Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231146111

In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler makes the case that Judaism and Zionism represent vastly different world views. Butler’s readers are more likely to be liberal and progressive secular Jews, but no doubt readers also include both political and religious Zionists. Because Butler does not address the Zionists directly, as Shaul Magid does in The Necessity of Exile, they may be scandalized by the critical studies approach drawing on a variety of Jewish scholars, postwar philosophers, German-Jewish thinkers, and Palestinian writers. Nevertheless, Butler addresses Jewish ethics as well as Zionism’s use of state violence and its newfound messianism.

After Israel’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Butler sought to debunk the claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, proposing that Judaism is in fact opposed to injustice, state violence, expulsion, dispossession; and that in all its traditions — secular, socialist and religious — Judaism is dedicated to social justice and social equality. And if that case could be made, “it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.”

Thus Butler sets out to show “that there are bona fide Jewish but imperative Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and containment [,…] affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak.”

To do this Butler needs to show that resistance to Zionism is itself a Jewish value, that Zionism’s illiberal exceptionalist lens must be replaced by a democratic universalist, and Jewish, lens. And, to overcome the objection that Zionism’s violence is only reactive and not intrinsic, it must also be demonstrated that a critique of state violence, which Israel uses to repress Palestinians, is not only inherent in Jewish values but that Zionism is not inherent in Judaism or in Jewishness. It’s a tall order.

Butler’s main task, like Magid’s, is to rescue Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and to rescue Judaism from the grip of a Zionist framing:

“It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious and cultural traditions and practices?”

In deriving first principles from an ethical or religious tradition, Butler asks if Jewish sources can be reinterpreted anew and if non-Jewish sources can ever be used to illustrate Jewish values.

One would think that these arguments would depend on firmly establishing that even Jewish sources regard Zionism’s qualities as alien to Judaism. And they do. But Jewish values such as cohabitation with the “other,” equality, and justice can be applied universally. Jewish experiences, such as dispersion and exile, may have particularist but also universal meanings. Certainly both Jews and Palestinians have experienced both. Butler acknowledges that universal concepts may not always hold precisely the same meaning for all parties. Even Jews are famously heterogenous. Everyone, Butler argues, perhaps Jews especially, must contend with the notion of the “other,” with alterity.

Ultimately, Butler elects “to depart from a[n entirely] Jewish-centered framework for thinking about the problem of Zionism and to locate Jewishness in the moment of its encounter with the non-Jewish, in the dispersing of the self that follows from that encounter.” These encounters are far-ranging, and if one does not have a solid background (which I don’t) in critical theory they will find themselves treading water instead of swimming happily along. Nevertheless, Butler’s book offers some useful framings to consider Zionism’s hijacking of Judaism.

Butler begins their meditations with an insight from Edward Said, who noted that Moses the Egyptian, Judaism’s founder, is recognizable as both a Jew and an Arab. The moment we begin to grapple with these opposing identities, we are engaging, in Butler’s terms, with alterity. Said makes the point that the only thing that really distinguishes Moses as a Jew is receiving the tablets at Sinai. The two peoples he embodies have much more in common — chiefly, their refugee status, both in scripture and in the modern historical record.

Outwardly it’s difficult to distinguish Mizrachi Jews from Arabs. It’s hardly a surprise that Jews (including many Ashkenazim) and Arabs share much of the same DNA. Now, many centuries after Sinai, having joined a world of nation-states, the real difference between contemporary Israeli Jews and Palestinians boils down to who has the power to deploy violence against the other to maintain its claim of exclusive ownership of a contested piece of land.

While critical studies certainly have their challenges, they are also remarkably capable of identifying central issues. In Zionism’s case it is institutional violence toward the “other.”

The weaponization of “alterity” and its counterpoint in the [non-militarized] idea of “cohabitation” are thus flip sides of a major theme of Butler’s book, whose first two chapters largely focus on Emmanual Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Rashi’s discussions of how Jews relate to non-Jews, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence.

Butler demonstrates that Judaism itself, Jewish scholars like Levinas, and sages like Rashi have long grappled with the ethics of the “other.” Contrary to Judaism, Zionism cannot see — in fact, refuses to recognize — the humanity of the “other,” valuing only survival, relying on state violence and operating by the law of the jungle.

Although Butler themself does not quote Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, this foundational document expresses Zionism’s almost sociopathic “survival-over-morality” in terms that ought to make any religious scholar shudder:

“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.”

Zionism’s fundamental absence of morality was echoed recently in a statement by Israel’s Kahanist National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir:

“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than Arabs’ freedom of movement. Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth.”

I had thought I was up to the challenge of reading Parting Ways because I had previously read several of the works of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, which Butler uses as departure points. I thought I might be able to keep up. And even though I had also read the Kafka mentioned and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I had never read Benjamin’s famously obscure meditation on violence, which also treats divine violence and wades into messianism. Despite a better than average chance of understanding Butler’s many eclectic references, some of the chapters were still a very tough slog.

It pains me when Zionists claim that their beloved Apartheid state and the twisted, amoral ideology that undergirds it are central to Judaism. There may once have been a Kingdom of Israel (actually two, which only lasted 125 years) but that Israel is clearly not the same as today’s ethno-state, despite the fantasies of Kahanists, hilltop setters and Christian Zionists.

So I don’t mean to slam Butler’s overall thesis at all, because I agree with it. But this slim volume makes something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complex. I also found the book physically painful to read because the font size is 8 or 9 points. There are far more approachable dissections of why Judaism and Zionism are not only completely separate but stand absolutely in opposition to one another.

We could start with the Talmud, for one. There is nothing in the Talmud’s 63 tractates that describes the contemporary state of Israel now run by fascists, Kahanists, and religious lunatics. Look at the Talmud’s laws of war to see how Israel has violated virtually every stricture. Or look to the pre-state Zionists for their objections to contemporary Zionism, discussed in Chapter 6 of Parting Ways.

Even before Israel’s founding, many of the early Zionists like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes quickly distanced themselves from the ethnic cleansing and fascism that had become inevitabilities of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism embraced at the 1942 Biltmore Zionist Conference. Their argument was that stealing from and murdering Arabs would create an unsustainable, racist state and violate every tenet of Jewish ethics.

And, really. How could Zionists have proceeded to steal an entire land from its indigenous people in spite of such easily-foreseen consequences? Because Zionism has no morality, no concern for the “other,” no respect for universal values. Even after there was no longer a Nazi threat to Jewish life, Zionism continued on its trajectory of genocide and dispossession of Palestinians.

Today finding Jews critical of Zionism is not very difficult. There are hundreds of Jewish organizations, even some within Judaism itself, that are critical of Zionism. If you’re looking for a contemporary, theoretical critique, check out the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which numbers a respectable share of Jewish intellectuals. Visit https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ and their podcast.

In the final analysis, recognizing the differences between Judaism and Zionism requires no esoteric meditation. Zionism, with its attendant, even logically consequential, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression, is diametrically opposed to Judaism’s Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! (Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue!). And Zionism most surely contradicts Hillel’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.”

This is the last of three book reviews on the One State Solution I started a few weeks ago. I previously reviewed Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, and Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. From time to time I will add additional One State reviews.

Jonathan Kuttab has dedicated much of his life to human rights, first as one of the founders of Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group established in 1979, and also as a co-founder of Nonviolence International in 1989. Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian lawyer who has practiced in Israel, Palestine, and the US and was the head of a legal team that negotiated the 1994 Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. In 1980 Kuttab co-authored a study of Israeli military laws governing the West Bank that had been modified from British Mandate and Jordanian law to apply more draconian control over Palestinians and to “legalize” land theft.

Kuttab, then, is as qualifed as anyone to present a non-violent program for a One State solution in his book “Beyond the Two-State Solution,” available in English, Hebrew, and Arabic print editions and also in electronic format.

Despite his conciliatory tone, Kuttab doesn’t pull any punches. Zionism is a land grab and, following each war and Oslo, Israel always grabbed as much land as it could — finally rendering impossible a Two State solution. Kuttab analyzes the many failed brokered peace agreements and tries to isolate the unresolved sticking points.

Kuttab acknowledges Israel’s extreme preoccupation with security, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian right of return, and a difficult-to-imagine reversal of illegal settlements. After looking at all the proposals that bowed to Zionist domination, he eliminates Two States as a workable solution because “the language of the Two State Solution leaves the battling ideologies intact, and only requires a geographic division and spatial limitation on the exercise of each ideology. Chauvinism, racism, discrimination, and inherent problems are all swept under the rug. No real critique of Zionism or Palestinian Nationalism is required, if we accept the language of the Two State Solution.” Kuttab’s rejection of Palestinian nationalism may grate on those who want to discard one nationalism for another.

Kuttab begins by enumerating the “minimum requirements” for Jewish Israelis when entering into a bi-national state: (1) the Jewish Right of Return; (2) Security; (3) a Jewish rhythm of life; (4) Hebrew; (5) the right to live anywhere in Palestine. For Palestinians the list is virtually identical: (1) the right of return for refugees; (2) Democracy; (3) respect for and protection of Arab Identity; (4) Arabic; (5) the right to move about and live anywhere in Palestine. Kuttab sees no pragmatic impediment to a bi-national state and sets about describing how one could be realized, how national and meta-national laws and even a bi-national Supreme Court could protect both peoples with binding judgments instead of hollow actions in toothless international courts.

Kuttab throws out any number of concrete suggestions for structuring a new bi-national state, but these are only useful to illustrate the point that any serious party could come up with plenty of workable ideas. For this reason it’s not worth dissecting Kuttab’s specifics because specifics must be proposed by both parties and negotiated only after both come to terms with the reality that a bi-national state is the only possible option.

Kuttab writes that “Jewish fears need to be addressed forthrightly” (but of course Palestinians have their own well-justified fears). Kuttab demonstrates enormous (disproportionate?) sensitivity to the fears of Jewish Israelis who, even with the most powerful and only nuclear military in the Middle East, habitually reject Palestinian rights because they are perceived to limit Jewish security. So Kuttab suggests writing Jewish supremacy into the new state’s legal system with a Lebanese-style requirement that the head of the new bi-national military always be Jewish, while the head of the national police always be an Arab. As much as I respect what Kuttab is attempting here, it is an odd and lopsided provision that cannot fail to be a show-stopper.

in remaining chapters Kuttab addresses other objections and challenges to his proposals. One is that a bi-national state has never succeeded before. But is that true? Kuttab writes that Lebanon and Yugoslavia may have foundered because of ethnic strife, but Switzerland and Canada are examples of successes of confederation models.

Even if a successful model did not exist, Kuttab writes that the Holy Land is a special case that deserves special effort, and that a resolution of this particular conflict could play an outsized role in resolving other regional and global conflicts.

Kuttab asks rhetorically why Zionists — having “won” — would ever agree to anything limiting their power or supremacy. The quick answer is that Israel’s victory has never been a stable “win” and, in any case, is not sustainable without bottomless aid and diplomatic cover from Western colonial enablers who will eventually tire of subsidizing human rights abuses. And in the long run the injustices perpetrated on Palestinians cannot be ignored forever.

Another objection Kuttab addresses is the argument that the degree of enmity is so great that it can never be surmounted. If this were true then contemporary national alliances of the 21st Century would be impossible — consider Britain and France, the US and Germany, the US and Japan, Germany and Israel. Many of these former bitter enemies became friends within a generation following the end of conflict.

A final argument for pursuing a single state — and against doing nothing — is that, under Zionism, there is no place for minorities. The logic of Zionism requires that minorities (Muslim, Arab, Bedouin, Christian) can never be allowed to become a majority, and which requires that they must either be repressed or eliminated. But this is logic of the 18th and 19th centuries. A multicultural democracy is manifestly superior to endless occupation, war, racist law, and the perversion of democracy.

Kuttab never says so explicitly, but ultimately Israelis will recognize that Zionism is incompatible with democracy. As fantastical as such a prediction sounds in the middle of Israel’s most genocidal war to-date, Israelis will eventually admit that Zionism did its job of saving millions of Jews but it is now time to abandon it, just as Palestinians will have to abandon their own nationalist aspirations — that is, if a bi-national state is ever to take root.

Kuttab’s final chapter is a discussion of what one might call the “attitude adjustments” necessary to make a bi-national state possible. Kuttab, as a proponent of non-violence, rejects armed resistance for both pragmatic and moral reasons (to give you a sense of where he comes from, he’s on the board of a Christian Bible college). Before the two peoples can ever start to build a shared state, settlement will have to stop. Israeli’s aren’t going away, and not all settlers are extremists, Kuttab writes. Likewise, Hamas isn’t going away and (contrary to the propaganda) many of their members are moderates. In any case, Hamas will have to be part of any One State solution.

Palestinians have rights and agency. Thus, truly democratic elections in Palestine — not a US-Israeli-appointed regime – would have to precede any sort of political realignment in order to obtain Palestinian agreement. Collective punishment has to stop immediately. Gratuitous repression and domination for domination’s sake would have to end. “Administrative detentions” and many other Israeli excesses and daily insults would have to cease before Palestinians could enter into a new state with Israelis. Terror attacks (from both sides) and Israeli military incursions would need to stop immediately.

Jonathan Kuttab joins many other One-Staters who have reached the same conclusion — that Two States are now an impossibility and, even if feasible, would only defer and compound the conflict. As unimaginable as One State is now, it is the best and only hope for two peoples sharing one land.

This is the second review of three books on the One State Solution.

My previous review was of Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In this post I will look at Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and in the final installment I will look at Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution.

Why One State? It’s time to say kaddish for the dead and move on. “Two States” was an idea that had its genesis over a century ago and might have had its day for the briefest moment in time, but it was almost universally declared dead by 1983. To continue promoting two states is dishonest and as creepy as pretending to talk to the dead.

It is also high time that American “Liberals” and “liberal” American Zionists stopped supporting a violent ethnocratic supremacist state. We don’t want one here and we shouldn’t be paying for the one in Israel. Americans pretend that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” but it’s no such thing. It’s an Apartheid state with a brutal occupation over millions of stateless people, and over five dozen laws that discriminate against its own non-Jewish citizens. With the massive amount of money American taxpayers shell out to preserve the Zionist state, why on earth are we not calling for a genuine democracy?

Moreover, the notion that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation is hogwash. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? A state for practitioners of Santeria? Rastafari? If liberals really believe in such a “right” then why are they not pushing just as hard for theocratic states all over the Western hemisphere?

It should go without saying: a repressive state does not have a right to exist as a repressive state. It cannot claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms constitute hate-speech or antisemitism. If there are calls to dismantle Israel’s Zionist state, for all the shrill Cassandras, this in no way implies the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself must cease doing business as usual. Portugal, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to name a few examples of former dictatorships or repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. The ADL and a myriad of Zionist attack organizations can infer whatever delusional meanings they like from it, but this is is what I mean when I utter that unambiguous phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic

While Ian Lustick proposes recognizing the reality of Israeli domination “from the river to the sea” and building a single secular democracy (however slowly) out of a repressive ethnostate, Omri Boehm’s vision is of redefining Zionism to promote a confederation that allows two peoples to share one land. Boehm’s vision is similar to an early (pre-state) thread of Zionism that advocated a Jewish homeland but not necessarily a state.

Boehm begins by recounting the angry reception that Tony Judt’s essay in the New York Review of Books (“Israel: The Alternative”) received from Zionists in 2003 when he proposed that Israel abandon Zionism and embrace liberal democracy. Zionists huffed that Judt had crossed a line from legitimate criticism of Israel to “illegitimate criticism of Israel’s existence.”

But then Thomas Friedman — hardly a kefiyah-sporting radical — declared in a February 2016 New York Times column that “they all killed the Two State Solution. Let the one-state era begin.” But he wasn’t finished. Friedman went on, “It’s over folks, so please stop sending the New York Times your proposals for a two-state solution […] The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.” And Friedman was not wrong. Even an unlikely Henry Kissinger threw shade on the Two State solution shortly before his death.

Haifa Republic recounts the history of the Yishuv — pre-Israel — and the varieties of Zionism that existed before Revisionist Zionism prevailed and from then on Zionism meant (1) a state not just a homeland; (2) exclusive control over all of Palestine; and (3) ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) to ensure a Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion implemented these goals and told the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937:

“In many parts of the land Jewish settlement would not be possible without transferring the Arab peasants. […] We’re lucky that the Arab people has immense and empty territories. The growing Jewish power in the land will increase more and more our ability to execute the transfer in large numbers.”

Boehm agrees with Lustick that a one-state reality now defines Israel:

The future is here: one-state politics now defines Israel’s reality, and the consequences are monumental — to Israelis, to Palestinians, and to world Jewry. But we’re still lacking a language for liberal Zionist thinking in a post-two-state, post-ethnic era.

But he believes that the beginnings of Zionism might hold the key to refashioning a new, shared democratic state:

The basic vocabulary of this language existed in the past — in Zionism’s beginnings. Whereas Zionist politics today is synonymous with the view that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state in Eretz Israel, the movement’s founding fathers held a more nuanced view. Intense ideological disagreements divided Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, but they could all agree on the distinction, all too often forgotten, between national self-determination and national sovereignty: up until very late in Zionist history, they all viewed the project as committed to the former but not the latter. In fact, they were for the most part committed to the latter’s denial.) That is, they believed that the Jews had the right to exercise political self-rule, administrate autonomously their own lives, and revive Jewish culture and education. But they did not believe that this should have been done in a sovereign Jewish state: the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty. Jabotinsky, for example, who is commonly regarded today as a raving right-wing Jewish nationalist, explicitly agreed with Brit Shalom, Martin Buber’s Zionist faction, that “the future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a binational state.” Even Hannah Arendt, who is often considered an anti-Zionist, could subscribe to this concept of Zionism. Until late in his career, Ben-Gurion actually did subscribe to it. When Wieseltier or Dershowitz condemn binationalism as a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, they overlook the distinction between self-determination and sovereignty: both as a crucial political distinction and as one that, historically, stood at the heart of Zionism’s origins. Israel’s political survival as a democracy depends on the recovery of this distinction.

Boehm wants to redefine Zionism — if such a thing is now possible. Redefinition seems like a face-saving device to soften the blow to liberal Zionists of abandoning the ideology. So Boehm doesn’t require them to abandon it; he just calls it something different. This seems like the perfect solution for people given to self-delusion. Maybe it could even work.

The Holocaust and the Nakba are thus the main pillars of Zionist thinking as we have come to know it– of the axiom that Zionism is essentially about Jewish sovereignty, and that Jewish demographic superiority, therefore, must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to see that this alleged Zionist axiom is not a Zionist axiom at all, and that adhering to it is leading to the destruction of Israel and expulsions of Palestinians.

It is time to restore a binational Zionism – with a strong notion of equal citizenship in a one-state solution. One way we can do this is by developing an art of forgetting, a politics of remembering to forget the Holocaust and the Nakba in order to undo rather than perpetuate them as the pillars of future politics. Ernest Renan advanced the idea of such an art of forgetting in his great lecture of 1882, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s account of modern citizenship can help us rethink Israel’s future relation to its past. What is true of the Holocaust is true of the Nakba: for the sake of a future binational politics, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the country would have to be, in a similar sense, forgotten. But it can be forgotten only if we commemorate it first–and do justice to the past by committing ourselves as citizens to the Palestinians right of national self-determination. This includes a meaningful commitment to the right of return.

Perhaps realizing he’s out on a limb, Boehm addresses his skeptics:

How practical a binational political program would be, one may however wonder. Thoroughly practical. None other than Menachem Begin, Israel’s first right-wing prime minister and a vehement opponent of territorial compromise, offers a viable model with the “autonomy plan” he devised in the late 1970s. Begin’s program could just as well be called the “one-state plan.” It included not only the institution of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, but also an option for all Palestinians to become full Israeli citizens, as well as complete freedom of movement and economic rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and a department within the Palestinian Autonomy’s Council for the Rehabilitation of Refugees. The Knesset voted on this proposal and passed it by a large majority in December 1977.

That Begin had some such plan is familiar to some, but its details, coming so close to a binational constellation, have received little attention. Historians, deferring to the two-state orthodoxy, tend to see the plan as Begin’s plot to prevent Palestinian statehood, not as a program that originates in Jabotinsky’s binational thinking and could test and open up the ethnic political boundaries and taboos of contemporary Israel.

It is worth pointing out that the Likud and Netanyahu are political descendants of Jabotinsky and Begin. Netanyahu’s father Benzion was even Jabotinsky’s secretary. Philosophically, then, resurrecting and adapting Begin’s plan is something the current (37th) government of Israel could conceivably do. Boehm calls this “new Zionist” proposal the “Haifa Republic” in honor of a city that has played a key role in the history of Jews and Palestinians:

It is time to explore a program reconstructed from Begin’s proposal — I call it the Haifa Republic — recognizing the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination, even sovereignty, in their own states, separated along the ’67 border, and yet regulating their separate sovereignty by a joint constitution ensuring basic human rights, freedom of movement, and economic liberties throughout the territory. Such a plan could allow many settlers to remain in their homes. And it would enable Palestinians to exercise rights commonly associated with the right of return-the aspiration to return to the territories from which they were expelled in 1948. Plans of this sort have been raised in the past, and are still promoted, but they are too often regarded as Post-Zionist. The attempt here is to rehabilitate such politics as a Zionist program, consistent with the core aspirations of Zionism’s founding fathers.

In essence the Haifa Republic is a Zionist two-state fiction that permits settlers to remain in the West Bank and opens up present-day Israel to currently-expelled Palestinians. It is also somewhat of an ideological fiction because the nature of Zionism has been redefined.

The final chapter of Boehm’s small book fleshes out a few details of the “Republic.” The Palestinian state Begin proposed was to be demilitarized, overseen by an elected Palestinian council, and included a provision for vetting the return of some “reasonable number” of Palestinian exiles. But it unequivocally asserted the Jewish right to “Samaria” and “Judea” (the West Bank).

The Haifa Republic is based on Begin’s idea, but instead of making Palestinians citizens of Israel (as in Lustick and Begin’s plans) Boehm would conjure Palestinian nationhood without a physical nation. In the Haifa Republic Palestinians would have their own military which co-operated with the IDF in a mutual defense treaty. Complete freedom of movement and the ability to buy and own land anywhere in Palestine would be extended to all within the borders. Arabic and Hebrew would both be official languages. East and West Jerusalem would be capitals of each nation, respectively, and a legal entity structurally similar to the EU would apply to both nations. There would be a shared supreme court that adjudicated disputes without international involvement.

The big question is how to get from today’s one state reality to Boehm’s.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

According to defenders of Israel’s Apartheid state — which today maintains a brutal supremacist regime across all of Palestine — the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” supposedly implies the genocide of the Jewish people. The ADL, which cites the Hamas and PFLP charters, calls it an “antisemitic slogan” that “means the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.” — Or so they say.

Hamas, of course, is not the only group to have used this phrase. Israel’s Likud party used a similar phrase (“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) in its platform. Perhaps it’s just simple projection, but Zionism has actually denied the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially through the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The perpetuation of a system of Jewish supremacy maintained by a genocidal occupation is both unsustainable and unimaginable.

The purpose of this and two essays to follow is to review three books that propose — instead of a Zionist supremacist state– a shared democratic, secular state in Palestine.

It is fair to say that the so-called Two State Solution (TSS) may have once had its day, but that day is long gone following massive settlement by now more than 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. Until or unless they are withdrawn there will never be any land for a contiguous Palestinian state. In terms of a Palestinian “rump” state, the conditions imposed on Palestinians in each of the American “peace” negotiations would have been unacceptable to Israel if imposed on Jews; thus each foundered because Palestinians too would reasonably not accept colonialism, even a “Lite” version that denied them a genuine state with full self-determination.

This leaves a One State Solution, or some variant, as the most reasonable solution — a single land for two peoples. Each of the solutions in these three books have a slightly different wrinkle, as we will see.

Today’s review is Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In following posts I will review Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Each of the authors has proposed a solution “from the river to the sea” that is more than a maligned slogan — a solution in which everyone in Palestine is free.

But before we get into the books, the Hamas Charter frequently cited by Israel-defenders actually reads like a mirror of Zionist policies. You could almost do a global search and replace of “Judaism” with “Islam” or “Jewish” with “Palestinian.” Or replace “the Jewish people” with the “Ummah” — and you get the idea. Palestine is still contested land and its original inhabitants have rightly never given up their claim.

Here is the context in the Hamas charter in which the contentious phrase is used:

“20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

This doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Elsewhere the charter makes it even clearer:

“16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

While it is presumptuous of the ADL and other Zionist attack organizations to tell us what our own words mean, their interpretations are quite a stretch. The authors of each of the three books I review could well be smeared as “antisemites” by Zionists for their proposals of secular democracies that do away with Jewish supremacy, but each of these proposals must be read to see how Jewish — and Palestinian — life and culture can not only survive but flourish in a shared state. This is anything but antisemitic.

And what of a Zionist state? Is dismantling a racist, Apartheid regime such a tragedy? The question answers itself.

To me the premise that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation seems strange. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? The state for practitioners of Santeria? Writing as a secular American, the whole notion of Christian Nationalism offends me, and the reality of today’s Christian nationalists (and their kissing cousins, the Zionists and Saudi Wahabbists) ought to be a cautionary tale about the dangers and excesses of theocratic states. So, yes, for Zionists to claim that Israel is the home of all the world’s Jews, including me, is both offensive and insane.

Furthermore, a repressive state does not have a right to claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms of it constitutes hate-speech or antisemitism. If people call for dismantling Israel’s repressive state — as it is — this does not mean the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself cannot conduct business as usual under its toxic ideology. Portugual, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to list only a few examples of former dictatorships and repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. This is what I mean when I say:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Paradigm Lost

Ian Lustick is a former intelligence analyst with the State Department, and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Lustick grew up Jewish in upstate New York. His dissertation was on Arabs in the Jewish state, and he has written extensively about the Israeli settler movement. He has clearly thought deeply about how two peoples might live in this one land.

Lustick’s One State Solution is essentially the democratization and transformation of Israel into a nation for all of its people from the river to the sea. He builds his case, beginning with an uncomfortable truth: “A Palestinian state could have been established and could have coexisted peacefully alongside Israel, but the opportunity to establish it was historically perishable and is no longer available.” The question then becomes: what kind of Single State does Lustick envision?

Lustick recounts the history of Zionism, from the Yeshuv to early Israel, through 1948, 1967, Oslo, the PLO, and Arab League peace initiatives. A Palestinian state was no longer an option by the 1980’s because it was official policy of almost every government that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could never exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” was the operational philosophy that decreed that Palestinians must experience unrelenting, uncompromising force until their nationalist aspirations have been extinguished. While it guided successive Israeli governments and parties like the Likud, it has never succeeded. A variety of Palestinian liberation movements have fought Israel tooth and nail since its founding. The unintended consequences of the “Iron Wall” were, according to Lustick, that “Zionism’s strategic logic unintentionally institutionalized a political incapacity to discern or exploit Arab willingness to compromise.” Zionist state builders like David Ben-Gurion convinced themselves that the Arabs would eventually give up. But they never did.

Another self-inflicted Israeli delusion is what Lustick calls “Holocaustia.” This is the abuse of the Holocaust by turning it into a justification for the demonization and nazification of Palestinians and the Arab world. In 2006 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed American Zionists in Los Angeles, telling them “it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2016 Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told a group of soldiers, “Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise: All of us, each and every one of us, has a number tattooed on his arm.” While the Holocaust was certainly a defining traumatic event for many Israeli and Jewish families, in Israel it became weaponized as the justification for Zionism. Without an imagined second Holocaust just on the horizon, and without a new Nazi to fear — or as of October 7th the biblical enemy Amalek — Zionism is little more than a 19th century nationalist ideology in search of a contemporary raison d’etre.

Outside Israel, AIPAC and dozens of “lobbying” groups that fly high above FARA registration requirements hold American foreign policy captive and provide Israel with all the armaments and diplomatic cover it needs to continue operating its 76 year-old occupation. Lustick presents little new information here, but this mention is necessary because the United States is the only — as of yet unrealized — hope for applying leverage on Israel. Owing to the shared colonial (and genocidal) history of both the US and Israel, any solution would have distinct American fingerprints on it. Lustick believes that there is hope yet that Americans may yet decide to “save Israel from itself” and show some tough love leading to a breakthrough. This is going to require a paradigm shift.

Lustick regards the Two State Solution (TSS) as a dead paradigm, albeit one that politicians and liberal Zionists cling to desperately. Amusingly, Lustick compares the TSS to the old theory of phlogiston, a non-existent element related to combustion. Only after trial after trial after experiment after experiment was phlogiston debunked. Similarly, there is now enough proof of the impossibility of the TSS so that policy makers ought to stop talking about it.

In fact, over one hundred years of schemes and negotiations have demonstrated that, given Israel’s refusal to permit a Palestinian state, the idea of two states is a dead letter. Lustick systematically shows how each of the assumptions underlying Two States were undermined by different facts or contrasting assumptions. For example, Israelis wanted “two states” to mean no territorial concessions, but for Jordan to provide land for a Palestinian homeland. It wasn’t until the Oslo process that both sides saw TSS as a real possibility. Right after Oslo Israel slowed down settlements and there was discussion of land swaps. But by 1983 it was clear that annexation of “Judea” and “Samaria” had progressed too far to ever support two states. The window had been closed. Hope had become fantasy.

Lustick has tried to formulate a solution given his understanding of the facts on the ground. And the facts are that there is already a One State Reality (OSR) “from river to the sea.” Sorely lacking, however, are evenly-applied freedoms within that space. Lustick writes:

Though there is no “solution” in sight, there is a reality. There is today one state, the State of Israel, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is an apparatus of power, recognized by the international community, whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. It collects taxes from West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and determines who enters and leaves those areas, who enjoys rights to property, and who can live, build, or even visit where. In its current form, the state is no group’s pretty picture. It was achieved by no one’s carefully implemented plan. It is not a solution but an outcome — a one-state reality (OSR).

Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are citizens of no other recognized state. As measured by the State of Israel’s impact on the intimate details of their lives and indeed on whether they live at all, they are as much its inhabitants as black slaves were of the United States and as Africans in the Bantustans were of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the twelve-year blockade of Gaza, combined with the exposure to state violence that these populations regularly endure, do not mark their exclusion from the Israeli state. Rather, they simply register the fact that Israel rules different populations in different regions in different ways. Though the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip came within the ambit of the Israeli polity fifty-two rather than seventy-one years ago, the palpable fact is that they live within it.

Officially, the Israeli government views lands west of the Jordan River but across the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from territories occupied in 1967 — as “disputed,” which implies that from their perspective they are part of the country, Thus, when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the number of Israelis in the country, it counts every Israeli living west of the Jordan River, not just those living in the part of the country surrounded by the Green Line.

Most official Israeli maps feature no divisions between the sea and the river other than administrative boundaries of districts and regions. Textbooks show lines surrounding the Gaza Strip and around Area A clusters and a slightly different shading for Area B clusters. But the only lines indicating a border between Israel and another sovereign country are those along its borders with Arab states — and these separate both Gaza and the West Bank from the Arab states. A map accessed in December 2018 on Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was titled “Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines.” The map labels the Gaza Strip as “under Palestinian jurisdiction” and the Oslo demarcated areas of “A” and “B” in the West Bank as characterized by Palestinian responsibility for “civil affairs.” The country’s international boundary includes both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within the state. All mail that enters or leaves the West Bank or the Gaza Strip does so via Israel. The undeclared OSR is also revealed in the ordinary language of public communications: images of the country used by Israeli ministries, weather maps, maps of annual average temperature and rainfall, maps of the topography of the “State of Israel,” road maps, and iconic depictions of the country’s borders used for tourism and other purposes.

In 2009 I visited Palestine and Israel. I spoke to Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American I met in Ramallah, who expressed the view that the Palestinian demand for a separate nation, if frustrated, would lead to a Civil Rights movement in which Palestinians demanded equal treatment within the Israeli state. In this scenario, would American decision-makers take Palestinian demands for equal rights and civil liberties seriously, or pretend that two states are still possible, deciding that Palestinians need another 75 years of martial law and repression? Most of today’s Congress would opt for the latter, I’m sure of it.

To democratize Israel would require abolishing Zionism’s discriminatory laws and injustices. Zionism itself would finally have to be discarded. The “Basic Law: Israel as a Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which assigns rights of citizenship only to Jews, would have to be repealed in an expanded democracy. As it is, the law discriminates against 20% of Israeli citizens of Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Muslim heritage for whom Israel resembles the Jim Crow South.

Finally, Israelis and Americans have to come to terms with the fact that Israel cannot be — and never really has been — a “democratic AND Jewish” state. Just as a “democratic and Christian” state is a similar impossibility in the US, American liberals and liberal Zionists will have to be among the first to recognize and reject this incongruity. In a land where Jews are actually a slight numerical minority, Zionism has no moral right to crush the hopes and lives of the majority. But for many Israelis and Jews who cannot see where Judaism ends and Zionism begins, this is going to be enormously challenging.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 is a history that nicely complements Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. While Pappe’s research shows exactly how Israel created both the conditions and tools to ethnically cleanse Palestine, Khalidi’s shows how the cleansing would never have been possible without Western colonial assistance, complicity and connivance.

Khalidi enumerates six “Declarations of War” by Western colonialists on Palestine, the last four of which he lays at the feet of the United States. The six include the time periods (1) 1917-1939; (2) 1947-1948; (3) 1967; (4) 1982; (5) 1987-1995; and (6) 2000-2014. From the Balfour Declaration to the League of Nations mandate system, to the carving up of Palestine in the most egregiously racist fashion, to colonial complicity in militarizing Israel, defending it in the UN, and pretending to be simultaneous ally and unbiased arbiter in so-called “peace” talks, the deck has been stacked since the beginning against Palestinians in favor of a European-flavored colonial outpost in the Middle East.

Khalidi’s accounts are invaluable, particularly since he personally was involved in some of the so-called “peace” negotiations and his family has a long intimate connection to Jerusalem and Palestine. But I’m going to skip over a discussion because, for me, Khalidi’s concluding chapter is the most important and thought-provoking. For the review you may have expected, Kaleem Hawa’s piece in the Nation is one of the best. And Khalidi himself spoke about the book at a gathering at Politics & Prose.

While the Goliath that is now Israel seems almost invincible, and justice for Palestinians so elusive, Israel nevertheless has a fatal vulnerability. The first is that Zionism, the ideology underlying everything the state does, has a bitter aftertaste in the 21st Century. Much of the world today regards Israel as an international pariah, a rogue state. As the historian Tony Judt observed, Zionism “arrived too late,” and it “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.” It is not lost on the Global South that represents the majority of the world’s nations that Israel’s only supporters are past and present colonial powers.

Israel’s second vulnerability is that, no matter how much hasbara (spin, propaganda) it generates, or how many Western Zionist lobby organizations are enlisted to do Israel’s bidding, Zionism itself can not withstand much scrutiny. There are simply too many founding documents, too many incriminating statements by politicians, too many political and military actions taken, too much history, too many racist, separatist, supremacist, discriminatory laws built into the state to deny or repudiate Israel’s malign ideology. Zionism, at its root, is scarcely different from the racist, undemocratic, repressive Christian nationalism that is Zionism’s greatest advocate in the United States.

Khalidi explains some of Zionism’s more blatant internal contradictions:

Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights. This systemic ethnic discrimination was always a central facet of Zionism, which by definition aimed to create a Jewish society and polity with exclusive national rights in a land with an Arab majority. Even as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaimed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” dozens of crucial laws based on inequality of rights were implemented in the ensuing years. These severely restricted or totally banned Arab access to land and to residency in all-Jewish communities, formalized the seizure of the private and collective (Waqf) property of non-Jews, prevented most indigenous Palestinians who were made into refugees from returning to their homes while giving citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants, and limited access to many other benefits.

The problem of Zionism is a central moral question — one that a younger generation of American Jews certainly recognizes:

This core problem is even more stark today, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel from the Jordan River to the sea that is equal to or perhaps slightly larger than the Jewish population. That inequality is the central moral question posed by Zionism, and that it goes to the root of the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is a view that is shared by some distinguished Israelis. Imagining scholars looking back one hundred years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”

Finally, the illusion of “liberal Zionism” has finally been shattered, as a slew of recent books by Jewish writers now acknowledges. Israel can either be a Jewish state that discriminates against and dominates non-Jews, or it can be democratic. But not both. Khalidi writes:

For decades Zionists insisted, often referring to the state’s declaration of independence, that Israel could be and was both “Jewish and democratic. As the contradictions inherent in this formulation grew ever more apparent, some Israeli leaders admitted (indeed, even declared it with pride) that if they were forced to choose, the Jewish aspect would take precedence. In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the”Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State, which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people…

It is clear, once you begin turning over rocks, that Zionism is based on a zero-sum calculation that only one people can exist in Palestine, that one ethnicity must dominate. Thus Zionism’s survival ultimately depends upon “completing the job” of ethnically cleansing Palestine begun in 1947. Israelis constantly talk about “transfer” of Palestinians and “death to the Arabs.” Even within “1948” (Israel proper) North American Jews unwittingly support Judaization programs in the Galilee and elsewhere, with the intent to create Jewish majorities in traditionally Arab cities. This is the Trail of Tears alternative to sharing land stolen from Palestinians: displacement, ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.

While early “drafts” of Zionism contemplated nation-sharing schemes, ever since the 1942 Biltmore declaration Zionism has meant only domination and expulsion for Palestinians. To speak of any other type would not refer to the Zionism that eventually prevailed but to some other species of Western liberalism generally reviled in Israel. To speak of a non-Zionist Israel for all people “from the river to the sea” provokes only shrill denunciations and accusations of antisemitism. This is because Israel under Zionism cannot survive multiculturalism, democracy, and equality any more than the Confederate States of America could have.

Khalidi’s last chapter considers what the future might hold. He writes:

Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.

We can effectively rule out compromise and reconciliation, not because of Arabs “who never miss a chance to miss a chance” but because supremacy and domination is built into the state and its polity. Poll after poll show that Israelis don’t want Palestinian neighbors, either internally or even as a neighboring state: 65% of Israeli Jews oppose the existence of a Palestinian state; 70% of Israeli Jews oppose Israel agreeing to the establishment of an independent and demilitarized Palestinian state; and 71.5 % of Israeli Jews believe that if there were a Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorism would be stronger or least stay the same.

That said, either two (real, not rump) states or a single confederated state are the best alternatives to Zionist domination of Palestinians from the river to the sea.

We can rule out the Algerian or Haitian scenario, where colonizers were expelled or overthrown. Israel is the only nuclear country in the Middle East thanks to France and the United States. It has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, again thanks to Western colonial powers. If Israel were to cease operating as a Jewish supremacist fantasyland for hilltop settlers, no doubt some Israelis would return to the US or Europe (before October 7th as many as 15% were contemplating leaving). Israelis who remained (most with nowhere else to go) would have to reconcile with a new reality, as white South Africans discovered upon the collapse of the old Apartheid system.

This leaves the third option – “finishing the job,” as American after American after American after American – and Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli and 500 more examples – have described their violent fantasies of a “Final Solution” for Palestinians. Following October 7th Israel seems to have doubled down on genocidal talk. As Khalidi predicted (the book was published in 2020), international attention would be drawn to any Israeli attempts at ethnic cleansing on a grand scale:

There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record sixty-eight million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict, and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect.

Given the attention, it would necessarily damage the “ironclad” relationship between Israel and its Western sponsors:

Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the West’s support for Israel, on which it relies.

Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than a any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step.

Given Israel’s attempts to herd Gazans into the Sinai and opening up West Bank areas barred since 2005 to settlements, Khalidi’s 2020 crystal ball might have been a bit off. Nevertheless, Gaza 2023 did focus world attention on Palestine and Zionism, and a growing number of people now see much more clearly what has been going on for the last 75 years — including many in the Jewish community.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many).

The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.” This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

From the West’s perspective, the Abraham Accords, begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden, offer a shortcut to solving of the Palestinian problem once and for all. As usual, these schemes rely on the collaboration of autocratic regimes instead of stable democracies. But Khalidi warns against such a short-sighted approach:

GIVEN AN ARAB world that is in a state of disarray greater than at any time since the end of World War I and a Palestinian national movement that appears to be without a compass, it might seem that this is an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians, and declare victory. It is not likely to be quite so simple. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the Arab public, which can be fooled some of the time but not all of the time, and that emerges with Palestinian flags flying whenever democratic currents rise against autocracy, as in Cairo in 2011 and in Algiers in the spring of 2019. Israel’s regional hegemony depends in very large measure on the maintenance in power of undemocratic Arab regimes that will suppress such sentiment. However distant it may seem today, real democracy in the Arab world would be a grave threat to Israel’s regional dominance and freedom of action.

Just as important, there is also the popular resistance that the Palestinians can be expected to continue to mount, whatever the shabby deal to which their discredited leaders may mistakenly assent. Though Israel is the nuclear regional hegemon, its domination is not uncontested in the Middle East, nor is the legitimacy of the undemocratic Arab regimes which are increasingly becoming its clients. Finally, the United States, for all its power, has played a secondary role — sometimes no role at all — in the crises in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the region. It will not necessarily maintain the near monopoly over the Palestine question, and indeed over the entire Middle East, that it has enjoyed for so long.

Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.

Finally, the war in Gaza has unleashed a struggle in the United States. Besides widespread protests against US complicity in Gaza, collusion with Israeli and autocratic Arab regimes, the Democratic president’s “ironclad” support for Zionism, and the massive military expenditures “we” are so willing to spring for instead of relief for our own citizens, it has become obvious to many that America is not a gleaming city on the hill — but instead an ugly empire with an insatiable appetite for war and the subjugation of weaker nations.

As Khalidi points out, controlling the narrative is essential to the survival of Zionism and the imperial aspirations of the Western colonial powers that support it. It takes considerable political repression, large doses of propaganda, and the abolition of civil liberties to keep a system like this running for the benefit of war profiteers and other stakeholders in Empire.

The bipartisan preoccupation with ensuring Zionism’s survival threatens to destroy the last shreds of our democracy. We Americans seem to be slow learners, so it may take several more decades of foreign adventures and supporting repressive regimes and toxic ideologies before we finally awake to the damage we’re doing to our own democracy.

I just finished reading Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile. This is the work of a rabbi who spent much of his life in Israel. It is a Jewish book for Jews grieving — not October 7th, not the growing and very real antisemitism of Trump’s America — but the realization, deep down, that something they have long loved is a cruel and bitter fantasy, its ugliness and evil an indigestible truth that insults every liberal value they believe in.

Magid writes:

As I write this in 2022, I do not think it’s provocative to state that liberal Zionism is in crisis. It is, after all, abundantly clear today that the present iteration of liberal Zionism, as a humanistic project of Jewish self-determination based on liberal democratic values, is in a defensive posture. The problem is that the social and political realities of the Israeli state today cannot be defined as “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination. This includes the country’s continued — perhaps permanent — occupation/ annexation of millions of stateless Palestinians and their land, as well as its own narrative self-fashioning — illustrated in part by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which arguably codifies Jewish domination, even supremacy, into the state itself. (The law states that national self-determination is “exclusive to the Jewish people” in the State of Israel, where non-Jews comprise over 20% of the population.) Many in the contemporary Zionist camp celebrate this ethnocentric turn. Most liberal Zionists do not. And yet most liberal Zionists remain steadfast in their defense of the State of Israel. Therein lies the crisis.

Magid writes that this extends to diaspora Jews, particularly American Jews raised with not necessarily the reality of democracy and equality, but with a deep belief in those ideas.

Last year these uneasy American Zionists watched as their Israeli cousins massed in the hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv and elsewhere to save Israel’s — not really a democracy — from fascists, racists, religious fanatics and genocidal monsters. Of course, absent from Israel’s so-called “democracy movement” was any pursuit of democracy for Palestinians on either side of the Green Line.

In parallel with the shifting values of liberal Jews, Magid notes how liberal America (at least parts of it) has also begun to jettison our own colonial-setter ideology:

John O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny theory was an engine that drove the American settler-colonial project during the western expansion, but was then replaced with Teddy Roosevelt’s “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism,” John Kennedy’s “nation of immigrants,” as well as later forms of multiculturalism. In retrospect, Manifest Destiny was, and remains, a racist and discriminatory ideology. Yes, white supremacists still hold Manifest Destiny as one of their ideological foundations, but such illiberal ideas are justifiably under attack in the continued culture wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance ofthe far-right white nationalists in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed [liberal Zionist],” the Manifest Destiny of the Israeli context, now rules the State of Israel.

Facing up to one’s own country’s settler-colonial history is not so easy. When Representative Lydia Velazquez introduced a resolution calling for annulment of the Monroe Doctrine, it received only six co-sponsors — all people of color — and GovTrack estimated it had a 0% chance of adoption. So if America is one step ahead of Israel in facing up to its racist, genocidal history, that step can only be measured in millimeters.

But Zionism’s main problem is that it appeared too late in world history. Ethnonationalism fell into disrepute after World War II for obvious reasons. Not simply an anachronism, Zionism like its ugly siblings Christian nationalism and Hindutva, is fundamentally racist, exclusionary, and undemocratic. A nation built on the supremacy of one ethnicity is bad enough, but when you throw in god and messianism, it quickly becomes both a moral and political disaster.

For those deeply invested in Zionism and its accompanying settler-colonialism, all criticisms are strongly deflected as nothing but antisemitism. Much in common with antisemites themselves, attempts to distinguish Zionism from Judaism are likewise rejected by Zionists, who claim that a Zionist state is the home of all Jewish people, and that (as antisemites could only dream) all Jewish people ought to leave their homelands and move to Israel.

The Zionist conflation of nationalism and religion only reinforces the antisemitic view that all Jews are racist ethnonationalists, and this is largely responsible for the predictable spikes in antisemitic expression whenever Israel’s aggression towards Palestinians becomes most severe. Similarly, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is designed to conflate Judaism and Zionism, a multi-tool to be used as both cudgel and legalism to muzzle Israel’s critics.

Unfortunately there is some truth to the conflation, as Judaism itself has been all-too-willingly put to work in the service of Zionism. It was once verboten to speak of an Israel that had not been divinely reconstituted. Orthodox Jews originally reviled Zionism and even today the Satmar, perhaps the largest sect of Haredim, still reject it. There is also a long history of anti-Zionism among liberal Jews, who before 1948 issued countless — prescient — warnings of the disaster that Ben Gurion’s expansionist vision would unleash on both Jews and Palestinians.

But after the 1967 war, many Jews began to think that all that winning must have been divinely ordained. Today there are few congregations that don’t host Zionist Federation events or have youth or congregational programs centered around Israel, lending weight to the view that antisemites hold that there is little distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

Rabbi (Rav) Abraham Isaac Kook predated the formation of the state of Israel, but he broke with Jewish Orthodoxy (literally) by claiming that creating a Zionist state was the first step of a messianic redemption of not only Jews but of the entire human race. After 1967 Kook’s son Zvi Yehuda Kook took it up a notch and created the Gush Emunim movement, upon which Israel’s violent settler movement is founded.

All this blending of Zionism and Judaism was bound to create a philosophical and theological muddle. Zionism was supposed to redeem Jews (particularity) and even the whole world (universality). But wasn’t that the purpose of Judaism?

As a rabbi, Magid dives into the question, looking at the historicity of some of these ideas within Judaism. He examines how the particular and the universal have always been in tension with one another in Judaism:

The universal, certainly as a kind of (perhaps messianic) ideal, was actually never quite endemic to ancient Israelite religion, even with the biblical tropes such as the decree that the Israelites shall be “a light unto the nations.” Yet Jewish responses to the universal-particular conundrum, which sometimes portray Jews as simultaneously “normal” (as in a normalized people) and “exceptional” (as in victims in perpetuity), continue precisely because the universal still hovers as a specter over the entire Israelite project. In some cases, such as Jewish communism or even certain versions of radical Reform Judaism, the universal becomes paramount, while in some forms of nationalistic Orthodoxy, the universal is subsumed by a highly particularistic narrative to such an extent that its presence is hardly felt. In such cases, the universalist tropes in prophetic religion either become so central as to efface the Jewish people’s particularistic agenda, or become interpreted and swallowed into a highly nationalistic paradigm. But in most forms of Judaism, universalism and particularism function in productive tension with one another.

Magid sorts through various writers on particularity and universality, taking on Chaim Gans’s A Political Theory for the Jewish People (2016). He considers Gans’ notion of universality and particularity and quickly dismisses the weak argument for Zionism’s “particularity.” But he also demolishes Gans’s insistence on a universal form of Zionism. And Magid does the same with Emmanuel Lévinas:

The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas seemed quite concerned with this dilemma, and sought an ethical core of Judaism (what he called “ethics as first philosophy”) that did not succumb to Reform Judaism’s assimilatory project or communism’s utopian one. He wrote numerous essays on this subject, arguing that true universalism can only arise from the particular, while the particular must carry the universal, which implicitly criticizes Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and perhaps Marx’s communism, as naïve and misguided. This remains a central concern for political philosophers to this day. But Levinas’s project apparently could not bear the weight of his own proclivities. When asked in a famous interview about the Palestinian as “other” to whom one owes primary responsibility, he responded, “The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy.” In other words, the Palestinian is not the other, the Palestinian is the enemy. “Ethics as first philosophy” meets Jewish trauma and anxiety. I think in that very honest moment, Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” collapses. (In pointing this out, I am influenced by Fred Moten’s devastating critique of Levinas in “There Is No Racism Intended,” in his book The Universal Machine.)

As esoteric as all this is, Magid is on to something. Zionism could have moved in a humanistic direction — but chose not to. In the end Zionism simply devolved into a naked power grab, devoid of any humanistic or universalist pretense.

Some forms of early secular Zionism attempted to embody this dynamic interplay between the universal and particular: much of it was humanistic in orientation, or at least aspirational, and committed to refracting some sense of universal values through the particularity of Jewish collective existence. This is why Marxism and socialism played such a significant role in early Zionism. The creation of a quasi-utopian collectivist entity that could be an exemplar for the revolution of Trotsky’s Fourth International was a goal of some early kibbutzniks. But that was a long time ago. The ethnostate that is contemporary Israel chose another path.

No one in Israel can live in such a society without recognizing it — even as it is almost impossible to imagine a different identity:

But if being an anti-Zionist means being anti-Israel, I could not embrace that either. Living in Israel, and still holding an Israeli passport, I didn’t quite know what it meant. I remain a citizen of that state, albeit a very ambivalent one. I served in its army. And yet I could no longer believe that Zionism, in any form, could create a just and equitable society. The myth that pervades Zionism, what Chaim Gans has called “proprietary Zionism” — that is, the fundamental precept that the land belongs to us — was, by definition, inequitable.

Magid writes of his ultimate reckoning with Zionism’s supremacist ideology in a chapter called “From My Tragic Love Affair with Zionism.” This reckoning, like that of many Israelis, was simply the product of paying attention to all the injustices around him, coming from the state he loved, and some of which he perpetrated himself:

Like many Israelis, the IDF was a transformative experience for me. I entered out of a sense of responsibility and duty to my adopted country. I served in 1988-1989, during the First Intifada. As a thirty-one-year-old father of three young children, I was what is called a “second-tier soldier”; I was in a combat unit but never saw real combat. […] But anyone who spends months in training in an army camp near Nablus in the West Bank, and travels around as a soldier, sees the ugliness and brutality of the occupation firsthand. The hatred in the eyes of Palestinian children as you walk by them in full combat gear; the humiliation of a father having to submit to the whims of a nineteen-year-old soldier in front of his son’s eyes. […] In a convoy, after dropping off a lone solider at the entrance to the Casbah (the main market) in Nablus, a fellow solider turned to me and said, “What the fuck are we doing here?” I had heard all the answers, but I had no answer for him then, and I have no answer now, other than domination, pure and simple. We do what we do because we can. That’s all. That is the reality of the Hebrew term ribbonut: not just sovereignty but a more potent implication of power over another in other words, domination. We are “masters” over the Palestinians — the settlers call “Lords of the Land.” That has become Zionism on the ground, certainly on the right but also on the center and center-left.

Sharing an American identity, Magid also makes the inevitable associations with our own, and international, history:

As a child raised in America, we learned about Jim Crow. As a graduate student during the boycotts of South African apartheid, we protested systemic oppression. Of course, each situation has its own contours and its own context, but as I experienced the reality of the occupation first-hand and, in some sense, the reality of Zionism through that lens, they were all comparable to what I witnessed as a soldier. […] The relationship between one’s experience and how one constructs the world they live in, and the world they want to create, is both vexing and complex. I moved to Israel to live in the land and to be a part of Jewish history. I experienced both deeply, intensely, and then painfully. Not being a native, my point of reference in regard to Israel, and to Zionism, was always contingent and never unconditional.

But once you have seen what cannot be un-seen, there’s no going back; there can only be alienation from what has shown itself to be an illusion. Magid’s experience is precisely like that of liberal Jews who — today, Spring of 2024 — have seen what cannot be unseen and cannot use the same vocabulary as beloved friends and family.

One can also be a stranger in one’s own home. My choice to no longer identify as a Zionist was not easy, and the choice came with considerable anguish, and pain. I lost friends, and it has strained relationships with those I still consider friends. […] But whatever I had envisioned Zionism to be, and whatever I believed I was getting myself into, at some point began to dissolve as I grew increasingly alienated from that national project. I no longer cared what it aspired to be because I could no longer bear what it was.

So if I have abandoned Zionism, now what? I believe the term “counter-Zionism” better represents my views about Israel today. I suggest we need another ideology — not a “post” but a “counter” to better equip Israel to face the next century. Zionism is too chauvinistic, too ethnocentric, too inequitable — it came to counter a diasporic existence in the wake of the cataclysmic failure of European emancipation, yet Jews today are now integrated into the countries in which they live.

In some way, Zionism was thus an understandable outgrowth of the ugliness of prewar European antisemitism. But the response to that ugliness has produced another ugliness. Here I follow Arendt who warned us of this in 1948. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe not. But that’s what has transpired, against the efforts of many truly heroic detractors, then, and now. Zionism had its time; it did its work; now it can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.

Magid’s thought project was to look beyond Zionism. He draws heavily from Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, הרב שג”ר [HaRav] Shagar, a postmodernist Torah scholar and intellectual who originally followed Abraham Isaac Kook. Though never progressive in a political sense, Shagar had a lot of influence within both religious Zionist and even liberal Zionist circles. Kook’s teachings were not broad enough for Shagar to reconcile with the reality he lived. Zionism’s political and religious limitations were increasingly clear and Shagar began to conceive of a next step in a redemption of the land that superseded cruel domination with a multicultural democracy. Shagar’s writings also emphasize the return to the cultural and religious wealth of a bygone age of Hasidism that became a repository for many of the Jewish values that Zionism has dismissed.

In a chapter called “Exile in the Land” Magid invokes Shagar and others, turning toward Jewish identity and the moral values that existed in exile and diaspora for hundreds of years after biblical Israel’s short 125-year run. For Magid the state is superfluous. He reminds us that many of the early Zionists specifically envisioned a mere Jewish homeland and some specifically warned against a state for both political and religious reasons.

There are those ultra-Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig who were against the state for this very reason. They held that the authentic Jew is the exilic Jew and thus they rejected the construction of Jewishness as connected to history and politics. The answer to their critique is that the establishment of the state is not a rejection of exile but rather a dialectical move, even a Hegelian one, that redirects exile into the state itself and thereby elevates it to its next phase, the phase of the political, to a state of justice and compassion.

Shagar viewed the positive and constructive notion of exile as a humbling force that enabled Jews to develop a deeply empathetic and ethical posture toward the world and toward themselves. He recognized the hazards of sovereignty as that which could erase both a relationship to the Divine and a sense of humanism toward the “other.” Here, we see again the notion of “substitution,” which Shagar describes in this context as a turn from a belief in God to a belief in the IDF, as a kind of inversion of the “substitution” of Nahman’s messianic vision. It reminds one of Golda Meir’s famous line as recounted by Hannah Arendt: “As a Socialist, I do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.”

Books like Magid’s are important for Jews at a time when the moral failures and crimes of Zionism have been so well documented, and they follow decades of political critique of Zionism as the anachronism and abomination that it is.

Neither peace in the Middle East nor Judaism can survive Zionism. A different Israel is possible and an authentic Judaism freed of racist nationalism is also possible. A growing number of Jews know it and are working to repair the world that Zionism risks destroying.

The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens by Richard N. Haas
ISBN: 9780525560654

For starters, it helps to know who Richard Haas really is. Read this. Haas characterizes himself as apolitical but he is an ideological dinosaur who was hatched in the Cold War and went on to support every manner of US intervention, most notably in Iraq. His love of democracy, if he really has one, certainly doesn’t extend beyond US borders. He bemoans diminished US influence, wants to promote a type of democracy that can stand up to Chinese intervention (even mockery) and be an example for the world to emulate. Who says the United States should aim to foist its own overripe democracy on the world? Haas goes on to talk about how the executive branch has assumed war powers from Congress but as a neoconservative he himself took full advantage of it

Haas writes, “Americans are required to observe the law, pay taxes, serve on juries, and respond to a military draft, if there is one.” Right. Just like Bone Spur Trump. Haas downplays the fact that the rights of the highest and lowest in America are vastly different. Even our obligations are different. Shouldn’t we fix this rather than making appeals to citizenship and nostalgia? Haas provides numerous examples that show how the Constitution is deformed and has led to virtually every democratic crisis in our history, but despite his own knowledge of all this, his book is about citizenship. Haas’s thesis is constructed by completely rejecting the structural inequalities and defects in law and society as primary threats to a healthy democracy. This is a sneaky little book for Liberals who want to listen to MAGA bedtime stories.

Haas tells us that fixing voting rights, making election day a holiday, making it easier to vote, eliminating barriers to voting, regulating social media, getting rid of dark money in political campaigns, offering open primaries, ending the filibuster, expanding the court, eliminating income inequality, improving education, introducing paid family leave, offering free college, student loan forgiveness, tax reform, and immigration reform – none of these things are going to do anything to fix our democracy. “This is where obligations come in: American democracy will work, and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at centerstage.” This is exactly the same”pull yourself up by your bootstrap, there is no racism in America” magical bullshit that MAGA America loves to sip on. In reality, we need massive structural reforms, if not a complete do-over, and then we can talk about citizenship – within a completely new context.

Haas’s 10 obligations are intended to be uncontroversial, appeal to patriotic emotion, and invoke an America of 50 years ago. But, given the state of our democracy, and the fact that we are 2 minutes to midnight before a new Fort Sumter, almost all of Haas’s prescriptions require copious caveats and exceptions:

(1) Be informed: OK; (2) Get involved: Americans waste a lot of time trying to get little single-focus groups to do something when their political institutions should be leading the charge. So get involved in what?; (3) Stay open to compromise: Within reason, but what ever happened to sticking to your guns? The last debt ceiling impasse revealed that Democrats’ idea of compromise was rolling over and sacrificing Black people; (4) Remain civil: Civility is vastly overrated. Civility is what liberals demand of those who (rudely or not) speak justice to power; (5) Reject violence: This is a strange appeal given that Haas’s necon buddies killed a million people in Iraq. And if America ends up fascist, it will be the obligation of every American to fight it; (6) Value norms: We ought to question what the norms are. Racism and American exceptionalism are norms and I don’t want any part of them; (7) Promote the common good: Fine; (8) Respect government service: This asks too much when the levers of government are usually tilted against the poor, those of color, and non-citizens – especially if those service employees are in the military, jails, border patrol, or police or work in an unjust legal system; (9) Support the teaching of civics: Not if the civics taught was concocted at Hillsdale College or promotes flag-waving neoliberalism; (10) Put country first: Why not an internationalist outlook?

This is a book that both Democratic Neoliberals and MAGA Conservatives can read because, without either caring to admit it, they share many of the same values.

If you’re considering buying this book, don’t.

I am an unapologetic anti-Zionist. I do not accept that a “chosen” people ought to have exclusive ownership over any chunk of the planet. No self-respecting omnipotent deity — if such even existed — would sign over real estate of a paltry seven or eight thousand square miles of land to a tiny number of people on a puny planet in a vast cosmos of trillions of possible worlds. Where’s the ambition in that?

Moreover, I do not accept that any privileged group has the right to lay claim to any part of the planet or its resources. Each of the many worlds in the universe belongs to all of the living creatures in it. This essential belief probably explains why I’m a socialist on top of my many other faults.

Last week, on one of my walks, I listened to a couple of episodes with Shaul Magid on Daniel Denvir’s podcast, “The Dig.” Magid has exceptional recall, insight and clarity into the nature and history of Zionism and the two episodes I listened to covered a lot of ground. They are an excellent, quick introduction for anyone interested in what Zionism is, and how it came about:

• Magid – Zionism (episode 1)
• Magid – Zionism (episode 2)

Besides being an historian, Magid is also a rabbi. Having listened to his dissections of Zionism in “The Dig”, for all those criticisms I don’t think I ever heard him actually repudiate Zionism. It may be relevant that he’s also a citizen of the state of Israel. And yet — Magid’s a sort of un-Zionist Zionist. One of a growing percentage of American Jews.

In one of the podcast episodes, Magid remarks how similar his thought is to Hannah Arendt’s and that he almost always has one of her books on his desk. Like Arendt, Magid wrestles with the many contradictions and malignancy of Zionism’s illiberal, racist supremacism and its inherent incompatibility with democracy. But what really bothers him is how limited Zionism is, and how much damage it has done to Judaism.

So it was perfect timing that a new book of Magid’s just appeared. Emily Tamkin’s review of Magid’s The Necessity of Exile in the Forward, a Zionist Jewish cultural magazine, describes it as a book to challenge Jews to imagine something new and different. Tamkin diplomatically describes Magid not as an anti-Zionist but as a “counter-Zionist” — which will nevertheless provoke strong antipathies from some of her readers.

In his podcasts, Magid makes the point that Zionism has to a great degree replaced or become a dangerous central tenet of Judaism. Early Zionists had little or no interest in religion, today many Israelis are secular, and if Jews in North America and elsewhere do not support Zionism they are not even acknowledged as being Jewish.

Magid cites the November 3rd essay in the Jerusalem Post (“No longer part of us”) in which anti-Zionist Jews are characterized as Hamas sympathizers or more “charitably” as the “wicked child” in the Passover Haggadah — as outsiders, as non-Jews. Break the Sabbath all you want, eat pork and shellfish, and marry outside the faith. But don’t question Zionism!

Judaism may be an ancient religion, but rabbinic Judaism, particularly the elaboration of religious, ethical and moral positions developed in the Talmud over centuries, is of more recent vintage and is the legacy of disaporic Jews. On the secular side, innumerable elements of Jewish culture, from Yiddish and Ladino, literature, theatre, Klezmer music, food, humor, and general Yiddishkayt, are likewise cultural products of the diaspora.

With all this richness, and with the manifest poverty of Zionism, Magid’s book seems to promise an exploration of how Jews can reclaim both the religion and the culture from the death grip of an ethno-nationalism that violates so many of Judaism’s ethical prohibitions.

While there have always been tensions between Judaism’s liberal and conservative sensibilities, the religion of Rabbinic Judaism and the culture that developed around it have at least preserved liberal elements not found in the Revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, the religious Zionism of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Religious Party, or the Jewish supremacist Zionism of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party. For those who wax nostalgic for the defunct Labor or Meretz parties, their “kinder, gentler” version of Zionism was equally dedicated to ethnic cleansing and occupation as any of the recent extremist parties.

I reject the common view of older American Jews that Israel is an insurance policy, “the only safe place on earth for Jews.” If the last 75 years — and especially the last 75 days — have shown us anything, it’s how delusional this view is. Israel is neither a safe haven nor a light unto the nations. It is a profoundly screwed-up, repressive state run by extremists, coddled and preserved only at enormous cost by non-Jewish colonial world powers who need it for their own geopolitical purposes.

It enrages Zionists that young Jews are calling for freedom in Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The moral rot of Zionism can only envision ethno-nationalist supremacy within this geography. Any other vision invokes an irrational, illogical, and propagandistic reflex that claims these young Jews want a second Holocaust to extinguish the lives of their Israeli cousins.

Such claims invariably regurgitate talking points from the many Zionist organizations that exist solely to run defense for Israel’s indefensible foreign and domestic policies. But they also represent the failure to envision anything beyond the de facto Apartheid state that now exists from the river to the sea.

Magid’s book’s in the mail. I’m looking forward to reading what he’s got to say.

A couple of months ago I woke up with significant vision loss in one eye. As someone in his seventies I was probably overdue for a health crisis, and there is nothing like losing eyesight to focus you on your mortality. I was terrified that my writing days might be over and I was in grief at the prospect of a shrinking world. Worse, the type of optic neuropathy I was diagnosed with sometimes claims vision in the remaining eye. After a month, life is returning to normal. I’ve made adjustments, learned to see without the headaches I initially experienced, and I’m taking driving a step at a time.

But needing to take as much control over my situation as I can, I resolved that if I lost the other eye I would be prepared. The Hadley Institute has many resources for blind and low-vision people, including the Braille lessons I have started “just in case” the worst happens. Another of Hadley’s many resources is a podcast where I first heard an interview with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, whose experience with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) was identical to mine.

Bruni is also the narrator of the Audible version of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and I was of course eager to see how he negotiated his own adjustment to vision loss. However, “The Beauty of Dusk” is not merely about Bruni’s experience of sudden partial blindness but is more a meditation on mortality, our ability to meet challenges head-on, to transform our ways of doing things, to change our thinking and even ourselves — as well as the satisfactions of meeting those challenges and discovering strengths and possibilities we never imagined were within us. In confronting all his own fears and questions, Bruni managed to write a wise and generous meditation on what it means to be human and vulnerable.

The title of Bruni’s book is apt and comes from this passage: “[…] my story isn’t about dawn. It’s about dusk. It’s about those first real inklings that the day isn’t forever, and the light inexorably fades. It’s about a rising and then peaking consciousness that you’re on borrowed and finite time.” Exactly. Those of us “of a certain age,” for whom “old age isn’t for sissies,” may prefer more humorous characterizations of our silver years. But dusk is a perfect reminder that our day is almost over and there’s just so much light to be snatched before it all ends. It’s a sobering but a brutally honest and even actionable metaphor.

Bruni’s meditation explores almost every aspect of his medical experience as well as much in his own life. But it is far from a medical memoir. Most of “Dusk” is devoted to stories from the many friends he has — as we all have — whose burdens are far greater than his. These are tales of people who met unthinkable challenges that most of us imagine would have stopped us in our tracks.

But it doesn’t work that way. Buried within each of us is the capacity to adapt, to change, to look at the world differently. Bruni draws from the work of numerous psychologists and neuroscientists to remind us that our brains and our personalities are far more elastic than we imagine. Bruni also pokes fun at the comic irony of how he was forced to “see the world differently.” As he half-jokes, “when one eye closes, another one opens.”

Bruni reminds us of the polite caution, if not disinterest, we show those with disabilities. After his own experience with disability Bruni started asking every one he knew about how they navigated the world, what their challenges were. Many of their answers surprised him. Their desire to talk about their struggles initially surprised him.

“The Beauty of Dusk” is a triumphant book, a slightly sentimental book, and occasionally a tedious book of things (like his dog) that only some readers will find engaging. But it is also a book about the hard realities, both good and bad, of aging and disability. As I listened to Bruni narrate, barely a month after my own opthalmological adventure, I at times found myself weeping. There were naturally tears of sadness for what is lost, but also tears of triumph over my initial terror, despair, and grief. There were also tears of recognition — felt more fully now than ever before in my life — that I am finite, that life is finite, that what is left to us of each day is not to be wasted. That vulnerability and disability are waystations that each of us will visit sometime in our lives.

It has been 57 years since James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time — 28 years since Rodney King was beaten down by police in L.A. and 6 years since Michael Brown was murdered by one in Ferguson, Missouri. In the interim there have been hundreds of these police lynching, all but a handful ever prosecuted.

Baldwin’s warning, from which his title was chosen, calls out the “racial nightmare” of this country by name, challenging America to “dare everything” to end it:

“If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophet, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”

But White America not only refuses to do anything about racism, it doesn’t even want to hear about it.

But if even the silent, nonviolent protest of “taking a knee” while the national anthem is being played is too much for delicate white sensibilities, then it is inevitable and expected — even reasonable to assume — that those most affected by America’s racial nightmare will have no other choice but to rage and try to burn the entire system down — over and over again, until the system stops killing them.

This essay was written about, and intended for, a group of friends I respect for their political engagement and civility. I hope this is received in the spirit of dialog.

I can’t believe it was fifty years ago that I first read Robert Paul Wolff’s “The Poverty of Liberalism.” Written in 1968, Wolff’s book took on the limitations (and poverty) of Liberalism — with its technocratic and individualistic utilitarianism, its grudging tolerance instead of full embrace of diverse community, and its acceptance of power dynamics instead of working toward shared values. Today, Liberalism continues to suffer a crisis of confidence, and its frequent conflation with democracy leads some people to believe that the crisis of Liberalism is really a crisis of democracy. Wolff’s book shows that this is not the case.

I have been attending a series of Wednesday night political dinners which, until last night, were mainly discussions of the Democratic presidential primary and current affairs — specifically impeachment and our descent into autocracy.

Most of my Liberal dinner companions support centrist Democrats. There are a couple of Progressives and a couple of conservative Republicans — though they are nothing like the MAGA-hatted racists seen behind Trump at his rallies. These are earnest, civil people trying to explain what they find wrong with American society and why they have embraced Donald John Trump.

Mind you, I don’t agree with their analysis — at all — and I haven’t been shy about saying so. But they know something that some of the others don’t — that a successful politician must passionately express a clear vision in terms voters understand. I don’t think any of the Democrats are doing that yet.

I’m no Republican, but I can still tell you all about Trump’s platform. Individual One ran on a platform of ridding the country of Mexicans and Muslims, building a wall that Mexico would pay for, bringing back dirty coal, eliminating regulations, giving billionaires tax breaks and padding his administration with them, making America Great (by which he meant White), privileging Evangelicals, outlawing abortion, and filling federal courts with extremists. That was Trump’s clear vision, as evil as it is.

But — quick! — without consulting an “on the issues” web page, tell me what Amy Klobuchar’s platform is. Or Biden’s or Buttigieg’s. No points if you say “Anybody but Trump.” That’s a phobia, not a platform.

Even Elizabeth Warren has the same problem of clarity, but it’s not because she hasn’t spelled out in great detail her many plans for healthcare, education, a 2% Wall Street tax, and other issues. It’s because Warren has drowned voters in a thousand policy memos — while failing to offer a stirring, coherent vision of a new America.

For the first time, last night’s discussion veered into Trump’s appeal to voters. Some at the table thought his simplistic, vague, and easily digested policy positions were absolutely the wrong approach for Democrats. Several said that radical policies of any kind would derail party unity (whatever that is), that what we really need is to simply focus on beating Donald Trump. And each of the centrist candidates my dinner companions support says the same.

One participant pointed out that even Bernie Sanders has failed to talk about deep structural injustices in America. Nobody is really talking about Native Americans. All of the candidates of color have been pushed out by the DNC and nobody is talking about racism. Now that Jay Inslee has exited the debate stage, climate change is scarcely mentioned. Another participant mentioned that no candidate has a coherent foreign policy. The White American Middle Class seems to care mainly about itself, its retirement, its health insurance. But there is a huge, forgotten America that centrist Democrats have never regarded as their natural constituents. If you haven’t read Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal,” buy yourself a copy.

First it was Republicans, but now Democrats have followed them in pandering to White America. And Democrats want to copy Republican success by focusing on regions like the Midwest, the South, and the Iron Range. This is a losing strategy. If you haven’t read Steve Phillips’ “Brown is the New White,” he argues that Democrats’ obsession with appealing to white centrists in Flyover Country will doom them in the 2020 election as it did in 2016.

Candidates who have tried to push past this limited view of the centrality of the White American Middle Class have been accused of being too strident or unwilling to compromise. There was a debate in the Democratic Party about identity politics, and the party elite decided to focus on white voters, not minorities. It was no coincidence that Democrats announced their “Better Deal” campaign in a white suburb in the South. Corporate media friendly to Democrats (there is also corporate media friendly to Republicans) red-baits Progressives or calls them brownshirts — and centrist Democrats take the bait.

Ignoring the fact that Republicans won the 2016 election on radical change, Liberals are only prepared to accept an extremely narrow range of acceptable socio-economic values and reforms. This may explain the strangely familiar situation Progressives and Conservatives both value values. If there has ever been any affinity between Trump and Sanders supporters, it may center around values.

In the Liberal political landscape, where values are suspect and only “electability” has currency, it is no wonder that the DNC bent over backwards to accommodate a second billionaire candidate — Mayor “Stop and Frisk” Michael Bloomberg. It is alarming to me that Democrats who claim to hate an entitled, racist billionaire from New York have fallen in line behind another one of precisely the same species.

It is unlikely that the 40-45% of Democrats who identify as progressive will ever see their candidate on the ballot in November. The Democratic Party is a much smaller tent than previously thought. And it’s too bad. Because, until the Democratic Party sheds its hollow centrist poliicies, it can never hope to win the confidence of voters looking for a new vision for America.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, and I followed columnist Esther Cepeda in reading King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But I’ve also been reading Cornel West’s “The Radical King,” which reprints many of Martin Luther King’s more “radical” essays and sermons. I’m not finished with it because you can’t read a book of thoughtful essays in one go.

But from what I have read, West sees no contradiction between the nonviolent King and the man he calls the Radical King. King’s nonviolence, for all the nods to Ghandi and other religious traditions, was rooted in his Christianity and specifically in the Black Church. Yet apparently there were also connections to the Jewish prophetic tradition — in which prophets rage against the evils of kings and tyrants. This may be one reason for King’s friendship with Abraham Joshua Heschel.

King’s most famous speech was part of a 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and when he was killed King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. King told his staff in 1966, “There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” King travelled across the country with his Poor People’s Campaign, a campaign that Rev. William Barber today is trying to revive. And though the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, four years later King still found himself fighting for civil and economic rights when he was assassinated in 1968.

America of 1968 was not only about to implode from racial injustice but also from economic injustices and wars of choice that were not only killing black, brown and poor white men but bankrupting America financially and morally. At quite a cost to his own political capital, and even putting himself at odds with other black leaders, King spoke out against American militarism and materialism.

King was regarded as the “most dangerous man in America” by J. Edgar Hoover, who also tried to brand King as a Soviet asset — not because he was a nonviolent advocate of racial equality (most certainly true), but because he represented a challenge to economic and political exploitation.

West points out in his introduction to the collection that King’s thoughts were constantly evolving. We are all familiar with the “long arc” optimism of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech but no one ever got to hear the more pessimistic sermon King had planned to deliver the Sunday after he was murdered, “Why America May Go To Hell.”

Toward the end, the radical King had grown disillusioned with white liberals whose deeds never matched their rhetoric. In one essay King discusses Stokely Carmichael’s rejection of both white allies and nonviolence. With increased physical represssion, Carmichael’s SNCC, CORE, and Deacons for Defense were all beginning to sense the limits of nonviolent strategy. In West’s “Black Power” excerpt from 1967, King never repudiates his nonviolence but clearly understands and even appreciates the reasons Black Power advocates gave for their willingness to use force if necessary:

“Black Power advocates contend that the Negro must develop his own sense of strength. No longer are ‘fear, awe, and obedience’ to rule. This accounts for, though it does not justify, some Black Power advocates who encourage contempt and even civil disobedience as alternatives to the old patterns of slavery. Black Power assumes that Negroes will be slaves unless there is a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.”

By coincidence, our book group’s selection this month was Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys,” set in Tallahassee, Florida in 1962. The very first page begins with Elwood Curtis’s thoughts on a ten cent record of Martin Luther King’s speeches. King’s speeches could also serve other purposes than a moral call to action. For kids like Elwood, King’s speeches were educational and also an affirmation of black pride:

“In the third cut on side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. […] Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites — not all whites, but enough whites — that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that ‘Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, I want you to know that you are as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town.’ That was Elwood — as good as anyone.”

Elwood is well-read, naive, and a bit of a geek. And when his bicycle chain snaps, he ends up being arrested along with the driver of the stolen Plymouth he has hitched a ride with. Elwood’s grandmother Harriet, a great believer in doing things by the book, hires a white lawyer who absconds with the $200 intended to defend Elwood. Elwood ends up in Nickel Academy, a segregated prison camp for boys, where some go missing without explanation. Whitehead’s book deals with the boys’ attitudes toward resistance and compliance, particularly in a [still] Jim Crow prison setting. A boy name Turner “with an eerie sense of self” who knows that only he is ultimately responsible for his own safety is the foil for the tragically well-behaved and trusting Elwood.

In one passage which seems to illustrate the divide between Black Power and Respectability Politics, Elwood is still trying to make sense of Dr. King:

“He called upon his Negro audience to cultivate that pure love for their oppressors, that it might carry them to the other side of the struggle. Elwood tried to get his head around it, now that it was no longer the abstraction floating in his head last spring. It was real now:

Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win our freedom.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood — all the Nickel boys — existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.

Indeed. What an impossible thing.

As he stated somewhat prophetically in his last speech, King had been to the mountain top. And King had seen the Big Picture if not been given sacred insight. King’s early sermons were well-crafted moral calls to action, Christian in style and language, but he frequently tipped his hat to other traditions. King was often ecumenical and usually very accessible. For example, in 1956 King delivered a sermon to 12,000 people at an Episcopal cathedral in New York City on the second anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The talk was about evil. His sermon contained the seeds of the same argument that so perplexed young Elwood:

“Let us remember that as we struggle against Egypt, we must have love, compassion and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to realize that as we seek to defeat the evils of Egypt we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves.”

Some will find King’s argument unconvincing (I am one), though most will admire the radical King’s ‘love of the oppressed. Some will admire the prophetic King for his speaking truth to power, while others will be surprised at his growing understanding of (and even sympathy for) those advocating change “by any means necessary” (King approached Malcolm X in 1966 about working together on a UN resolution).

Though King believed in ecumenism and frequently linked arms with men of different faiths, West cautions us to always remember that King’s

“radical love flows from an imitation of Christ, a response to an invitation of self-surrender in order to emerge fully equipped to fight for justice in a cold and cruel world of domination and exploitation. The scandal of the Cross is precisely the unstoppable and unsuffocatable love that keeps moving in a blood-soaked history, even in our catastrophic times. There is no radical King without his commitment to radical love.”

More essays to go.

The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry

I have forgotten precisely how Wendell Berry’s “The Hidden Wound” came to be on my reading list. At the time I ordered the book I did not know that Berry had written it in 1968 as a meditation on race relations, safe in a quiet research room in a library on the Stanford campus. I knew only that Berry was a respected “agrarian” poet from Kentucky and a thoughtful man. Maybe I was hoping for a little hope.

Despite its age and defects, Berry’s book was not a disappointment. Those reading the book a half a century after it was written will be put off by dozens of uses of the N-word to describe a certain type of labor thought to be menial. And today’s reader will likewise be bewildered or angered by his thesis that white supremacy has equally wounded both whites and blacks. As one unsympathetic reviewer put it, “This book looks at the cultural wound of racism from the perspective of the oppressor, implying that the abused and the abuser suffer equally.” Berry never even comes close to making that case.

Likewise, Berry’s depictions of his grandfather’s tenant farmer Nick and Aunt Georgie are cringe-worthy tales of noble serfs who found true happiness in honest work on someone else’s land. To reinforce this notion Berry recalls the tale of Eumaios, “the noble swineherd” who befriended Odysseus upon his return to Ithaka. Berry also places himself in the shoes of Dostoevsky’s landowner, Levin, who desires to know more about the serfs who work his vast estate.

And Wendell Berry, in 1968, was hardly ready or willing to indict Capitalism for the separation of white men from the actual stewardship of the land they instead stole and despoiled and had others work on. His arguments are diffuse and he is almost comically incapable of drawing the obvious links between the racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction he describes throughout his meditation. Instead of understanding the sources of this alienation politically — which he explicitly rejects — Berry seizes upon Southern Agrarianism as the cure for his and America’s wounds.

Yet, despite these many sins and omissions, Berry’s book is nevertheless filled with insight. In the book’s early pages, Berry writes of white self-delusion facilitated by conscious myth-making and propaganda:

“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the ‘gentleman and soldier.’ However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism — an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of (my emphasis) Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.”

As a Southerner familiar with slaveholder customs, Berry demolishes the lie that slavery did “no harm” to either party:

“First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own?”

Southern Christianity itself had to contend with this moral contradiction. It solved the problem by completely hollowing itself out. Murder, rape, slavery and exploitation were no longer to be regarded as sins and were replaced by prohibitions on trivial acts such as drinking, failing to attend church, or gambling.

“Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage — a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.”

Fifty long years before Steve Bannon’s pan-European nationalism efforts, Berry indicted white American culture as a sterile, delusional imitation of Europeanism — while, on the other hand, he pointed to black culture’s richness and connection to the reality of its people, history and the land.

And Berry wanted some of that:

“And then in the spring of 1964 I turned back on the direction I had been going. I returned to Kentucky, and within a year bought and moved onto a little farm in my native part of the state. That return made me finally an exile from the ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most Americans. What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its source: my home countryside, my own people and history. And for the first time I felt my nakedness. I realized that the culture I needed was not to be found by visiting museums and libraries and auditoriums. It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or even the quality of the writing I did; a man, I thought, must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to learn to belong to my place.”

The Southern Agrarianism that Berry seized upon in 1968 may then have been a naive, nostalgic rejection of industrialization, but today it is a prominent feature of Neo-Confederacy and the Alt-Right. Berry’s meticulously-drawn links to the actual stewardship of land by black farmers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers belies the claims of the revisionist Neo-Confederates whose real or imagined ancestors simply owned the people who worked the plantations.

Most importantly, what Berry’s book tells us is that white people have understood racism for centuries and have passed down their own history as a self-indictment. “The Hidden Wound” was written at just about the same time the Kerner Report came out. White America has been able to read about this wound for at least a half century.

So now the real question is — what the hell are we going to do about it?

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas is not an academic tome, but that doesn’t prevent him from introducing us to some of the neoliberal swindlers who persistently argue that giving the masses a few crumbs of their billions is doing good in the world. And Giridharadas does it without any need for class analysis or labor theory of value. It’s a quick-paced, enjoyable, and very enlightening book.

In America, where at least 40% of the population believes that immigration has created a zero-sum game in which they are losers of jobs and benefits to immigrants, these same people wholeheartedly embrace the “win-win” logic of neoliberalism, which says that when the super-rich profit, everybody does. Worse, they tell us that only they, these technocratic gatekeepers, are qualified to make change in an increasingly complex, technological world. It’s the Liberal version of Trump telling his base, “only I can save the country.” No matter who’s saying it, it’s profoundly anti-democratic.

Giridharadas points out that the founders of the Gig Economy exploit workers while claiming to be innovative job creators by using their considerable P.R. machines and the razzle-dazzle of their pompous mission statements. It’s not exploitation, these hucksters wink — at least in the sense of stealing from the consumer or the working class — if consumers and workers willingly give up their rights and power and wealth and private information for someone else’s profit.

Giridharadas convincingly explains how and why it is that the so-called “philanthropy” of the super-rich never manages to solve real problems or help real people. Instead, everything becomes a feel-good campaign that looks great on a web page or on a balance sheet. Carbon credits? Pay someone to take responsibility for your pollution. Problem solved — on paper.

We meet people like Vinod Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist, who speak of schemes like 2020 “entrepreneur” Presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s plan to give $1000 to every family. These people know the super-rich are creating a world in which perhaps 80% of all workers may eventually be redundant and the ramifications scare the hell out of them. The world of their creation represents an “entertainment” problem (“how would we occupy the minds of all those people?”) and a political one (“how would we keep them from revolting?”) Remarkably, Khosla tells us without shame the real purpose of Yang’s plan. “To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well enough off. Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system, okay?” And, to neoliberals, real change is anathema.

Young, intelligent, well-heeled Americans, just at the moment of launching a career, are deeply torn between the cardboard values their parents, priests and teachers mouthed to them during their childhoods. But now, here they are, suddenly adults and working for McKinsey & Co., selling their souls and swallowing the most egregious cognitive dissonance. Indeed, Capitalism and its evil twin, neoliberalism, are charades, as Giridharadas implies, and people in Latin America know all too well. Sadly, many young people discover the truth for themselves only a few short years into their professional lives — but six figures into debt. Their work is no longer just a charade but a prison.

Review of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” — Daniel Boorstin, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” (1961).

* * *

Americans are exceptional people. Exceptionally credulous and exceptionally delusional. From homeopathy to Mormonism, Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland” is an exploration of home-grown American pathologies that, were they physical, would be pickling in formaldehyde in the Mutter Museum. Though Andersen’s book reads as though we were traveling down strange back roads of American life, the frightening thing is that — quite to the contrary — the odd paths he describes are actually superhighways of American culture.

Nobody emerges unscathed in Andersen’s book. Even Thoreau, the dropout who lived a couple of years in a cabin in the woods near Boston, then spent the rest of his life living with his parents, doesn’t come off smelling much like a flower. I knew that Cotton Mather was a religious fanatic, but I didn’t know he was a trailblazer for Harold Camping, the End Times preacher who (like Mather) repeatedly erred in predicting the date the world would end. Anne Hutchinson, we were taught in school, was an early feminist and the victim of Puritan oppression, and together with Roger Williams was an early champion of religious tolerance. There is even a monument on Beacon Hill naming her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” But the truth is, Hutchinson, who claimed to be a prophet, was even more extreme than the Puritan lunatics she followed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they sent her packing. Ultimately, the mother of 15 ended up in what is now Rhode Island, only to be further hounded by Puritans into the wilds of New York (what is now the Bronx). After unwisely settling on Siwonoy land, and after repeated warnings by Siwonoy warriors, she and six of her children were killed in 1643. The Puritans celebrated her death as proper payment for a heretic.

I was unaware that the Southern “Lost Cause” memorialized on Stone Mountain, Georgia and elsewhere was largely inspired by British “chivalric” literature. Andersen quotes Mark Twain, who noted that “the change of character [in the South] can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter Scott’s influence than to that of any other thing or person. by his single might [he] checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; […] with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs […] and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote […]. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war. […] Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern characters, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

The story of Joseph Smith’s home-brew religion is likewise something that could only happen in America. In many ways Mormonism was the predecessor of Scientology, also an American phenomenon. Andersen writes that Joseph Smith was originally a treasure hunter and huckster who eventually concocted a derivative (he uses the word “fan boy”) religion based on “revelations” given to him by the angel Moroni (nowhere to be found in Old or New Testament). Smith, who called himself a prophet and incentivized converts by encouraging men to take multiple wives, was told of golden plates buried, it just so happened, four miles from Smith’s house, containing mysterious scripture that Smith translated himself by sticking his face in a hat in which a “seer stone” had been placed. It is a testament to exceptional American credulity that there are now over six million Mormons in the United States. Protestant Evangelicals, who believe in virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, angels, demons, End Times, the Rapture, and a 6000 year-old world, think Mormons are the nutty ones.

As the 20th Century dawned, America’s fancy turned toward conspiracy. Henry Ford, publisher of the “Dearborn Independent,” printed millions of copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-semitic screed that described a vast Jewish conspiracy to run the entire world. Anarchists and Communists were to be found under every rock and behind every hedgerow. The FBI was founded to root out Jewish Commies. The McCarthy show trials took this to a repressive new level. The Trump administration’s and the right wing media’s QAnon, Birther, immigration, racial and other conspiracies — they’ve all been around a long time. Perhaps it’s just simple rhyme, or maybe it’s poetic irony, but one of Trump’s mentors and lawyers, Roy Cohn, played an important role in the McCarthyite show trials.

Twain’s remarks on chivalric literature’s contribution to Southern myth-making identified one culprit, but the myth-making was just getting started. In 1895, “Wild Bill” Cody, a P.T. Barnum-like figure who had made a fortune putting on racist recreations of Indian massacres, staged a show In Brooklyn called “Black America” in which he hired 500 former slaves to recreate a Southern plantation complete with cotton gin and slave cabins. For two months, Cody’s employees “pretended to be enslaved, picking cotton bolls from a recently planted acre and processing them in a real cotton gin. Tens of thousands of white people watched ‘the labors that the Negroes of slavery days engaged in, and the happy, careless life that they lived in their cabins after work.'” A New York Times article wrote that “a fat black mammy, with a red handkerchief on her head, sits outside one of the little cabins, knitting.” Until prices plummeted in the 1920’s, New England’s wealth depended on the textile industry, and Big Textile’s economic power in turn depended on Southern cotton. North and South, everybody wanted to feel good about slavery.

While all this was going on, a former Tennessee governor was making the national lecture circuit describing the happy life of slaves. “I never shall forget the white-columned mansions rising in cool, spreading groves. And stretching away to the horizon were the cotton fields, alive with the toiling slaves, who, without a single care to burden their hearts, sang as they toiled from early morn till close of day.” As Anderson sums up, “nostalgia had been turned back into a pathology.” But the myth-making continued well into the present. Stone Mountain, D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” (which Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House), and monument building continued to push the tale of a noble South. This still resonates with a frightening percentage of Americans in 2019, including many who regard the decommissioning of Confederate monuments as something worth killing over.

Andersen goes on to describe the rise of Christian populism and hucksterism. From the Moody Bible Institute (founded by a former shoe salesman), to Cyrus Schofield (a morally corrupt politician who made a fortune marketing his own bible), to Billy Sunday (who attacked mainstream churches and evolution), the early 20th Century represented American Christianity’s strongest rejection of science and rationalism. In 1925 a quarter of a million people came to Memphis to hear Billy Sunday rail against evolution. Tennessee succumbed immediately and made it “unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities […] and all other public schools of the State […] to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Naturally, this was a slap in the face of the U.S. Constitution, but a slap coming from the “Bread Basket of the Confederacy.” That same year the Scopes “monkey” trial pitted Clarence Darrow (defending teacher John Scopes) against William Jennings Bryant (for the state). After nine whole minutes of deliberation the Tennessee jury found Scopes guilty. A few days later, after returning to Ohio, Jennings Bryant dropped dead. Everybody got something they liked out of the Scopes trial.

H.L. Mencken, while reporting on the trial, made several side-trips to revival meetings and described people speaking in tongues. “Tongues”, writes Andersen. “Mencken had witnessed the defining voodoo artifact of the newest species of fanatical Christianity.” “As grassroots Christian beliefs grew more implausible in opposition to the liberalizing mainstream, some of the grass roots yearned for more implausible and flamboyant Christian practice.” In Topeka, Kansas, bible college operator Charles Parham, who asked students to “forsake all, sell what they had, give it away,” to enter the school, “on the very first day of the twentieth century, this twenty-seven-year-old put his hands on a student, a thirty-year-old woman, and, according to him, ‘a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.'” Whatever Parham was pushing, one might not need to smoke it, but it was seriously strong.

The rise of Hollywood and American marketing and advertising was also uniquely American. Andersen writes that, “my argument here is that movies and then television, and then video-games and video of all kinds were a powerful and unprecedented solvent of the mental barriers between real and surreal — not that that was Hollywood’s explicit intent (although sometimes it was, as in the case of”The Birth of a Nation”).” And Americans love their fantasy.

On October 30, 1938 radio listeners heard the following broadcast, authored by Orson Welles and now known as the “War of the Worlds” — “At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as — quote — like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun — unquote. We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.”

As the broadcast unfolds, the audience is not clear whether they are listening to a radio play with a musical selection — or a real emergency broadcast interrupting it. The announcer returns, interrupting the music once more. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, “I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.”

Later — “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer cuts in. “I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray.”

The result of the “War of the Worlds” was mass hysteria conditioned by a plausible reality. Or, alternatively, it was propaganda to condition a patriotic response to a new political reality. Andersen writes: “In real life during the previous few weeks, the Munich Agreement had been signed and Germany had invaded the Sudetenland: some listeners that night figured the ‘Martians’ bombing and burning America were actually Nazi invaders.” Fantasy could be useful in molding public acceptance for joining a war.

The suburban pastoral fantasy is another uniquely American phenomenon. “Along with America’s extreme passions and knacks for religion and show business, the suburb became yet another fantasy-driven facet of the ‘divergence of the American experience,’ as [Kenneth T.] Jackson writes in”Crabgress Frontier,” ‘from the rest of the world.'” “In fact, the suburb was a twofer, fantasy-wise. Loathing cities had always been a defining American impulse, but as cities rapidly filled up with millions of blacks and Catholics and Jewish and otherwise not-quite-white immigrants, a lot of native-born people found cities even more loathsome. […] Suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, and preferably Protestant) people.” The result was White Flight and thousands of versions of Levittown.

Andersen touches on the theme of “nostalgia” over and over again: nostalgia for a lost South; nostalgia for days when slavery gave slaves “carefree” lives; and nostalgia for the days when America was White. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you were here for the 2016 Presidential campaign. But nostalgia leads to viewing the past with heavily tinted (or even fully opaque) glasses. As he recalls his Omaha childhood in the Fifties Andersen is at first tempted to say it was all so “normal.” Instead, he concludes that the Fifties were “freaky and fantastical.” His two reasons for this are television and suburbia. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty became a box office hit in 1947 by satirizing an American freak who fictionalized himself as a dashing hero, living in his own private dream-world. Yet the new normal — driving in and out of suburban pastoral fantasies, immersing in endless new televised fantasies — was turning all Americans into Walter Mittys without them realizing it.” Add to this the world of advertising that increasingly depended on television, and what Andersen describes is the world portrayed — the irony isn’t lost on me — in the television series “Mad Men.”

No doubt, if the Fifties were anything, they were “fantastical.” Las Vegas, Playboy magazine, Scientology, McCarthyism, newly revived Christian fundamentalism, Reich’s Orgone theory, Disneyland — even the Beat generation, Kerouac and company — all represented uniquely American flights into fantasy. Americans were also embracing drugs as never before. “Burroughs loved his junk, Kerouac his speed, Ginsberg his weed. Regular Americans also discovered and embraced new, legal psychotropic drugs in the 1950’s.” Benzedrine, Dexedrine, tranquilizers, miracle pills. Patent medicines, including heroin, cocaine, and morphene, had been with us all along. Now Americans were buying drugs like candy. Today, despite the “War on Drugs,” we seem to have endorsed the old DuPont motto: “better living through chemistry. Ask your doctor if mind bending drugs are right for you.

During the Fifties mainstream America embraced the Christian fundamentalism that H.L. Menken and secularists had once mocked. Twenty-five year-old Billy Graham started off as a radio preacher, then took his show — “Youth for Christ” — on the road. Soon the road became the Rose Bowl, and before long Graham was in Hollywood where “dreams could come true on streets of gold and a zillion corrupted sinners needed saving.” Signs at Graham’s L.A. Revival Meeting told the masses to “come and expect a miracle” in the Holy Ghost Miracle Tent. Before long Graham was praying with Harry Truman in the Oval Office and attending Eisenhower’s inauguration. Graham attended the first National Prayer Breakfast and Eisenhower’s “born again” baptism. In 1950 “In God We Trust” was added to America’s motto –the Founders had never thought to invite God into government while explicitly separating Church and State.

Besides Graham, Norman Vincent Peale was also an influential religious figure of the time, publishing books like “The Power of Positive Thinking.” “Peale mass-marketed two strains of though that had wormed their way into American Christianity since 1900: magical thinking about wealth and success […] and see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil as practical means of getting there. Lots of prominent Protestant theologians hated”The Power of Positive Thinking” — it was egocentric, materialistic, and escapist, a cult. Billy Graham loved it.” Fast forward to 2019 and Evangelicals have embraced “prosperity theology” while giving their leaders a “mulligan” on personal morality. In another rhyme of history, Billy Graham’s son Franklin now champions the cult of a corrupt and dissolute president who excels in being egocentric and materialistic.

Andersen also has much to say about New Agers, Back to Earth believers, New Medical Quackery, the Internet, Virtual Reality, AI, Eternal Youth, American Exceptionalism, Cryogenic life extension, the X-Files and people who believe it, hoaxes, urban myths, populism, anti-Vaxxers, gun nuts, survivalists, Flat Earthers, climate deniers, moon landing conspiracy believers, and the World Wrestling Federation.

Though the destinations are different, all of us seem to be traveling the same roads.

By Meir Shalev

I did not enjoy A Pigeon and a Boy in the least. I felt I was being beaten over the head with Biblical themes instead of pleasantly delighted by resonances of them. I did not appreciate the heaping helping of Zionist mishigas in the book, either.

And there were plenty of technical problems with the book. The author could not decide whether his main character was addressing his deceased mother or talking about her. The ramp-up to the merging of the book’s present and past threads was painfully long. And, almost as soon as the threads came together, I guessed the ending. Two chapters featured talking pigeons. Characters were wooden, except for perhaps Meshulam, who was the one character I liked the most despite his forced labor as a device for greasing plot points.

Yairi’s relationship with Tirza is told, not shown. Yaacov and Raya, and his ex-wife Liora, are two-dimensional yekkes. The one-week reconciliation with Liora had me scratching my head. Numerous chapters devoted far too much detail to incidental characters, such as the Dutch bird-watchers in the last chapters. And there was more pigeon lore and craft than anyone — with perhaps the exception of a pigeon handler — could ever stomach.

The climax of the story — pardon the pun — was a ridiculous travesty of medical probability, as a half-dead soldier, ripped apart by machine gun fire, channels his skill as a premature ejaculator to fill a vial with semen to be sent by carrier pigeon to his love. Sure, I comprehended that this was a metaphor for the triumph of life in Israel over death in European ghettos and Konzentrationslagern. I grasped that Yair’s house, built in part by Bedouins on Arab land, was a metaphor for the creation of Israel. I understood the repeated “and it was good” from Genesis when each new phase of Yair’s home was completed. Not to mention the sabbath bride and all of it.

But, all in all, I found the book ham-fisted and a horrible slog. I would have preferred a book that handled the themes of identity and belonging that Shalev was probabably aiming at with much more delicacy and literary skill.

Diana Johnstone’s 2016 book Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton is not an election year hit piece like Dinesh D’Souza’s “Hillary’s America.” It is not a book about Hillary’s character flaws or her political flip-flopping. It is a book about foreign policy. More importantly, it is a book that deals with Clinton’s metamorphosis into a war hawk within an already hawkish Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of military aggression within the wider arc of the Cold War and Realpolitik. In 2018, as Russiagate consumes the minds of Centrist Democrats nostalgic for John McCain’s brand of militarism and American Exceptionalism, it’s an important book to revisit.

Johnstone begins with the U.S.-approved, if not engineered, coup which deposed Honduran President Manuel Zalaya. We immediately get a sense of how Hillary Clinton operates, her back-channel deals with old Cold War warriors who supported the Contras, friends in the Honduran military trained at the School of the Americas, and her stonewalling on returning Zalaya to power, even as half of Central and Latin America refused to recognize the eventual “winners” of the putsch.

Johnstone takes the reader through the beginnings of neoconservatism, originating in NSC-68, a 1968 Cold War document that still influences the foreign policy of Republicans and Democrats. She spends some time on the Israeli-American lobbyists who have hijacked American foreign policy and focused it on destroying the Middle East in order to “save” Israel – the only nation in the region to actually possess nuclear weapons. Johnstone goes on to examine the history of American foreign policy, particularly as driven by an interesting rogue’s gallery of female war hawks: Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, and Samantha Power, all Democrats.

Describing Clinton’s disconnect from feminism, Johnstone writes at length about the strange cases of PussyRiot and Femen, whose antics were used to full advantage by Clinton and the American media to attack Vladimir Putin and present their actions as “exercises in democracy” while their inevitable arrests were presented as an assault on civil liberties. Though we recoil from the Russian expression for disorderly conduct – “hooliganism” – we have no such compunctions about pepper-spraying and handcuffing peaceful demonstrators here at home. Johnstone also notes the right-wing Ukrainian connections to both groups as well as the co-optation of Amnesty International in serving the State Department.

Two chapters of Johnstone’s book deal with how NATO was expanded in violation of agreements with the former Soviet Union, and on the war that Bill Clinton waged in Yugoslavia. The war was sold as a “humanitarian intervention” to prevent genocide, which set the stage for future expansions of NATO and for more “humanitarian” wars. This particular war, as you may recall, resulted in the dissolution of Yugoslavia into pieces aligned with the West and a Slavic chunk aligned with Russia. Johnstone describes the process by which the West demonized Serbia’s leaders, applied sanctions, supported local proxies, sabotaged international diplomacy, cynically used international courts (which the US refuses to be bound by itself) to prosecute parties it didn’t like, manipulated the media, and bombed the hell out of its enemies. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, rejected diplomacy while telling reporters, “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” This is the same Albright who thought killing half a million Iraqi children through sanctions on medicines was “worth it” to get Iraq to rid itself of imaginary WMD’s.

Then we fast forward into Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, with her own war in Libya. Though her Republican adversaries shamefully exploited the loss of four lives in Benghazi, Clinton herself made a joke about the sodomization and murder of its leader and the transformation of an entire country into a failed state. Clinton famously mocked Obama’s dictum: “don’t do stupid shit,” claiming the United States needed a more sophisticated organizing principle. But “stupid shit” is precisely what Clinton did. She wrecked Libya.

In a long — and today a particularly relevant — chapter entitled “Not Understanding Russia” Johnstone makes the case that Clinton was armed only with an ancient Cold War mindset. Not that much has changed since NSC-68. Russia is still Reagan’s Evil Empire, and Putin is Stalin. “Soviet aggression” has been replaced with “Russian aggression” and NATO must be expanded to envelop Russia. Meanwhile, Poland and the Ukraine have developed strong fascist tendencies, which the United States either ignores or encourages (think Manafort), and Russia’s seizure of Crimea (which had been a gift to Ukraine in the first place) is portrayed in the press like Hitler’s Drang nach Osten. Where Bush expressed an amusing appreciation for Putin’s “soul” Clinton took a harsher view: “he was a KGB agent, by definition he doesn’t have a soul.” Under Secretary Clinton, the United States spent millions on Kremlinologists who, at one point, were trying to analyze Putin’s cowboy gait to see if he had Asperger’s Syndrome.

In June of 2016, the United States led the rest of NATO in war games in Poland, now governed by a far-right administration. In “Operation Anakonda 2016” 31,000 troops from 24 countries practiced for a Soviet and Warsaw Pact invasion. The commander of U.S. Army Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, explained what the games were all about: “History shows that Russians only respect strength,” he told NPR.

In 1997 former Carter administration advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (and midwife to Al Qaeda) joined Henry Kissinger as one more anti-Russian ideologue dispensing not only anti-Soviet “tough love” but developing a strategy for American domination and hardening of its superpower status in his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostratic Imperatives.” Brzezinski, whose son Ian was involved in the Ukrainian “Orange revolution,” has a low opinion of democracy, of the intelligence of citizens, of privacy, and of Europe or Asia or the Middle East. It is all a vast field to be plowed by Americans. Only after remaking the new world in the American image can there be peace. “But in the meantime it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.” Russia is therefore as much an enemy as Iran or ISIS. A reviewer in “Foreign Affairs,” David C. Hendrickson, warned in 1997 that the anti-Russian prescriptions in Brzezinski’s book were so severe that even a democratic Russia would resist them and there would be unpredictable blow-back.

The United States was looking for ways to mire the Soviets in their own Viet Nam. Afghanistan was the stroke of evil genius emanating from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s twisted mind. In the last days of the Carter Administration Brzezinski recognized that Central Asia was the “soft underbelly” of the Russian bear, a source of conflict that, if exploited, could destabilize Moscow and mire it in war. Brzezinski was no Israel hawk like the neoconservatives. His goal was not to merge US and Israeli interests but to weaken the Soviets. But they shared many goals: a unipolar world, massive increases in the U.S. military, nuclear hegemony, regime change, punishing enemies, rewarding friends.

By rewarding our Islamist friends who opposed the Soviet Union in the 80’s and 90’s, the United States actually created terrorists like bin Laden, who at one point was on both U.S. and Saudi payrolls. The antagonism between the United States and Russia became so great that when Russia tried to warn the U.S. of the elder Tsarnaev brother its help was ignored. Putin brokered the surrender of Syria’s last remaining chemical weapons, but it was an unappreciated gesture because it delayed a U.S. attack on Syria. And when Putin took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to explain why the West must exercise caution in Syria, that Assad was also fighting terrorists, the United States paid him back by threatening the Russian-Ukrainian trade pact and building up NATO even more. The U.S. feigned shock when, faced with uncertain southern naval access, Russia took back the gift Khrushchev had given to the Ukraine in 1954 – Crimea, a peninsula the size of Maryland.

Johnstone concludes her book with “The War Party” — amoral neoliberals neither strictly Republicans nor strictly Democrat, but technocrats with political ambitions and wealthy friends from America’s many defense industries. From philanthropists who give money to Islamophobia, to think tanks, PAC donors, owners of the “free” press, opinion-shapers, oligarchs and despots. How is it, Johnstone asks, that Clinton and her ilk can curry favor of the Saudi family, Egyptian military dictators, Wall Street, Nigerian dictators, the Israeli occupation, and Ukrainian fascists? And what about all those wars? It’s bi-partisan. It’s just business.

Johnstone suggests that wars are nothing we need worry our pretty little heads over. Leave wars to the true professionals — contractors, mercenaries — and pay for it by simply adding to the national debt. Thanks to drones there are now very few American casualties, so why should we worry? If children die in a drone strike in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq, who is to say their terrorist parents weren’t responsible for putting them in harm’s way? And if the war hawks do get caught with blood on their hands, we accept at face value the lie that this is simply the cost of keeping us safe.

Hillary Clinton may be long gone, but the foreign policy and neoliberalism Clinton created and stands for still poisons the Democratic Party.

When Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, anti-Semitism was the raison d’etre for a Jewish state. “Die Welt widerhallt vom Geschrei gegen die Juden, und das weckt den eingeschlummerten Gedanken auf.” (The world resonates with screams against the Jews, and that wakes long-slumbering thoughts.)”

Herzl had in mind either a Jewish state in what is now Argentina or in the “ever-memorable historic home” of Palestine, which was clearly his his preference. Herzl saw the poorest European Jews emigrating first to the new state — the most desperate, those of “mediocre intellects” who would do the rough work of establishing a foothold. They would then be followed later by “those of a higher grade.”

Herzl thought it would be necessary to entreat the Sultan [Turkish emperor] to give European Jews some of the land Turkey was then occupying. In exchange, Herzl daydreamed, Jews would get the Ottoman Empire’s finances back in order. The new Jewish state would be neutral, form a bulwark against Asian “barbarism,” and would be a Eurocentric state “in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.” In exchange, the Jewish state would guard the extra-territorial sanctuaries of Christendom and Christians would be grateful to a people they once hated.

It may irk today’s Zionists to hear Israel referred to as a “colonial enterprise,” but this is precisely what Herzl imagined it to be in its infancy. Israel was to be created by two separate organizations — the Society of the Jews, and by the Jewish Company. Like the Hudson Bay Company which explored Canada, and the London Company, which founded the American colonies, Herzl’s Jewish Company (later the Jewish National Fund, and later still national offshoots like the American and Canadian Jewish Federations) were set up to create a pipeline of colonists to a new land. The Jewish Company was to be based in London.

The chapter, “The Jewish Company,” describes how the company acquires land and builds housing for its first wave of poor Russian and Romanian workmen. There would have to be inducements to work for their homes, to stay out of trouble — and the seven hour day was one such inducement. No man was to be idle, for development of a moral citizenry was one of Herzl’s goals. A tenth of the citizenry was to be tasked with military defense. The Jewish Company would provide housing, set up bank accounts, provide loans, create employment by creating industries, purchase a family’s assets when they emigrated, and help them as soon as they arrived in the Jewish state. What Herzl described was — without irony or exaggeration — a vast “colonial enterprise.”

Herzl anticipated the use of indigenous, non-Jewish labor. This was the 19th Century, slavery was not an alien concept, and Herzl worried about the misuse of local slave labor instead of well-compensated seven-hour-a-day workers, which he regarded as a morally repugnant shortcut. The Jewish Company would, therefore, prevent the abuse and enslavement of non-Jewish labor by using boycotts (the irony!), roadblocks, or “various other methods.”

In “Local Groups: Our Transmigration,” Herzl describes the process of resettlement. No one would have to migrate in steerage, though luxury travelers would have plenty of travel options. Each travel group would have a rabbi, who would be enlisted in the nation-building project. “Our rabbis, on whom we especially call, will devote their energies to the service of our idea, and will inspire the congregations by preaching it from the pulpit.” The long history of Zionist co-optation of Judaism seems to begin with this.

The Middle Classes — and by such Herzl was not referring to sad-sack “mediocre intellects” from Russia and Romania, but German-speaking Austro-Hungarian elites of whom he was a member — would lead this new society. What Herzl described sounds very much like the world of English colonials in India: “The middle classes will involuntarily be drawn into the outgoing current, for their sons will be officials of the Society or employees of the Company ‘over there.’ Lawyers, doctors, technicians of every description, young business people — in fact, all Jews who are in search of opportunities, who now escape from oppression in their native country to earn a living in foreign lands — will assemble on a soil so full of fair promise. The daughters of the middle classes will marry these ambitious men. One of them will send for his wife or fiancee to come out to him, another for his parents, brothers and sisters. Members of a new civilization marry young. This will promote general morality and ensure sturdiness in the new generation; and thus we shall have no delicate offspring of late marriages, children of fathers who spent their strength in the struggle for life. Every middle-class emigrant will draw more of his kind after him. The bravest will naturally get the best out of the new world.”

Herzl’s theory of the state is simplistic. He rejects Rousseau’s Social Contract out of hand, instead grasping at the Roman Empire’s concept of “gestor” — advocate. The role of “gestor” is played by the Society of the Jews. “This organ of the national movement, the nature and functions of which we are at last dealing with, will, in fact, be created before everything else. Its formation is perfectly simple. It will take shape among those energetic Jews to whom I imparted my scheme in London.” The “energetic Jews” Herzl was referring to were members of the Maccabean Club in London, with whom he met in 1895.

In describing how the land would be occupied by the new settlers, Herzl writes, “In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews.” Herzl, the cultured Viennese idealist, would never have imagined today’s hilltop settlers of the West Bank.

Herzl did not have a democracy in mind, nor would differences of opinion be permitted in the new state: “I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit in our people, which has now degenerated into petty vanity. Many of the institutions of Venice pass through my mind; but all that which caused the ruin of Venice must be carefully avoided. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others, in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation, and wish to be the most modern in the world. Our people, who are receiving the new country from the Society, will also thankfully accept the new constitution it offers them. Should any opposition manifest itself, the Society will suppress it. The Society cannot permit the exercise of its functions to be interpreted by short-sighted or ill-disposed individuals.” It seems he got his wish.

Today the state that Herzl envisioned still operates without a constitution. Its borders remain in dispute. Its citizens argue whether they are Jews or Israelis. Israel has greater religious diversity than the United States owing to large Palestinian, Bedouin, and non-Jewish European groups. And a million of its citizens live abroad.

After Thanksgiving I was looking for something in my bookshelf when I found a book I’d never bought. It was Glenn Beck’s Broke. When I opened the cover it contained an effusive recommendation — from me! — and a cryptic note: “15 of 16.” It dawned on me that I’d been pranked.

This set me looking for the rest. Of course the principal conspirators — my brother-in-law, sister-in-law, and son — were messing with my head. There were actually only 14 more. If I didn’t have the right number, they certainly had mine.

And what a collection it was!

• America by Heart by Sarah Palin, a dunce who can now be forgiven somewhat when compared to her male counterpart running the country
• Broke by Glenn Beck, two parts conspiracy theory and one part crackpot economics exploration
• Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, by Glenn Beck (again) — a guy who thinks he’s Thomas Paine but is really just a pain without any common sense
• Decision Points by hapless Decider-in-Chief, George W. Bush, a dishonest, sanitized memoir of his many failures and weaknesses masquerading as success and strength
• Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America by white supremacist Ann Coulter, who picked a book that describes her to a tee
• Godless by VDARE and Aryan Nation darling Ann Coulter, sins of liberal atheists from Willie Horton to the Walkman
• More than Money by Neil Cavuto, uplifting stories of CEOs who triumphed despite their white privilege
• One Nation by narcoleptic fundamentalist surgeon Ben Carson, a meditation on what really enslaves and plagues America — and, surprise! — it’s nothing that would occur to any rational human being
• Slouching Towards Gomorrah by Robert Bork, which puts a cold white finger on what’s really wrong with America — pestilential strivings for democracy and equality
• The Case Against Barak Obama by David Freddoso, a hatchet job on Obama (prior to his other racist book, Gangster Government: Barak Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy)
• The Death of Outrage by William Bennett, a hit piece on Bill Clinton that reminds us that there really is a vast right wing conspiracy
• The Tyranny of Gun Control by conspiracy theorist and gun nut Jacob Hornberger and lover of all things Austrian Richard Ebeling
• The Way Things Ought to Be by oxycodone connoisseur Rush Limbaugh, unhinged rants on blacks, gays, women, law and order, and Hollywood liberals
• To Renew America by serial adulterer and well-educated “deplorable” Newt Gingrich, on “reasserting the values of American civilization” — code for beefing up American hyper-capitalism and racism
• Who’s Looking Out for You? by Bill O’Reilly (with a dedication to Roger Ailes), which attacks people who don’t take responsibility for their actions or the ill that befalls them– like, for instance, black people and women [including those he personally sexually abused]

My new collection had been repurposed from a library book sale that had no buyers for them. My sister-in-law’s wicked sense of humor provided an alternative to the town dump.

I related this experience to friends who thought it was pretty funny — something they’d love to do to bleeding hearts of their own.

Well. I just happened to have a box of books they could use.

I confess, I bought Reni Eddo-Lodge’s “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” for its provocative title. As American democracy unravels and the ugly white supremacy it was all built on emerges like Dorian Gray’s portrait, I have noticed many black Americans simply giving up on white Americans. Sadly, that includes me. Fortunately, and despite the title of her book, Eddo-Lodge has kept talking about race — to whites and blacks alike.

The book offers reader a great overview of British race problems — which are, not surprisingly, much like our own in America. Police killings, redlining, civil rights abuses, organized racists and nationalists, disappointing liberals — race in Britain could be a parallel universe, though it has its own features. Second, this is a book by a black British feminist, which offers us a view of the intersection between race and gender. And as a second-generation Briton, Eddo-Lodge also discusses how class and wealth intersect as well.

Eddo-Lodge has a wonderful chapter that differentiates structural racism from raw bigotry, and she takes an effective stab at white privilege and the notion of so-called “reverse racism.” In another chapter she interviews far-right BNP leader Nick Griffin. In another she describes how feminism was a gateway to her understanding of race. And she has much to say about white feminists.

One of the best lines in the book comes from the ending of the chapter “Fear of a Black Planet”:

“The paradox, of course, is that those who oppose anti-racism have worked themselves into quite the double-bind. It’s a bit of a Schroedinger’s cat situation. If, as they say, racism doesn’t exist, and black people have nothing to complain about, why are they so afraid of white people becoming the new minority?”

“Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” is filled with statistics, polls, case studies, and individual stories; and it ends with thirteen pages of footnotes. But not before offering readers suggestions on fighting racism — or staying sane while surviving it.

Review of “The True Flag” by Stephen Kinzer (ISBN 9781627792165)

Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag is an account of the moment the United States embraced Empire and never again looked back. The U.S. had already taken Native American and Mexican land by force and tasted victory in Cuba. Now it was contemplating making the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam – and Hawaii – permanent colonies. Powerful business and political interests, including Theodore Roosevelt, who had made a name for himself on San Juan Hill in Cuba, were unapologetic advocates of empire.

For the Imperialists there was little difference between taking Texas or the Philippines. From the moment the U.S. became a nation, Thomas Jefferson described America as a new empire and set forth the goal of taking Spanish territory when “our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.”

But in 1898 there was a powerful, national “Anti-Imperialist League” – founded in Massachusetts, with at least a hundred chapters. It was led by former Senator and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, magnate Andrew Carnegie, labor chief Samuel Gompers, civil rights advocate Booker T. Washington, Democratic Party leader William Jennings Bryant, co-founder of the Republican Party George Bouthwell, former presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison – all opposed the Treaty of Paris advanced by President William McKinley that would foist “Christian” rule over the “niggers” and savages of the Philippines.

For over a month the issue was debated in the Senate and the true soul of American Imperialism was bared and permanently read into the Congressional Record. Kinzer makes use of the Record, as well as contemporary newspaper accounts in his excellent book.

Behind the scenes were the Imperialists – Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and Senators from mainly what we would now call the red states. American industry wanted to expand beyond its limited trade with Europe, the states of the North had tasted victory in the Civil War, and suddenly there were new enemies and new markets to conquer. Finally, the crumbs of Spain’s disintegrating empire were simply too tempting to resist, and the Philippines were seen as a stepping-stone to China. Nationalistic, “jingoistic” fervor gripped the nation, and it was not merely industry and commerce itching for war – it was also the average American who was aching for conquest.

While debate over America’s soul was raging in the Senate – and this is how serious the moral risks of Imperialism were seen at the time – the Philippines had already been occupied. In what even at that time had become standard operating procedure, President McKinley instructed General Arthur MacArthur (father of General Douglas MacArthur) to provoke a military response from the Philippine military. The resulting massacre claimed 3,000 Filipino and 60 American lives and galvanized public opinion in favor of possession of the islands.

On the same day that the battle in Manila occurred, three American newspapers published a new poem by Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden: the United States and the Philippine Islands.” Kipling’s work was everything Americans wanted to hear, and had been specifically written for the occasion:

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;

This was an anthem for Christian warriors. This was a rationale for conquest. Moreover, it was a glorification of a better race performing its Christian duty to serve their captives’ needs, these “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” and – curiously – to “veil the threat of terror.”

Since the beginnings of Imperial America, the threat of terror from non-Christians and non-white has always been a rationale for occupation.

The final nail in the coffin of American anti-Imperialism was the betrayal by William Jennings Bryan, head of the Democratic Party, who decided to play along with the Republican Imperialists, supporting the Treaty of Paris, and then begging for Philippine independence. That was his shockingly naive strategy. Bryan, who saw himself as a “pragmatic progressive,” managed to shake the resolve of at least a dozen Democrats, who ended up voting with the Republicans.

Senator Eugene Hale of Maine, a fundamentalist who cheered the U.S. acquisition of Hawaii because of his state’s many missionaries, was nevertheless shocked by the bloody Filipino insurgency and the brutal manner in which is was suppressed: “More Filipinos have been killed by the guns of our army and navy than were patriots killed in any six battles of the Revolutionary War. […] The slaughter of people in no way equal to us […] has stupefied the American mind. No one has said that our mission of commerce and of the gospel was to be preceded by the slaughter of thousands of persons.”

But senators like Hale had been deceiving themselves all along. McKinley and his generals certainly anticipated the slaughter. They planned it.

The Imperialists ran their victory lap and boasted that the United States was now the most fearsome military in the world. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge felt no need to address the East Coast elites or their swishy European friends. After the U.S. victory over the Filipinos, Beveridge did what today’s chickenhawk Congressmen do – traveled to the Philippines on a “fact-finding mission” and met with the American occupation commander, General Elwell Otis, who was fighting an insurgency with 30,000 troops. Like today’s Senators who strap on the kevlar and pose for patriotic constituents, Beveridge did all that and thanked the troops for their service. American troops, he said, were “Saxon types” with “racial virtue in their veins.” They were “manifest destiny personified.”

“We are the most militant nation on earth,” Beveridge crowed. “We have more of the world, we know more of the world, we are better prepared to bless the world and thus to bless ourselves. The great people of the American Republic, from whom flow all our large and elemental movements, feel that the day of our empire, as a soverign force of earth, is in its first grey dawn.”

And Beveridge had nailed it. This, the theme of Kinzer’s book, was indeed the grey dawn in which the American empire was born. Or at least its paternity acknowledged.

The story ends, as we know, with the United States committing war crimes in the Philippines, including mass slaughter of civilians and the use of an early form of waterboarding, carving out what is now an American gulag in Guantanamo, Cuba, and making the other seized territories permanent gifts to pineapple barons and American sweatshops. Eventually Hawaii became a state. Puerto Rico was plundered by Congress, victimized by investment schemes created for industry that financially bankrupted the island for generations to come.

Now, over a century later, the only thing that’s changed is that a modern-day “Anti-Imperialist League” is all but unimaginable in a nation at permanent war for generations. And Democrats and Republicans are still unanimous in continuing to take up the “White Man’s Burden” – invading any land they fancy and preempting any threat of terror from sullen brown devils with their childish, savage ways.

* * *

Earlier this year Terry Gross did an interview with Stephen Kinzer on Fresh Air.

Review of “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (ISBN 9781400079490)

This book, written in 2004, is one of those – like The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and It Couldn’t Happen Here – books that have had second lives following Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Philip Roth imagines an America that finally gives in to its darkest xenophobic impulses. His real-life hometown near Newark, New Jersey, experiences first one shock, then another, then another, and another, as fascism creeps into the White House under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. The story Roth tells is a slow-moving nightmare – and it really resonates because a nightmare is precisely what we are living in now.

Lindbergh, of course, really did have a real-life flirtation with Nazism, even accepting an award from Hermann Göring.

Roth’s childhood, re-imagined in terrific detail, doesn’t need to stray too far from real American history because intolerance and nativism was baked into the national cake. Rich white plantation owners gave way to automotive magnates like Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent featured headlines like “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” But with an epidemic of Islamophobia and Brown People Phobia today, hate-peddling billionaires like the Kochs, Mercers, and Adelsons, and modern day equivalents of the Dearborn Independent, we haven’t moved the needle a millimeter since 1920.

Much of Roth’s story is about political conflicts within his own Jewish family, which become a lens into the Jewish community of the time – or maybe the one of today. Roth’s fictional brother Sandy is a self-hating Jew, as is his fictional aunt Evelyn and her husband, Lindbergh sycophant Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf – a man who never met a Nazi he didn’t like. This brings to mind the curious relationship between the right-wing Jewish community of 2017 and the Trump Administration. Our modern day Bengelsdorfs – settler-ambassador David Friedman and “Rabbi to the Stars” Shmuley Boteach – now occupy prominent positions in and around the most xenophobic presidency of all time.

For a book designed to make you think, The Plot Against America also has one hell of a great plot. Father Coughlin, Walter Winchell, Fiorella LaGuardia and hundreds of real historical figures make believable appearances in this tale of what coulda, mighta been – could have easily been. For those who don’t know their history, there’s even a postscript that fills in some blanks.

I won’t spoil the book by giving anything away. Needless to say, the Jews of America don’t come out unscathed.

But Roth’s insights into the ease with which the United States can slide into fascism can’t be ignored. This is an argument, a though experiment even, and Roth makes his case.

Philip Roth understood in 2004 how easily, even wordlessly, a sitting president could unleash a pogrom on a helpless minority – and his choice of words gave me the chills for its accuracy and prescience:

The week after the September assault on Detroit’s Jews – which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan’s governor nor the city’s mayor – new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell’s enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he’d instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself – who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard stationed beside him – explained by the “climate of hate” emanating from the White House.

Five stars.

I received “What We Do Now” as a gift for making a contribution to Democracy for America (DFA).

“What We Do Now” is 200+ pages containing 27 short essays or excerpts from speeches by a number of liberal politicians, activists and writers. They include VT Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote about the six American banks that represent 60% of the American GDP; MA Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the importance of crafting a coherent economic message; Anthony Romero of the ACLU, on the dangers our democracy faces – all the usual suspects weighing in on all the usual issues. And I don’t mean to make light of them.

But after two months into the Trump presidency, I dare say we are already doing precisely what the roster of authors suggest – without having read them first. Most of us have already figured out the demagogue’s media tricks, as George Lakoff deconstructs them. And the fact that his own supporters will suffer the most, as Paul Krugman points out. We know what to expect economically, politically, and culturally. And we’re resisting.

Linda Sarsour’s essay was my personal favorite, followed by Alan Lichtman’s piece on rebuilding the Democratic Party. Sarsour takes just the right tone of stridency and progressive opposition. Lichtman, on the other hand, should be required reading (and re-reading) as a warning of how difficult it is going to be to convince Democratic centrists they were wrong. Lichtman betrayed the most partisan bias of any of the authors in the book and is clearly both a Clinton fan and a TPP proponent. But he mis-characterized opposition to the Trans-Pacific trade bill as the “rat-trap of protectionism” and didn’t bother to mention the corporate goodies buried in the TPP that were so problematic for progressives. On this Lichtman can’t see any difference between Trump and Sanders, and this is a form of blindness.

Thus, “What We Do Now” perfectly encapsulates ongoing conflicts and contradictions within the Democratic Party. For DFA to reward me with a book containing an essay by Bernie and another by a Hillary surrogate tells me the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is far from over.

Without much leadership from the Democratic Party a resistance movement has arisen. Liberals and progressives are making daily calls, attending meetings, writing letters, attending marches and rallies – all in defense of “what we once had.” The resistance is encouraging, but social and political movements cannot be based entirely on nostalgia – regardless of the Republican Party’s fleeting success with it. If we are honest, we have to recognize that the world we created is not that rosy. We can do better.

This was at least where my mind wandered after reading Mohsin Hamid’s On the Dangers of Nostalgia.

Hamid is a Pakistani novelist perhaps best known for the book (and film) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He writes that we seek solace in nostalgia because the world is spinning so fast. We fantasize that the men and women of the past were more confident and secure in their roles and their work than we are today. We understand the technology of the age of toasters. Robotics scares the hell out of us. We watch TV and search the internet, but the fictions and connections we are really looking for are much deeper and older, more primal. Our identities are, in part and in fact, stories. And we are story tellers. Why retreat to the past, then, when we can create new stories for an even better future? Read Hamid’s complete article here.

* * *

And – speaking of reading – people tend to read mainly what fits or confirms their pre-existing views. Democrats and Conservatives literally read different news and hear different opinions. But if you really want to know your political adversary, you need to know what goes on inside his pointy little head. There is some disagreement whether it was Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or Mario Puzo who came up with the quote, but “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is good advice no matter who said it.

Republicans certainly understand this rule – know what the competition is up to. So even though it hurts, tune into the president’s speech tonight at https://www.whitehouse.gov/.

* * *

Finally – speaking of rejecting nostalgia in favor of a better future – Massachusetts Senate Bill S.291 proposes banning “Indian” names as school mascots. This would cost my own town of Dartmouth a couple dollars to change. But it would finally end an insult similar to that of turning Black jockeys into lawn ornaments or reducing Native Americans to wood statuary in front of cigar shops. “Indians” are people, not mascots. If you really can’t think up a new mascot that belongs on your school’s front lawn, try a gnome, smurf, or a pink flamingo.

Some may object to this as “political correctness” – but what does this phrase really mean other than civility? It’s long overdue that this kind of unthinking insensitivity and low-grade racism ended. As the rest of the country plunges deeper into racism and xenophobia, it would be rather sweet if a few oases of sanity and kindness, like our own Bay State, shone a little light into the nation’s heart of darkness.

Regarding my summary of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an anonymous reader wrote to correct me on the time period in which the book was written and to do a much better job of explaining Alinsky’s purpose than I did. – Thanks.

Alinsky didn’t write Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years, He published it in 1971 during the Nixon years. 

I worked with Alinsky. Contrary to the likes of Gingrich, Saul was not a Marxist. He was a old-fashioned American patriot who frequently quoted the Founding Fathers.

One of Alinsky’s favorite quotes – mine too – and which he used to introduce an earlier book I also recommend entitled Reveille For Radicals, is from Thomas Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern for it, but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.” 

Saul’s objective was not mere resistance. People tend to focus on Saul’s tactics but his objective – the objective of Alinsky style community organization –  was participatory democracy. No less than to make US style representative democracy work the way the founders intended. Here I would recommend you go back and take a look at [the ending of] Obama’s last State of the Union.

Saul’s tactics, based in life-long experience, close observation and study under everyone from UC sociology professors to John L. Lewis and Frank Nitti – what he called called “applied social science” – were designed to involve – to enfranchise – those who were excluded from civic decision-making that effected their lives. 

Alinsky used confrontation over issues important to peoples’ lives to get them involved. He started off with what he called “fast, easy victories” to give people confidence they could actually get things accomplished and to convince others to join the effort so it would be possible to take on bigger and bigger projects. In addition to political tactics Saul  taught leadership skills, research skills, fund-raising skills, how to prioritize and pursue goals and how to build not only a voluntary neighborhood organization but a coalition of voluntary associations.  

If everyone’s involved, all interests represented – and people are informed about available options and the implications of those options – Saul figured things would turn out at better than they would otherwise. What he called “enlightened self-interest.” An informed, involved citizenry was an article of faith with him as distinct from those who rely on demagoguery and/or ideology for their answers. Saul was a big fan of checks and balances. 

The idea that an educated citizenry is essential to representative democracy is of course also basic to American style democracy as envisioned by people like Jefferson and Franklin. 

Basically, Saul was a teacher – saw himself that way and saw Alinsky-style organizers that way too.  

Saul taught people citizenship – how to become effectively and productively involved.

Saul  believed therein lay the best available answers. The opposite of those who purposefully seek to disenlighten because an enlightened citizenry would never buy what they are trying to sell.

Newt Gingrich created the meme that Saul Alinsky was the Machiavelli behind Obama. Since then, the Right-wing blogosphere has been littered with denunciations of Alinsky. This has also resulted in a cottage industry of pamphlets, articles, and spinoffs like “Rules for Conservatives” by Michael Master, Jerome Corsi’s “Saul Alinsky: the Evil Genius behind Obama,” Will Clark’s “Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky and their Useful Idiots,” Richard Bledsoe’s “Can Saul Alinsky be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and Post-Obama Era,” and, well, you get the idea. Not to mention Ben Carson’s claims that Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. The Right doesn’t like it when the little guy fights back.

Alinsky learned his lessons in organizing generations ago and wrote the book Rules for Radicals during the Reagan years. He knew what kind of stacked deck workers play against. And he knew full-well what effect he had on the Right – “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.'” Well, Alinsky’s methods worked, and his enemies respected him. Despite all their venom, the Tea Party eagerly adapted Alinsky’s methods successfully. And in fact the following quotes from “Rules for Radicals” were taken from a Right-winger who studied him in depth. Alinsky saw politics precisely as the Right does – as all-out war. And in times of war one does not always take the genteel high road.

In the quotes below, it’s clear Donald Trump uses many of Alinsky’s principles, and it’s also clear how poorly most Liberals do. Alinsky’s ideas may seem alien to people unaccustomed to street fighting. But we have now entered a period where politics has got to get a little rough.

* * *

First, excerpts from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

• This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience — and gives full respect to the other’s values — would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. — P. xviii
• As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. — P. xix
• “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. — xxi
• A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change, but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution. — xxii
• But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: “Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing — but this only swings : people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.” — xxiii
• The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins — that is, until the late evening newscast, when suddenly we are plunged into the world as it is. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest. Two examples would be the priest who wants to be a bishop and bootlicks and politicks his way up, justifying it with the rationale, “After I get to be bishop I’ll use my office for Christian reformation,” or the businessman who reasons, “First I’ll make my million and after that I’ll go for the real things in life,” Unfortunately one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric or the first million, and then one says, “I’ll wait until I’m a cardinal and then I can be more effective,” or “I can do a lot more after I get two million” — and so it goes. In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. — P.12-13
• It is not a world of peace and beauty and dispassionate rationality, but as Henry James once wrote, “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” Henry James’ statement is an affirmation of that of Job: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare…” — P.14
• The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced for the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not men. — P.26
• One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. — P.26
• …The secretary inquired how Churchill, the leading British anti-communist, could reconcile himself to being on the same side as the Soviets. Would Churchill find it embarrassing and difficult to ask his government to support the communists? Churchill’s reply was clear and unequivocal: “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” — P.29
• The fifth rules of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis — will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. — P.32
• The seventh rule of ethics and means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success and failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. P.34
• The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. — P.35
• The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. …the essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was. — P.36-37
• Eight months after securing independence (from the British), the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them. — P.43
• All effective actions require the passport of morality. — P.44
• But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead. — P.59
• The organizer becomes a carrier for the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel. — P.72
• To realistically appraise and anticipate the probably reactions of the enemy, he must be able to identify with them, too, in his imagination and foresee their reactions to his actions. — P.74
• With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason — this is a fight with a windmill. — P.76
• The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion. — P.96
• If the organizer begins with an affirmation of love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. — P.98
• The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” — P.100
• The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. — P.116-117
• THE THIRTEEN RULES – Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. …The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. …the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. …the fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. …the sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. …the seventh rule : is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. …the eighth rule: Keep the pressure on. …the ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than : the thing itself. The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. …The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter-side. …The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. …The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. — P.126-129
• One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act. — P.134
• It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger. — P.134-135
• I have on occasion remarked that I felt confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday. — P.150
• For example, since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. No organizations, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations. This is what that great revolutionary, Paul of Tarsus, knew when he wrote to the Corinthians: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter killeth.” — P.152
• Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our populations — with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they are here and will be. — P.189

* * *

David Frum is a prominent Neoconservative who worked for the Bush administration. Many of his foreign policy prescriptions are pretty repellent. But for Frum, as with many Neocons, Trump’s proto-fascism is so frightening that he’s offering advice to the Atlantic Monthly’s liberal readers:

“It’s possible I’m not the right person to offer the following analysis. Yet it’s also a good rule to seek wisdom wherever it may be found.”

And Frum’s counsel on strategy is pretty sound. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like Alinsky’s:

• The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are. You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic. Wave the flag, be more inclusive. Disinviting pro-Life women from the Women’s March may have been an error. Invite more cops and veterans. Don’t be so partisan. Be inclusive. Be dignified. Don’t let Trump set the tone.
• Strategic thinking, inclusive action. The military formula is – superior force at a single point. OWS fizzled because it was diffuse. Be selective with demands that can be achieved. And go after specifics related to Trump – “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” – “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” – “Divest from the companies.” – Limited “asks” with broad appeal.
• Protests are fun but meetings are effective. Bodies in the street represent potential power, not necessarily real power. What happens when people get on the bus and go home? In contrast, it’s the mundane day-to-day organizing that gets things done. Less hair-splitting, more organizing. Relentlessly use the kind of tactics Indivisible spells out to keep steady pressure on elected officials.

Review of “Von Wutbürgern und Brandstiftern” by Hajo Funke (ISBN 9783945256640)

This is a book review, but it’s not entirely that.

The title of Hajo Funke’s book translates to roughly “Of Angry Citizens and Arsonists” – which describes the break with polite center-right politics and an embrace of angry rhetoric and violence by native Germans, and the rise of neo-Nazi and xenophobic groups. This is a shockingly familiar story in Germany but one also familiar in almost every Western nation.

Author’s Introduction

Funke introduces the German Extreme Right: Pegida, the NPD, and the AFD. Pegida is now also a political party and is in Denmark. The AFD cultivates the appearance of a dry, conservative economics-focused party but its base is the radical right consisting of members of the NPD (a barely-legal party that never got much traction), Pegida (primarily a hate group for xenophobes), the German “Identitäre Bewegung” (white supremacist “Identitarian movement”), and the “Institut für Staatspolitik” (the National Policy Institute, founded in 2000), which sees itself as the voice of Germany’s “New Right.”

But Germany’s New Right is not so different from the old in its connection to Nazism. In the USA Richard Spencer’s “National Policy Institute” (founded five years later) seems to be a knock-off of the Institut für Staatspolitik – and virtually every feature of German neo-Nazism exists in the United States. This is one reason I found Funke’s book so fascinating and chilling.

Funke frames the political climate in Germany. He paints a picture of alienated young Muslims sitting in chat rooms and working themselves up to acts of violence. But this is also what happens with angry white Germans. Both seek online confirmation for their beliefs and become angrier by the minute. And for the Wutbürger somebody has to pay. Germans found an example in Jörg Haider of the FPÖ in Austria, who offered simple solutions – get out of the EU; kick out foreigners; and shut the borders. Then Austria would be great. Sound famliar?

Of course real reasons are more complex. Geopolitical issues – such as Western nations destabilizing the Middle East – created refugees. The rise of ISIS was a consequence of Western nations creating failed states. The economic meltdown of 2008 wasn’t created by Syrian asylum seekers, nor was income inequality within Western nations, nor were the bankruptcies of southern European nations. Global Capitalism, globalism, and unstable markets are not a refugee issue. But simple minds cry out for simple solutions.

Funke cites Oliver Nachtwey’s book on economic decline in Germany – the end of the “German dream” that has shaken those who thought their place was secure in the modern BRD. Low-paying MacJobs are proliferating just as elsewhere in global Capitalism, and the social safety net has disappeared. People are on their own and they’re angry.

Economic inequality engenders political inequality and political instability. Funke points to Armin Schäfer’s work on participatory democracy. Das Volk may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They know that the big decisions are not made by little people – even in a benign liberal “democracy.” Consequently voters often sit out elections. Why bother? It’s all been decided. And the press? They’re run by elites, right-populists tell voters.

Funke cites Wolfgang Streeck’s “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Streeck writes of the frequent crises of Capitalism, the profit-taking that occurs even when markets fail, and of the austerity programs and the sacrifices citizens must make in order to prop up the markets. The”elites,” say right-wing populists, always manage to suck money out of the system while the little guy suffers. And this is correct, although one right-wing “populist” is himself a billionaire sucking money out of the system. But the rightwing-populist cannot – and will not – repudiate Capitalism or point fingers at the real criminals. Another enemy must be found.

As the economic middle class becomes thinner and more vulnerable, the stability of the political center of the middle class becomes weaker and it can move in unexpected directions. Zick and Klein’s book “Fragile Mitte” describes this phenomenon and offers reasons for the country’s move to the right: although economically weaker, they slavishly align themselves with the ruling class.

Finally, Funke enumerates a few of the right-wing demagogues busy at work in Europe: Norbert Hofer and Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria; Marine Le Pen in France; Geerd Wilders in the Netherlands; and Nigel Farage in Britain.

Right-wing demogogues claim the EU takes jobs away from workers; that the EU imposes quotas on refugees. Globalism is your enemy, say the populists, because it imposes a second set of laws over nations, injuring sovereignty and productivity. As for NATO, only the NPD in Germany is opposed. For the AFD the Defense industry is nation and business friendly. Foreigners are the problem. Never is it global Capitalism because neo-Nazis don’t really want to fix an unjust system. They just want to be the ones to run it.

Against Human Dignity

The section describes how easily hate speech becomes acts of hate. When the far-right start calling for the expulsion of foreigners, it’s not long before supporters start fire-bombing them. The “Mitte-Studie” from the University of Leipzig showed that the middle class (AFD members especially) were increasingly likely to be hostile to foreigners and evinced anti-democratic and authoritarian attitudes. A surprising number also approved of a dictator. In the German states where right-wing parties were politically strongest there were more physical attacks.

PEGIDA – Unleashed resentment

Pegida’s first demonstration was in Dresden in October 2014, where over 10,000 people protested foreigners and the nation’s asylum laws. It was founded by Lutz Bachmann, who apparently loves Hitler, and has grown to at least 40,000 members, at one point having 200,000 Facebook page supporters. The University of Göttingen did a study of the typical Pegida member: 80% male; 70% without religion; 80% in a relationship; average income, most late thirties to fifties. 90% were unhappy with the way democracy worked. And they were angry. This is a Trump supporter.

AFD: Alternative for Germany – Populist in form, Extreme Right in substance

In the preceding chapter Funke goes through a list of Pegida organizations in each of the German states, as well as showing links to the NPD and the AFD. The AFD is a party whose platform is a bland enumeration of mostly economic policy, which seems to place it on even footing with the CDU. However, the AFD has a “wing” of extremists who regularly coordinate work with Pegida and the NPD. In many ways, they are all interchangeable.

Originally the AFD was constituted as an economic opponent of the Euro and as a political opponent of the CDU. It was formed by an economics professor, Bernd Lucke, and a former IBM (Europe) executive, Hans-Olaf Henkel. Both opposed the Euro but found the international company they were in – Marine Le Pen in France, for example – distastful.

But it wasn’t long before they were deposed (see the “Erfurt resolution” of March 2015) by extreme right-wing members Björn Höcke, André Poggenburg, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, Alexander Gauland, and Frauke Petry, who replaced “technocrats” and those “without vision” with “patriots” capable of taking the fight to the mainstream parties, the media, and “social experimentation.”

Funke footnotes a voting rights survey with figures on attacks against foreigners, mainly Muslims. On the “wahlrecht” website there is a page that shows percentages each party would get if an election were held today. In Baden-Württemberg, Saxony, Thüringen, and Sachsen-Anhalt the AFD is running second place behind the CDU. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they lead. They are not yet ready to take on everyone and take over the government. But they’re gaining on the CDU.

Björn Höcke, one of the party leaders, is the motor driving the extreme right transformation of the AFD. Höcke has been trying to Nazi-fy the party by making it more Völkisch – a racial adjective meaning organic, tribal, and “native” in a genetic sense. Even Frauke Petry, the telegenic, well-spoken and English-fluent face of the party, has defended the use of this old Nazi adjective. It is a perfect example of a German dog whistle. The neo-Nazis for whom the party speaks know exactly what the term really means. The party is also unapologetically anti-Semitic, although it keeps trying to appeal to Zionists on the basis of shared commitment to nationalism and ethnocentrism.

Despite the many links between the AFD and the NPD and Pegida, AFD leadership has sought to keep a safe distance from more violent elements of the other two movements. In May 2016 the party passed a resolution playing down these connections. But Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the party’s “go to” man for all things anti-Islamic, condemned the move while praising Pegida: “Pegida exudes calm and discipline, equanimity and sensibility.” Tillschneider sees the AFD’s role as carrying Pegida’s protests into parliament. Alexander Gauland, another AFD leader, describes the relationship this way: the AFD and Pegida are “naturally linked.”

Funke offers many examples of fuzzy lines between the three extremist groups. Pegida and the NPD have strong relationships to resurgent Nazism and a cadre of neo-Nazi members. The AFD takes pains to distance itself from them, creating “deniability,” but the AFD’s message is still crafted to appeal to them, and AFD leadership praises their extreme brethren. The AFD also refuses to condemn violence against foreigners. Bottom line – neo-Nazism is a unified movement in Germany. Only at the top is there a thin veneer of respectability – and even that is often unmasked by leaked internal documents or YouTube videos of private meetings. Americans should recognize the frightening similarities between German and US politics.

The extreme “New Right”

As if all these angry xenophobes were not bad enough, Germany has a problem with white supremacy. The Identitarian Movement and what we call the “Alt-Right” here in the USA have found a home in Pegida and the AFD.

In 2000 Götz Kubitschek founded the “Institut für Staatspolitik,” which publishes “Sezession,” and sees itself as thinkers of the “New Right.” Both journal and founder have close relationships to all three extremist organizations as well as the Identitarian Movement. Sezession regularly attacks the “lying press” and majority-elected political “elites.” The American Alt-Right happily reproduces these materials, although Americans now have their own Kubitschek in Richard Spencer who has a similar journal. In Austria, where voters narrowly rejected an Identitarian candidate, a 2014 Sora Institute poll showed 40% think Nazis weren’t so bad and 30% liked the idea of a Führer – numbers that doubled since the 2008 economic crisis.

Kubitschek is a disciple of Armin Mohler, credited as an “early thinker” of the New Right. Mohler described himself as a fascist and deserted from the Swiss army to join the SS. He was also an admirer of Mussolini. Kubitschek is a pal of the extreme-right publisher of the short-lived Compact magazine, Jürgen Elsässer. One issue of the defunct magazine featured a roundtable with AFD members on white supremacy.

In Germany the Identitarian movement was resuscitated from outlawed French neo-Nazism, “Génération Identitaire,” which again has its American admirers. Alain de Benoist developed a racist ideology for the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) and was embraced by both German New Right and American Alt-Right. He advocates a type of Apartheid and cultural hegemony: “What the ND wants is a federal Europe, founded on the principle of subsidiarity…” This Catholic concept on the surface sounds a bit like federalism, but it really means turning your back on the rest of society. Many Catholics are appalled at the corruption of the principle, but it is part of the AFD’s platform.

Kubitschek is also knee-deep in the Identitarian movement, along with Pegida supporter Felix Menzel, editor of the “Blaue Narzisse” and whom American admirers would call a Christian Identitarian. Kubitschek has close relationships with Austrian neo-fascists and neo-Nazis. To Identitarians the problem is “population transfer.” They see themselves being replaced. The former head of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, had a catchy title in his book, “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany does away with itself). But if the problem is “population transfer,” transfer is also the solution. Identitarians believe multiculturalism must be fought and foreigners expelled. Trump has promised the forced expulsion of 11 milllion foreigners and 53% of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Ethnosupremacy is not just for Nazis anymore.

Limits to opposing the Right

Germany’s “liberal democracy” can’t (or won’t) fight the extreme right as it once did – despite an uptick in rightwing terror attacks. In Brandenburg rightwing groups have started doing “evening strolls” – intended to send a chilling message to immigrants. AFD parliamentarians propose the most hateful policies in the Bundesrat. Is this “democracy at work? Or”democracy doing away with itself?” And both local police and national security agencies now have extremists within their ranks. When a permanent state of emergency is declared, you can bet it won’t be by moderates.

This is a terrifying book, but at the end of the day it’s a German problem. Germans had better wake the hell up and crack down on these groups before it’s too late.

Ditto for us.

Review of “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson (ISBN 9781844670864)

Benedict Anderson writes in a florid style, using metaphors where descriptive phrases would be more useful, which often forces you to reread a long paragraph in order to find the simple idea buried within. It is quite annoying, yet Anderson’s distillation of the features of nationalism is valuable for a patient reader. That said, I don’t agree with everything he writes, as you will see.

“Imagined Communities” takes us through many phases and factors in the development of nationalist thought. Anderson makes a few initial generalizations: that nationalists insist their nations are far older than historians would agree; that nationalism is “normal”; that pan-nationalism is thought to be aberrant; that the political power of nationalism is incredibly strong when compared to its thin and flimsy philosophical foundation and its incoherence. We seem to be dealing here with something as dangerous and tantalizing as a narcotic.

Anderson’s definition of a “nation” is an “imagined political community” – not merely invented but invented out of whole cloth. Its cultural and psychological roots are a preoccupation with death and sacrifice (example: the unknown soldier). Nationalism on the surface is incredibly similar to religion: it addresses many of the same needs for belonging and individual meaning. In this Anderson takes pains to disavow a causal link, but he points out that nationalism arose just as religion was being eclipsed by secularism in the 18th century.

Looking at nationalism anthropologically, religions and nations share a sacred language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). The sacred language (referred to as a “truth-language”) is necessary for the transmission of sacred texts which convey foundation myths. Consequently nationalists often insist on the use of a particular language since it is central to establishing nationalist narratives and propagating them.

A king’s legitimacy stemmed directly from God. Dynastic rule was possible because one’s father or ur-father was the man God had anointed to lead his people. An easily understood reason for God’s anointing of the king was sacrifice. For example, in Judaism, the near sacrifice of Isaac was necessary to establish legitimacy for the story of biblical Israel that would follow. It involved a truth-language (Hebrew), and cosmology blending seamlessly into history. But when did Abraham actually live? The question has sent historians scrambling for answers. In later years, the story of biblical Israel would become linked to the foundation of a modern state.

Printing and the Reformation weakened “truth languages” as millions of publications were issued in German, French, English, and other “vulgar” languages. When Luther posted his theses, they were printed in German. Protestantism replaced Catholicism, German replaced Latin, and married clerics replaced a supposedly celibate hierarchy led by a Pope whose legitimacy stemmed all the way back to Saint Peter. It was quite a shakeup: language had become the central feature of nationalism, not God.

The Holy Roman Empire operated on Latin which was not only a “truth language” but a pan-national language. When the Church finally lost its absolute control over Europe, the alliances and marriages joining the royalty of diverse nations meant that the royalty did not always speak the language of its subjects. For example, the Habsburgs ruled Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Italians, Ukrainians, and Austro-Germans; the Turks ruled over a similar polyglot empire. And both were hated by everyone – the Habsburgs for their choice of administrative language, German, and the Turks for propagating their language.

But the bourgeoisie did speak the people’s language. To this class was left the responsibility of directly managing peasants, who were happy to have their local languages elevated. Slowly, local (“national”) languages became the standard among not only serfs and middle management, but by the kings themselves.

To language were added additional trappings – flags, inherited nobility, anthems, national stories of sacrifice – all intended to create “buy in” from the serfs. And all “imagined” in the sense that they were actually of fairly recent vintage. Even in the United States, Anderson points out, this was the case. Americans may have been the riffraff of Europe, but each of the founding states had its own anthems, flags, nobility (Penns and Carrolls, for example), their genealogies and generals. A war was fought to preserve an amalgam of states which itself had only existed a couple of generations. But by the time of the Civil War an imagined nation whose legitimacy derived directly from God’s grace had to be preserved at all cost. (I find it interesting that American nationalism seems to have only partially digested European nationalism. In many parts of our country inhabitants still identify with the “Old Country” – Scots/Irish, German, Quebecois (who in turn identify with their Old Country, France), Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and others)

With the establishment of the League of Nations, the “nation-state” became the norm. Empires and dynasties were on the way out. The last European empire dissolved in 1974 with the end of Portuguese dictatorship. By the early 20th Century subjects of former empires all began wanting their own nations too. Arabia, India, Israel… But Imperialism came hand-in-hand with nationalism. By the 19th Century every self-respecting “nation” was expected to have some sort of Imperial project to despoil and pillage neighbors or the Third World.

It is impossible to be honest with one’s citizenry about the reasons for subjugating another people. And it’s impossible to be honest with those brought under the heel. Consequently, propaganda has always been a feature of the nation state. It turns out, the stories invented for legitimizing the subjugation of another people are closely related to the stories invented to establish the legitimacy of one’s own “nation.” And education fulfills this function. Schools have always been necessary for normalizing national values and propagating national myth. It is no coincidence that long after European colonists left India or the Dutch Indies the educational institutions they created still exist. At first the purpose was to instill the values of the settler state, but now the same institutions promote their own fledgling nationalism.

But the lures of nationalism don’t entirely depend on language. Toward the end of his chapter on the last waves of nation-state formation, Anderson brings up the case of Switzerland, a polyglot federation. Many historians contend that Switzerland never really became a state in any real sense before 1813, that in 1891 the Swiss were late-comers to European nationalism. And it wasn’t until this year, right on the verge of the 20th Century, that they decided to look back 600 years and declare the “real origin” of the Swiss nation as the year 1291. They had rehabilitated a long-standing “Confederation” and re-invented it as a “nation.” Schlomo Sand has an even more controversial theory about the “invention” of Israel.

The last waves of nationalism occurred in Africa and Asia. As empires struggled to educate and standardize native-staffed bureaucracies, and as global Capitalism exploited new markets, schools, the media, laws, and language began forming all the trappings of modern nation-states (it took Anderson 3 pages to say this). It wasn’t long before the natives became restless, and then not much longer until they had established their own nationalisms. The 20th Century saw a frenzy of people desperate to form themselves into nations.

* * *

The last part of the book is equally fascinating because Anderson addresses patriotism and racism, both contemporary features of nationalism – especially in the United States.

Anderson contends that patriotism is almost exclusively presented in the language of love – admittedly, love of a very narrow and inflexible sort. Individuals may not deviate from this “love” – expressed as devotion, purity of heart, willingness to sacrifice even one’s life – or they will be hated. Anderson poses the provocative question – “Can the reader think immediately of even three hymns of hate?” (apparently he had not read the third stanza of the “Star Spangled Banner”). Militarism epitomizes the ideal of willingness to sacrifice for the nation, and it shares many of the same features of religion (observe a military funeral – equal parts nationalism and God).

Because we have now encountered a state based on ideology and myth, Anderson makes the case that anti-Semitism and racism are not necessarily derived from nationalism, that their roots are actually based in class. The ruler is divine, the aristocracy well-bred and cultivated, deserving of their rights to govern serfs and peasants. All are protecting the destiny of a people.

“The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of external contaminations. […] The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class rather than nation.”

Anderson goes on to say that, because racism is class-based:

“… on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.”

This assertion is impossible to reconcile with actual history. In Nazi Europe millions of Poles were murdered. In the Americas, colonial powers waged genocidal wars on natives across the seas. The United States is currently waging a war on Muslims half a world away. The atomic bomb was not used against Europeans but against Asians. Life is cheap when Europeans are not involved.

In the British empire Lords were the supreme aristocrats. But in the colonies, even the petit bourgeoisie scrambling for advantage or exiled, could “play aristocrat.” They could have their mansions, cooks, houseboys, and horses. And they could have their slaves. From India to the Americas, brown-skinned people were subjugated to the whims of Eurotrash. And while Anderson’s theory is that this was class-based racism, there seems to be no example of a European people that was ever forced into slavery by other Europeans. Class does not appear to me to be the main factor.

Still, here we are in the New World – New York, New Jersey, New Haven. The colonies were what Anderson calls “doubles” of the Old World. Ethnically we were British, French, German, or Spanish. But the distances between Old and New Worlds made holding together far-flung colonies impossible in the long run. When the United States finally penned a Constitution, it was truly something new – something no longer based on European history, or even its own. There was no mention of Columbus, the Mayflower, or Pilgrims – all that came later.

By the 1830’s, however, the new state was a “nation.” It had a piddling history, its genealogies, some founding myths. People were beginning to ponder what their country was and how they belonged. As always, things had to be invented, facts adjusted, to suit the story. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck and Jim’s friendship is portrayed as a friendship of equals – but Jim is also a slave.

After reading Anderson’s book, I came away thinking that he had somewhat haphazardly synthesized the thinking of other authors on nationalism – Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony Smith. I am particularly fascinated by how nationalism can easily supplant religion. For example, Zionism has largely eclipsed Jewish observance since the Six Day War; and while many Americans no longer take the family to church, they never fail to “support the troops.” In both societies religious militarism is a striking feature (think of the US Air Force Academy or the IDF). And in both there are problems with institutionalized racism – privilege of one ethic group and demonization of another.

But all in all, a useful book to kick off thinking about the anachronistic scourge of nationalism.

Review of “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank (ISBN 9781925228885)

This book explains when the Democratic Party decided to abandon organized labor, befriend Wall Street, and embrace the professional, instead of the working, class. It explains how Bill Clinton put a bullet in the head of an already-injured New Deal, ushered in a new era of “meritocracy” and its close friend, social and economic inequality. It explains how and why all of Obama’s “best and brightest” simply ended up doing what the Republicans had done before them. It explains why — even in Bright Blue states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts — economic inequality has not been addressed or repaired by Democrats. It takes us from Boston to Fall River, one of the poorest cities just a short ride away. It looks at the record of Duval Patrick, once an “Obama Lite” governor, one who started his professional career at Ameriquest and ended up at Bain Capital.

But Democrats can’t help it. This is who they are. Clinton the First, Clinton the Second, Obama, and many other “meritocracy” Democrats draw Frank’s scrutiny. Their friends, the Eric Schmidts, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerbergs, are their idols. Their shared values are with pharmaceutical magnates and software developers, hedge fund managers and dot.com billionaires. Long gone are Democratic friendships with captains of organized labor such as the teamsters or the teachers. Half the time Democrats at war with Labor (think Rahm Emanuel’s and Arne Duncan’s attacks on teachers). The New Democrats are nothing like FDR’s allies of the common man. Instead, they are smug, well-fed, well-educated functionaries, “gatekeepers” who serve the ruling class yet still like to think of themselves as the Democrats of their fathers’ generation — all while betraying them.

They are a separate economic class — themselves neither fish nor fowl, workers nor oligarchs. They have no idea where their allegiances lie. They think they’re voting for the common man but they live, dress, and eat better — and then they wonder why their noble gestures aren’t appreciated.

Frank concludes his book with this:

“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?

Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republicans is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.

What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity – to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest – once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”

I would also add — don’t automatically give your vote to a party that hasn’t earned it.

Review of “Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París, Christina MacSweeney (Translation) (ISBN 9781566894302)

Among Strange Victims has an unlovable protagonist who is content with his peeling walls and his boring daily rituals. He apparently told his family he was attending college but dropped out almost immediately. The description of his day is boring in the extreme, and unfortunately this does not make for good fiction. As he puts it, “one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely.” Sadly, most readers do not have this same strength.

Our lazy protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to identify himself at the beginning of his story, spends considerable time on a “disintegrating” bench in a gazebo, watching people. When he is not doing this he is working in a museum editing press releases and proofreading the catalog. In one chapter we learn how he goes to a cafe, has a cup of tea and returns home with the soggy tea bag, which he hangs on the wall. Gripping narrative – this is not. At about this point the reader is ready to stretch his arms a couple of thousand miles and and throttle the author.

By the time the narrator has accumulated ten teabags on his wall, still not much has happened in the story, which until now has been a tale of boredom, shirking, and masturbation. And then he decides to save the life of a hen in the vacant lot next door. He throws a table into the lot, and goes down to position it as a suitable shelter. Which is when he discovers a grisly bag full of putrefying viscera.

But now we once again enter stagnant waters when his co-worker Cecilia is sent a prank marriage proposal in his name, and she accepts. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name: Rodrigo Saldivar.

The book goes on in his way for many hundreds of thousands of keystrokes, each of them more painful than the one before. There is the mystery of a turd on his bed. Then we meet a BolaÒo type academic slumming in Mexico, an elusive and dissolute philosopher-boxer the academic is studying while living with the narrator’s mother, and a shady gringo who bought a nubile young girl whose urine is used for rituals.

In the end not much is resolved, although we do finally learn who has deposited the turd on the bed.

I am not sure if my quarrel is with the work itself or with the translation, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant, nor a rewarding read. I have limited patience for writers who, rather than invite you into their heads and hearts, try to keep you at arm’s length or deposit turds on the pages of the book you bought from them. The book has an intellectual conceit, but it’s a rather shallow one.

BTW, if you want to see another sample of SaldaÒa ParÌs’s writing, which demonstrates more talent than this first disaster of a novel, here is a piece he wrote for Electric Literature:

http://electricliterature.com/planes-flying-over-a-monster-the-writing-life-in-mexico-city-954a79f43165

For the giveaway pile.

Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)

Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.

Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.

One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.

Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.

But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.

Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.

Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.

A review of “Consequence” by Eric Fair.

I began this book last night and finished it this morning. Although the first person, present tense is grating for the length of an entire book, and Fair still is not fully open with himself or his readers, it was an engrossing read. My three stars reflects an average of four stars for interest yet only two for candor.

What happens to a man who goes off to war? The book certainly answers this question: nightmares, guilt, alcoholism, sometimes death – either by war or the man’s own hand.

How does a man like this reconcile his own religion with what he is ordered to do? I don’t think we ever really get an answer. In his account, Fair’s family expect him to become a pastor like his grandfather, but he is drawn to a darker, physical side, first becoming a policeman, where he learns to deploy violence against people who are always (well, at least in theory) criminals. For the longest time Fair thinks religion will save him, and the book contains a strange account of his interrogation of salafis who tell him how much like them he really is – a thread that really leads nowhere. Aside from Fair’s restlessness and his perpetual life crises, readers never really learn why he avoids the ministry, why he stubbornly clung to Presbyterianism despite it changing in front of his eyes, why he really dropped out of theological school. It wasn’t that his writing was starting to take off; it was something else, unnamed, unexamined.

And why does a man go off to war – especially when many in his family have warned him against it? Fair again avoids fully answering the reader’s questions, but we sense a tremendous restlessness in him that leads him to ignore his father’s and grandmother’s counsel. Fair is obviously a person of well above-average intelligence, and he is given to instrospection and guilt, but he shies away from truly probing the demons that still stir within him.

The book begins with a quote from Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Maimonides was the Arab-Jewish Talmudist who, besides being the Sultan’s physician, wrote Guide for the Perplexed and had much to say on moral conduct. Maimonides counsels the guilty party to approach his victim “again and again until he his forgiven.” Islam requires precisely the same of a wrong-doer, while in Christianity a hall pass signed by Jesus suffices. Unfortunately, all of Fair’s – and Bush and Cheney’s, and Obama’s – victims are now either dead or lost to squalid prisons in places where Americans will fear to go for a long, long time. A dark truth never acknowledged in this book is that there never will be apologies – and there never will be forgiveness for these personal and national sins.

And so in the end Fair falls back on his Christianity – or perhaps just wishful thinking. In his aunt’s words, Eric Fair ends up forgiving himself: “I am just a human kid.”

Review of Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

“Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (ISBN 978-0465059997), by Martin Ford, a former software developer and entrepreneur, begins with a survey of the technology landscape – an over-clocked world where change seems to follow Moore’s Law – doubling in speed every couple of years. Ford paints a picture of the capabilities of robots and the dismal economic climate for humans that has existed since the mid-seventies: real wages are declining; wealth is being concentrated in the hands of 1% of the nation; half of all college graduates are not finding work that can use their college education; even highly-skilled professionals are being replaced by automation; the top 5% now accounting for 40% of all purchasing; and he asks whether tech firms – which pride themselves on “disruptive technology” – will disrupt the entire system. This is a great question – the entire system is indeed heading for a collapse. But Ford does not seriously explore the nature of “the system” – and he is certainly not looking for serious solutions – only bandaids.

Ford examines the “service sector” jobs left to American workers and refutes the notion that they are training grounds for young workers to learn valuable workplace skills. It turns out, actually, that 90% of fast-food workers are over 20, the average age is 35, their median hourly wage is $8.69, and most of them qualify for welfare programs costing taxpayers at least $7 billion a year. And still the fast-food chains are looking at new technology to replace half of their employees with automation. Ford writes that we can expect similar encroachments of robotics into wholesaling operations, retail, and agriculture. Yet, like men waiting for their turn in front of a firing squad, most workers today already see the writing (if not the blood) on the wall. What Ford is telling us is nothing new.

From the beginning of the computer age, even its creators foresaw the threat of human obsolescence. Norbert Wiener argued in a 1949 New York Times piece that there is theoretically no human task that a computer cannot learn and duplicate. In the Sixties, President Johnson convened a panel to write one of those government studies destined to molder in a filing cabinet – this one about the “Triple Revolution” occurring in the United States: human and civil rights; advances in weaponry; and “cybernation” or cybernetic automation. The report concluded that, without oversight and planning, the “nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder.”

But economic planning is for Commies and sissies; and besides, the nation now had an oil crisis, stagflation, Iranian hostages, Sandinistas to fight, medical students to rescue in Granada, and corrupt ex-friends to punish in Panama. The Reagan years marked the beginning of attacks on labor, the rapid ascendency of pro-business advocacy in government – and what in retrospect was a new austerity regime being imposed on American workers. Ford lists seven trends he sees responsible for the misery of workers: stagnant (actually decreasing) wages; decreasing share of the national income by workers and increasing share by corporations (inequality); declining labor force participation (despite women being forced to augment family incomes); long-term unemployment and lack of job creation; soaring wage income inequality; declining opportunity and underemployment by college graduates; and the rise of McJobs and loss of full-time jobs with benefits.

Amazingly, Ford ascribes all these developments to technology. And he feels obliged to explicitly discount three other contributors: globalization (outsourcing and offshoring); financialization (the turn from factories to hedge funds); and politics (trickle down market fundamentalism in Congress and rabid pro-business lobbying from without).

Although Ford’s own graphs show a plunge in the percent of manufacturing jobs from a height of 32% in 1952 to a low of 8% in 2012, his discussion centers on the percentage of foreign products Americans buy from foreign corporations. He writes that the plunge in manufacturing jobs began before NAFTA and, hence, globalization was not the cause. However, labor historians might disagree with Ford. Textile workers, for example, remember the loss of their jobs to Mexico in the Fifties; and Mexicans remember the loss of these very same jobs in the Sixties to Asia. Globalization cannot be linked solely to trade agreements and Ford mistakenly labels globalization a modern phenomenon. Even the first economists, like David Ricardo, had it very much in mind.

Ford correctly nails the obsession with profit-taking and the abandonment of job and product creation. However, he writes that it is “important to realize that growth in the financial sector has been highly dependent on advancing information technology.” No doubt the hedge fund guys need their high-speed computers and trading networks. But Ford does not mention that the financial sector’s growth is largely the result of reckless deregulation and the invention of questionable financial “products” like the ones that nearly crashed the economic system in 2008 and necessitated massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. These companies, deemed “too big to fail,” were not permitted to reap what they sowed. They were hauled off the edge of the abyss, guaranteed continued rapacious profits, and their CEO’s were still remunerated handsomely despite their questionable ethics and performance. For one brief moment the curtain dropped on the wizard and those who did not avert their eyes saw how obscene profit-taking was and how income inequality is actually generated. Meanwhile, the average citizen-consumer – who represents 65% of economic growth in the United States – was left to fend for himself. The recovery plan both parties championed was not only unfair, it was irrational: it rescued the wrong people.

Ford grudgingly acknowledges the political climate that banned unions, attacked worker rights, deregulated businesses, dropped or eliminated taxes on the wealthy, sent an army of lobbyists to Washington, made sure corporate press shills printed op-eds from right-wing think tanks, and foisted all the economic risk on taxpayers and working people. Ford writes that, even in Canada where unions are healthier than in the U.S., income inequality is rising – the implication being that it’s not political. But Ford doesn’t mention the Tory government of Stephen Harper in the same breath, or the fact that some provinces of Canada (Alberta, for example) are as non-union as the American South.

Ford concludes that information technology “stands alone in terms of its exponential progress. Even in nations whose political environments are far more responsive to the welfare of average workers, the changes wrought by technology are becoming increasingly evident.” What nations is Ford referring to? Are there really any powerful First World nations that do not espouse labor-crushing austerity programs or champion trickle-down economics? The IMF, global banks, the G8, and global trade agreements have made sure the world is safe for Capitalism. Greece is not suffering because of technology.

He moves on to a discussion of comparative advantage in which businesses and nations choose to forego opportunity “X” for a more profitable one, and permit those who can do “X” more inexpensively to do so. Robots, Ford says, mean never having to say “I’m sorry, I’ll pass on that opportunity” because they can be programmed to do anything. Ford describes “long tail” distributions, which describe employee/profit relationships. In 2012 Google made $14 billion with 38,000 employees; GM made $11 billion with 840,000. His prediction is that most corporations of the future will have to look like Google, and this in turn will force people out of stable full-time jobs into the “informal economy,” the “Uber economy,” in which people pick up work where they can. Ford cites Jared Lanier, claiming this is essentially the model in the Third World, and that it is precisely what accounts for the erosion of the middle class. But Ford does not describe how a strong middle class makes a nation politically stable. He makes the throwaway point about citizens having a moral right to share in the benefits of technology – especially since much of it is funded or seeded by taxpayers. So presumably the public deserves a few more tech jobs and discounts when buying Tang.

But by all means: let’s disrupt technology but leave the system alone.

Ford loves factory tours. We are introduced to sportswriting bots, data mining apps, marketing analytics, machine learning, language translation, neural nets, genetic programming, cars that drive themselves, project and productivity management software, AI, complex modeling, smart searching, customer management, online ordering, cloud computing, specialized robotics, and programs that write symphonies. We learn that computer-delivered educational and machine-reading tests have not delivered on early expectations. Medical diagnosis, on the other hand, using massive repositories of case studies, pharmaceutical data, and symptoms, has been a useful tool in the hands of medical specialists. Ford, however, gushing over the possibilities of delivering family medicine by robot, runs off the rails when he advocates “para-medicals” – lesser-trained medical professionals, similar to paralegals, whose job it will be to run the medical robots that talk to human patients.

There is an odd tendency among humans to think up complex and stupid systems, then double down on them by devising yet more complex and stupid solutions to the systems’ shortcomings. Ford’s is one such example. Another is the predicted use of elder-care robots in Japan – because, Ford says, the Japanese are too xenophobic to hire foreigners to take care of their elderly.

Many uses of technology – like the use of IBM’s Watson to diagnose and manage types of leukemia – are lumped into robotics in Ford’s book – for example, his mention of glucose sensors for diabetics. If this is the face of robotics, then my old mercury-based thermostat is as well. Both are basically sensors linked to controllers. Google Nest and Google’s contact lens are examples of how the company is developing consumer products to enable it to creep into the lucrative medical market. These are new products and, if anything, will put people to work somewhere – likely outside the U.S. But they are, as yet, not robotic threats to human jobs.

Ford’s discussion of medical overcharging – $6,500 CT scans and $200 aspirins – does not address the issue of greed. Instead, he portrays these practices as necessary maneuvers to cope with that 5% of medical patients who, he says, account for 50% of all expenses. He teases us that AI software running on a tablet in a doctor’s hands will make diagnoses and devise more cost-effective treatments. However, who would not expect the software to cost physicians $1,000 a month and have to run on otherwise standard Android tablets, but costing $5,000 each? Gouging is so entrenched in medical software that it would surprise no one that such an exception for a single AI product would ever be made – particularly when many physicians nowadays are investors in their own labs. Ford proposes creating a single-payer health care system which can mitigate the gouging. He suggests a private management consortium modeled on the old national AT&T phone system – a sanctioned oligopoly. His ideas include auctioning off operating licenses – as if he had never heard of the problems the FCC has run into with bandwidth spectra. But my question is – why? Why is he trying to design a new health care system on the heels of the first one ever created, and one that could be dismantled after the next election? And what does all this really have to do with robotics?

Cars are another story. Self-driving vehicles are almost here, and they belong to two family trees: one is the traditional family car from Detroit, Japan, or Bavaria, plus a host of self-driving and self-parking options; the other is the Google car, a no-frills vehicle that will eventually not even have a steering wheel. Many options for these new vehicles are possible, but Ford sees, eventually, a world of commercial car fleets. For a monthly fee you would have car service, pickup and dropoff capabilities, and vehicles would cease being status objects – simply another commodity like cable TV or high speed internet. These fleets would be owned by companies like Google, Avis, Hertz and Uber. Ford slyly suggests that the changes wrought by driverless cars would be the ultimate in disruptive technology: “Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.” As fleets consolidate, the number of taxi drivers, muffler and brake guys, auto body shops, car dealerships, detailing shops, and car washes will shrink dramatically. As fleets of cars grow, the fleet of auto guys will fade into obscurity – only to be replaced by a much small number of highly-trained technicians in the fleet garages. Ford did not touch on some of the privacy issues of concern with cars today – particularly that cars gather tremendous amounts of personal information on their drivers and can actually be hacked during operation. Or that vehicles will no doubt also become part of our new surveillance landscape.

In fact, the privacy and civil liberties implications of robotics and automation are entirely absent from Ford’s book.

Expanding the context in which technology changes are expected to occur, Ford paints a picture of the fragility of the middle and upper-middle class – including the top 5% which constitutes an affluent upper tier, but one easily broken by the loss of two salaries. He discusses debt, education, aging, and labor force participation. The bottom line is: our national prosperity was once dependent upon a healthy middle class, and the middle class is anything but healthy nowadays. Most people already understand this.

When Ford turns his attention to the “Singularity” and the general kookiness of Ray Kurzweil, it’s initially an amusing story – until we discover that Kurzweil’s pseudo-religion of “eternal life via cybernetics” is widely supported by, and shapes, Silicon Valley. The use of new technology at micro levels – nanotechnology – will create, he writes, chemical and mechanical miracles that will prolong life and function like the alchemist’s bowl, synthesizing entire meals from amino acid glop – at least so sayeth the prophets of the future with their billions to spend experimenting on the rest of us.

In his final chapter, Martin Ford takes a stab at creating a “new paradigm” for economies in which, as Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy puts it, “the future doesn’t need us.” In this future, the highly educated are not really needed. Not surprising; they never were. Even today, between 20% and 50% of college graduates are “overeducated” for existing jobs in industrialized countries. Ford questions the conventional wisdom that throwing more vocational education at today’s burger flippers will magically create a climate for more technologically-related economic growth. He describes the job market as a huge pyramid, with the technical and business elite at the top – graduates of graduate programs – and not just people with graduate degrees, but people from prestigious universities. The kind of people whose survival would be assured by sticking them in a secure vault in a granite mountain somewhere in case of nuclear war or an asteroid. Ford laughs at the expectation of finding technical jobs for everyone. “The person who would have worked on a farm in 1900, or in a factory in 1952, is today scanning bar codes or stocking shelves at Walmart. […] So, historically, there has been a reasonable match between the types of work required by the economy and the capabilities of the available workforce. […] The conventional wisdom is that, by investing in still more education and training, we are going to somehow cram everyone into that shrinking region at the very top [of the pyramid].” Ford’s bleak prediction is like End Times: only a small multitude will be saved during the Apocalypse and make it to heaven. The rest of us are doomed.

Ford makes much – everything, actually – of the speed of technological innovation and sees this as the primary driver of the threat of the working class (or working aspirants). But technology is a very fast but relatively small wind-up mouse in a room with a huge elephant no one wants to talk about. That elephant, of course, is Capitalism. It takes 255 pages for Ford to mention the word – the economic system imposed on people in nations where technology is regularly used against them. He writes, “The progression toward ever more automation is not an artifact of ‘design philosophy’ or the personal preferences of engineers: it is fundamentally driven by capitalism. […] The only difference today is that exponential progress is pushing us toward the endgame. […] Changing that would require far more an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.”

Or – and this does not occur to Ford – changing the system.

If Capitalism is a race for market domination, then a supermarket chain cannot survive its equally technologically-savvy competitors unless it eventually replaces all its cashiers with automated checkouts. Fast food restaurants cannot survive the demand for the cheapest possible “food” unless they eventually replace their humiliatingly-attired employees with vending machines or burger-stamping robots. Mass retailers like Walmart cannot mercilessly crush their competition unless they reduce or eliminate warehouse workers, retail workers, transportation workers, and replace American seamstresses with Bangladeshi children living in shacks and working in fire traps twelve hours a day. But the need to win at all cost exacts enormous social costs – costs that, under Capitalism, businesses and their wealthy owners and investors refuse to pay. This is why, as Ford points out, Social Security is abused as a permanent safety net. This is why most Walmart and fast-food employees collect welfare benefits at a cost of billions to taxpayers – when many of these same corporations are paying no taxes at all. Ford sees the dysfunction. He just doesn’t have the stomach to really change it.

So what is Ford’s solution – since he seems to think that Capitalism is the only form of economic and social organization? A basic guarantee of income. Hand out croissants to the peasants so they won’t revolt. He cites Friedrich Hayek, the ultra conservative economist, who saw this as an interim measure – right before pulling the plug on all social support systems. Ford writes that, without doubt, conservatives are not going to like this idea. I would suggest that neither Libertarians nor Social Democrats nor even Socialists are going to like the idea very much because citizens are completely at the mercy of a government that can “giveth or taketh away” such benefits. Worse, Ford envisions a society of free agents, where everyone is scrambling to “go out and participate in the market.” He thus betrays his own Free Market fundamentalism. He’s for the Uber economy. Besides, there is, as many economists and historians have pointed out, no such thing as an entirely free market. Could I, under Ford’s scheme, found an empire like the Tata’s, or Donald Trump’s? Probably not. I’d have to be born into wealth, as in these examples, or born with a silver spoon in my mouth like Bill Gates, the Walton heirs, or Mark Zuckerberg. And if the top 1% owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, how is guaranteed income really going to help the bottom 99%? The super-rich will still have their billions and their disproportionate access to influence and politics. No, if we are being honest – a monthly allowance is really just to keep the proletariat from rioting.

I have a low tolerance for “timely,” “insightful,” and “pioneering” books on social issues that seriously pull their punches, especially when they ignore the most egregious features of the problem they are examining. “Rise of the Robots” is such a book. I am very grateful to the friend who let me read his copy – and for the fact that I did not have to buy a copy myself.

I re-read Josef Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” after many years to see how it has stood up. And it does – very well. Modern critiques of the book have been harsh, but Conrad’s story turned the tables on colonial Europe, suggesting who exactly were the savages.

The story is recounted, as fin de siècle stories sometimes were, as the recollections of a narrator once-removed. The narrator recounts a tale told by a mariner named Marlow, who as a young man had been out of work for some time and had obtained work as a river pilot for a Belgian colonial enterprise.

In Part I of the story, even before Marlow enters the Congo, his first ominous brushes are with the corporation to which King Leopold had given the charter to pillage a massive part of the Dark Continent (an area 75 times as large as Belgium itself). The company Marlow visits when signing on is quartered on a street with grass growing up through the cobblestones – a spent Europe. As if a heroic journey were beginning, in Conrad’s story the building is “guarded” by two old crones who usher Marlow into a perfunctory interview, then a medical examination in which his supposed “English cranium” is measured every which way (phrenology was in vogue and it had eugenic overtones). He next visits the aunt who has secured his position for him, who gives him a lecture on how he is benefitting the savages of the Congo, doing the Lord’s work.

Then Marlow begins his month-long trip up the river, on a French steamer captained by a morose Swede who tells him the story of another Swede who has committed suicide, all along which various European colonial military forces are shooting their cannons into the brush – for no purpose other than to demonstrate colonial power – or building insane projects with slave labor, whose weak and used-up laborers are literally cast upon heaps to die. It’s not a pretty picture of European colonialism. Conrad often describes the natives as “brutes” and “cannibals” and “savages” and his use of the word “nigger” describes the collared and chained people of Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries: still slaves, though only a legalism alters the true status of people “brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts.” In contrast, the Europeans are described as “pilgrims” – presumably on a quest supposed to be holy.

When Marlow arrives in Leopoldville, he discovers that the vessel he was hired to captain has been sunk, its bottom ripped out on a sand bar, and that he is to proceed to find Mr. Kurtz, an agent many miles inland whose franchise accounts for more than half of all the colonial spoils. Kurtz is legendary and expected to go great places on his return to Europe. And we learn what it is these colonists are up to. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.” Marlow, in speaking to the station master, sees a portrait of a blindfolded woman holding a torch (very likely Astraea), but it appears sinister to him. It turns out to have been painted by Kurtz, who is believed to be quite the Renaissance man. It seems to at least this reader to be a warning that the practice of foisting Western ways on non-Western people is not going to end well.

Conrad briefly pulls us out of the dark midnight of Marlow’s tale described as a dream. “It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake.”

Marlow resumes his tale, remarking that the minor colonial functionaries ensured uninterrupted trade in worthless glass beads, yet the rivets that could have repaired his boat never managed to find their way to him. Marlow resolves to get them in three weeks, but all that arrives is another colonial expedition looking for more spoils. “Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Take that, Dick Cheney. Take that, United Fruit.

In Part II, Marlow runs upriver into the “heart of darkness.” It is as if he is moving back into the time of pterodactyls, into pre-history. He considers the thin veneer of civilization that Western man has accreted and the common humanity with the “cannibals” and “savages.” He ponders the ease with which a “cannibal” with a bone through his nose can be trained to watch the pressure gauges on a steamer. On the eve of arriving at Kurtz’s station, they stop at a deserted settlement and find a sign warning them to “approach cautiously.” They stop for the night, resolved to proceed cautiously by light of day. In the morning there is a thick fog and to all the “pilgrims” their steamer is the only object left in the world, everything else “gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” Marlow asks why the steamer’s native crew (“thirty to five” Europeans) did not eat them. And all the passengers wonder at the unseen natives on the riverbanks: “Will they attack, do you think?” The question is answered the moment the arrows start flying at the vessel and a crewman is killed.

The main narrator then interjects in a sort of flash-forward, to point out that Marlow has lied to Kurtz’s wife – women need to be shielded from the truth – the truth, Marlow believes, is that Kurtz’s bleached skull will be found with a mountain of ivory he has collected. Marlow speculates on the identity of the half-British, half-French Kurtz – mentioning a report Kurtz has written for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” It is a magnificent opus, Marlow believes. It suggests that savages can be elevated by the white man. Yet, at the end of the report, in unsteady handwriting, Kurtz has scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow is faced with the decision to convey the report to its intended readers – or to “lose” it. Mainly he wants to preserve Kurtz’s memory, but he is undecided about the report. The fast-forward ends and finally Marlow’s steamer arrives at its destination and there he meets a young Russian who knows Kurtz.

In Part III, the Russian fills in Marlow on Kurtz and, through his binoculars, he sees Kurtz’s compound walls, surrounded by heads. Now we know the truth about the man. We meet a fierce, beautiful black woman who may have been Kurtz’s consort, and we learn that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer. But Kurtz is in bad shape and the natives return him to Marlow, whereupon he is loaded onto the boat and conveyed back out of the heart of darkness. On board he dies after many days, his last uttered words being “the horror, the horror.” Marlow returns to Belgium with Kurtz’s papers and the report (from which he as ripped the final scrawled page) and protectively guards Kurtz’s memory, even lying to Kurtz’s fiancee about his last words. The story returns to the prime narrator, who returns us to the story’s present – an old group of seafarers on a tranquil waterway flowing “into the heart of an immense darkness.”

I love this story because it so beautifully combines the political, the psychological, the cultural, and is written in Conrad’s beautiful language. His descriptions are always rich and thoughtful and – though European (and American) colonialism are officially gone – they linger about, continuing to wreak their horrors on the rest of the world.

This volume also contains three other stories.

• “Amy Foster” – a beautifully-written tale of a Slavic shipwreck victim who marries Amy Foster.

• “The Secret Sharer” – the tale of a ship’s captain who risks everything to help a murderer who steals aboard his ship.

• “Youth” – a wonderful story, with surprisingly modern and very poetic language, about a young officer on board an old ship hauling coal to Bangkok.

Review of “Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (ISBN 9780486224848)

This is a fascinating book. As Emma Goldman painted it, Anarchism is the ultimate in Western freedom, but at its core it is humanist and not a sociopathic cult of individual advantage (Ayn Rand comes to mind) – and certainly not the cult of terror as it was commonly portrayed. Yet Goldman and her comrades never succeeded in making Anarchism attractive to the public. This was due to constant character assassination by the corporate press, infighting, and whispers that Goldman was somehow associated with several high-profile assassinations, including President McKinley’s. The Anarchists themselves were passionate orators who spoke in generalities, were fond of using literary references, and they were not shy about stating that the public they were courting could sometimes be nothing more than a stupid mob. And they were arguing against nationalism and populism at a time these were quite popular. Anarchists were feared and reviled as ISIS is today, and J. Edgar Hoover’s modern FBI was created largely out of this fear.

Anarchism and Communism were both finished off by the corporate press, intense government surveillance, zealous prosecutions, show trials, executions, Congressional hearings, and the suppression of their ideas by legal edict. In the United States we have always had freedom of the press and expression – as long as any ideas expressed are in line with capitalism and nationalist fever.

Anarchism may be dead, but Goldman’s social and political criticism is as relevant as ever. In fact, reading this volume of individual essays written almost exactly a century ago is to realize how little has changed in this nation. Is our militarism, police brutality, neglect of the poor, social inequality, gun fever, our culture of violence, or the massive prison industry anything new? Read this book and weep. It has always been thus so.

The book’s first essay, “Anarchism,” argues successfully for individual freedoms and shows that the only function of the state is to guard a monopoly on violence for the benefit of oligarchs to whom the masses have stupidly given away their rights, wealth, and lives. True. But for all the Tolstoy and Emerson she quotes, Goldman does not really offer a picture of how Anarchism would actually work in practice. In fact, she is rather cagey about committing to any depiction of a new way of organizing society, except to say that social associations would be voluntary.

“Minorities versus Majorities” puts her on firmer theoretical ground, but her views insult the public. Jimmy Carter knew the sting of a public too dumb and proud to be chastised for its greed and shortsighted thinking. Don’t mess with the mob. Instead we prefer the rouged flattery of a Reagan who capitalized on our American 20 Mule Team Borax wholesomeness, Christliness and cleanliness. Goldman shows that majorities routinely persecute minorities and, worse, usually do so in the service of privileged minorities. Goldman could not have foreseen the Hobby Lobby case, but this is a perfect contemporary example of her point. She points out that public opinion is fickle and dangerous and that it tends to reject justice in favor of stasis. Goldman says it is individuals, not the masses, who generate new ideas that change the world. The crowd “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

“The Psychology of Political Violence” attempts to explain why lone wolves were flaunting society’s monopoly on violence and using it themselves: “The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless, monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at least as an irresponsible lunatic.” She defends the bomb-throwing lone wolves and the authors of political manifestos (like the contemporary Unabomber). She sympathizes with those driven to insane acts by a cruel society: “The indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable.” She lists the homicidal damage by the state: victims of wars of choice, victims of industrial accident, the poor who die of hunger, victims of police and Pinkerton killings: “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.” And I agree. The terror of individuals is nothing compared with the terror of any state.

“Prisons” describes the huge prison industry that existed a century ago, and the prison-industrial complex built to permit corporations to further exploit the incarcerated. Sound familiar? Goldman quotes Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, something we would shy away from today – after all, there is no need to describe the actual human experience of being unjustly (or justly) jailed or condemned. She points out that in 1915 the U.S. was spending $6 billion a year to incarcerate people – five times the combined output of wheat and coal, and representing the greatest proportion of jailed people in the world. “Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts.” Goldman points out that, whatever we are doing, it’s not working. We still have the most violent society in the world. She cites homicide rates of that time. Chicago then had 118 murders that year. London (5 times greater in population) had only 22. She points out that crime is a direct consequence of human desperation and quotes Havelock Ellis extensively. She examines the nature of crimes; from political to violent to economic, she charges society with creating the conditions for crime to flourish. Citing Quetelet, Lacassagne, and Ellis, she writes: in the end “every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“Patriotism: A menace to Liberty” cites the well-known Dr. Johnson quote describing patriotism as the “refuge of scoundrels.” Goldman describes how hyper-nationalism is nothing but a tool for encouraging a violent society to extend that violence to wars of opportunity. She cites Tolstoy’s conception of patriotism – “the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.” Goldman could not have foreseen the future when soldiers were elevated as gladiators to be publicly worshipped, thanked with several holidays a year, given preferential hiring, and granted economic, social, and even legal benefits denied others.

Goldman points out that the ruling class has its “cosmopolitan” (current word: “global”) interests, that patriotism is for chumps, for the masses. She hadn’t heard of Swiss or Cayman Island accounts but she points out that it is never the oligarchs who must sacrifice their children – they tend to get the officer positions far from the front. Quoting Carlisle: “war is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” And then we wonder why our citizens act in greater proportion like wild beasts. Goldman speaks explicitly of the links between “militarism” and “commercialism.” In the end, she writes, war is incredibly profitable – at least for some people.

She brilliantly describes the benefits of a volunteer military (which the U.S. had at the time, just as we do today: “conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society.” And “it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by the European Powers far more than anything else.” It seems when someone else is dying for questionable militaristic adventures we don’t bother to examine the reasons for it so closely. In fact, she says, capitalism is based on militarism: “The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter.” She points out that militarism is reinforced by economic security. She could not have foreseen how many men (40% from the South) signed up for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she understood their economic motivations: “Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments?” Goldman also could not have foreseen JROTC or the militaristic high school recruiting provisions in “No Child Left Behind,” but she wrote: “Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception: ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy.”

The book also includes a pamphlet Goldman wrote defending the memory of Francisco Ferrer, an anti-cleric and anti-monarchist who was killed for his beliefs rather than actions by Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, otherwise known as King Alfonso XIII.

In addition to her political work, Goldman wrote literary and cultural commentary. “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” aptly nails the stifling effects of Puritanism on American culture. “It is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.” The Puritan Fathers “established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. […] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. […] With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible.” It is Puritanism, Goldman writes, that, “having suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, […] blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman […] to bear children.” Goldman did not foresee the day when unmarried women, too, would be forced to bear children they did not want. Prostitution is “born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism.” It is the back-alley, the outlet, the furtive, the covert, the perverted expression of sexuality that, like much in this country, cannot breathe. To top it all off, she writes, the poor worker can’t even spend Sundays away from the gloom of Capitalism; he must attend church and permit himself to be lectured-to. Puritanism, in the end, contributes to stifled, miserable, unharmonious lives.

The Anarchists were among the earliest feminists. In “The Traffic in Women,” Emma Goldman describes how Capitalism and Puritanism create a culture in which women become commodities. She actually uses the word “commodity.” She also uses the phrase “double standard” when describing attitudes around sex for men and women. At first, a poor woman with no means of her own must resort to what she euphemistically calls “Mrs. Warren’s profession.” And these are working girls in every sense. “The average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?” Citing Margaret Sanger’s observations on women driven to prostitution by economic necessity, she writes: “Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of two thousand cases, 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guaranty for their ‘safety and purity’ in the sanctity of marriage.” Goldman points out that the “sanctity of marriage” cannot survive poverty, much less natural inclinations. Much of her critique of sexual politics had its genesis in being ostracized by friends and comrades, and actually having to set up her seamstress shop (she did piece work) in a brothel, where she was treated kindly and where she began to see the women there as desperate, even moral, workers – only driven to the profession by necessity. Citing Havelock Ellis, Goldman saw the institution of marriage in a patriarchy as inherently corrupt: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” For women, Goldman described marriage as a “miserable institution which they can not outgrow.”

In “Woman Suffrage” Goldman turns her attention to universal suffrage, the right of women to vote. But she warns women that the vote alone will not set them free. Starting with Christianity, she writes: “Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned women to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman.” Goldman could not predict the Palins and Bachmanns of today, so she must have had extraordinary powers of discernment. War, too, oppresses women, leaving them bereft, lonely, often without resources. Her energies are sapped and sucked by housekeeping. “Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.” She mocks the power of the vote and asks what it has bought men: “The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.” She looks in several countries where women have the vote and finds individual freedoms there completely lacking. In four states which already permit women to vote, Puritanism keeps them in their place. She cites Emmeline Pankhurst on economic equality. Without economic parity there can be no equality. Why, after 100 years and thousands of observations like Goldman’s, is this still so? And then she takes on class.

“The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” was written as women’s suffrage was partly underway. It is in some ways a meditation on What’s Next? Goldman realized that emancipation would not be panacea. She predicted continuing wage inequality with men; that women now functioning independently would be afraid to “marry down” because of class concerns; that “love would rob her of her freedom and independence; […] that motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession.” Goldman somehow saw the future long before women had to discover how to “lean in” and attack “glass ceilings.” She cites a book by Laura Marholm on exceptional women of the day: Eleonora Duse; Sonya Kovalevskaia; and others. She writes that the more exceptional the woman, the more difficult it is to find a mate who will love her and awaken love in her: “In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being.” It has taken a hundred years for some men to cherish exceptional women; but even here nothing is perfect.

“Marriage and Love” is a savage attack on the institution of marriage. “On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close inspection it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” Ouch. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. […] Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments.” Double Ouch. “Dante’s motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: ‘Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.'” Triple Ouch, anyone? She declares marriage as a failed institution; every twelvth marriage ends in divorce. She obviously didn’t see a 50% failure rate coming. “Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? […] How can such an arrangement end except in failure?”

“The Modern Drama” is Emma Goldman sticking her toe into literary criticism. She was exceptionally knowledgable of literature in French, German, Russian, English, and Yiddish and frequently cited contemporary writers in these languages. She tipped her hat to Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Andreiev, Gorki, Whitman, Chekov, Mirbeau, Zola, Maupassant, Holz, Suderman – and others. Her influences would have been chiefly European Naturalists writing fiction and drama. But Drama, the theater, was especially dear to her heart. She had nothing against propaganda and pamphleteering. She did it herself. But she especially venerated the theater as a place where people could see humanity in a mirror. She saw drama also as a way to suggest new values to society. For this reason it is not difficult to understand why she especially loved Ibsen’s plays. Much of this essay is analysis of plots; what the characters and their strivings meant to her. And, by extension, to humanity.

She was something. I would have to add her to my list of exceptional women of history I’d like to meet in a time machine. Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg…

The introduction to this collection by Richard Drinnon is aptly titled “Harking Back to the Future,” which was absolutely perfect. Emma Goldman was way ahead of her times, and a century later is still way ahead of ours.

Review of Orfeo by Richard Powers

We don’t fully understand the link with Orfeo (Orpheus) until the end of Richard Powers’ book, when we have to acknowledge Els’ life’s goal in hindsight as the strivings, like Orfeus, of the musical being known for his ability to charm all living things, capable of even moving stones to tears. Like Orfeo, Els dies at the hands of those who cannot hear his divinely-inspired music. The Greek historian Strabo wrote of Orpheus as a mortal suspected of hatching a violent plot by his killers – and this is pretty much what happens to poor Peter Els in the book.

As I began reading Orfeo, it struck me that Peter’s father’s death merited only a quarter of a page, yet the author’s digressions on Kindertotenlieder and his dead dog, Fidelio, and the reminiscences of their attendance of musical funerals (really!) went on for pages. Powers worked a little too hard to sell us the notion that Els was a high-strung music geek – the kind who has a little eight year-old’s erection when he hears dissonant music for the first time. Please. I was really not enjoying the book at first.

But it did eventually get better.

Within short order we learn that Els is obsessed with the notion of creating transcendent music, something good, something unique, something remarkable, something possibly even holy. Unfortunately he cannot seem to find it in a world that filters out so much, that has such a short attention span: a world that generates and treats music like a commodity. Intermixing hints of the godliness of Els’ goals – and hints of a social critique of art in a capitalist society – muddies Powers’ theme.

In the first 70+ pages we find Els persisting in his art, but also taking the occasional shortcut. He experiments with Markov chains – probabilistic state machines that permit new states to be randomly generated. If you’ve heard it – and it exists – Markov chain-generated music is dull and lifeless, even when using many orders of complexity and tweaked by a human hand. It is unsurprising that Els moves on to something more alive – though randomness is at the heart of both his music and his life.

Els is explicitly compared to Faust several times – more muddying. He makes the acquaintance of Richard Bonner, a performance artist and artistic co-conspirator described as “seductive,” and he begins to see the act of making art as not simply bold but subversive. Is Orfeo the story of a Faust’s fatal seductions by a Mephistopheles or is it what happens when artists have impossibly high ambitions and are not understood?

Ultimately, Els’ wife Maddy, once a fringe musician herself but now a responsible wife and mother, begins to appear to him as a “schoolmarm” and his marriage and relationship with daughter Sara founder as he goes his own way and they move to Saint Louis. He lives a somewhat itinerant existence until (by random chance, again) he becomes a lowly adjunct professor in a charity appointment.

Much of the plot of Orfeo is counterposed with events of the Sixties through 9/11. There is the occasional reference to theory of art under capitalism (recalling Adorno and the Frankfurter school). In numerous places music (recounting the experiences of Messaiaen and Shostakovich, for example) is described as subversive to the state, and even Els’ innocent project of producing music with a telephone keypad for his daughter may have had unintended consequences (unwittingly dialing emergency services) that leave him on a Homeland Security watchlist. Creating custom sequences of DNA encoded with music might have seemed like conceptual art to Els, but in post 9/11 Amerika it is an attack on die Heimat, Verrat gegen das Vaterland.

Many reviews of the book seem to peg Orfeo as an exercise in music appreciation, and no doubt Powers adores the composers he describes. However, for “civilians” like me it was also a book about seeking patterns and manipulating them. Many of the obsessions of practitioners of art, music, and literature seem to center on recognition of patterns and concepts, and/or imposing, forcing, shoe-horning, conjuring, or wishing them [just as often inartfully] into some kind of artistic vision. To some degree, everyone in Els’ family is guilty of this offense: his doomed authoritarian father; his brother Paul, a conspiracy theorist; and his sister Susan, living in an ashram in India. Els, either by temperament or choice of collaborators, is looking for meaning in nature and working mightily to convert nature into meaning. Even Els daughter Sara is a data mining whiz – perhaps the ultimate in pattern recognition pursuits. Maybe there’s no avoiding it: it’s just what we humans do.

There is a sequence in the book early on in which Els goes for his morning walk and encounters a Spandex goddess running while listening to her iPod, filtering thousands of melodies by sending them like a concentration camp guard either to the right, where they live for a closer listening later, or to the left, where they meet a certain death. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.” We learn that Els has a rule for himself: that he will always listen through to the end of a piece. This flaunts the practices of a society whose teens are drowning in Adderall. After attempting to listen to the hour-long pieces Powers has chosen to describe in the novel, I confess to firmly belonging to the ranks of Adderall philistines. Life is too short to honor or indulge every artist’s notion.

Society’s brutal winnowing principle is not just for the products of art but for artists as well. Society surrounds “dangerous” art and artists like macrophages attacking pathogens – a principle reflected in the paranoia overtaking our nation. “The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain.” Once Els goes on the run, someone discovers an old composition of his and “mines” the lyrics for dangerous and subversive references. Society is clearly afraid of challenge and provocation – if nowhere else than in the citizenry’s pointy little heads.

Els is painfully aware that his artistic search is not bringing him any pleasure, nor does it seem to bring anyone else much. In England after a traffic-direction miscalculation has killed his mother while vacationing there, Els goes to a pub and sees happy publicans singing to crude tunes: “People at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years.” How easy it is for artists to doubt themselves. And sometimes with inexplicably good reason.

Our protagonist lives in an age in which randomness, chaos, and lack of control are what truly set the world in motion. And why should his art not reflect this reality? Watching the Arab Spring unfold, we see it through Els’ eyes: “As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune.” Thus, we can imagine, his interest in musical DNA was hatched.

Still in England, Els visits his first love, Clara, who has set him on his artistic trajectory. They have dinner and she takes him upstairs to her bedroom, telling him everything is on the table, anything is possible – and he flees from her. It seems tragic to the reader but Els senses the same danger in Clara that society senses in him – and he does not have the courage to live life on these terms. He really doesn’t know in which world he belongs. On the one hand, he is Sara’s father (“make something good, daddy”) and on the other a subversive wannabe. This is the tragedy of the book. He cannot be a god.

Els eventually writes an opera entitled “City of God.” It is a Reformation tragedy based on actual events in Münster, Germany. A group of Protestant religious fanatics who have become polygamists believe the earthly world must end before a heavenly kingdom replaces it. Bonner is a collaborator in the production, but it is threatened by oddly similar events unfolding in real time in Waco, Texas. We learn that Els is not in the enterprise solely for fame, since he pulls away from his own opera when Waco hits the news. Something else motivates him (l’art pour l’art)? Somehow we start taking his music more seriously, seeing him as more artistically principled, but simultaneously as more timid.

Els, based on positive reviews of his opera, is then offered a job as an adjunct music professor and one of his students comes for musical advice, showing him a complex composition it turns out was written by software called “Sibelius” – a “program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus.” Shortcuts call out to Els again. Is he himself an average tunesmith who needs a lab full of DNA to make him another Orpheus. The answer is: yes.

After concocting his test-tube music and being investigated after his dog’s death, the seventy-one year-old Els goes on the run, first visiting a therapist with whom he once had an affair, his ex-wife, Bonner (now in an Arizona care facility for Alzheimer’s patients), and finally his daughter. By now we have learned that Els has tinnitus, brain lesions which have affected his musical sensibilities, and Bonner has convinced him that, as long as he is considered a terrorist, he might as well engender a little terror – by leaving a trail of vaguely incriminating Tweets. As Els navigates to his daughter’s house in a borrowed car with “the Voice” app on a borrowed cellphone, he notices the marks of tramps and vagrants on the highway, recalling a composer who memorialized them. To a consummate pattern-seeker like Els there are signs and wonders everywhere. His frame of reference has always been musical, but ultimately all of life is just random noise.

Finally Els arrives at his daughter’s house. He notices she has a piano and has not, apparently, rejected everything musically important to him. But, having sufficiently alarmed Homeland Security, Els is now surrounded by a SWAT team. With his musical powers gone and seeing his life as one huge mistake, Els decides to “arm” himself with a thin flower vase – art as a weapon – all too easily confused with a beaker of pathogens. We know how this sad story is going to end – and in the tragic end the novel is ultimately focused on society’s fear of art and the difficult path to it by artists of any stripe – not solely as a music appreciation project by Powers, the failed composer.

I had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon,” a book our reader’s group chose this month. After a couple hundred pages it was clear to me that things were not going to get better but I ploughed on, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the author never give it to us.

In theater, when someone says “hey, want some peanuts?” it’s something you notice. The second time it’s either a coincidence or a phrase that puts the audience on alert. The third time you hear “hey, want some peanuts?” you’ve entered the world of farce. This is what happens when a boring Swiss man, who can just barely manage to read Portuguese with the aid of a dictionary, is showered with manuscript after manuscript after letter after letter after note after valedictory speech by people who eagerly and inexplicably invite him into their lives — and who all seem to have reams of the stuff — never (as one would expect) in a single closet or shoebox. And, to boot, these are all people who just happen to be able to recite, verbatim and at theatrical length, arcane passages from these profound nuggets they have preserved apparently just for the eyes of the Good Burgher Gregorius — people who are always alive after 80 or 90 years, and who are always conveniently at home when Gregorius calls. Farce.

Then I disliked our epistolary hero, Amadeus. The dude had it all — money, private schools, parents who encouraged him, pushed him to excel, sisters who worshipped him. He had looks, brains, and talent. Yet he spent his life whining about everything. Where did all this Weltschmerz come from? And it is a mystery to me, given the vast quantity of letters he appears to have written incessantly, how he actually managed to study for medical school or even run a practice. Maybe it’s just me but, despite the many observations he raised in the hundreds of pages of italics which have now permanently damaged my eyes, there was never a true center to Amadeus. Thus the many relationships he had with friends, family, comrades, his wife, or his lover, were like gears that never actually meshed in reality. Mercier only projects a cardboard gearworks. This book, then, was never anything more than a highbrow Harlequin romance.

If I disliked Amadeus, I despised Gregorius. Here was a guy who chose to spend his life being a shmoe, with his nose firmly stuck only in past realities — or more accurately – in comforting fictions. And he had absolutely no sense of the world he actually lived in. Personally, I can identify on one level with a fellow with bad eyesight who loves languages and is bewitched by a feeling that speaking in, and living in, a different culture gives you a kind of second life. But Gregorius had such an unbelievably tenuous grasp of the reality around him, even in Portugal, that the book just didn’t work for me. Gregorius was less than the cardboard cutout Mercier presents us.

I wrote these notes in Mexico, where many people have done precisely what Gregorius did — taken off suddenly and started a new life. But you know what? These people manage to have cocktail parties, spouses, friends, hobbies, pictures on the wall, and they don’t take up trying to learn Farsi while simultaneously memorizing Spanish conjugations at the Gringo language schools. I wanted to slap Gregorius. Hard. But then he had that mysterious neurological condition that went nowhere, like most of the plotlines in the book.

For a book written in the God voice, Mercier’s characters are incredibly two dimensional, especially the women. In over 400 pages, we should have known Gregorius’ mind much better, or that of his sisters. But with an excess of blah-blah and an almost total lack of dialog, how could we ever learn who any of these people are?

Then there’s what passes for plot. Besides the massive number of PASSAGENS INSUPORTAVELMENTES PRESUMIDOS UNBEARABLY PRETENTIOUS PASSAGES a reader must suffer, I kept waiting for something to happen. And, as the joke goes about a waiting Swiss wife, nothing much ever did. The structure of the whole book rests on flat, inconsistent, implausible characters and piles of disconnected thought written in a score of third person voices, all of which sound suspiciously identical.

And why the hell would Gregorius ever begin his quest in the first place? An apparently suicidal woman writes a phone number on his forehead and he instantly decides to run off to Portugal? Please! We never learn who is on the other end of the phone in Lisbon, but it was apparently a working number — unlike our protagonist. To me this dropped detail, one of dozens, points to shoddy literary workmanship. Mercier’s book reminds me of THE ARTIST. I know both the book and the modern silent film won awards for their — uniqueness — but I just can’t see why.

One of the things our bourgeois, prep-school revolutionary, Señhor Amadeus, rails against is Kitsch. If he had ever truly been a living, breathing character, he’d be rolling over in his Lisbon grave over this book.

One of the definitions of the German loan word Kitsch is “a tasteless copy of a work of real art.” Another common definition is “art that chooses aesthetics that convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama.” I think both of these more than apply to the book. Mercier’s characters constantly spew forth melodramatic utterances worthy of Mexican telenovelas. But, frankly, all the characters sound the same. Whether it’s Amadeus at seventeen or Jorge, or Adriana, or Silveira.

Our old friend, the real writer, Milan Kundera, calls Kitsch “the absolute denial of shit” – in other words, a sanitized, Disneyesque reality that poses no real questions and only forces sentimentality down our throats. While Mercier makes hundreds of sad observations, there is no truly coherent point of view, there are no questions asked in earnest. Only incessant “why mommy’s.”

Art historian Clement Greenberg (Art and Culture, 1978) equates uninspired adherence to “academic” schools of thought with Kitsch. Mercier may not belong to an Academie des Beaux Arts but, when we peel away his pseudonym, it turns out that Herr Doktor Peter Bieri is indeed an ex-academic who (in extreme contrast to some of my esteemed ex-academic, truly artistic friends) has not strayed far from the dusty papers of a past life as philosopher of time, mind, and ethics. Sadly, we are treated to pages of italicized ramblings that I suspect have largely been pulled from Bieri’s own private journals.

Ultimately, Gregorius returns to Bern, looks up his ex-wife, gets checked into a clinic by his Greek opthalmologist chess-playing, always on-call for psychological counseling buddy, and the novel grinds to a merciful but long-overdue end. But in the absence of any real plot or meaningful character development, the ending is very unsatisfying — especially after 438 pages of literary torture.

Will Gregorius put on his new glasses and stylish clothes, fuck the brains out of Florence and take her off to Salamanca – or anywhere but Bern? Or will he stay in those thick glasses and academic corduroy and go back to the dreary job that Kägi is holding for him?

You know what? Who gives a shit?

In the first several chapters of her 1951 book On the Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt examined 19^th century anti-Semitism and provided a class analysis of how it arose. As a classless group often associated with, under the protection of, providing services to, or granted special rights by the monarchy, Jews became a proxy for class antagonisms with the monarchy and among the European classes. First a declining aristocracy, then a scattered group of small political parties, each discovered that Jews were a useful substitute for challenging state power directly, and that anti-Jewish sentiment could be easily linked to religious antipathy for Judaism. The state religions, for their part, were only too happy to oblige. Even after the collapse of European monarchies, Jews continued to play a similar role in nationalist movements. And, of course, imperialism played a part in defining anti-Semitism.

Arendt’s analysis differs from the normative Jewish view, recited at Passover each year, that “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us.” Arendt dismissed this as a hollow explanation of anti-Semitism, but admitted it serves another purpose:

“In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that anti-Semitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of external anti-Semitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.”

Arendt noted that the Jewish view was, strangely, precisely the same that the anti-Semites had of Jews. There was nothing historically unique, really, about a particular group of Jews. All Jews were simply an eternal plague to be fought, put down, or got rid of and, as she notes from Nazi records, anti-Semites coolly exterminated Jews without particular animus.

Whether one agrees with Arendt’s class analysis or not, it still seems clear that the historical causes of, and flavors of, anti-Semitism must be varied; that the relationship of Jews to the states in which they were persecuted — often first as protected, perhaps emancipated, in some cases elevated to the nobility — is not simple and does not indicate a generic, unwavering hate of Jews shared by everyone in every age. How otherwise could German Jews have succeeded in bourgeois society in the 18^th and 19^th centuries? How could Jews have attained influential posts in the various empires in which they lived during exile? The Book of Esther disqualifies itself as history but still seems to be a potent myth.

And if Arendt’s mechanics of anti-Semitism are correct and class antagonisms are at the heart of anti-Semitism, how then can antagonism to the state of Israel be explained? Since Andre Sakharov’s revisionist definition of anti-Semitism (based mainly on opposition to a Jewish state and not confined to simple baseless hatred) virtually every Diaspora Jewish organization has taken more interest in defending the state of Israel than in pursuing justice for individual victims of hate crimes. Arendt’s higher standard for defining anti-Semitism doesn’t seem to be at work in organizations like the ADL. But the Purimspil is recited as if a fact.

Could it be that antagonism toward Israel has nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Zionism?

I just read Tom Segev’s book, 1949: The First Israelis (ISBN 978-0805058963). Segev calls himself a First historian, as opposed to a New historian, in using only recently-available archive materials from the Knesset and national archives. 1949 is the story of the first years of the new Jewish state, told in the words of those who created it. There are many quotes, for example, from Ben Gurion’s diaries and from transcripts of Knesset sessions and other government meetings.

Segev spends a lot of time on Israeli immigration, the secular/religious divide, government austerity programs, school system(s), the relationship to other governments (particularly the US), and what is striking is that, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 puts it, “that which hath been is that which shall be, and that which hath been done is that which shall be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” applies nicely to tensions in the Jewish state which persist to this date.

For example, post-Zionism – the view that Zionism has done its job and that it’s now time to move on to make Israel a “normal” nation – is currently seen in Israel as a discredited aberration of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Or anti-Zionism – calling for a single, secular state of Jews and Arabs – is now seen as a contemporary response to the failure of a Two State solution. But Segev discusses some of the voices of the Canaanite Movement, like Yohanan Ratosh, who foresaw an Israel eventually without Jews. Of course, breaking as it did from right-wing Revisionist Zionism, the Canaanite movement was hostile to not only Judaism and Eastern European Yiddishkeit, but Islam and Arab civilization as well. It envisioned a secular, Hebraized, Middle Eastern culture encompassing former Jews, Arabs, and Druze. Other groups, like the Hashomer Hatzair, were militantly anti-religious. Organizations like “The League for the Prevention of Religious Coercion” sprang up within 3 years of the founding of the state. Religious Jews were described as “God’s Cossacks.”

Recent riots in Jerusalem over a parking lot could have been torn from the headlines of 1949. In May of that year, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rioted over ticket sales for movies on the Sabbath, and over automobile traffic in the Meah Shearim quarter. The haredi, operating on the warnings in Jeremiah 17:27, took “reproof” to mean even physical violence – arson, rock-throwing, home invasions, bare knuckles, and even biting people – and rioting were justified in protecting the peaceful day of rest. Segev, in the chapter entitled “The Battle for the Sabbath,” recounts how (to avoid writing) the ultra-Orthodox bent down the corners of their prayer books containing page numbers to record the license plates of Sabbath violators, whose cars were then torched later in the week.

Segev reminds us that American peace envoys have been involved in Palestine since the very founding of the state of Israel. In September 1948, when the Swedish UN negotiator, Folke Bernadotte, was murdered by Zionist terrorists, Ralph Bunche took over the UN negotiator’s role. Bunche negotiated the 1949 armistice agreement, for which he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.

And the Israeli relationship with America has often been as troubled as it is today. Although the United States was the first nation to recognize Israel, our support of the state was not the one-sided love-fest now cited by Israel’s defenders. Apparently, in recognizing Israel, the United States also expected (imagine!) that an Arab state would soon follow, in realizing the two states apportioned to the land by the United Nations. And the United States was dismayed by Israel’s already apparent plans to sacrifice peace for more land. Segev writes: > Mark Ethridge, the US delegate to the Lausanne conference, wrote President Truman that Israel’s inclination to base her future on her military security, while forgoing the chance of making peace, seemed “unbelievable,” in view of her being such a tiny state. According to him, he had tried to explain to the Israelis that they were endangering their own future and that of the entire Western world, but his efforts had been in vain.

Truman himself wrote to Ben-Gurion arguing in behalf of an Arab state “because he sympathized with the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, just as he had earlier supported the Zionist cause because he had sympathized with the Jewish refugees…” Ben-Gurion fumed about Truman’s letter: > The State of Israel was not established as a consequence of the UN Resolution. Neither America nor any other country saw the resolution through, nor did they stop the Arab countries (and the British mandatory government) from declaring total war on us in violation of UN resolutions. America did not raise a finger to save us, and moreover, imposed an arms embargo… […] There are no refugees – there are fighters who sought to destroy us, root and branch. […] The rebuke and the threatening style [of Truman’s letter] are incomprehensible.

Interestingly, not all distrust of the United States resulted from Israel’s rejection of American even-handedness. Some of it sprang from Israel’s founding as a state that rejected, at least initially, both Western civilization and capitalism. At the founding of Israel in 1948, MAPAM represented Marxist Zionists and had the second largest bloc, next to Ben-Gurion’s MAPAI party. But even Ben-Gurion himself did not regard Israel as a capitalist state. During the “austerity debates,” which resulted from immigration which overtook Israel’s ability to provide jobs and housing for the new olim, Ben-Gurion defended a planned and controlled economic system. He famously declared, “the state of Israel is not a capitalist state.”

Likewise, Americans were suspected of being members of the CIA with “Arabist” motives. When “Fred Harris”, a freelance American military advisor, actually one Fred Grunich, was asked by Ben-Gurion for his military advice, many in the Knesset openly interpreted the real motivation to the desire by the United States to spy on Israel.  American Jews too were seen as convenient sources of money but were regarded as second-rate Jews who were not prepared to suffer for the new state, as their Polish brethren had.

Israel’s selective enforcement of laws and endemic corruption have likewise been present since its founding, mainly as a consequence of the internal tensions within Israeli society, which have often caused competing groups to “look the other way” to either bolster their own power or prevent offense to another group. The take-away message is that Israel has always been less a nation of laws than a collection of ideologies and a series of handshake agreements. Conflict between religious blocks, MAPAM, and MAPAI, and major organizations like the Histradrut, the JNF, and the army actually made many fear civil war in the early years.

The discussion of the Nakba, now disputed and actually criminalized in Israel, is recounted in a number of memos and letters by various cabinet and Knesset members of Israel’s first government. As Arab village after village and Arab city after city were emptied and its inhabitants deported, it became clear that it was deliberate. While the American ambassador, James McDonald, argued for a return of the refugees, Ben-Gurion was “as hard as a rock” in his rejection of this. Moshe Sharett wrote: > The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine, in a way more spectacular than the creation of the Jewish state, is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population. […] The opportunities opened up by the present reality for a lasting and radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state, are so far-reaching, as to take one’s breath away. The reversion to the status quo ante is unthinkable.

Josef Weitz, head of the Jewish National Fund, proposed measures designed to drive internally displaced refugees even farther into desolate areas: > They must be harassed continually.

1949 recounts the stories of the aliyot of Yemenite and Polish olim. Yemenites were regarded as savages and were subjected to horrendous conditions in the resettlement camps in Israel. Polish immigrants, by contrast, were put up in hotels.

The Kulturkampf between religious and secular worlds in Israel occupies a large portion of Segev’s book, particularly in the story of the Israeli school systems(s). Censorship, laws, agrarian policy, immigration, defense, housing, settlements – any topic the first Knesset ever discussed – is mentioned in this very readable, exceptionally interesting book.