Faced with this evidence of greenwashing on agribusiness and the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) some people say “what about the Zero Carbon Act”? That proves they are serious doesn’t it? I think that we do need institutional reform to deal with climate, and I’ve pointed to what we need and some of the problems of the Zero Carbon Act before, but it should not be at the expense of immediate climate action.

Much of the government’s climate policy focus in the last five years has been on building an elaborate climate bureaucratic structure. This began with the years-long process to get cross-party support for the Zero Carbon Act, the years-long process to establish the Climate Commission, then there was the years-long processes to build the carbon budgets and the Emissions Reduction Plan.

These structures and processes do look good but they don’t cut emissions – only regulations and policies that cut emissions actually cut emissions. Now you might argue that over time this bureaucratic superstructure will lead to significant emission reductions, and maybe they will, and maybe they won’t, and maybe they can be improved.

The problem is we don’t have years to wonder and hope. We need to have been tangibly cutting actual emissions for the last five years, and cutting them harder over the next five, if we are to play any part in stalling global climate catastrophe.

Spending five years on not implementing much policy to cut emissions, in order to implement a bureaucratic superstructure that might result in emissions cuts down the road if a future government has the courage to use the climate superstructure to implement the policies that this one has not, is plainly not a serious policy to cut emissions. Just implement the policies.

However, in agriculture, our biggest polluter, there is no ambiguity that this climate policy structure has delivered nothing. The Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) has almost nothing to offer except magical technologies that don’t currently exist. The government’s excuse for offering no serious policy on cutting agribusiness emissions in the ERP is, you guessed it, He Waka Eke Noa. Predictably Federated Farmers really liked the Emission Reduction Plan, because it, you know, didn’t reduce agribusiness emissions!

The 2022-23 Budget that followed the ERP allocated $710 million over four years to agribusiness climate initiatives, but it turns out the money is to look for magic bullets to cut emissions. And some of these magic bullets might be worse — recently $11 million was given to research nitrification inhibitors that kill soil biology in order to cut nitrous oxide emissions following the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.

Killing our soils is the exact opposite of what we need to do. The money in the ERP comes from ETS revenue paid by others, because agribusiness is not required to pay into the Emissions Trading Scheme. It is a giant subsidy from everyone else to agribusiness to maintain the pretence of climate action.

It seems a big price to pay to maintain the pretence — it would be a lot cheaper just to paint the cows green.

Some might argue that the climate bureaucratic superstructure may not achieve much in reality, but it is not actually harmful. Sure, the argument goes, this elaborate policy superstructure has wasted lots of time and energy which could have gone into policies that would actually cut emissions, but it is harmless enough.

Well, maybe you’d only think that if you haven’t been following the litigation. Crown Law, the government’s lawyers, are using the Zero Carbon Act etc to actually block climate action in the courts. Here are two quick examples.

In the most recent case against the Energy Minister’s decision to issue more onshore oil and gas exploration permits, the Minister’s lawyers argued that the Zero Carbon Act allowed for more oil and gas exploration and so it was fine. This is in spite of the fact that the world already has more oil and gas reserves than can be burnt to stay under the 1.5 degree guidance that is in the Zero Carbon Act.

Previously climate lawyers have been able to argue that the global situation for oil and gas must be taken into account but now, significantly, under the Zero Carbon Act, the Crown argues you can only consider the New Zealand situation. So the Zero Carbon Act is being used to justify oil exploration and protect it from legal attack by climate activists.

And in a previous case against the Climate Commission, James Shaw’s lawyers argued that the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act was only “aspirational” and not binding on the government.

Marc Daalder reported it thus:

“Crown Law counsel Polly Higbee told the High Court references to 1.5 degrees [in the Zero Carbon Act] used “broad, aspirational language” and it would be “too prescriptive” to argue that the purpose section placed any actual duty on the Government.”

No actual duty on the government from the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act is what Shaw’s lawyers told the court. Outside the court, when speaking to climate activists, Shaw says that the 1.5 degrees target is binding, but in court, where it matters, his lawyers argue it is not.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of greenwashing. There were many people in the climate movement who worked hard to deliver the Zero Carbon Act and honestly believed it would be a significant tool to cut emissions, rather than defend oil exploration against legal attack.

The final argument for these bland instruments like the Zero Carbon Act is that we need to get broad political elite consensus on climate to get change. History tells us the opposite. To choose just one example which is close to the PM’s heart — nuclear free.

Nuclear free New Zealand was not a result of a consensus process. It was vociferously opposed by the National Party and its many allies — they voted against the legislation and spoke out against it. Nuclear free NZ was not won by reducing our ambitions to what was acceptable to the National Party and the US State Department.

Thousands of peace and environment activists campaigned for it and the Labour government eventually came round to their position, and stood up to provide leadership. There was no political elite consensus. The reason that the National Party never repealed the nuclear free legislation when they returned to government in 1990 was because of its broad support from civil society, support that resulted from civil society campaigners and a Prime Minister willing to fight for the policy (once he finally came round to it).

Introducing vacuous climate legislation that achieves little, in order to get the National Party to vote for it, is pointless, or worse.

Winning the debate on real climate action is the only way to ensure it sticks, and greenwashing undermines that public campaigning.

Conclusion
During the 2017 election campaign I bumped into Jacinda Ardern in Wellington airport and she told me my job at Greenpeace was to hold her government accountable. I respected her for saying that and I agreed with it, and still do. And so that is what I’m doing.

The government has done some good stuff on climate, but on the really big and difficult climate policy issues they are greenwashing. And the greenwashing has disoriented and weakened the climate movement and meant that we are getting much weaker climate policy out of this government than we would otherwise.

And I refer to Ardern rather than Shaw deliberately because there is an uncomfortable political reality that sits behind all this: Jacinda Ardern makes the climate policy in this government and James Shaw presents it. The first rule of politics is to learn how to count — look at the numbers and you will understand this government — Labour has a simple majority and Shaw isn’t even in Cabinet.

James Shaw may like the climate policy, he may not, I don’t know. He may be the architect of crucial bits of it, or not, I don’t know. He is allowed to say he would like to improve the climate policy, but he cannot speak out against it and keep his job. And once you dwell on that hard political truth, all this makes a lot more sense.

It’s not my job or Greenpeace’s job to say whether that is an acceptable position for the Green Party to find itself in, but it is our job to call out greenwash when we see it. We believe that only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it.

For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa and was co-leader of the Green Party for nine years. He resigned from Parliament as an MP in 2015 to take up the Greenpeace position.

• Petition: Ban synthetic nitrogen fertiliser

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: SN#1 (Steven Newton) – CC BY 2.0

As with previous breakaway religions thrilled by the prospect of the new, breakaway sporting competitions offer a chance to reassess doctrine, administration, and philosophies.  It has happened in football, cricket, and rugby, often controversially, and almost always indignantly.  The attempt to create a rival competition is now taking place in a sport famously described as the spoiling of a good walk.

The LIV Golf Invitational Series is set to run from June to October and promises to be an extravaganza played on three continents.  The chief executive of the enterprise is the man of the eternal tan, golfer turned businessman Greg Norman, while LIV Golf Enterprises is itself majority owned by the Public Investment Fund, which operates on behalf of that inglorious institution known as the Saudi government.

Norman claims to have sent invitation letters to 250 players of the top-ranked players to compete in the tournament.  “Our events are truly additive to the world of golf,” he claims in justification.  “We have done our best to create a schedule that allows players to play elsewhere, while still participating in our events.”

Opposition to such schemes from the traditional golfing establishment has never been in short supply.  Norman had previously pitched the idea of a World Golf Tour in November 1994, which would have featured eight events with $3 million on offer to the top 30 players in the rankings.  Despite being initially outmanoeuvred, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem retaliated by appropriating the breakaway challenge, announcing the creation of three $4 million World Golf Championship events in 1999 and a fourth the following year.

A disgusted Norman could only rue his defeat before such unsportsmanlike devilry.  “I think there is only one word for it and that is control.  Now control is there, in their mind, and let them have it, let them go with it, let them see what they can do.”  Dreams of revenge at these closed shop operators were entertained.

This time around, the Tours are again readying their weapons and options.  Retribution against the usurpers, they promise, will be severe: banning players who sign up, restricting entry into the majors, and preventing participation in the Ryder Cup.  Lawyers will be smacking their lips at the prospect of legal challenges and bloated briefs.

The more troubling picture in the grand scheme is the sports washing hand of Saudi Arabia.  The kingdom has become an aggressive strategic investor in sports events, hosting Formula One motor racing, boxing events, purchasing European football clubs and promoting wrestling. With each encroachment, human rights considerations and a regime’s brutality blur and eventually vanish before the size of the wallet.

This rebranding of the blood-stained image of Saudi Arabia using sports has been spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, palace coup plotter and figure behind the butchering of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.  A good number of golfing officials have preferred to overlook that nastier side of the surly Crown Prince, not to mention such blemishes as the war in Yemen.  In the words of European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley, the Kingdom’s “goal to make parts of the country more accessible to global business, tourism and leisure over the next decade” was to be appreciated.

Pelley is not the only ethically challenged enthusiast for Riyadh’s ventures.  From the other side of the competition, Norman, otherwise known as the Great White Shark, shows no sign of having a moral compass.  All he sees is golf and opportunity, promising his Saudi investors that the country will become a powerhouse of the sport under his guidance. As for Saudi Arabia, he sees cashed-up reforms, star studded progress.  “It’s an eye opener to see how the country is investing into their people and opportunities from a health and wellness perspective, from a sporting perspective, from an education perspective,” he bombastically, and inaccurately told Arab News last year.

Attacks on his recruitment as Saudi Arabia’s sportswasher-in-chief are parried.  “Look, I’ll be honest with you, yes, the criticisms have stung a little bit, but I’m a big believer that you can’t run through a brick wall without getting bloody,” he told The Telegraph last month.  “I’m willing to run through this wall because I’m a big believer in growing the game of golf on a global basis.”

Such statements do not merely betray a crass insensitivity but a naked adoration for the agents of Mammon.  When asked about the fortune he is being paid by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund – some put the figure at $50 million a year – he retorted with a question.  “What’s the definition of a fortune?”

Despite acknowledging the brutal murder of Khashoggi, having previously called it “reprehensible”, he found comfort in the passage of time.  “Every country’s got a cross to bear.”  There was much guilt to go around.  “I am the type of person who looks into the future, not out of the past, and see what Saudi Arabia has done in a very short time to invest in the game.” Well done, Crown Prince, you’ve certainly got an ally there.

On the issue of hypocrisy, Norman is quick to identify his archenemies in the PGA Tour as monumental culprits.  While they had not specifically accused the entrepreneur of “sportswashing”, they had certainly gotten others to stump for them.  “Yes, it’s ok for them to go into China, with the Uyghurs?  Seriously?  Step back and take a really good, honest, hard look at the facts and then you’ll see, ‘Hey, Greg Norman is not such an ogre after all.’”  Not an ogre, but a most useful dolt for the House of Saud.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The LIV Golf Invitational Series is set to run from June to October and promises to be an extravaganza played on three continents.  The chief executive of the enterprise is the man of the eternal tan, golfer turned businessman Greg Norman, while LIV Golf Enterprises is itself majority owned by the Public Investment Fund, which operates on behalf of that inglorious institution known as the Saudi government.

Norman claims to have sent invitation letters to 250 players of the top-ranked players to compete in the tournament.  “Our events are truly additive to the world of golf,” he claims in justification.  “We have done our best to create a schedule that allows players to play elsewhere, while still participating in our events.”

Opposition to such schemes from the traditional golfing establishment has never been in short supply.  Norman had previously pitched the idea of a World Golf Tour in November 1994, which would have featured eight events with $3 million on offer to the top 30 players in the rankings.  Despite being initially outmanoeuvred, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem retaliated by appropriating the breakaway challenge, announcing the creation of three $4 million World Golf Championship events in 1999 and a fourth the following year.

A disgusted Norman could only rue his defeat before such unsportsmanlike devilry.  “I think there is only one word for it and that is control.  Now control is there, in their mind, and let them have it, let them go with it, let them see what they can do.”  Dreams of revenge at these closed shop operators were entertained.

This time around, the Tours are again readying their weapons and options.  Retribution against the usurpers, they promise, will be severe: banning players who sign up, restricting entry into the majors, and preventing participation in the Ryder Cup.  Lawyers will be smacking their lips at the prospect of legal challenges and bloated briefs.

The more troubling picture in the grand scheme is the sports washing hand of Saudi Arabia.  The kingdom has become an aggressive strategic investor in sports events, hosting Formula One motor racing, boxing events, purchasing European football clubs and promoting wrestling. With each encroachment, human rights considerations and a regime’s brutality blur and eventually vanish before the size of the wallet.

This rebranding of the blood-stained image of Saudi Arabia using sports has been spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, palace coup plotter and figure behind the butchering of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.  A good number of golfing officials have preferred to overlook that nastier side of the surly Crown Prince, not to mention such blemishes as the war in Yemen.  In the words of European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley, the Kingdom’s “goal to make parts of the country more accessible to global business, tourism and leisure over the next decade” was to be appreciated.

Pelley is not the only ethically challenged enthusiast for Riyadh’s ventures.  From the other side of the competition, Norman, otherwise known as the Great White Shark, shows no sign of having a moral compass.  All he sees is golf and opportunity, promising his Saudi investors that the country will become a powerhouse of the sport under his guidance.  As for Saudi Arabia, he sees cashed-up reforms, star studded progress.  “It’s an eye opener to see how the country is investing into their people and opportunities from a health and wellness perspective, from a sporting perspective, from an education perspective,” he bombastically, and inaccurately told Arab News last year.

Attacks on his recruitment as Saudi Arabia’s sportswasher-in-chief are parried.  “Look, I’ll be honest with you, yes, the criticisms have stung a little bit, but I’m a big believer that you can’t run through a brick wall without getting bloody,” he told The Telegraph last month.  “I’m willing to run through this wall because I’m a big believer in growing the game of golf on a global basis.”

Such statements do not merely betray a crass insensitivity but a naked adoration for the agents of Mammon.  When asked about the fortune he is being paid by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund – some put the figure at $50 million a year – he retorted with a question.  “What’s the definition of a fortune?”

Despite acknowledging the brutal murder of Khashoggi, having previously called it “reprehensible”, he found comfort in the passage of time.  “Every country’s got a cross to bear.”  There was much guilt to go around.  “I am the type of person who looks into the future, not out of the past, and see what Saudi Arabia has done in a very short time to invest in the game.” Well done, Crown Prince, you’ve certainly got an ally there.

On the issue of hypocrisy, Norman is quick to identify his archenemies in the PGA Tour as monumental culprits.  While they had not specifically accused the entrepreneur of “sportswashing”, they had certainly gotten others to stump for them.  “Yes, it’s ok for them to go into China, with the Uyghurs?  Seriously?  Step back and take a really good, honest, hard look at the facts and then you’ll see, ‘Hey, Greg Norman is not such an ogre after all.’”  Not an ogre, but a most useful dolt for the House of Saud.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

On the afternoon of March 10, a group of armed police and military officers raided the offices of The Alternative Digitalk, arresting the nine and confiscating equipment, including cameras, laptops, and books, according to media reports, a statement by the local press rights group Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda (HRNJ-U), as well as police and court documents reviewed by CPJ.

The journalists arrested that day are Norman Tumuhimbise, The Alternative Digitalk’s executive director who is also an activist and a published author; programs director Arnold Mukose; TV host Faridah Bikobere; producer Jeremiah Mukiibi; presenters Lilian Luwedde, Teddy Teangle Nabukeera, Tumusiime Kato, and Rogers Tulyahabwe; and an intern, Jacob Jeje Wabyona, according to Tumuhimbise’s brother Innocent Ainebyona, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, and the HRNJ-U statement.

On March 15 and 16, seven of the journalists were released on police bond, but are still under investigation on charges of sedition and cyberstalking, according to human rights lawyer Eron Kiiza and the HRNJ-U-appointed lawyer Geoffrey Turyamusima, both of whom are working on the case and spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Two journalists, Tumuhimbise and Bikobere, remain in jail, and were charged with cyberstalking and “offensive communication,” during a court hearing in the capital Kampala on March 16, according to Turyamusima and court documents reviewed by CPJ. During the hearing, Bikobere and Tumuhimbise told the court they had been severely physically abused while in state custody, Ainebyona and Turyamusima told CPJ.

“Authorities should unconditionally release Norman Tumuhimbise and Faridah Bikobere, drop all charges against them, end all investigations against other The Alternative Digitalk journalists, and return their confiscated equipment. Allegations that these journalists have been severely physically abused should be investigated credibly, holding anyone responsible to account,” said CPJ sub-Saharan Africa representative Muthoki Mumo. “President Yoweri Museveni, whose name has been invoked in these proceedings, should also declare that he is against arbitrary detentions of the press and condemn acts of abuse by security personnel.”

Cyberstalking and “offensive communication” can carry prison terms of up to five and two years respectively under Uganda’s Computer Misuse law. Sedition can carry up to seven years, according to the penal code.

Kiiza and Ainebyona told CPJ that The Alternative Digitalk is an offshoot of Alternative Uganda, an activist group headed by Tumuhimbise and of which Ainebyona is also a member, which campaigns for better governance in Uganda. On its social media accounts, the group defines itself as a “non partisan (sic) and non-violent social movement” campaigning for “youth led change.”

CPJ’s review of The Alternative Uganda’s YouTube channel, where it has about 2,700 followers, and Facebook page, with over 24,300 followers, shows that it publishes The Alternative Digitalk’s programming, such as interviews, including with politicians and government officials, analysis of current affairs as well as entertainment and lifestyle programming.

In the court documents, police allege the offenses were committed by the journalists between January 2020 and March 9, 2022, against Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in the form of content published by The Alternative Digitalk about two of Tumuhimbisi’s recently published books. The books, “The Komanyoko Politics: Unsowing the Mustard Seed” and “Liars and Accomplices,”are sharply critical of the Museveni government, according to media reports, Kiiza, and CPJ’s review of “The Komanyoko Politics.” [Editor’s note: Komanyoko is a vulgar insult originally from Kiswahili.]

In several YouTube and Facebook posts in late February and early March made by The Alternative Uganda, which streams The Alternative Digitalk’s content, The Alternative Digitalk advertised Tumuhimbise’s books and announced the planned March 30 launch event in Kampala. On March 1, the outlet published an hour-long interview with a retired judge who wrote the foreword to “The Komanyoko Politics.”

In that book, excerpts of which CPJ reviewed, Tumuhimbise’s commentary describes Uganda’s political culture as “vulgar” and full of “malice, fights, insults, greed.” He also alleges that the president “only tells the truth by mistake” and criticizes government appointments for Museveni’s family, including his son, Lieutenant General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and wife, Janet Museveni.

Copies of this book were among those confiscated by the security officers who raided the media outlet’s offices, according to a police search certificate, a document outlining how the search was carried out and listing those who witnessed it, reviewed by CPJ. The officers also confiscated four cameras, microphones, several laptops, hard disks, as well as CDs and a company vehicle, according to that same document.

On March 16 and 17, when seven of the journalists were released on bond from the police’s Special Investigation Division in Kireka, a suburb of Kampala, two of them were limping, Ainebyona told CPJ. CPJ was unable to immediately communicate with the released journalists, whose phones were confiscated when they were arrested.

During the March 16 court hearing, Bikobere said she needed medical attention because she had been beaten by officers and was passing blood in her urine, according to Turyamusima. A video clip posted on YouTube shows part of Bikobere’s testimony in which she says she feels pain in her stomach, back, and chest; has bruises all over her body; and offers to “undress” so that her injuries can be put on record.

Tumuhimbise also told the court that he had been beaten, saying he was punched in the head and forced to drink and unknown substance, according Ainebyona and Turyamusima. Both journalists were remanded to Luzira Prison in Kampala until their next hearing on March 21.

Uganda military spokesperson Brigadier General Felix Kulayigye told CPJ by phone that the military’s involvement in the raid on The Alternative Digitalk was in support of a police operation and referred CPJ to the police for comment. Kulayigye declined to answer questions on allegations of torture, saying the journalists had not been in the army’s custody.

Calls and text messages to Uganda police spokesperson Fred Enanga and President Museveni’s senior press secretary Nabusayi Lindah Wamboka were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion have repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.

The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today’s empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins… especially not the USA.

Every day we read that secret lists of millions of Chinese communist party members have infiltrated western national governments or that espionage honey pots have targeted politicians, or Russia is subverting western democracies, and preparing false flags to invade its neighbors.

In all cases, the stories pumped out by mainstream media rags reek of 1) Five Eyes propaganda psy-op techniques, and often unverified accusations, while 2) deflecting from the actually verifiable British Intelligence tentacles caught repeatedly shaping world events, regime change, infiltration, assassination and conspiracies for over a century including the push to overthrow Trump under a color revolution.

Among the most destructive of these conspiracies orchestrated by British Intelligence during the past century was the artificial creation of the Cold War which destroyed the hopes for a multipolar world of win-win collaboration guided by a U.S.-China-Russia alliance as envisioned by FDR and Henry Wallace.

1. Stephenson immediately flew two of his top SIS officials in from the BSC HQ in New York to manage the Gouzenko affair for the next 8 months: Peter Dwyer (head of counter-espionage for BSC) and Jean-Paul Evans. Evans is an interesting figure whose SIS successor was none other than triple agent Kim Philby who replaced him when he left his post as British liaison to the FBI and CIA in 1949. Evans himself went onto work with leading Round Table controller and soon Governor General Vincent Massey in the creation of a new system of promoting the arts in Canada pouring millions of dollars into modernist/abstract art, music and drama under the Canada Council which grew out of the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission for the Arts in Canada. This body founded in 1957 took over the reins of control from the CIA and Rockefeller Foundations who had formerly enjoyed a near monopoly sponsoring such things as part of the post-WWII cultural war against communism. Stafford notes that “the man who impressed Ottawa with his love of the arts had also played an important part in the history of Anglo-Canadian secret intelligence.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matthew J.L. Ehret.