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By Richard Falk

3 Mar 2017 – Donald Trump has articulated clearly, if somewhat vaguely and incoherently, his anti-globalist, anti-UN approach on foreign policy. For instance, in late February he told a right-wing audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “there is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency, or a global flag. This is the United States that I am representing. I am not representing the globe.” A similar sentiment was expressed to Congress a few days later in a tone of voice and choice of words praised by media wonks as ‘presidential.’ On this occasion Trump said, “[m]y job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America.” Such rhetoric coming from a normal American leader would probably be interpreted as an expression of geopolitical humility, implicitly rejecting the standard insistence on American exceptionalism, exemplified in recent times by the project to create and maintain the first global state in human history.

This potentially self-limiting language might even be understood as renouncing earlier claims to assert American global leadership as the keystone of world order. George W. Bush in 2002 gave this bold leadership claim a sharp edge when he insisted the that only the US model of market-based constitutionalism was a legitimate form of governance for sovereign states in the 21st century. Or even more grandiosely, in the spirit of Michael Mandelbaum and Thomas Friedman, that the United States as a consequence of its martial strength, technological prowess, democratic values and institutions, and skills of leadership provides the world with the benevolent reality of virtual ‘world government.’ Let’s face it, Donald Trump is not a normal political leader, nor is he someone disposed to embrace humility in any form, so we should take his pledge to represent American interests while leaving the world to fend for itself with many grains of salt, especially if we consider the specifics of the Trump worldview. What Trump seems to be offering is maximum disengagement from international and global arrangements designed to institutionalize cooperation among sovereign states, and that is where the UN figures in Trump’s unfolding game plan.

Even before being sworn in as president Trump engaged in UN-bashing on behalf of, and in concert with the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. His dismissive comment contained in a tweet is rather revealing: “The UN has great potential, but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk, and have a good time. So sad!” Of course, we are not told what Trump thinks might bring into being this ‘great potential’ of the UN. Also not surprisingly, the tweet was provoked by Security Resolution 2334, adopted December 23rd by a 14-0 vote, which sharply criticized Israeli settlement expansion as unlawful and as creating a major obstacles to establishing peace with the Palestinians. The Obama presidency was sharply criticized by Trump and others, including many Democrats, for allowing passage of this resolution at the UN by failing to do what it had consistently done for the prior eight years, shield Israel from often fully deserved, and long overdue, UN censure by casting a veto. It seems that Trump, a bipartisan consensus in Congress, and the new US Representative at the UN, Nikki Haley evaluate the usefulness of the UN through an ‘Israel first’ optic, that is, the significance of UN is actually reduced to its attitude toward Israel, which is viewed through Israeli eyes, and is unmindful toward the wide spectrum of UN activities and contributions to human wellbeing.

It must be acknowledged that the Obama presidency did only slightly better when it comes to both the UN and Israel. True, Barack Obama in his annual addresses to the General Assembly affirmed the importance and contributions of the UN by concrete reference to achievements, and used these occasions to set forth his vision of a better world that included a major role for the UN. Also, Obama recognized the importance of the UN in dealing with the challenge of climate change, and joined with China to ensure a multilateralist triumph under UN auspices by having the 194 assembled government successfully conclude the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. However, when it came to war/peace issues such as drone warfare, threats of war directed at Iran, modernization of nuclear weapons, and the defense of Israel, the Obama Administration flexed its geopolitical muscles with disdain for the constraining limits imposed by international law and international morality. In this core respect, Trump’s approach, while blunter and oblivious to the etiquette of global diplomacy, appears to maintain fundamental continuity with the Obama approach.

With respect to defending Israel even when it faces responsible criticism, I can report from my own experience while serving as UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, that the defense of Israel’s unlawful behavior within the UN during the Obama years was unconditional, and deeply irresponsible toward respect for international legal obligations, especially in relation to upholding international humanitarian law and norms governing recourse to non-defensive force. American chief representatives at the UN, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, both called for my dismissal from my unpaid post in vitriolic language without ever confronting the substance of my criticisms of Israel’s murderous periodic attacks on Gaza, its excessive use of force in sustaining the occupation, its expansion of unlawful settlements, and its discriminatory administration of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. I mention this personal experience to underscore the willingness of the Obama presidency to go all in with Israel despite the awkward fact that Obama was being harshly attacked in Israel, including by government leasers, and hence also in the US. Obama was being wrongly accused of being unfriendly to Israel as compared to earlier American presidents. Israel has high expectations that Trump will sway with the wind from Tel Aviv.

More to the point, Trump’s view of foreign policy at this stage appears to be a primitive mixture of state-centrism, militarism, nationalism, overall what had qualified until World War I as realpolitik. There was back then no UN, few international institutions, no international law prohibition on aggressive war, no Nuremberg Principles imposing criminal accountability on political and military leaders, no tradition of protection for international human rights, and no affirmation of the inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination. It was a Eurocentric state system that combined the interaction of sovereign states in the West with colonial rule extended directly and indirectly to most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Of course, now the colonial system has formally collapsed, China, Russia, and India have risen, Europe has declined, nuclear weapons continue to shadow human existence, and the specter of global warming dangles a sword of Damocles over the human condition. Trump seeks to restore a simpler world with his raucous rally cries of ‘America First.’ This is to be accomplished by carrying out a series of promises: to renegotiate trade arrangements, build walls, crush terrorism, terrorize undocumented immigrants, liberate police from accountability, bar Muslim immigration, and develop the world’s most feared nuclear arsenal. It is not a pretty picture, but also it involves a reckless disregard of the fragility of our interconnected and networked world order that mandates a globalizing framework for common problem-solving rather that a retreat to a glorious past that never was.

Of course, it would be misleading to leave the impression that the Trump worldview is bereft of any constructive thoughts about how to engage with the world. Trump’s controversial connections with Putin and Russia impart a contradictory impression: what is favorable is an evident interest in exploring prospects for a cooperative relationship, which goes against the grain of the American national security establishment, including several Republican heavyweights, which seemed likely in an expected Clinton presidency to be readying the country for a dangerous plunge into a second cold war. It would be ignited with reckless bravado by confronting Russia along its borders; in contrast, what is dubious about the Trump overtures to the Kremlin are the backdoor dealings with Russian officials during the presidential campaign and subsequently, reinforced by the ‘golden shower’ innuendo and unresolved concerns that Trump’s withheld tax returns might reveal awkward information about indebtedness or business dealings or both.

Whether Trump is going to abandon this effort to smooth things with Moscow under this pressure from the US intelligence and security bureaucracy will be a defining feature of whether his foreign policy gets early stuck in the Washington swamp, or risks the governmentally unsettling effects of discontinuity with the past. There are some cynical interpretations of Trump’s opening to Russia as primarily intended to set the stage for intensified confrontations with China. If this view is even partially correct it could easily generate a cold war of its own, although with new alignments. It might quickly lead to hot battlefield incidents that could further escalate, giving rise to renewed fears of nuclear war.

Trump occasionally expresses an appreciation of international cooperation for mutual benefit with other states, as well as recognizing the benefits of keeping traditional alliances (NATO, Japan, South Korea) alive and threatening those countries that menace the global or regional status quo (North Korea). What is totally absent is any acknowledgement of global challenges that cannot be met by states acting on their own or cooperatively through bilateral arrangements. It is here where the erasure of the UN from political consciousness is so troublesome substantively as well as symbolically. To some degree this erasure preceded Trump and is widespread. It has not been challenged as yet by even the Sanders’ end of the political spectrum in the US. I found it telling that Obama made no reference to the UN in his Chicago farewell speech, which can be most accurately understood as a more positive and polite version of Trump’s ‘America First’ engagement with the world.

Even better, on an abstract level, Trump expressed some sentiments that if concretized could overcome some of the forebodings being voiced here. In his speech to Congress on February 28th Trump said “[w]e want harmony and stability, not war and conflict. We want peace wherever peace can be found.” He went on to point out that “America is friends today with former enemies. Some of our closest allies, decades ago, fought on the opposite sides of these World Wars. This history should give us all faith in the possibilities for a better world.” If this outlook ever comes to inform the actual policies of the Trump presidency it would give grounds for hope, but as of now, any such hopes are mere indulgences of wishful thinking, and as such, diversions from the one true progressive imperative of this historic moment–political resistance to Trumpism in all its manifestations.

Dark lines of policy have also been set forth by Trump. The angry defiance of his Inaugural Address, the belligerence toward China, threats toward North Korea, exterminist language in references to ‘radical Islamic’ extremism and ISIS. Trump’s belligerence toward the world is reinforced by lauding military virtues and militarism, by appointing generals and civilian advisors to top positions, and by boosting the military budget at a time when the United States already spends almost as much on its military machine as is the total of military expenditures by all other countries, and has only a string of political defeats to show for it.

These contrasting Trump imaginaries create an atmosphere of foreboding and uncertainty. Such a future can unfold in contradictory ways. At present, the forebodings clearly outweigh the hopes. Although Trump speaks of fixing the decaying infrastructure of the United States and not wasting trillions on futile wars, especially in the Middle East, his inclinations so far suggest continuity in such brutal war theaters as Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

We have reached a stage of human development where future prospects are tied to finding institutional mechanisms that can serve human and global interests in addition to national interests, whether pursued singly or in aggregate. In this central respect, Trump’s ardent embrace of American nationalism is an anachronistic dead end.

What I find particularly discouraging about the present bipartisan political mood is its near total erasure of the United Nations and international law. These earlier efforts to modify and ameliorate international anarchy have virtually disappeared from the political horizons of American leaders. This reflects a loss of the kind of idealism that earlier energized the political imagination of those who spoke for the United States ever since the American Revolution. There was admittedly always much hypocrisy and self-deception attached to this rhetoric, which conveniently overlooked American geopolitical ambitions, slavery, and devastation visited on native Americans. It also overlooked imperial maneuvers in the Western Hemisphere and the ideologically driven foreign policy of the Cold War era that brought death, destruction, and despair to many distant lands, while keeping a dying European colonialism alive for many years by deferring to the warped logic of the Cold War.

Finally, I believe that the agenda of resistance to Trumpism includes a defense of the United Nations, and what its Charter proposes for the peoples of the world. We need a greatly empowered UN, not an erased UN.

6 March 2017

By Lakshmi Puri

3 Mar 2017 – Yayi Bayam Diouf became the first woman to fish in her small rural fishing village in Senegal despite initially being told by the men in her community that the fish wouldn’t take bait from a menstruating woman. When she started practicing law, Ann Green, CEO of ANZ Lao, was asked to make coffee or pick up dry cleaning (by men and women), simply because she was a young woman. The difficulties faced by Yayi and Ann in entering the labour force and at the workplace are not only unique to them, but sadly is the reality for many women across the globe.

These difficulties represent violations of women’s human rights to work and their rights at work with gender-discriminatory laws still in existence in 155 countries, resulting in the gender wage gap of 23 percent globally. Also, women represent 75 percent of informal employment, in low-paid and undervalued jobs that are usually unprotected by labour laws, and lack social protection.

Only half of women participate in the labour force compared to three quarters of men, and in most developing countries it is as low as 25 percent. Women spend 2.5 times more time and effort than men on unpaid care work and household responsibilities. All of this results in women taking home 1/10 of the global income, while accounting for 2/3 of global working hours. These inequalities have devastating immediate and long-terms negative impacts on women who have a lower lifetime income, have saved less, and yet face higher overall retirement and healthcare costs due to a longer life expectancy.

Women’s economic empowerment is about transforming the world of work, which is still very patriarchal and treats the equal voice, participation and leadership of women as an anomaly, tokenism, compartment or add on. Despite recognizing progress, structural barriers continue to hinder progress towards women’s economic empowerment globally.

Women in all professions face what we call sticky floors, leaking pipelines and broken ladders, glass ceilings and glass walls! At the current pace, it may take 170 years to achieve economic equality among men and women – according to estimates from the World Economic Forum’s latest Gender Gap Report. This is simply unacceptable.

To accelerate the move to a planet 50/50 in women’s economic empowerment and work will require a transformation of both the public and private sector environments and world of work they create for women and also how they change it to make it a women’s space of productive and fulfilling work.

It will mean adopting necessary laws, policies and special measures by governments. It means their actively regulating and providing incentives to companies and enterprises to become gender equal employers, supply chains and incubators of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, together with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (on financing for development), position gender equality and the empowerment of women as critical and essential drivers for sustainable development. There is a Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality (Goal 5) which seeks to ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ and sets out global targets to address many of the remaining obstacles to gender inequality.

The framework recognizes women’s economic empowerment as essential enabler and beneficiary of gender equality and sustainable development and a means of implementation of all the six targets of SDG 5, including ending all forms of discrimination against all women and girls; ending all forms of violence and harmful practices like child marriage: recognizing and valuing unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family; ensuring women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life; and ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Achieving these targets would have a multiplier effect across all other development areas, including ensuring equal access to decent work and full and productive employment (SDG 8), ending poverty (SDG-1), food security (SDG-2), universal health (SDG-3), quality education (SDG-4) and reducing inequalities (SDG-10).

The upcoming 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW61) will consider “Women’s Economic Empowerment in The Changing World of Work”, as its priority theme providing the international community the opportunity to define concrete, practical and action-oriented recommendations to overcome the structural barriers to gender equality, gender-based discrimination and violence against women at work.

We live in a world where change is happening constantly, presenting new challenges and opportunities to the realization of women’s economic empowerment. The innovations – especially in digital and information and communications technologies, mobility and informality are also increasing rapidly. Emerging areas, such as the green economy and climate change mitigation and adaptation offer new opportunities for decent work for women.

Also, in the context of new digital and information technologies, it is estimated that women will lose five jobs for every job gained compared with men losing three jobs for every job gained in the fourth industrial revolution. Successful harnessing of technological innovations is an imperative as is women’s STEM education and capability building, financial and digital inclusion for the realization of women’s economic empowerment.

Achievement of women’s economic empowerment, as well its related benefits, requires transformative and structural change. In his report on the priority theme of CSW61, the Secretary-General of the United Nations identifies are four concrete action areas in achieving women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work, including strengthening normative and legal frameworks for full employment and decent work for all women at all levels; implementing economic and social policies for women’s economic empowerment; addressing the growing informality of work and mobility of women workers and technology driven changes; and strengthening private sector role in women’s economic empowerment.

Progress must be provided from both the demand and supply sides of the labour market. From the demand side, the enhancement of capacity building and the creation of a value chain of education skills and training for women is key to accelerating change.

This will in turn lead to decent work opportunities as well as productive employment for women. From the supply side, there must be a creation of an enabling environment for women to be recruited, retained and promoted in the work place, including through promoting policies to manage trade and financial globalization.

These forces, profoundly altering the world of work should come as a benefit to women and the working poor in rural and urban areas; and macroeconomic and labour market policies must create decent jobs, protect worker rights, and generate living wages, including for informal and migrant women workers.

Enhanced interventions to tackle persistent gender inequalities and gaps in the world of work, and stepped-up attention to technological and digital changes to ensure they become vehicles for women’s economic empowerment are needed. The creation of quality paid care economy is also pivotal in employment creation and in empowering at least a billion women- directly and indirectly as well as providing much needed jobs for all!

Transformative change is not only possible but it would generate tremendous dividends for the economy. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, if women were to play an identical role in labour markets to that of men, as much as USD 28 trillion, or 26 percent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.

Moreover, the total value of unpaid care and domestic work, dominated by women, is estimated to be between 10 and 39 per cent of national GDPs, and can surpass that of manufacturing, commerce, transportation and other key sectors. With women’s economic empowerment the global economy can therefore yield inclusive growth that generates decent work for all and reduces poverty ensuring that no one is left behind.

With the United Nations Observance of International Women’s Day, we celebrate the tectonic shift in the way that gender equality and women’s economic empowerment has been prioritized and valued in the international development agenda and express the resolve that we will all do everything it takes including transformative financing to achieve the ambitious goal of Planet 50/50 in the world of work by 2030.

Lakshmi Puri is Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women.

6 March 2017

By Linda J. Bilmes

THIS OCTOBER MARKS 15 years since American troops entered Afghanistan. It was a precursor to the occupation of Iraq and is the longest military conflict in US history. Yet the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in these wars have rated barely a mention in the presidential campaign.

The most recent estimates suggest that war costs will run to nearly $5 trillion — a staggering sum that exceeds even the $3 trillion that Joseph Stiglitz and I predicted back in 2008.

Yet the cost seems invisible to politicians and the public alike. The reason is that almost all of the spending has been financed through borrowing — selling US Treasury Bonds around the world — leaving our children to pick up the tab. Consequently, the wars have had little impact on our pocketbooks.

In earlier wars, the government routinely raised taxes, slashed nonmilitary spending, and sold war bonds. Taxes were raised to pay for the Spanish-American War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War I and World War II. Top rates of federal income taxes climbed to 70 percent during Vietnam and to over 90 percent during the Korean War. These policies were all part of an explicit strategy of engaging the American public in the war efforts. In sharp contrast, the George W. Bush administration cut taxes after the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001 and again, in 2003, when we invaded Iraq. Most Americans pay lower taxes now than they did 15 years ago.

Congress has also managed to avoid painful budgetary choices. Since 2001, Congress has employed a series of so-called “temporary special appropriations” to authorize hundreds of billions of dollars for war spending, bypassing the regular spending process. Despite President Obama’s pledge to end such “gimmicks,” they have continued throughout his presidency. Thus the money appropriated for the post-9/11 wars did not have to be traded off against other spending priorities. The war appropriation also gets far less scrutiny than the regular defense budget. Consequently, the war budget has become a magnet for pet nonwar spending projects that senators and congressmen want to slip in under the radar. As a consequence, the reported war cost per troop deployed has ballooned from $1 million per year at the peak of the fighting in 2008 to $4.9 million today.

Besides ducking the immediate financial burden, most of us are also shielded from the risks and hardships of military service. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were the first major US conflicts fought entirely by an “all-volunteer” military force. Less than 1 percent of the adult US population was deployed to the combat zones — the smallest percentage at any time since the short peacetime period between the two World Wars. Instead, our small volunteer army is supplemented by a large shadow force of private contractors. In Afghanistan, contractors outnumber US troops by 3 to 1, performing critical roles in virtually every area of military activity. More than two-thirds of them are recruited from other countries, including the Philippines and Nepal.

As a result, the post-9/11 conflicts have become a “spectator war,” as Andrew Bacevich of Boston University put it, in which most Americans are neither engaged nor involved.

All of this accounts for the absence of any real political discussion about how we will fund huge costs of the war that are still to be paid — for example, the $1 trillion in lifetime disability compensation that we have awarded to 960,000 recent veterans. Worse, no one is asking whether the current approach in Afghanistan is working. Last month the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, reported that corruption in Afghanistan is far more widespread than before the 2001 US invasion, due to US policies that “unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.” But his investigations get barely a mention in the media.

As long as the cost of the war remains hidden from public view, there is no pressure to reexamine our military strategy. Donald Trump says his secret plan is to “ask the generals.” But the Pentagon should be focused on tactics, not on deciding our national purpose. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins, she cannot lead a national conversation unless the public is paying attention.

This will change only if we are obliged to pay for war operations as we go, and to set aside money now to support and care for our veterans in the future. This is not simply about sound fiscal budgetary policy. Rather, it is about shouldering the burden of our wars and, in doing so, being open to learn from our mistakes. We all want to continue to “support our troops.” Sweeping the costs under the carpet is not the right way to do it.

Linda J. Bilmes is a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University and coauthor, with Joseph E. Stiglitz, of “The Three Trillion Dollar War.”

17 October 2016

Is The Lady still a champion of rights and democracy?

By David Hutt

The life of a politician is made infinitely easier when, as the saying goes, their actions are judged by their reputation, and not the other way around. Such a phrase is befitting of Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom the media can describe with a number of glowing phrases: Nobel prize laureate, democracy icon, human rights defender, champion of the Myanmar people.

However, Keith Harper, who served as former U.S. President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, had these words to say about her on Monday:

Unfortunately, what has become increasingly clear over the ensuing months, is that while Daw Suu Kyi was perfectly comfortable reaping benefits as a human rights icon for her own pro-democracy struggle, she is not prepared to display the political courage necessary to take a stand for an unpopular Muslim minority group and prevent the grave and systematic denial of their human rights.

A few more choice extracts from the statement include:

For far too many, her iconic status as pro-democracy crusader makes it difficult to hold accountable a Suu Kyi-led government no matter the well-documented human rights violations…

Her Nobel Prize has become a most awful kind of shield from proper scrutiny…

Even accepting that Suu Kyi does not sufficiently control the military, she has utterly failed to utilize her considerable bully pulpit which would undoubtedly be impactful.

The phrase“scathing attack” might have been apt to describe this statement if it wasn’t for the clarity and logic of its argument. But when one criticizes Suu Kyi there is the sneaking suspicion that you will be palmed off as just an iconoclast or, perhaps worse, unfair. I can already hear the thoughts of her apologists: “Leave her alone, she’s trying her best. Look at what she’s up against.”

Very well. She is up against a military (Tatmadaw) that still automatically controls a quarter of seats in the parliament and three key ministries and has proven to be largely independent of the NLD government. And then there is a resurgent movement of chauvinist Buddhists, openly calling for the persecution of the Rohingya and finding a good deal support among the general public.

But Suu Kyi has known what she is up against for decades (these are hardly new developments) and, even under the perilous situation of house arrest, was happy to deride her opponents for what they were: dictators and murderers and oppressors of the people of Myanmar.

Yet, we are to believe that it is perfectly defensible, now she has achieved a position of power, that her once famed audacity to stand up to the forces of the Tatmadaw and chauvinists in society has become conspicuously quiet. A recent article in the Harvard Political Review intoned an odd mixture of feebleness and sophistry:

While Suu Kyi deserves some of the criticism for her failure to effectively deal with the violence against the Rohingya, her silence does not stem from a naive hatred of the group, but from a careful standoff between her, Myanmar’s military forces, and Buddhist nationalists.

Of course she doesn’t hate the Rohingya. Few sensible people claim as much. And the use of the word “careful” appears odd, since in this reading the NLD is in the most perilous position. Nevertheless, the intent of this opinion has become something of an orthodox view of many commentators, warranting two questions.

First, isn’t it an indication of opportunism and cynicism, not careful or sensible politics, to negate one’s principles when in a position of power? Indeed, how else can one look at the situation other than that Suu Kyi possessed greater courage to stand up to the military junta and its civilian frontmen when under house arrest (with no power) than she does now as the de facto leader of an elected government, with a number of ministries to her name and the freedom to travel the world as an elected official (with the apparent ability to raise awareness of the issue and cash through the goodwill she is owed by some international statesman).

In a 1989 essay, Suu Kyi wrote that “it is undeniably easier to ignore the hardships of those who are too weak to demand their rights than to respond sensitively to their needs.” How the prophetic becomes the pathetic.

Moreover, and this is important: she has not been “silent” on the persecution of Rohingya as some people like to say. Instead she called the accusations of human rights violations “fabrications.” This is not avoiding the issue; it’s taking the side of the perpetrator.

Let us, for a moment, quickly look at what Suu Kyi believes to be fabrications. Here is just one story of many documented in a February report by the UNCHR on the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, which also stated that as many as 66,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since October escape what has been called “human rights violations.” This is told by an 11-year-old girl:

The next time the military came, there were eight to 10 of them, they were asking where my father and sisters were. They were also saying that they were searching for people from Bangladesh. They removed all my clothes and all my mother’s clothes and kicked us with their boots. Then they left. I do not know why. But the next day they came again. This time there were seven of them. They dragged my mother outside the house and locked themselves in the room with me. I do not know if they all abused me, I lost consciousness at some point. My mother woke me up with water. I was bleeding a lot.

In 2011 Suu Kyi was lauded by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when the pair met for the first time. During this address at the meeting, Clinton spoke warmly about the famed speech Suu Kyi delivered at a UN conference in Beijing in 1995 on women’s rights.

During that speech Suu Kyi oscillated between the blatantly false and the blatantly obvious, but it had a powerful effect anyway. “To the best of my knowledge,” she said, “no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered most in situations of conflict.”

Two decades on, all Suu Kyi had to say on a conflict in which girls as young as 11 were gang-raped by the military personnel of the country she represents was that the claims were “fabrications.” As for no woman starting a war, she might have overlooked other cases such as the fact that Queen Victoria was on the throne during the Second and Third Anglo-Burmese War. (Or was Victoria as “passive” in these wars as Suu Kyi is in Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Hardly). Nevertheless, it is clear that Suu Kyi hasn’t also done much to end the current war on the Rohingya, only fanned some of the flames.

Now, returning to the orthodox view, the second line of argument is that her supposed reticence to speak out about the violations against the Rohingya and the actions of Buddhist chauvinists is a calculated decision, somehow reasoned to be for the greater good. She is gradually building a democratic society and does not want to anger the Tatmadaw, sparking a possible coup against the NLD, so the argument goes.

If this reason is to be accepted, then it is clear Suu Kyi has placed politics and pragmatism above any ideals. Fair enough, but then one should see her for what she has become, a mere mortal politician, not the icon she is still thought of as (the Asian Nelson Mandela shown in the likes of Luc Besson’s The Lady).

Moreover, if it is some calculated decision, she had better show some results soon. At the moment, the social change the electorate thought it was voting for is happening at snail’s pace, if at all.

The NLD ran its 2015 campaign on the slogan, “Time for Change.” “Vote for us, just look to the party flag,” Suu Kyi told a crowd in August that year. “It’s time for change, let’s vote for NLD and have real change!”

Instead of the change, the NLD government has cracked down on free speech, allegedly formed close ties with “crony capitalists,” and seen hundreds of NLD activists quit, claiming the party’s leaders have become too authoritarian. It has failed utterly to deal with demands of the various ethnic groups and the economy has hardly surged as predicted. Moreover, the whole saga of Suu Kyi not being able to become president left a bad taste in the mouth.

Today, NLD members and Suu Kyi seldom speak to the media, one might guess because they will be asked difficult questions they don’t want to answer. It even took her a month to make a public comment on the murder of prominent Muslim lawyer and activist U Ko Ni, an old comrade and friend.

Of course, some reforms have taken place. But they are nothing like the ones promised. On the issue of change, Suu Kyi has offered only excuses. She said last month: “Our citizens who have been struggling hard for many decades may think it’s a very long time. But for the history of a country, for the history of a government, 10 months or one year is not much. This is just a short period.”

Wasn’t this the same line of the ancien regime (give us more time to reform and change)? And where is the sense of urgency that motivated the NLD before their victory? Some apologists have tried the line that expectations were simply too high after the NLD won in 2015, consciously turning the blame on the electorate, not the NLD. I have even seen in print the suggestion that Suu Kyi’s fawning over the military is, perhaps, akin to Stockholm syndrome (which is either hyperbole or an admission that she is unfit to lead).

One conclusion, drawn by Kirsten McConnachie of the University of Warwick, writing in The Conversation in February, is that “the new government looks much like the old regime.” Another is that the whole saga speaks not of patient or clever politics (however unsavory that would be given the context) but of a government and a leader completely out of their depth. Maybe rumors of declining health also factor into this.

Towards the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the character of Nick Carraway comments that “the loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” There is a stirring emotion to feel some sympathy for Suu Kyi; she has fought for decades and sacrificed a great deal (more than most would forego) to get to where she is.

But such sympathy quickly fades when one considers that it is the people of Myanmar who have truly suffered, and that these are the same people being let down by the person who promised them genuine change and has, so far, failed to deliver. Then again, another emotion stirs: I desire nothing more than to be proven wrong.

1 March 2017

By Priti Gulati Cox

Salim Khan, a Muslim driver was burnt alive after a message was passed on the police wireless that a Muslim driver was coming that way. On the night of February 28, when people were attacked in Vatwa, all they could see was heads and more heads. Swords were being waved in the air, shots were fired by privately owned guns. “Tab hame malum pada ki hamara Allah ke seva koi nahin” [“Then we realized that none but Allah is on our side”], one witness said. The crowd had only one intention: Musalmanon ko khatam karo! [Finish off the Muslims!] And throughout, innocent people were killed.

— From an inquiry into the carnage in Gujarat by Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) fighting for justice for the victims of the violence in Gujarat.

If someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.

— Narendra Modi, then Gujarat Chief Minister, in response to a Reuters interview eleven years after the carnage, when asked whether he regretted the violence.

It’s 15 years now and justice to some extent has been done compared to other communal and targeted pogroms. Some of the powerful perpetrators have been punished and the struggle to establish command responsibility continues.

— Teesta Setalvad, human rights activist, secretary of CJP and author of “Foot Soldier of the Constitution – A Memoir,” in response to my question regarding justice for the victims of the carnage in Gujarat and their surviving families and friends.

February 27-28, 2017 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the 2002 Gujarat genocidal pogrom in which, according to CJP’s tally, as many as 1926 people lost their lives in violence that erupted after the Godhra train tragedy in which 59 people—mostly kar sevaks (right-wing nationalist volunteers)—were burnt alive. They were among commuters on the Sabarmati Express returning from the Ram temple site in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. That site had been controversial ever since December 6, 1992, when the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque, was demolished by a mob of Hindus to make way for the temple.

Since then, that site has become a focal point for the riling-up of right-wing Hindu nationalism. And the pogrom that followed the 2002 train attack was a release of pent-up hate that was looking for an excuse to explode.

The bid for power by the right-wing had begun long before, in the 1920s. The BJP (the current ruling party) is an affiliate of a cultural guild known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which was established in 1925.The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal (the youth wing of the VHP) are also affiliated with the RSS and along with the BJP itself were responsible for unleashing the carnage in Gujarat in 2002. The VHP have been trailblazers in the campaign to construct a temple dedicated to Rama on the site of the demolished Babri mosque. And a construction of a “grand” temple remains very much part of the BJP agenda today.

Gujarat, the state that birthed and raised the guru of non-violence, M. K. Gandhi—who himself was assassinated by a Hindu extremist—is not new to communal violence. The state’s history is steeped in it. For example, an incident during a 1969 pogrom “brings out the depth of animosity against the Muslims,” according toCJP: “A young Muslim, enraged by the destruction of his property said he would take revenge. Upon this the crowd seized him, showered blows on him, and tried to force him to shout Jai Jagannath (a Hindu slogan). Staying firm, the youth refused even if that meant death. To this, someone in the crowd responded that he might indeed be done away with. Wood from broken shops was collected, a pyre prepared in the middle of the road, petrol sprinkled on the pyre as well as on the youth, and he was set alight with ruthless efficiency. What is remarkable is that there was no resistance from any Hindu. The wails of the Muslim inhabitants of the area were drowned in the celebration of the incident by the Hindus.”

Between 1961 and 1971, 799 incidents of communal violence were recorded in Gujarat, with 1969 shouldering the biggest toll of riots. And since then, communal violence has erupted in the state many times. In just the years 1987 to 1991, 106 incidents were recorded. For most of that time Modi was serving as the general secretary of the BJP, and it was around then that the Ram Janmabhoomi(Rama’s birthplace) campaign took center stage in Gujarat, aiming to to construct theMandir (temple) at the site. It is believed that the largest contingent of men, women, and youth responsible for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya had come from Gujarat.

The ideology of Hindutva (Hinduness) is at the core of the RSS and its actions. And thanks to RSS and the other fanatical organizations that surround it, this ideology has penetrated every sphere of society—women, education, slums, youth, tribals, farmers, publishing, and more.

Narendra Modi, himself an RSS pracharak (volunteer) was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. The BlP first came to power in Gujarat in the mid-nineties, amid a campaign of hate against the state’s minority communities. Literature included fliers proclaiming, “India is a country of Hindus…. Our religion of Rama and Krishna is pious”; anti-Christian propaganda; penetration into tribal areas; and training camps espousing hatred, distribution of Trishuls, swords and other weapons at religious functions.

According to CJP,“Sustained and systematic efforts were made by organizations like the BJP and its Sangh Parivar[RSS family of organizations] affiliates to communalize Gujarati society, through large-scale distribution of hate literature and other means. Hinduism was given more and more aggressive interpretations with a conscious design to promote a feeling among Hindus that they, the majority community, were being treated unjustly through appeasement of Muslims by various vested interests. The view that Muslims were fundamentalist, anti-national, and pro-Pakistan was systematically promoted. In some cases, Hindus were even exhorted to take up arms to defend their interests.”

The Hindutva campaign reached its zenith with the 2002 pogrom. Between February 28 and March 2, sixteen of Gujarat’s twenty-four districts were engulfed in unspeakable mob violence unleashed upon Muslims—children, babies, women, men, and elderly alike. Mobs of five to ten thousand people armed with swords, trishuls, lathis, agricultural implements, stones, acid bulbs, bottles, petrol bombs, and burning cloth balls were let loose on helpless residents. In tearful testimonies to the eight-member Concerned Citizen’s Tribunal, riot survivors recounted incidents such as these:

Nahi, aaj to upar se order aaya ke aaj tumhari jaan bachane ki nahi hai [No, today we have orders from above that you are not to be saved], one witness testified that a policeman, KK Mysorewala, clearly told her.

Many witnesses testified that when out of distress they screamed, Allah! Allah! they were taunted by the attackers, who said, “No, say Jai Sri Ram!”

The mob had started breaking windows. They threw burning tires inside and the women inside would catch them and throw them out. In fact the witness’ hands were singed.

They caught hold of innocent children and sliced them up. They were pulled out of their mothers arms.

Most of the dead bodies were charred or mutilated beyond recognition and an overwhelming majority of the survivors did not manage to have access to the bodies of their relatives in order to perform the last rites in a dignified manner.

Between 5 and 6 p.m., when the mob was at the height of its frenzy, many of our women were first raped and then doused in kerosene and petrol and burnt. I saw them doing this.

Ehsan Jafri, [a parliamentarian] who was clearly a specific target, allowed himself to be dragged out of his own house…for 45 minutes, he was brutally dismembered and then finally decapitated. He was stripped, paraded naked, and asked to say, Vande Mataram! and Jai Shri Ram! He refused. His fingers were chopped off and he was paraded around in the locality, badly injured.

So, where does justice and accountability stand today, exactly fifteen years later?

Teesta Setalvad forwarded me a conviction sheet put together for the anniversary by CJP, titled Accounting for the Dead – A Battle Half Won. Here’s part of what it said:

CJP’s Major exercise to Commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Gujarat genocide has been to Account for the Dead and Missing to end for once and for all the Falsification of Figures by the State. Once Compiled we shall seek through Opposition Members of Parliament that the Figures on the Record of Parliament are also Corrected. Our Tally shows that as many as 1926 Lives were Lost in the Reprisal Violence that broke out after the Godhra Tragedy from February 28, 2002 onwards.

There is a calculated design to deny every aspect of the Violence, the Facts behind the Crimes, the Conspiracy, Planning etc.

The Zakia Jafri [wife of slain parliamentarian Ehsan Jafri] Case that seeks, for the first time in criminal jurisprudence to establish criminal and administrative culpability for the mass crimes that broke up in Gujarat is still pending having charted an arduous course from the Police, to the Gujarat High Court, down to the Magistrate’s Court and now is being heard in the Gujarat High Court. The perverse attack of State Agencies on CJP and it’s office bearers Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand have been [in] direct proportion to the furtherance of this judicial exercise: an attempt to establish for the first time in Indian History a Chain of Command Responsibility for the Mass Crimes that broke out in the state from February 28, 2002 and were not contained until May 5-6, 2002 when KPS Gill was sent by then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to oversee the law and order situation.

The Gulberg Massacre Verdict dated June 17, 2016 delivered by Judge PB Desai however discards that the Gulberg Massacre was part of any conspiracy. As stated by Tanvirbhai Jafri it was as if12-15,000 strong mob had gathered “to have chai and smaosa” that day!

They [the victims and witnesses] are threatened and induced to retract testimonies by perpetrators and the henchmen of the state machinery that has been thrice elected to power with perpetrators now also holding sway in Delhi.

The Perpetrators in the face of those in Power or those part of allied/sister organisations of the Hindutva Right who enjoy Political Patronage have even used, and continue to use the Criminal Underworld to issue threats and offer inducements.

An estimated 400 girls and women were subject to brute gender violence; even the state of Gujarat has been forced to admit to 176 women being brutally assaulted. No reparation has been offered to women and girls or their families. Over 428 persons are officially admitted as missing since the 2002 carnage, the remains of 226 not yet traced and thus denied a dignified burial and last rites. At least 270 places of cultural and religious importance for the Muslim minority were destroyed: barely 40 have been since rebuilt, not by a repentant state, but by the community itself.

Police witnesses have stated in their testimonies that the mob was huge enough, nearing 4,500-5,000. Injured and traumatised eye-witnesses have said that it was closer 15,000 strong.  That the mob was also shouting slogans like ‘Miyaon ne kapo, maro,” [Cut and kill the Muslims] is also part of the record.

The panchnamas of the site reveal how the embers were allowed to burn, undoused at Gulberg society for three days after the attack, ensuring that any forensic evidence behind the killings is properly destroyed. When survivors buried the charred remains of their loved ones at the Kalandari Masjid Kabrastan on March 3, 2002, these bodies had been reduced to ashes.

Citizens for Justice and Peace’s single most significant achievement has been the convictions, at the first stage of as many as 157 perpetrators (of which 142 were to Life Imprisonment) in over a dozen major criminal trials related to the Gujarat Genocidal pogrom of 2002. In appeal at the High Court, 19 of these have been since acquitted. CJP plans to challenge these further in the Supreme Court.

There has been no expression of Remorse for the Perpetrated Violence of 2002 either by the State Government or the Party it represents, Nationally.

In the last 10 months, the Gujarat police and administration has made several attempts to threaten, humiliate, and implicate Teesta Setalvad in a number of cooked up cases and even held out threats of impending arrest.The attempt is to divert the CJP secretary’s attention from her legal aid work to enforced self-defence. A price that human rights defenders must be prepared to pay.

Many thanks to Teesta Setalvad and CJP for their unwavering struggle for justice and reparations for the victims and the survivors of the cowardly attack on the Muslim communities of Gujarat in 2002. Please visit CJP, Sabrang and Khoj to learn more about Teesta and Javed’s work.

Priti Gulati Cox (@PritiGCox) is an interdisciplinary artist and a local coordinator for the peace and justice organization CODEPINK. She lives in Salina, Kansas, and can be reached at p.g@cox.net.

1 March 201

By Eric Zuesse

Syria’s peace-talks are about settling a horrific six-year-long war, but this is more of an international war that’s being waged on the battlefields of Syria, than it is a civil war within Syria itself. This fact is often ignored by the press, but the peace-talks are really more between the foreign powers than between their proxies who are killing each other (and Syria’s civilians) within Syria. These peace-talks are international because the principals in this war are international. And, because the principals are international, the principles that are being fought over are, too — they are so basic that the end-result from these talks will be not only some sort of new peace, but some sort of new Constitution for Syria: really a new nation of Syria.

The main issues which are being negotiated at the Syrian Peace Talks that resumed on February 23rd in Geneva, are constitutional in nature: whether Syria is to be governed under Sharia (or Quran-based) law, or whether instead it is to be a multi-ethnic democracy. The Sharia-law side is supported by the United States, Turkey, and the Arabic royal families, who own Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, all of which royal families are fundamentalist Sunnis. The multi-ethnic democracy side is supported by Bashar al-Assad (Syria’s current leader), Russia, and Iran.

Some proponents of the Sharia-law side are advocating that Syria be broken up into at least three separate ethnically-defined nations, which then would be Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite, each of which would be ruled only by its majority ethnicity, just as Israel is ruled by its majority ethnicity, which in Israel’s case is Jewish. (Another prominent recent example was apartheid South Africa, except that in that particular case, it was the White minority who ruled over the Black majority. Of course, those racial laws ended when Blacks there became allowed to vote.)

In essence, the contested polarity is between whether the future of Syria will be as a religious-ethnic dictatorship, versus as a multi-ethnic (including multi-religious) democracy.

All polling of the Syrian people, even during the current war and even performed by Western polling firms, shows a strong preference by the Syrians for a multi-ethnic, entirely non-sectarian, democracy. Moreover, when questioned as to whether they believe this still to be possible for Syria, solid majorities of the Syrian people respond in the affirmative. Generally speaking, they blame, above all, the United States government, as being behind the influx of tens of thousands of jihadists from around the world into Syria to overthrow and replace the Assad government. (Perhaps they don’t so much blame America’s Islamist allies for this invasion by jihadists, because the Sauds etc. are Muslims and mainly Arabs, as Syrians themselves are.)

(In recent years, those findings by the main polling-firm, WIN/Gallup, can be seen here:

2014: http://www.orb-international.com/perch/resources/syriadatatablesjuly2014.pdf

2015: https://www.orb-international.com/perch/resources/syriadata.pdf

2016: https://www.orb-international.com/perch/resources/2016-syria-tabs-weighted.pdf.)

Syrians are the most secular nation in the entire Middle East. The effort by the U.S. and its allies to impose a jihadist government there is not popular with the Syrian people.

In preparation for the current round of U.N.-sponsored Syrian Peace Talks, there was a preliminary peace conference in Astana Kazakhstan, in which the participants were Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Syria; and it produced a strong statement in favor of a multi-ethic, multi-religious, democracy in Syria. Russia also produced there, for future consideration by the Syrian people, a draft Constitution of that type, to be discussed and ultimately voted on by the Syrians.

Agence France Presse reported, on February 12th, that (boldfaces and links here are by me):

Syria’s opposition on Sunday announced its 21-member delegation, including 10 rebel representatives, for a new round of UN-sponsored peace talks in Geneva scheduled for February 20 [subsequently rescheduled for the 23rd].

The delegation will be headed by Nasr al-Hariri (pictured), a member of the National Coalition, replacing Assad al-Zoabi, who led the opposition at several previous rounds of talks in Geneva last year.

The delegation’s chief negotiator was named as Mohamed Sabra, a lawyer who was part of the opposition’s technical team during negotiations in Geneva in 2014.

He replaces Mohamad Alloush, a rebel from the powerful Army of Islam faction.

Alloush served as negotiator during three rounds of peace talks in Geneva as well as negotiations in the Kazakh capital Astana in January organised by Turkey and Russia.

Neither Alloush nor the Army of Islam were listed as members of the delegation to Geneva, though it was unclear if the group was boycotting the talks or would be represented by other delegates.

No reason was given for the decision to replace either Zoabi or Alloush.

Alloush had been selected by the Saud family, and so was rejected by Russia, Iran and Syria, at the Astana conference. Turkey at that conference proposed and the others accepted Sabra, who heads the Syrian Republican Party, which was created in 2008 simply to criticize Assad, and didn’t even become active until it received major funding from Turkey and became publicly “founded” in Istanbul in 2014, by members of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. So: now, instead of Assad negotiating with an agent of the Saud family (Alloush), as had been the case when the U.S. ran the preparations for the peace-process (the process that U.S. President Barack Obama sabotaged on 17 September 2016 and thus brought to an end), Assad is negotiating this time with an agent of the Erdogan family (Sabra), and Russia instead of the U.S. has been running the preparations for the peace-process, which is currently under way at the U.N. in Geneva.

The National Coalition was created on 12 November 2012 by the Saud family and their Gulf Cooperation Council of all of Arabia’s royal families, who own (other than the Sauds’ Saudi Arabia), Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman. Nasr al-Hariri, who thus represents those families, heads the delegation of ‘Syrian opposition groups’ that Turkey’s Mohamed Sabra will be negotiating on behalf of. So, actually, Assad will be negotiating against representatives of, and who are negotiating on behalf of, all of the Middle East’s leaders of Sunni-run nations.

Furthermore, “Nasr al-Hariri selected 21 opposition delegates during a meeting of the Syrian opposition in Riyadh in preparation for the talks,” and so the entire selection-process for those ’Syrian opposition’ members was done under the Sauds’ watchful eyes (and money).

Magnanimously, a representative of the National Coalition, who spoke about Russia’s allowing ‘the Syrian opposition groups’ to be selected by Turkey, the Sauds, and the other Middle-Eastern Sunni powers, “called it a ‘sacrifice’ that Russia, which backs the Syrian regime, has offered to Turkey in the hope that in return it would win concessions to make room for the so-called Moscow platform, named after the Syrian parties that are under the political influence of the Kremlin.” (Those are generally the strongest supporters of a secular democratic unified Syria.)

However, on February 24th was reported that, “Hariri repeated in his news conference that the opposition’s priority was to begin negotiations on a political transition with a transitional governing body, suggesting it would not back down on its demands that Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad step down.” The U.S.-Saudi alliance refused for the person whom all polls showed to be overwhelmingly the top choice by Syrians to lead their country — the only person who was wanted by over 50% of the Syrian public to be Syria’s leader — Bashar al-Assad, to be allowed onto the electoral ballot for Syria’s Presidency; they refused to allow democracy in Syria. So, the Sunni powers (which also includes the U.S. as their core military arm) are as steadfast as always, about overthrowing and replacing Syria’s non-sectarian government. And they all blame the main Shiite nation, Iran, for all problems: “‘Iran is the main obstacle to any kind of political deal,’ Hariri said.” To them, this is really a war to conquer Iran; it’s like Christianity’s 30 Years’ War had been in Europe, back in the 1600s. But, of course, it is also what RFK Jr. has appropriately called it — “Syria: Another Pipeline War.” It’s rooted both in religion and in economics.

On January 24th, at the close of the preparatory talks, in Astana, for the current peace talks in Geneva to end Syria’s war, was issued a “Joint Statement by Iran, Russia, Turkey” asserting that they all:

Reaffirm their commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, non-sectarian and democratic State, as confirmed by the UN Security Council.

Russia was the only one of those three nations that also proposed then a specific draft Constitution for postwar Syria. Perhaps that’s because Russia is the only one of these three whose own government and Constitution is entirely secular. Thus, too, Turkey’s key agent at the current Geneva talks, Mohamed Sabra, was reported, back on 17 November 2016 (two months after the U.S. had ended its participation in Syria’s peace process) to have — as Egypt’s Al-Ahram put it — especially criticized Russia’s proposals for “trying to isolate Islamic groups that disagree with the principles of a democratic and secular state, and thus exclude them from the political process. ‘This will lead to a realignment of forces, change the essence of the military conflict in Syria, and sow the seeds of civil war in the country,’ Sabra remarked.” Assuming that Egypt’s main newspaper was accurately paraphrasing and translating what the chief negotiator for the U.S.-and-Sunni alliance actually said, Russia was being criticized there for insisting that what follows after Syria’s war must be controlled entirely by the people of Syria, and not by anyone outside the country — Sabra, the chief negotiator for the U.S.-Sunni alliance, actually was speaking publicly there, against commitment to “the principles of a democratic and secular state.” It’s actually fitting: twice in one day, the Secretary General of the U.N. had criticized the U.S. position for its opposition to democracy in Syria.

1 March 2017

Our intelligence apparatus is doing far more than stoking paranoia about the Russian bogeyman — it’s threatening democracy.

By Patrick Lawrence

A couple of books come to mind amid the relentless leaks emanating from the spooks on either side of the Potomac and, not to be missed, their high approval ratings among our patriots of liberal persuasion.

One is The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, published two summers ago. This is David Talbot’s history of the infamous CIA director’s quite successful effort to turn Langley, Virginia, into a state within a state, perfectly capable of taking on the one whose leaders Americans elect. We now call this “the Deep State,” and Glenn Greenwald put the debate on this point to bed in 140 characters a few days ago: “To summarize journalistic orthodoxy: only fringe conspiracists think a Deep State exists, but all sane people know Kremlin controls US Govt.”

(What exactly is the “Deep State,” anyway? Here’s a rundown of the basics.)

President Kennedy fired the Deep State’s godfather in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs calamity and Dulles’s never-acknowledged support for a failed coup against de Gaulle (believe it, the French president). Taking this to the ultimate, Talbot, who founded Salon 20-odd years ago, makes a persuasive case that Dulles retreated to Georgetown, gathered his loyalists, and probably architected JFK’s assassination two years later. Talbot’s book does not include this incident, but I have it from a former spook of great integrity, now noted for blowing whistles: A few years into Barack Obama’s presidency supporters asked at a fundraiser, “Where’s our progressive foreign policy, Mr. President?” Obama’s reply: “Do you want me to end up another JFK?”

The other book is I.F. Stone’s The Haunted Fifties, 1953–1963. The great Izzy’s commentary in I.F. Stone’s Weekly during those egregious years was among the few available sources of sanity in a nation of anti-Russian zombies. “To have kept his head in the hurricane of corrupted speech, ritualized patriotism, paranoid terror, and sudden conversions to acceptability,” Arthur Miller wrote in a foreword to the collection, “required something more than his wits and investigative talent and a gift for language.” It did—and does, so let us take a lesson. Stone endured, Miller observed, because he had faith that “a confident, tolerant America” would eventually come back to life.

I propose staying with this thought. But it is no good looking for help among the corrupted, the paranoid, and the suddenly converted.

One finds little confidence and less tolerance among Americans now. One finds instead, a president who has more bad ideas than you’ve had hot dinners—a man with an antidemocratic streak that appears to result from his failure to understand the principles of democratic government. There is only one thing worse than this president. I refer to the liberal reaction to his election. It had been bad but short of dangerous for some time after the night of last November 8. As of last week, I count it a disgrace: It is full of danger now.

I know it is a long time ago, but cast your mind back to those autumn days when mainstream Democrats considered “President Hillary Clinton” a shoo-in. There was going to be a big problem come November 8, they direly warned: All the Trumpets and Trumpettes will not accept the result. They will refuse Clinton her legitimacy. They will deny and resist and rampage. They will be in the streets. They will put our great republic’s political process, our very glory, at risk.

Striking it has been to watch liberals as they commit these very sins. One opinion-page inhabitant predicted “a perpetual fever swamp” after Clinton took the White House. Are we not sloshing through one now? Here is what these people utterly refuse to grasp, from what one can make out because it is too embarrassing: Donald Trump is a consequence. He is not the cause of anything.

To be clear: Given that the Supreme Court broke the democratic process decisively with its Citizens United decision seven years ago, the street is a perfectly logical place to be, in my view. But there is no point in being there unless one is for something and not merely contra. Having failed to think things through, the implicit argument among many of those taking it to the street these days is that things were copacetic before Trump came along and ruined them. Obama now goes down as the Mighty Quinn. The self-delusion is astonishing, and the historians will fix it, one hopes. But in the meantime, this error turns consequential: It lands us with the kind of problem that David Talbot suggests killed Kennedy in Dallas, if you care to entertain the thesis.

Read the histories. The Ivy League culture that still suffuses the CIA has from the first been far more liberal than conservative. The Democratic Party’s Clintonian era is perfectly exemplary on this point. As a smart friend said the other day, John Brennan, who served Bill Clinton and then Obama at the CIA and wanted to serve in an HRC administration, had a lot of trouble sorting out his role in Langley and his relations with the Democrats.

Now look.

It is one thing to tar Donald Trump with a groundless campaign, Nixon-style, so as to insinuate without evidence that he entertains objectionable ties to Russia. That is mere politics. (And I like Reince Priebus’s term for this last Sunday on Fox News. Citing top officials in the IC, which stands for intelligence cabal, Priebus asserted, “They have made it very clear that the story is complete garbage.”)

It is another matter altogether when the descendants of Dulles (whom Priebus suggests are not united on this one) mount what looks awfully like a coup operation against the president of our republic. That is a strong phrase, but it belongs on the table far more than the “complete garbage” you can read in any day’s edition of The New York Times. There I will put it for now, awaiting a historically informed argument for taking it off.

Leaks have the wonderful advantage of requiring no substantiation. With Michael Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s national-security adviser, they have already claimed one prominent victim. Who or what is next? Priebus? Trump himself? Or maybe just crippling the Trump White House’s determination to forge a saner relationship with Moscow will do.

I have seen a few naked emperors in my day, but this one is positively obese (and wears a Speedo at the beach). This is a perception-management campaign quite similar to those mounted decades ago in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere. The media are thoroughly complicit, and the objective is perfectly plain but nowhere mentioned. We have an intelligence apparatus that has accreted autonomous power such that no president dares try to control it: This much lies beyond debate. Now we watch as it counters a president who proposes to scrub the single most important passage in the narrative of fear and animosity on which this apparatus depends.

You have two potential casualties here, readers. It is very dangerous to suffer either.

One, this looks like the most serious threat to (what remains of) American democracy since… since the Kennedy assassination, if you accept David Talbot’s case. It comes from the very people everyone from Pat Moynihan to Edward Snowden warned us about—those who abide in the culture of secrecy, the Deep State. Set aside all thought of “it can’t happen here.” At the very least you are watching the threat that it is going to happen.

You want to get Trump out of office? Good idea. Do the work. We all want to see your plan.

Two, if the spooks, the seething mainstream of the Democratic Party, and the neoconservative warmongers succeed in taking down Trump’s détente policy and who knows whom among its advocates, the already distorted role of intelligence agencies in the foreign-policy process will be further consolidated. More immediately, Americans will be condemned to live with Russophobic fear more or less indefinitely. I have only one question on this point, and maybe some (more) elderly fellow can answer it: Was the anti-Communist case that haunted the 1950s so impossibly flimsy as this? Hard to believe, given all the damage it did, but maybe we are about to learn something very awful.

Another question, actually. How did it come to be that what we witness daily now is to be cheered? My own answer runs to an old confusion characteristic of Americans. Most of us are entirely taken up with means. This has been so for a long time. We say we have ideals, ends, but in truth these are museum curiosities now. Our only purpose is merely to sustain the present—which by definition is not an ideal. If it takes a CIA operation to get this done—in this case to kneecap Donald Trump—well, one is all for it.

“Bring on the special prosecutor” was the headline on an editorial in the Times a few days after Flynn resigned. All the banners of liberal outrage were aloft by then. At first Flynn’s sin was talking to Russian officials before Trump’s inauguration. When the idiocy of this position finally dawned, it was, as it is now, that Flynn had lied to Trump and Vice President Pence. Unless Flynn broke a law, and he did not by any untainted judgment, this is a matter strictly between Trump and Pence and Flynn, if I am not mistaken. It is the latest peg for the anti-Trump people to hang their hats on, but as grounds for a special prosecutor, it is ridiculous. The proposal is less for a special investigation than for a fishing expedition, and given how the non-evidence of a mail hack was conjured into the “highest confidence” of Russian meddling, it is impossible to say what “evidence” or “conclusions” would be drawn from it.

One cannot figure, in the case of the Times, what the object of the exercise might be. On the one hand, it is a brimming chalice of liberal anger, and so an expression of the Democratic Party’s elites. Recall, the Times confessed on page one last summer that it had abandoned all efforts to report about Trump objectively. On the other, it is full tilt these days finding Russians under every bed: Having subverted our democracy, they are subverting elections in France. They are subverting elections in Holland. They are subverting something or other in Kosovo, I cannot make out quite what. This is typical CIA stuff. Does the Times carry the agency’s ball, then?

Maybe both. Or, as earlier suggested, between the Democrats and Langley, maybe there is only one ball: It is the same for the two of them.

Long, long ago, Tom Wicker, the much-noted Timesreporter and later columnist, called the CIA “a Frankenstein monster no one can fully control.” That was in the edition of April 27, 1966, when the Times published the third in a running series of influential exposés of the CIA’s limitlessly crazy doings. People were outraged, as I suppose it is necessary to explain. This was five years after Arthur Hays Sulzberger stepped down as publisher. Sulzberger served the CIA and had signed a secrecy agreement with the agency, so Wicker could not know of this connection, and it was not in his piece.

To conclude where I began, think for a moment about I.F. Stone during his haunted 1950s. While he was well-regarded by a lot of rank-and-file reporters, few would say so openly. He was PNG among people such as Sulzberger—an outcast. (Among my favorites of Stone’s many good lines: “It’s always fun reading the Washington Postbecause you never know where you’ll find a page one story.”) Now think of all the good Stone did. “I know that in the fifties,” Arthur Miller wrote in recollection, “to find his Weekly in the mail was to feel a breath of hope for mankind.”

Now think about now.

A few reporters and commentators advise us that the name of the game these days is to sink the single most constructive policy the Trump administration has announced. The rest is subterfuge, rubbish. This is prima facie the case, though you can read it nowhere in the Times or any of the other corporate media. A few have asserted that we may now be witnessing a coup operation against the Trump White House. This is a possibility, in my view. We cannot flick it off the table. With the utmost purpose, I post here one of these pieces. “A Win for the Deep State” came out just after Flynn was forced from office. It is by a writer named Justin Raimondo and appeared in a wholly out-of-bounds web publication called Antiwar.com. I know nothing about either, but it is a thought-provoking piece.

My point here is simple. You have studied the Enlightenment? Good: You know what I mean when I say we are headed into the Endarkenment. The lights upon us are dimming. We have been more or less abandoned by a press that proves incapable of informing us in anything approaching a disinterested fashion. As suggested, either the media are Clintonian liberals before they are newspapers and broadcasters, or they are servants of power before they serve us.

This is the media’s disgrace, but our problem. It imposes a couple of new burdens. We, readers and viewers, must discriminate among all that is put before us so as to make the best judgments we can and, not least, protect our minds. The other side of the coin, what we customarily call “alternative media,” assumes an important responsibility. They must get done, as best they can, what better-endowed media now shirk. To put this simply and briefly, they and we must learn that they are not “alternative” to anything. In the end there is no such thing as “alternative media,” as I often argue. There are only media, and most of ours have turned irretrievably bad.

And now they are doing much to land us in very grave trouble.

22 February 2017

By Andre Damon

Speaking before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump reaffirmed the core pillars of his presidency: vastly expanding military spending, slashing taxes on corporations, scapegoating immigrants for the crisis of American capitalism, and promoting economic nationalist trade policies.

In contrast to his inaugural speech, Trump couched his extreme right-wing policies in the traditional conventions of American politics. The media, as if on cue, praised Trump’s speech for “reaching across the aisle” and taking a bipartisan approach.

CNN, which last week was included by Trump as part of the “enemies of the people,” headlined its article on the speech, “New Tone, Ambitious Vision.” In praising his remarks, various media talking heads ignored the fact that the administration, packed with fascistic figures such as Steve Bannon, is in the midst of a massive crackdown on millions of undocumented immigrants.

The official response to Trump’s speech by Democrats was given by former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear, who currently does not hold any elected office, and who is generally unknown to the public. Beshear devoted his brief rebuttal to a defense of Obamacare, the broadly despised pro-corporate health care program, while denouncing Trump for “ignoring serious threats to our national security from Russia.”

Despite their tactical differences centering on foreign policy, the generally warm response by the media and half-hearted rebuttal from the Democrats points to the fact that, within the ruling class, there is broad and bipartisan support for the essential goals of the Trump administration: Expanding military spending, strengthening the repressive apparatus of the state, slashing corporate taxes, and eliminating social spending.

The day before his speech, Trump announced plans to increase the military budget by 10 percent, to be paid for by an equal reduction of discretionary social spending. But beyond pledging to provide “the men and women of the United States military with the tools they need,” Trump largely ignored the implications of his military expansion and foreign policy in general.

Trump’s budget directive was criticized by both congressional Republicans and pro-Democratic publications, such as the Washington Post, for not going far enough in proposing to slash spending on social entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

In his speech, Trump indicated that he would work with Congress to cut these programs, including by turning Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor, into a block grant system, which could be cut by state governments. “We should give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid,” he declared.

He also proposed a massive attack on public education, in line with the perspective of his new education secretary, Betsy DeVos. “Families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them,” Trump said.

At the heart of Trump’s speech was his program of economic nationalism. Trump called for subsidies for US companies to help them penetrate foreign markets, declaring that his administration is “developing historic tax reform that will reduce the tax rate on our companies so they can compete and thrive anywhere and with anyone.” He complained that “when foreign companies ship their products into America, we charge them almost nothing.”

Notably, when Trump declared that his administration will make “it easier for companies to do business in the United States, and much harder for companies to leave,” former Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders applauded. Sanders, together with other Democrats, stated his willingness to cooperate with Trump on nationalist economic policies.

While Trump’s speech was couched in the language of defending “American jobs,” his economic program is, in fact, centered on slashing corporate taxes, eliminating regulations and increasing the exploitation of workers in the United States.

Trump gave a full-throated defense of his vicious crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which has sparked broad popular opposition and demonstrations throughout the country. “As we speak, we are removing gang members, drug dealers and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our citizens. Bad ones are going out as I speak tonight and as I have promised.”

Trump’s speech included a modification to his earlier immigration proposals, calling for a switch “away from this current system of lower-skilled immigration, and instead adopting a merit-based system.” Such a policy would continue all the cruelty and violence of his ongoing immigration crackdown, while seeking to ensure a steady supply of skilled labor for American companies.

He likewise reiterated his support for his so-called Muslim ban, declaring, “It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur…. We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America.”

Toward the end of his speech, Trump exploited the presence of Carryn Owens, the widow of a US Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, who died in a raid in Yemen last month. Ignoring the denunciations of the operation by Owens’ father, Trump described the mission as a “highly successful raid.”

Trump’s invocation of this murderous rampage, which led to the killing of 25 Yemeni civilians and eight children, was greeted with the longest standing ovation of the entire speech, from both Democrats and Republicans.

Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the address was its utterly delusional character. Trump declared, “Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved.” He added that, as a result of his presidency, “Dying industries will come roaring back to life… Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our beautiful land.”

All of this is a ridiculous pipe dream. The very fact that Trump, a con-man and scam artist, has been promoted to the highest political office in the state is proof of the deeply decayed state of bourgeois rule in the United States.

1 March 2017

By Ranjan Solomon

his has been yet another of those horrific weeks in Palestine. Israel’s intolerance is growing. Far away in Australia, Netanyahu is getting a mixed reception – the government which welcomes him with a red carpet regardless of the fact that he heads the worst form of government there is anywhere in the world right now. Civil society, churches, trade unions, academics, students, and even the opposition protested and held wide-spread protests where he was labeled a war criminal.

Around the world, Israel is viewed as a criminal state. Its judicial system has just allowed a blatant murderous soldier to get away with a lenient sentence. The courts made a mockery of justice. The Arab League called the sentence itself an act of ‘racism’. A large number of human rights groups and activists joined the chorus of condemnation of the sentence. But Israel is unfazed and it will be no surprise if the criminal is let off the hook earlier than the term of the sentence and given back his position in the army.

69% of Israeli’s want that punishment to be either repealed or further reduced. Contrast that with the way Israel handles so-called crimes (and non-crimes) of the Palestinians. Even the innocent are picked up, arrested, thrown into prison without valid charges under the provision of Israel’s administrative law – a law that allows Israel to imprison a person without charges for six months and extend that by a further six months – an arrangement that often runs into years. They further rationalize their legal and administrative error by torturing prisoners and using the confessions obtained under torture as evidence to even decades of prison sentences. Democracy and the law in Israel are a strange species, a breed of their own. Both these instruments are twisted and warped in total regard for all civilized norms.

Israel won’t even allow itself to be scrutinized when it is accused of serious war crimes or other actions that render it in violation rights law and standards. It probably finds itself in the Guinness book of records for the number of independent investigations it has turned down. Just today, there is a report of why it won’t allow an American investigator from Human Rights Watch into the country, saying that Human Rights Watch is ­“systematically anti-Israel” and works as a tool of ‘pro-Palestinian propaganda’ while ‘falsely raising the banner of ­human rights.’

Nahshon, a top spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, confirmed that Israel rejected the visa request Human Rights Watch personnel basing its decision not on the individual but on its low opinion of Human Rights Watch. “We said no. It’s very simple. We consider the group to be biased, systemically hostile toward Israel. In a way, we consider them absolutely hopeless.”

Iain Levine, program director at Human Rights Watch, reacted: “This decision and the spurious rationale should worry anyone concerned about Israel’s commitment to basic democratic values,” Bashi said that in the past year, Human Rights Watch has not only reported on alleged violations by the Israeli government but also investigated and condemned the arbitrary detention of journalists and activists by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and executions by Hamas authorities in Gaza. Israel.

Israel has no tolerance for human rights and even less for being investigated when it commits those violations. The HRW report says: “Israel’s right-wing government has recently targeted Israeli human rights groups for extra scrutiny and warned European governments to stop funding them. Members of anti-occupation groups, such as ‘Breaking the Silence’ which is composed of Israeli army veterans, have been called “traitors.”

News- be it mainstream or alternative- highlights ascending intolerance and the resistance to listen to the voice of reason. They also show the emergent global rejection of Israel’s occupation. Israel’s down fall may be a matter of time. It may behave like a cornered tiger when that happens. The preferred option is that dialogue will light up the pathway to a peaceful, just, and lasting settlement.

The news items we share below highlight the intolerance and the resistance. They also show the emergent global rejection of Israel’s occupation. Israel’s down fall may be a matter of time. It may behave like a cornered tiger when that happens. The preferred option is that dialogue will light up the pathway to a peaceful, just, and lasting settlement.

24 February 2017

By Sara Flounders

The dangerous U.S. military escalation of its 5-year war to overturn Syria’s government can be seen in the Sept. 17 bombing, which killed 62 Syrian Army soldiers and aided the position of the Islamic State group. The attack sabotaged a U.S.-Russian brokered ceasefire and led Russia to call for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting.

At the same time, there has been a heavy barrage of U.S. war propaganda. “White Helmets,” a new film, is part of the sophisticated disinformation campaign.

War propaganda is always more insidious on the home front, but it is an essential ingredient of imperialist wars. Charging the enemy with genocide, baby killing, mass rapes, mass graves and weapons of mass destruction have all been debunked after a U.S. war. But they saturate the media before a war and seem indisputable.

Samantha Powers, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has denounced both Russia and Syria. She labels U.S. wars “humanitarian interventions,” and has used unsubstantiated war propaganda to justify wars in West Asia, North Africa and the Balkans that have decimated countries, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Social media hype

The film praising White Helmets, a U.S.-British-funded group embedded with U.S.-funded reactionary opposition forces, is trending on Netflix. The documentary’s well-publicized launch is calculated to help it win awards and convey the call for deeper U.S. military involvement in Syria. It premiered the Sept. 17-18 weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.

NBC News praised the featured group as “Angels on the Front Line.” The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal sang the movie’s praises and White Helmets’ “selfless, humanitarian role.”

The White Helmets defines itself as unpaid, unarmed first responders in Syria, claims 3,000 members and alleges it is a Syrian Civil Defense group. It claims to have saved 40,000, even 60,000 lives in Syria, by rescuing survivors from bombsites.

Most claims about the White Helmets are unverified self-promotion on social media. Interviews with and media coverage of the grouping show desperate appeals for an increase in U.S./NATO military action in Syria — not peace and reconciliation. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and other journalists have quoted its calls for a no-fly zone as a “humanitarian” option.

The much-hyped White Helmets is not a Syrian organization, nor was it created by Syrians, nor is it educational. It is a U.S.-British creation. Former British Army officer James Le Mesurier, self-described as a British “security” specialist, founded it. He previously worked for Blackwater, the mercenary organization universally condemned for its murderous brutality in Iraq.

U.S. AID funding

The White Helmets’ website declares the group is “unfunded, independent and neutral.” At an April 27 press conference, U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner acknowledged the organization has received $23 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development. That agency’s website explains, “Our work … advances U.S. foreign policy objectives.”

Additionally, the White Helmets receives millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros, the Netherlands and the British Foreign Office. Equipment and vehicles come through Turkey.

The White Helmets has never functioned as a neutral force. While attacking the Syrian government and calling for more U.S., British and NATO bombing, the group functions exclusively in Syrian areas held by the Nusra Front, a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaida. This well-funded group operates on the ground with U.S.-, British-, Israeli- and Saudi-funded militias committed to destroying Syria’s government.

While claiming to be “unarmed,” the White Helmets appears in videos with weapons, surrounded by armed militias.

The U.S. brought White Helmets’ leader Raed Saleh to the U.N. Security Council in 2014 to testify against the Syrian government and to lobby for a U.N. resolution approving a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone — meaning direct U.S. intervention. Saleh promotes bombing to “save” the people of Syria and is hardly “neutral.”

Washington later barred Saleh from the U.S. when he tried to attend a gala dinner honoring White Helmets with a keynote speech from USAID. The State Department deported him, citing his connections to “extremist organizations.”

The White Helmets is the latest of a series of front groups, designed to give a “humanitarian” gloss to Washington’s latest war of regime change in the Middle East.

White Helmets was established as a social media presence of the Syria Campaign, AVAAZ and Purpose — interlinked campaigns that push for U.S. destruction of Syria. They quote each others’ material and create the illusion of a democratic, independent opposition in Syria.

These forces are also pushing for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for White Helmets to further legitimatize their calls for an expanded war. They also campaigned for Washington to bomb Libya under the guise of a “humanitarian” no-fly zone.

Resources that tell the truth

While the corporate media and TV entertainment channels seem to be taken in by this slick film, it takes little effort to expose who White Helmets is and reveal its role in the ugly U.S.-funded war in Syria. Information is available online in various formats. But this has not stopped the constant, orchestrated promotion of White Helmet.

“The White Helmets — al Qaeda with a Facelift” is a 4-minute video on Youtube which reveals the truth about the grouping. (tinyurl.com/zojokn3) The Syria Solidarity Movement, including Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Ken Stone and Hands Off Syria, which made the video, has extensively researched White Helmets’ funding and role.

Change.org’s petition opposes the Nobel Peace Prize nomination, concluding that the White Helmets is “terrorism and neocolonialism under the umbrella of Humanitarianism.” (tinyurl.com/z52cttu)

21 September 2016