Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.

Interwar 11: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

Back when we covered the US Civil War, we talked about how the US ultimately un-did the Reconstruction. But undoing the Reconstruction went on and on, and the Tulsa Race Massacre (formerly known as the Tulsa Race Riot) was a major moment of the destruction of a prosperous Black community. The history, the aftermath, the coverup – Dave talks about some of the effects on US politics a century later.

Resisting Sanctions and Economic Warfare

Resisting economic warfare is possible. The main challenge for anti-imperial governments is military.

According to a paper published in the Lancet Global Health journal, economic sanctions imposed by the US on other countries have killed about 38 million people since 1970. A key feature of that economic warfare is the deliberate undermining of the currencies of countries singled out for punishment. In February, Trump’s Treasury Secretary boasted about how he brought about a collapse in the value of Iran’s currency. But it is not only sanctioned governments that must manage their currencies under the boot of the U.S. Empire. We’ll review the strategies governments have used to manage their exchange rates and conclude with a note on how economic warfare is inseparable from the real thing.

Basics of monetary policy under U.S. tyranny

Money is the inevitable result of goods and services being exchanged in a modern economy. If too little money circulates in an economy, the exchange of goods and services is restricted and unemployment can rise to excruciating levels. That often happens because central banks try to keep inflation very low by restricting the money supply (often done by raising the central bank interest rate on government bonds, making borrowing more expensive and disincentivizing it, thereby reducing the amount of money banks put into circulation through these loans). Too little money in circulation can cause deflation- a fall in the weighted average of all prices. But too much money printing can result if too much money chases after too few goods and services. It can cause the opposite of deflation, which is inflation. At excessively high levels inflation will prevent most people’s wages from keeping up with rising prices. When people lose purchasing power, they are impoverished. A state’s money policy should align with the real resources – labor, skills, natural resources including energy, infrastructures of various kinds – available in the economy. (Social classes within a country can have very different ideas about what a desirable money policy is).

A huge additional concern is foreign exchange. Unless a country is rich and powerful enough to have its central bank print a “reserve currency” like the U.S. dollar, then it also needs to worry about the international value of its currency. It is a global economy: all countries need imports, and they need foreign currency to pay for them. Today, about 57% of global central bank reserves are in U.S. dollars. The percentage was over 70% in 2000.

Using its dollar reserves to buy or sell its own currency is one way a central bank can impact the value of its currency (the exchange rate), selling dollars they have saved to buy back their own (eg., rials) in order to keep their own currency from depreciating too much, or buying dollars to build reserves when their own currency gets so strong that local industry is harmed by cheap and abundant imports. An alternative tool for protecting local industry, as someone taught Trump half a lesson about this term, is tariffs – but that’s a story for another newsletter.

If the value of a country’s currency drops too low relative to the US dollar, the cost of all imported goods people try to buy inside the country soar, which in turn can drive up all other prices, leading to an inflationary spiral. An overvalued currency, on the other hand, can stifle the development of domestic industry: when no other country can afford to acquire your expensive currency to buy what you’re selling, costumers will look for those goods somewhere cheaper. If you’re in the UK or the USA, you can go shopping on the world market with your strong currency and buy what you like, with no incentive to buy local, depriving your local businesses of the opportunity to sell to the local market. If you can’t sell in the local market the chances of succeeding globally are low. Deindustrialization results. Not a terrible outcome in the metropole, whose role in the global economy is to consume, not produce (even the flagship military industry is basically consumptive: its products are made to be blown up).

Ideally, the value of a country’s currency is stable and at a level that’s compatible with its economic development: not too high or too low relative to the U.S. dollar. (Again, social classes within a country can have very different ideas about what a desirable exchange rate is)

International trade also requires payment systems (ie., SWIFT). Because the U.S. dollar is still the world’s top reserve currency, the U.S. financial system remains the heart of the international payment system. As Andres Arauz, former head of Ecuador’s central bank, explained, when two countries in Latin America trade with each other – seemingly not involving the US at all – money still flows briefly through U.S. banks as part of the transaction. The U.S. Treasury then can claim jurisdiction over businesses in other countries, arresting foreign executives like France’s Robert Pierucci in what he called The American Trap. This is sometimes called “long-arm jurisdiction”, and it is one of many ways the U.S. exerts control over every economy in the world. The U.S. has tremendous coercive economic power that is ultimately backed by its military might.

There are various strategies governments have used to try to manage their currencies.[1]

Floats and pegs: options for the unsanctioned

A 1:1 Peg to the U.S. dollar (Argentina)

From 1991 until 2001, Argentina, under U.S.-backed rightwing governments, pegged its currency to the U.S. dollar. The government guaranteed that it would buy and sell Argentine pesos as if they were equal in value to dollars.

This strategy has been called a close cousin to dollarization. Dollarization is dispensing with your own currency entirely and using the U.S. dollar. What low inflation-obsessed economists like about a dollar peg and dollarization is that they greatly limit and eliminate, respectively, a central bank’s ability to print money.

In Argentina’s case, the dollar peg was credited with ending high inflation. But poverty and unemployment spiked after adopting the dollar peg. Then, in 1998, Argentina entered into the worst recession in its history. It continued for four years. Throughout the crisis IMF economists insisted that the dollar peg was not the problem – that Argentina simply needed to reduce wages and government spending (destroying health, education, human infrastructure, the social safety net…).

Taking IMF orders (and loans) during the crisis led to deflation, but it didn’t end the crisis. It made it worse. The crisis ended shortly after Argentina took three measures: 1. abandoned the peg, 2. let the peso devalue down to 25 cents, and 3. defaulted on $100 billion of government debt.

Argentina’s economy recovered quickly and living conditions improved steadily for over a decade. The key reason: Argentina began stimulating the economy rather than strangling it with austerity to try to save the dollar peg.

Sadly, because of imperial “long-arm jurisdiction”, the default led to Argentina being targeted by vulture funds: A U.S. businessman and funder of Philos Israel and other pro-Israel projects, Paul Singer, purchased Argentina’s debt and years after the default, sued Argentina in a U.S. court and was awarded $832 million of Argentina’s money by that court.

A managed float of the currency (Argentina)

Shortly after default and devaluation of 2001 Argentina imposed foreign exchange controls. High income exporters were forced to turn over dollar earnings to the central bank in exchange for pesos at the greatly devalued rate. That helped Argentina’s central bank build up dollar reserves so that it could implement a managed float of the peso.

If a central bank does nothing to impact where international supply and demand for its currency sets the exchange rate then it is said to allow the currency to “float”. With a managed float, the central bank does intervene to try to keep the exchange rate stable, but does not try to keep the exchange rate very far from where the international market would set it. A fixed exchange rate regime (a peg) is characterized by much more intervention by the state and a greater distance between the fixed exchange rate and the rate that would exist if the currency were allowed to float.

Argentina’s recovery happened mainly under the leftwing governments of Nestor Kirchner and later his wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The “Kirchner period” lasted from 2003-2015.

Thanks to Western democracy, Argentinian voters in 2023 were able to return economic madness and extreme Zionism to the presidency in the form of Javier Milei, who talks to his dogs that he named after right-wing economists like Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, bringing Argentina down to historic economic disaster, eating donkey meat and tree bark.

A reasonable peg to the dollar (Bolivia)

Under the leftwing Evo Morales government in Bolivia (2006 – 2019) the country greatly improved living conditions while maintaining a very stable exchange rate and low inflation.The poverty rate was cut in half, and extreme poverty by 60%. Bolivia’s currency (Boliviano) traded at about 6.8 for one U.S. dollar (about 15 cents) throughout this period The central bank intervened in the market to keep it remarkably stable.

To achieve that stability Bolivia built up massive central bank reserves that reached 48% of GDP by 2013, one of the highest in the world. The key to building huge reserves while also paying for public investment and social programs was a sevenfold increase in the government’s hydrocarbons export revenues. Morales ended loan agreements with the IMF whose economists had always opposed the nationalization of hydrocarbons.

Bolivia probably got carried away building reserves and should have plowed even more money into reducing poverty. A small reduction (say 10%) in its reserves would have gone a long way towards additional poverty reduction without sacrificing a stable currency. Could that have translated into additional public support – perhaps enough to have prevented the 2019 US-backed coup that ousted Morales? Possibly. Regardless, Bolivia’s approach to maintaining a stable and appropriately valued currency, while successful overall, was still very expensive both politically and economically. It illustrates the difficulty of operating within the US imperial system even when not subjected to crushing U.S. sanctions.

Dollarize your economy (Ecuador)

Decades of closely following IMF orders led Ecuador to disaster that drove unprecedented mass migration during the 1990s. Throughout the 1990s the central bank tried to keep the value of the sucre stable at a reasonable rate relative to the dollar but failed miserably. Constant devaluations were a feature of the catastrophic 1990s. In 1999 the banking system collapsed and in 2000 the government decided to adopt the U.S. dollar as its official currency.

President Jamil Mahuad, who made the decision to dollarize, remains despised in Ecuador, but dollarization is popular. More precisely, there is widespread fear that abandoning dollarization would mean a return to 1990s chaos and financial collapse.

Under the leftwing government of Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007’-2017) it was shown that dollarization isn’t the policy straitjacket that both proponents and detractors assumed it was. Correa’s government defaulted on government bonds owed to foreigners then repurchased them at greatly discounted rates. It took advantage of the benefits dollarization can bring (low inflation, low interest rates, a minimal need to hold dollar reserves) to help pay for public investment and social spending. It used banking regulations and tariffs to work around the limitations dollarization imposes. The government actually created a very significant amount of money during its last years in office – not by printing US dollars of course- but through the banking system.

All that said, dollarization was, overall, a burden that the Correa government had to bear. Assessing Correa’s achievements it must be stressed that Ecuador was not under U.S. sanctions while he was in office. The U.S. was focused on undermining Venezuela. In a post-Gaza genocide world, it is impossible to believe Correa’s government would have gone un-sanctioned.

Use a gold standard (USA, UK, Zimbabwe)

A gold standard has been fiercely advocated by right wing extremists like Ayn Rand, Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan. If a currency must be backed by gold, then the government cannot print what gold standard advocates call “fiat money”. But note (as discussed above regarding Ecuador) that even if the government cannot print money (even if it used gold coins as its currency) it could still create money through the banking system. That’s why goldsmiths ended up becoming powerful bankers in seventeenth century England. Also, a gold standard exists by a government fiat (decree) just like money that’s printed when there is no gold standard.

Contradictions aside, there is no doubt that a gold standard imposes extremely tight restrictions on the government’s monetary policy. As economist Bill Mitchell has explained, the gold standard was used in the United States from 1873 to 1933. It made the Great Depression much worse than it would otherwise have been, and even its narrow record on keeping inflation low and prices stable was not good. Price stability improved in the U.S. after the gold standard was abandoned.

When there is hyperinflation (an inflation rate of over 50% per month), it is the main problem hurting an economy, so resorting to a gold-backed currency – to trigger deflation – may appear justified- as in Zimbabwe recently. But the government must eventually find ways to increase the money supply as Ecuador did under the constraints of dollarization. It has been about a century since the leading capitalist states subjected themselves to a pure gold standard – 55 years if you count the Bretton Woods system, a modified gold standard for international trade after WWII that the U.S. dismantled in 1971. That alone speaks volumes about the problems with a gold standard.

Cuba resists sanctions through multiple modes

Reserve currency rationing, multiple fixed exchange rates and barter (Cuba)

Almost immediately after taking power in 1959, Cuba’s government was subjected to economic warfare and other acts of war perpetrated by Washington. While Che Guevara ran the central bank (1959-61), all Cuban pesos were replaced with new ones printed in Czechoslovakia. The new pesos arrived in Cuba disguised as arms shipments. The old pesos, held in large quantities by the revolutionary government’s enemies in the U.S., were suddenly made worthless by Che’s surprise maneuver. Additionally, anticipating the US blockade, Che quickly ordered Cuba’s gold reserves moved out of the US.[2]

During the Cold War, Cuba’s socialist government used a fixed exchange rate relative to the Soviet ruble and the US dollar, but also tightly controlled foreign currency to ensure that its use was compatible with the government’s economic plan. By 1979 possession of US dollars was legal only for the government and tourists. The Cuban government set pesos equal to US dollars for the purposes of setting some prices. That was very different from the 1:1 peg to the dollar in Argentina which had a freely convertible currency and consumer prices set by markets.

Another huge difference was Cuba’s barter-type trade with the USSR which was deliberately set up to be favourable to Cuba. This offset not only the harm done by U.S. sanctions but also the harm US imperialism did (and still does) to unsanctioned countries through normal trade. In fact, passively accepting unequal exchange is the requirement for remaining un-sanctioned.

One of the most valuable products Cuba received from the USSR in exchange for Cuban exports, largely sugar, was oil. By the mid 1980s, Cuba’s re-export of Soviet oil became its largest source of foreign currency.

Post Soviet sellout: two currencies, one pegged 1:1 with the dollar (Cuba)

The USSR was formally dissolved in 1991. Cuba was cast into the infamous “special period”. Smelling blood, the U.S. intensified its sanctions.

Cuba quickly turned to tourism to get foreign currency it could no longer get through its trade with the defunct USSR. It legalized the circulation of the U.S. dollar in Cuba in 1993, but still carefully regulated and taxed its use. Legalization reduced the size of the black market for dollars which had grown as Cubans living in the U.S. sent increasingly large amounts of dollars to family members in Cuba.

In 1994 Cuba introduced the CUC, a peso that Cubans and tourists could exchange at par with the dollar. The CUC reduced the need to have as many dollars circulating in Cuba. The CUC circulated alongside the dollar in Cuba until 2004. Cuba’s regular peso, known as the CUP, exchanged for dollars at a very different fixed rate. In 1996 the rate was 1 dollar for 18 CUP.

Cuba also defaulted on foreign debt which was also key to it surviving the special period. By 1994 Cuba had not only survived the special period, in defiance of IMF predictions, but also returned to growth.

Beginning in 2000 barter-type trade with Venezuela helped reduce the pressure on Cuba to get dollars. Cuba doctors and other professionals worked in Venezuela in exchange for Venezuelan oil.

In 2004, the government concluded that the influx of dollars in a decentralized manner was not doing enough to alleviate Cuba’s dollar shortage. Cuba again centralized its control of U.S. dollars and other foreign currency. With rare exceptions, only the CUC and CUP were allowed to circulate in Cuba.

The CUC exchanged at 1 CUC to 24 CUP for Cuban consumers and 1 CUC to 1 CUP for state enterprises.

Slow transition towards currency and exchange rate unification (Cuba)

Cuba’s post-1993 reforms allowed rapid growth of the tourist industry which by the early 2000s became Cuba’s major source of foreign of currency. But it also caused problems and resentment. It created a two tier system where workers in industries like tourism who had ready access to CUCs had much higher incomes than those without. The system incentivized highly educated professionals to abandon their professions to work in the tourism industry if they could.

To some extent that problem was offset by the health care sector. The medical services provided by Cuban doctors working abroad became a very important source of foreign currency.

Beginning in 2013, the government stopped allowing some state enterprises to exchange CUC and CUP at a rate of 1:1. The 1:1 rate meant the enterprise was treating revenues and costs as the same whether in pesos or dollars – a massive cost to the government that often discouraged efficiency. So in 2013 some state enterprises were required to exchange at a rate of 1 CUC for 10 CUP.

As former Minister of the Economy, José Luis Rodríguez, explained, the goal was to gradually shift to one currency whose exchange rate was set through a managed float (discussed above).[3] Helen Yaffe, in her book “We are Cuba” described the extensive public consultations and debates that are always ongoing about public policy in Cuba. Cuban leaders were extremely careful to prepare the public for currency and exchange rate unification. The CUC was eliminated in 2021, eight years after the process was initiated, but multiple fixed exchange rates are still used for the CUP.

The long economic war on Venezuela

After suffering two U.S.-backed coup attempts in 2002-2003 Venezuela abandoned a floating exchange rate system in favor of foreign currency controls and a fixed exchange rate. By 2010 it began using multiple official exchange rates. It worked well enough until 2013 when it suddenly ran into problems with an inflation-devaluation spiral that was driven by a black market for dollars. This problem became vastly worse after the U.S. and its proxies deliberately crashed oil prices in 2014 to hurt Venezuela, Iran and Russia. The U.S began imposing broad economic sanctions in 2015, under Obama, which were intensified repeatedly through Trump’s first term.

Starting in 2019, Venezuela began to significantly relax foreign currency controls – to give Venezuelans many more legal ways to get dollars. In 2020, Venezuela also shifted away from indiscriminate fuel subsidies to a system that was far more targeted – and that recycled dollars back to the government. The economy has been growing since 2021 despite crushing US sanctions.

Contrary to western media lies about political repression, necessary economic reforms in Venezuela were delayed by the government’s remarkable tolerance for U.S.-backed subversives as we argued in our book “Extraordinary Threat”.

If a country has a market economy – which is the case for all the cases we reviewed except for Cuba – then it would appear that a managed float and single exchange rate appears to be best – if it is a realistic option politically. (It wasn’t realistic in Ecuador during Correa’s decade in office as we explained). However, even Cuba, which has a socialist planned economy, has a managed float and a single exchange rate as a long term goal. But extreme U.S. malevolence has obstructed Cuba’s efforts. That said, a one-size-fits-all conclusion about the best exchange rate system for all countries in all circumstances would be unwise.

China’s inimitable methods

Currency options are not a menu that a government can choose from, but historical choices arising from contingency and improvisation. Cuba has survived through so many crises because of its revolutionary trajectory and its ability to mobilize its people. China, on the other hand, was the largest economy in the world for most of history, passed through a century of humiliation, and is returning to its historical role. China has also had a revolution and shares with Cuba the ability to mobilize people for major undertakings. Its size and resources mean that it has passed from defending itself from US sanctions, to working around them, and is now reaching the point of challenging them directly.

Under U.S. economic sanction from 1949-1979, China used barter trade within the socialist bloc as well as with the capitalist bloc. The terms of the barter trade with the Soviet Union were a source of resentment and one of the causes of the Sino-Soviet split (documented in Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War). For a long time, Hong Kong served as a bridge between China and the capitalist bloc. As China builds out the Belt and Road Initiative, they made specific deals, including infrastructure-for-resources deals, avoiding the U.S. dollar and its long-arm jurisdiction.

China’s socialist economy has successfully used a fixed exchange rate system – and China is far less vulnerable than Cuba to U.S. aggression. Even the IMF has conceded that China’s control over foreign currency flows allowed it to grow during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s when other Asian economies were devastated. In fact, China did well because it did the exact opposite of what the IMF coerced other Asian countries to do. After the Asian financial crisis, many countries built up massive dollar reserves to avoid ever having to go to the IMF for help. Standard capitalist economics textbooks don’t tell developing countries to build up reserves to defend against the kind of predators who teach economics at Harvard.

Since 2005 China’s exchange rate has gradually become more flexible – similar to a managed float.

In 2018, Canada under PM Trudeau was convinced to arrest the CFO of the flagship Chinese tech company Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, on behalf of the US, who wanted to prosecute her, alleging that Huawei was not complying with US sanctions on Iran. The analogy to Pierucci and the American Trap, which ended with the US-based General Electric acquiring the cutting edge part of the French giant Alstom, was obvious. But China did not hand Huawei over to the Americans. Instead, Canada ended up handing Mme. Meng back to China. This was one turning point in China’s history of being sanctioned.

Next, in 2022, the US and Europe scolded China for providing an economic lifeline to Russia, whose economy was supposed to collapse when the West stopped supplying it with Western goods. China expanded its trade with Russia, unfazed.

In 2026, with the Strait of Hormuz closed to the US and its allies in aggression and genocide, the US demanded that China stop trading with Iran lest its refineries face secondary sanctions. China employed a 2021 law called the “blocking mechanism”, declaring that any company complying with US sanctions would face severe legal consequences in China. This is another turning point in China’s history as it constitutes the most direct challenge yet to the US sanctions weapon.

Iran, Russia, and the other inimitable method: war

In 2026 Iran has discovered a unique and probably unrepeatable option for defeating a U.S. sanctions regime. When the U.S. and Israel initiated a unilateral war of aggression by assassinating Iran’s supreme leader and killing 180 schoolchildren in Minab, Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, charging a toll for ships passing through, and conducting both tolls and trade for its own oil in currencies other than the dollar. As a result of these war conditions, Iran has broken out of the sanctions regime that had been destroying its economy and is now selling more oil at higher prices than before the war, as well as exerting control over a significant portion of the economy of its enemies. Oil in West Asia was referred to in 1944 by the US State department as a “stupendous source of strategic power” and “the greatest material prize in world history”. Deployed since 1979 against Iran by the US, that stupendous power is now in Iran’s hands.

This option cannot be generalized because no other country has the capacity and the confidence to go to direct war against the U.S. To do so, a country would need a vast underground military-industrial complex, a huge, dispersed, and motivated leadership class that can recover from the assassinations of key figures, deterrent-level air defense, the ability to threaten to destroy a large amount of the world economy, physical control over one of a handful of key global logistical chokepoints, and the ability to fight a standoff war with the U.S. air force, navy, and all of its allies.

Or some similarly potent set of attributes – like Russia has.

Russia was supposed to collapse under the weight of sanctions in 2022. Biden boasted that the ruble was goint to turn into rubble. Instead, Russia has defeated the sanctions and used them to develop local industries including their own military-industrial complex. As with Iran, Russia’s success in defeating the sanctions was inseparable from their success on the battlefield. Russia chose a slow, casualty-averse attrition strategy knowing that NATO and the US could continue adding resources to match Russia, but knowing also that Russia’s military industrial production was a match for the West in a long war of attrition. Russia also had its own “stupendous source of strategic power” as a major oil and gas producer. When the US cut Russian gas out of European markets, Russia found markets for their energy in the east (as did Iran). With resources to sell, markets to sell them to, and currencies other than the dollar to trade in, there was no way the ruble was going to turn into rubble.

We conclude this newsletter with real war because economic warfare is inseparable from kinetic war and cannot be conducted without its threat. This year, the Trump dictatorship has bombed Venezuela, imposed a sadistic fuel blockade on Cuba, and launched a disastrous war on Iran. Trump has also threatened that Cuba will be invaded next. Economic wars on Russia and Iran were followed by the real thing; the US makes clear every day that it intends the same for China. Eventually, targeted countries (which eventually, will be everyone) will have to defend their economies on the battlefield.

NOTES

[1] The overview we provide for Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador comes primarily from Mark Weisbrot’s 2015 book “Failed: What the “experts” got wrong about the global economy”

[2] Our sources on Cuba were two of the books Helen Yaffe wrote about Cuba: “We are Cuba” and “Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution”. This article of Yaffe’s was also very informative.

[3] See page 42 of Cuban Economists on the Cuban Economy

Did the war disrupt weather modification on Iran?

Speculations about post-war rainfall

In November 2025, Iran’s president Pezeshkian announced that Tehran could no longer remain the capital of Iran: drought would soon make the city of 10 million people unlivable. Scientific American diagnosed Tehran’s plight as “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption”, citing Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.

Six months later, Tehran was experiencing record rainfall and snow, and dams were overflowing in other parts of the country. The Iranian Embassy in Bulgaria posted a video of one such dam, at Paveh.

You can’t predict the weather. But “climate change and corruption” presumably didn’t change in six months. If the rain keeps up, what did change?

This note reviews some of the scientific literature on weather modification, with specific reference to well-funded weather modification programs based in the United Arab Emirates, which were damaged in Iran’s retaliatory strikes during the Ramadan war. The notion that the US military induced drought over Iran and/or Iraq is speculative; the notion that the US and UAE are engaged in active weather modification in Iran’s environs is established fact.

  1. Cloud seeding

The focus of the UAE weather modification program is cloud seeding. Simply explained, cloud seeding involves aircraft spraying materials (usually silver or potassium iodide) into clouds around which water vapor will condense, growing clouds and inducing precipitation. The US military weaponized cloud seeding over Vietnam between 1967 and 1972, which they called Operation Popeye, to try to disrupt North Vietnamese logistics by extending the monsoon. Another US military weather modification project was called STORMFURY (not Epic Fury or Epstein Fury), and involved the manipulation of hurricanes (Willoughby et al. 1985).

From Department of Defense 1974, SEASIA Rainmaking. Retrieved from the soon-to-be-defunct Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20090612231729/http://www.sunshine-project.org/enmod/popeye

The UAE program is not limited to chemical interventions. In 2021, they tried what the BBC called “cloud-busting drones”. The drones delivered electric charge to clouds to attempt to aid condensation.

Evaluations of the UAE’s extensive cloud seeding program indicate success in enhancing rainfall (Hosari et al. 2021, Wehbe et al. 2023), and the physics of cloud seeding continues to advance, including in and around the UAE. Saudi Arabia reported a successful cloud seeding in 2025 (Alzahrani and Abdelbaki 2025).

  1. Ground-based weather modification

German scientists have experimented with using lasers to create clouds – in lab conditions, but lasers aren’t the only option for ground-based weather modification. A 2009 paper by Beare et al., “Accounting for spatiotemporal variation of rainfall measurements when evaluating ground-based methods of weather modification” described a study in Australia of a system called Atlant, a ground-based ionization technology for affecting rainfall. The system’s functioning is described as follows:

“1. Initially, negative ions are generated from a high-voltage corona discharge wire array; the ions become attached to particles in the atmosphere which later act as cloud condensation nuclei; the ions are conveyed to the higher atmosphere by wind; the electric charges on these particles are transferred to cloud droplets; and the electrostatic forces on droplet interaction aid the coalescence of the cloud droplets, resulting in enhanced raindrop growth rate and ultimately increasing rainfall downwind from the Atlant ion emitter.”

Ground-based manipulation of the ionosphere through the emission of radiated power is the science of the US military’s HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). Emitters can add considerable energy to targeted areas of atmosphere. Ground-based ion emitters were used for cloud seeding in Oman in 2013 and 2014 in a trial reported in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences (Chambers et al. 2016).

  1. Iran’s complaints

Iraqi scholar Salam Abdulqadir Abdulrahman (2024) described cloud seeding as “problematic” because of the transnational nature of clouds and disputes over water:

“Similar to water basins, there are cloud basins or cloud lines, shared by states.

“A cloud basin starts from where the clouds form and begin their journey and all the areas they travel over to where they disperse completely. For example, the northern areas of the Middle East, except for the northern part of Turkey, share a basin. Their clouds are largely formed over the Mediterranean Sea and move eastward. They travel over Israel and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, south of Turkey, northern Iran and some other areas. It is believed that seeding clouds in one state, the upwind, reduces the amount of rain in another state, the one downwind; i.e. part of the rain of a downwind state is seized by an upwind state. The shift of rain causes security concerns for downwind states.”

Iran thus complained in 2018: “Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, accused Israel in a press conference in 2018 of manipulating weather and making the clouds unable to rain over Iran. He alleged that Israel had stolen Iran’s snow.”

  1. Rainfall in 2026

Two mechanisms are suggested for how a drought over Iran could be engineered through UAE-based weather modification.

  1. First, cloud seeding over UAE could indeed have deprived Iran of rainfall in proportion to the extra rainfall received by UAE.

  2. Second, if ground-based ionization can be used to encourage condensation, a similar process could be used to discourage condensation and prevent the formation of clouds.

One Iranian poster (@AcEpic69, April 15/26) speculated that THAAD radar arrays could be used to disrupt the formation of clouds over Iran. Another poster (@raminrnp, April 22/26) believes that weaponized weather modification against Iran will continue from other bases (Qatar, Bahrain), drones, HAARP emitters in the northern hemisphere, and more.

In this fourth section we have left the scientific literature and headed on to twitter. The evidentiary standard is lowered. Correlation is not causation. But the radars are destroyed, the UAE’s cloud seeding program is disrupted, and it’s raining in Iran again.

Interwar 8: The rise of the first Reza Shah Pahlavi

After the Cossack Coup, a power struggle between rivals leads to Reza Khan rising to the top. He defangs an American financial mission, jails and executes his rivals, plunders the tribes, makes a personal bank, and becomes not only Shah, but in Gholi Majd’s words, “the largest private landowner… in all likelihood in the recorded history of mankind.” Britain’s sponsorship of his rise, and Britain’s sponsorship of his fall in 1941, ends our study of Interwar Iran.

Interwar 7: Reza Khan and the Cossack Coup of 1921

The 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement made every Persian government that followed unviable. Britain wanted Iran to be a colony, but couldn’t find a viable collaborator in the Qajjar Shahs or the Majlis. So, in 1921, they used one of their favorite moves: they organized a coup to overthrow a government they had installed and supported. The coup was run by the only viable military force in available: the Cossacks. And one Cossack commander in particular rose to prominence in the process: Reza Khan, who in a few years will change his name to something more familiar…

The academic racists behind Iranian monarchism

Aryan race theory is a made-in-Europe import

The war began with the US assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader and murdering 168 schoolgirls in class.

Assassinations and attacks on schoolchildren are now a normal part of the way the US and Israel act in the world. Still, it was jarring to see online that in places like Toronto and Beverly Hills, people celebrated these murders. Even in North America, which is full of diasporas who call for the overthrow of the countries from which they came, seeing – from non-Israelis – celebrations of genocidal bombing is rare, surprising – even baffling. After all, when Israeli Jews celebrate deaths, they’re celebrating the deaths of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians – never other Jewish people.

What explains these dancing monarchists? Why no solidarity for their fellow people back home?

Hasan expresses bafflement at people dancing while Iran is being bombed

There is only one answer: those dancing see themselves as racially distinct from the people being bombed. They have no more solidarity with the bombing victims in Iran than Israeli Jews have for Palestinians. How is that accomplished? The same as it is with Zionists: over generations, through school textbooks and media saturation. It turns out these dance moves have their roots in an unexpected place: dusty academic texts from a century and a half ago.

As one racist president of the Eugenics Society, JM Keynes, put it memorably a century ago: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

To whose academic tune are these monarchists dancing? The melody of Aryan race theory, of course. Orientalist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, first coined the Aryan term. Around 1786, Jones wrote about these Aryans (1).

“… we Europeans, together with the Persians and the Hindoos, however wide may be the apparent and superficial differences between us, are, nevertheless, members of a close and common brotherhood in the great families of nations. First westward and northward, afterwards east- ward and southward, the Aryans extended…”

Jones’s contemporary, Freidrich von Schlegel in Germany, took this up, putting Germany and the Indo-Iranians together in the Aryan race in 1819: “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin”, he said. To Schlegel, who coined the word ‘Aryan’ from Greek and Sanskrit words, it was the Aryan race who brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe (2).

From the beginning, these European racial anthropologists were as anti-Arab as they were pro-Aryan. French orientalist Ernest Renan (3) wrote in 1852:

“Imprisoned as all Semitic people are in the narrow circle of lyricism and prophetism, the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula never had the slightest idea of what can be called science or rationalism. It is when the Persian spirit, represented by the Abbasid dynasty, vanquished the Arab spirit, that Greek philosophy penetrated Islam. Although subjugated by a Semitic religion, Persia always maintained its rights as an Indo-European nation.”

Renan believed that Arabs and Aryans were “perfectly distinct… two different species having nothing in common in the manner of thinking and feeling.”

Racism is an academic theory with many filthy contributors but one of its main founding fathers must be Arthur de Gobineau. The author of the 1855 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races taught that race was the motor of history, that all good things came from the pure white race, and that purity of race and blood were the key to everything. Gobineau wrote that Aryans were pure and unadulterated, that Jews were the chosen race and superior to all others, and that Arabs, Africans, and Asians were degenerate races. (4) As Iranian-Canadian academic Alireza Asgharzadeh describes Gobineau (5):

“Seeing racial crossbreeding as central to the decay of civilizations, Gobineau argued that civilizations mixing with peoples incapable of civilizing will be ruined eventually. In his view, “the blood” was the source of all human ability, power, intelligence, creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness. These qualities were passed on through blood from one individual to the next, and from one racial generation to another. If a race’s blood was contaminated, then the entire race and its civilization would be contaminated. Gobineau insisted that different races were innately unequal in talent, worth, and ability, and only the “white Aryan races” were capable of creating culture and civilization. The non-Aryans and “darker races” could not produce higher forms of culture and civilization; they could only borrow from the white races.”

In Gobineau’s own blood-quantum words (6):

“The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quality of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements.”

Gobineau’s 1855 book arrived in time to inspire a Persian-flavored version of Aryan race theory from playwright Fath’ali Akhundzadeh (7). In his 1860 book, the Maktubat, Akhundzadeh argued that the Arabs are to blame for everything. He quotes a medieval-era play, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: “From drinking camel milk and eating lizard / The Arab’s fortune has reached the point / That he wishes for the Persian crown.”

Akhundzadeh mocked the Islamic tradition of charity, arguing that Persians should not “bear expenses of 100 or 200 tomans to go to Hajj and feed hungry Arabs.”

He mocked the foundational Shia story of martyrdom, summarizing it as: “a thousand and two hundred and something years before, ten or fifteen Arabs killed ten or fifteen other Arabs in the Kufa desert [allusion to the yearly Shi‘ite commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, who was murdered in Karbala and not Kufa].”

Akhundzadeh’s most virulent hatred was always for Arabs: “The Arab tribe is unique among the tribes of the world in its capacity to weave lies and create tales, and the people of Iran are unmatched in their propensity to believe lies and tales.”

Akhundzadeh’s protege, Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (d. 1896) built on that rotten foundation, with two books written in the 1890s, Seh makhtub and Sad khatabeh. Kermani “calls Arabs “bare-arse, savage, hungry, vagabonds.” He goes on:

“I spit on them . . . naked bandits, homeless rat-eaters . . . vilest humans, most vicious beasts . . . camel-riding thieves, black and yellow scrawny lot, animal-like and even worse than animals.”

Kermani also “affirms that “the philosophers of Europe write that we have never seen two nations more antagonistic and opposed to each other in character than [Aryan] Iranians and [Semitic] Arabs.”

His dehumanization of Arabs is so excessive that he even implies that they may deserve no less than extermination.

“If it was not for the ruthless ulama of Iran,” he warns, and their relentless praising of the Arabs, Iranians would have taken revenge over their ancestors’ blood, and they would not have spared “one single tribe of the barbarian Arabs on the face of the earth.””

Everything was fine for Aryan race theory until the 20th century, when British and German racists realized they didn’t actually want to be in the same race as Indians and Persians. So the British changed their theory, and the poor Indo-Iranian racists were left behind. As Asgharzadeh puts it (pg. 92): “This was a major blow, particularly to the overexcited Aryanist elements in places such as Iran and India who were preparing their own versions of Nazism, based on the presupposition that they were biologically related to the same “superior race” as Hitler’s Aryan race.”

In Asgharzadeh’s summary (pg. 102):

“All this discursive/ideological confusion, disharmony, and Aryanist mumbo jumbo means that notions such as the Aryan myth, the superior Aryan race, pure blood, and superior civilization were nothing more than powerful ideological/discursive tools to facilitate the desire and aspirations of certain groups for power and domination.”

Academics need infrastructure – ideally state power – to get their ideas across, from journals to university students and teachers, to textbooks and children’s education (and now, Western-sponsored Persian language satellite television, Western-run Persian language social media…) The ideas found an eager patron in Reza Shah Pahlavi, a Cossack officer who’d come to power in a coup in 1921, and the German Nazis (8) sponsored a number of journals in the 1930s to disseminate Aryan race theory. Iran-e Bastan, Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran, Partow e-Iran, Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid, were the top journals in Iran’s literary scene. Asgharzadeh (pg. 111):

“The Nazi propaganda machine advocated the (supposedly) common Aryan ancestry of “the two Nations.” In order to further cultivate racist tendencies, in 1936, the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were “pure-blooded Aryans” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 160). In 1939, the Nazis provided Persians with what they called a German Scientific Library. The library contained over 7,500 books carefully selected “to convince Iranian readers . . . of the kinship between the National Socialist Reich and the ‘Aryan culture’ of Iran” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 161). In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn among Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblances among these leaders (Rezun, 1982, p. 29).”

Without reviewing what’s happened in the literature from the 1950s-1979, you get the idea (see my two sources, Asgharzadeh and Ebrahimi, for that history). Suffice it to say that the monarchists are the intellectual progeny of this body of work. As surely as Zionism flowed from the pens of Herzl and Jabotinsky, the Iranian monarchists Aryanism flows from the pens of Gobineau, Akhundzadeh, and Kermani. The interlocutors, the explainers, the informants for the US/Israel adventure currently upending the world order, are readers of this work and its derivatives. They see the world divided into races, they see themselves as Aryans, and they see the Iranians in Iran as impure, adulterated by Arabs.

Iran meanwhile has moved on, with a state and society that are the product of a revolution that occurred in 1979, sending their children to win medals in things like math olympiads and wrestling. The 1979 revolution affirmed everything despised by the Aryan race intellectuals: Shia Islam, justice for oppressed Arabs in Palestine, confrontation with the European masters.

Steeped in these readings and ideas, the monarchists dancing to celebrate the deaths of 168 schoolgirls and an 86-year old religious leader see themselves as purer, superior beings to those killed.

But there are no chosen peoples or superior races. Just like their Zionist masters, it turns out the people who believe they are Aryans are mere mortals like the rest of us.

Notes

  1. Alireza Ashgharzadeh. Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles. Pg. 85. Cites Farrar 1878 (Farrar, 1878, pp. 306–307) citing William Jones.

  2. Asgharzadeh: “In a book titled Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808/1849), Schlegel asserted that the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan race had brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe from their Himalaya homeland. In 1819, Schlegel used the term Aryan to identify this discursively emerging Indo-European race who had presumably brought culture and civilization to the world. The term Aryan had been derived from Herodotus’s Arioi and Sanskrit’s Ariya. He associated the root Ari with Ehre, the German word for honor and gave a new dimension to the rising importance of language by connecting it to racial and national issues.”

  3. Renan, quoted in Reza Zia Ebrahimi’s 2016 book, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation.

  4. Quoted in Ebrahimi pg. 114.

  5. Asgharzadeh pg. 69

  6. Gobineau, 1915/1967, pp. 209–210 quoted in Asgharzadeh

  7. Akhundzadeh and Kermani are the main subjects of Ebrahimi’s book. All quotes from these two over the next paragraphs are from Ebrahimi.

  8. Asgharzadeh: “As early as 1933, the Nazis began to publish a racist journal titled Iran-e Bastan [The Ancient Iran]. The journal was financed by Siemens-Schuk-kert, and Major von Viban of the Political Department of the NADFA in Berlin handled the editorial issues. A pro-Nazi Iranian intellectual named Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Seif worked as coeditor of the journal (Blucher, 1949, p. 137)… “Iran-e Bastan played a very important role in advocating Persian racism among the Iranian elite and intellectuals. It provided a starting point for Persian nationalists to launch their chauvinistic attack on whoever they did not see as Aryan. Following the Nazi journal, all kinds of chauvinistic magazines, journals, and newspapers such as Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran [The Love of Iran], Partow-e Iran [The Light of Iran], Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid [The Seat of Jamshid, imaginary Ancient Persian King] dominated the Persian literary scene. All these publications highlighted the past and the pre-Islamic glories of the Persian nation and blamed the supposedly “savage Arabs and Turks” for the backwardness of Iran.” (pg. 11).

After Noam

A program of reeducation

During the first few rounds of Chomsky Epstein revelations – indeed even before – I’d been seeing, from leftists on social media, various versions of the meme that Parenti was the real leftist and Chomsky, mere controlled opposition.

As the revelations rolled out, many said that they knew it all along, that they had long resented Chomsky’s anarchist / libertarian politics, the things that he said against the Bolshevik Revolution and the USSR, against “conspiracy theories”, against BDS and the right of return, in favor of the “two-state” dead end.

But Parenti wasn’t my pathway to activism. Chomsky was. I didn’t know it all along.

Discovering Chomsky

I grew up reading the Canadian daily newspaper my dad subscribed to, The Globe and Mail, every morning, for as long as I can remember, in disgust without knowing why. As a teenager, I stumbled on Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire in my public library; Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in a shopping mall bookstore. I wrote a high school history essay about Mao Zedong. I read about the life and death struggles of the revolutionaries of the past. But these people were literally leading warriors into battle. I couldn’t see a way to emulate them in my own life. About a year later I found Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy in a university library. Even after reading about revolutionaries, there was something new in that experience. It felt like the mainstream media that had been playing in the background my whole life had encased my mind in glass and Chomsky’s writing shattered the glass. I didn’t know it was possible to write like that, in that style, without the reverence and deference for American power that was an invisible part of every word and image on cable TV and newspapers at the time. I tracked down all the books I could find by Chomsky: Turning the Tide, Year 501, Culture of Terrorism, World Orders, Old and New, Towards a New Cold War, American Power and the New Mandarins. I got into Fateful Triangle and co-authored books like Manufacturing Consent and The Political Economy of Human Rights, later.

It’s only recently that I’ve been hearing people who say that Chomsky never said or did anything special. This is not my experience. To me, there was a lot he did that was special, and I’ll try to get specific about that below. But it wasn’t just what he said and how he went about the writing, but the fact that I could actually imagine trying to do what he did – not leading a guerrilla movement or a satyagraha, but working in science and then trying to make a political contribution through writing. I saw it, and I did it: I’d always liked science and been interested in history and politics and writing, and seeing that Chomsky had done it, I thought I could try to do both.

Searching for Chomsky’s name, I found ZNet on the 1990s internet. I joined their online forum community, volunteered for their website, started my political writing journey there, attended their summer school, taught at their summer school, and became friends with people who were also major political and intellectual influences on me. This became my main political engagement for more than a decade and a half. It’s hard for me to express how proud I was to be associated with Z and with Chomsky specifically. It’s difficult to put into words how much of Noam’s ideas, methods of working, teaching style, and even interpersonal and activist approaches I consciously tried to absorb. If there was such a thing as a “Chomskyite”, I was one. Maybe I still am.

An elite defector

I never had the delusion I would reach either the scientific heights or political influence that Noam did. Everyone’s capacities are different, we were from different eras, and we started in different places. These are realities of class society. In my life I’ve met people who started with fewer privileges than I have had who couldn’t get a break: getting a ride somewhere or transit fare, fixing a broken computer or getting a form printed became huge challenges. I’ve also known people for whom everything works out, who could easily do things that would never occur to me as being possible or feasible.

This is a fundamental thing I don’t think people understand about Chomsky: He’s a member of the elite who became a dissident. He was always going to have a high academic and public profile. He published his writing in elite journals. When he talks about even the most genocidal US policies with total disgust, he uses the first person “we” to describe the US – “we bombed”, “we overthrew”, “we slaughtered”. Back in 1967, when he was a decade younger than I am now, he was on a panel with Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag – on the stage with the most prominent intellectuals of the time. Coming from where he comes from, there is something of the magician that betrays his illusionist profession to reveal how the tricks work backstage. He focuses his criticism on US imperial intellectuals, because he knows (and hates) how they think. Not, again, something that others who are not of his background could emulate.

Chomsky has argued – I took his word for it then and I disagree with him now – that US elite culture didn’t really support Israel until after the 1967 war. In his words, he was “driven out of the mainstream” over the Palestine Question around 1970, after – according to his analysis – the post-1967 consolidation of Zionism in the US. By then he was already so prominent that his being “driven out of the mainstream” helped to generate an alternative media ecosystem, with Z Magazine’s growth in the 1990s being due in significant part to the fact that they were publishing Chomsky. And not only Z.

Chomsky’s enormous standing in the US intellectual class and in the Jewish community meant that when he took up opposition to Israel, it had the effect of giving the rest of us some kind of permission to do the same. Thanks to decades of struggle by Palestinian activists, the Palestine movement has reached the maturity to follow Palestinian voices. But in the early 2000s, those of us “Palestine people” who were neither Palestinian nor Jewish, found ourselves looking to Jewish voices like Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, and others, to quote [1]. When I went to occupied Palestine in 2002 with the International Solidarity Movement, it was after reading an article by Chomsky’s student Tanya Reinhart called, simply, “Stop Israel!” Thankfully, the movement is finally moving beyond the need for this and recognizing this as an issue for all humanity – for all of us Basel al Araj called “Palestinian in the broad sense” [2]. But in those years, Chomsky had a role in creating that space, at least around here. His punishment for breaking this taboo was being “driven out of the mainstream”.

The US establishment may have regretted driving Noam from the mainstream. Many decades later, they absorbed him back in.

Demystification

No one can decide where they come from nor the talents they’re born with. There’s nothing wrong with being from an elite family, especially if you become a dissident. Or a revolutionary – wasn’t Castro from a big family? Nor is that something that can be learned, or emulated. What then, are the elements of the “Chomskyism” that I am lamenting?

Reading Chomsky’s books, you’ll come across phrases like, “as any six year old would know”, “a three year old could understand”. These kinds of statements are popular in the natural sciences, when trying to distinguish between easier and harder concepts. Chomsky’s agenda was to demystify social and political affairs. He didn’t want ordinary people to be intimidated by academics or elites who claimed to rule because they were so much smarter. No, Chomsky always argued, these were things anybody could learn and do, and you didn’t need complex social theories. His scientific ideas, which I know only a little bit about, were also along these lines – that human capacities like language were the endowment of everyone.

First Principles

Another famous phrase of Chomsky’s is the “elementary moral truism”, which was that “we should judge ourselves” (“we” meaning the US) “by the same standards we judge our official enemies.” Chomsky also repeatedly referred to the “elementary moral principle” that it’s only moral to focus on things one can affect – hence, people of the US ought to focus on US crimes, which they are supposed to have responsibility for, and not the crimes of enemies, which, however awful they may be, are not your responsibility any more than lamenting the crimes of Genghis Khan is your responsibility. In 2026, it is pretty clear that ordinary people in the US have much less ability to affect foreign policy than is implied in this principle and that the crimes committed by the genocidal, pedophilic Epstein class might as well be being committed by foreign occupiers or aliens since ordinary people have zero ability to influence them. Nonetheless, Lenin also held something like this idea [3] in the lead up to WWI, arguing that instead of joining their respective ruling classes in going to war against other workers, socialists ought to take the battle to their own national ruling classes.

Like building a mathematical system, Chomsky wanted to present a small number of “elementary moral truisms” which reveal the injustice and immorality of US foreign policy. Demystifying elites is a good thing to do. Teaching that understanding politics is within the grasp of anyone is also a good thing to do. It’s possible to overdo it – if you tell a student that something they are struggling with is actually simple, it might be empowering, but it might also be disempowering. Chomsky also overreached when he claimed that Marx’s political economy was overcomplicated by a class of Marxist intellectuals. As Chomsky knew, some elements of political economy are complicated and take long and difficult study to understand. It isn’t always mystification.

Using their sources

Another “Chomskyism” is to use establishment sources to refute establishment propaganda. The most devastating critiques are delivered by quoting US and Israeli officials themselves. This was a powerful technique worth using, but it can be overused and devalue local sources and people on the ground.

The Analogical Method

In his tribute to Noam for his 95th birthday, Z Magazine publisher, 1960s antiwar activist, and former MIT student of Noam’s Michael Albert described what he thought admirable and remarkable about Noam. In terms of his work and teaching style, Chomsky was remarkable for giving time to everyone who approached him with a sincere question, answering emails all day, every day. He especially supported activists and activist groups. Michael also talks about how, in addition to reading fast and a lot and remembering a large amount of what he reads (qualities that others have, if perhaps to a lesser extent), Chomsky has a skill with employing analogies:

“He would switch from talking about the U.S. in Vietnam (then obscured by emotional preconceptions and prejudices that the U.S. could do no wrong) to the role of Russia in Eastern Europe (where an American could see invasion and imperialism more clearly). He would switch from discussing the possibility of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (which deeply-held axiomatic U.S. beliefs biased against recognizing since the U.S.was never the bad invader) to the possibility of Iran invading Afghanistan (easier to conceive for someone from the U.S.). He would switch from assessing the criminality of the U.S. punishing Afghanistan’s whole population for their country housing terrorists who attacked the U.S. (confused, after all, how could we be criminal) to Britain (if it had done so) punishing the U.S. for housing and financing IRA acts in Britain (easy to analyze since of course anyone else can be criminal). Or he would compare the media emphasizing 9/11 as terrorism but not seeing the U.S. embargo of Iraq as chemical and biological warfare waged on civilians. He would move from discussing U.S. media dynamics to discussing old Soviet media dynamics, or from discussing U.S. foreign policy to discussing the behavior of Mafia dons, and so on. The analogies would bypass confounding biases to reveal core features and then he would switch back to see them in more difficult to accept circumstances like scientists with thought experiments more generally.”

This, one of the trademark “Chomskyisms”, was certainly useful for breaking through propagandized thinking. Chomsky would use American hatred for Russia or Iran to stump audiences as to why they don’t have that same energy when the US is committing crimes. He compared the silence on the US-sponsored Indonesian massacres in East Timor with the wall-to-wall coverage of Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia. For people who didn’t like him, these analogies were the ammunition to insinuate he was an apologist for the Khmer Rouge, or for tankies, to say he hated the USSR. I believe he did sincerely oppose the USSR and in his reading of history, the Bolsheviks prevented a libertarian socialist or anarchist revolution from happening (a reading of history I don’t share, and for which Parenti’s reading in Blackshirts and Reds etc. is much better) but the point of these analogies was much more tactical and pedagogical: it was always to show that if, as you’ve been taught, you hate these actions by official enemies, you should hate these actions by the US (which he would say, “crimes that we are committing”) that much more.

Even though my first exposure to this analogical method was Chomsky, I learned later that Marx used it a century before when critiquing the British Empire’s second opium war. The British used as a pretext that the Chinese attacked their fleet as it headed to the capital where the British Ambassador wished to set up. In an 1857 article in the New York Daily, Marx asked: “Does the right of the French Embassador to reside at London, involve the right of forcing the river Thames at the head of an armed French expedition?”

The Chronological Method

Another key element of Chomsky’s method was the fact that he read the New York Times every day for many decades and was able to hold details, quotes, and historical events. He also freely read primary sources, classic texts, and archives, without any intermediation. Simply by holding on to the chronology, Chomsky was able to debate propagandized people even when they claimed to have life experience. The link is dead now, but one of the most memorable moments for me was a lecture he gave at MIT that I watched on video in 2000 (“The Current Crises in the Middle East: What Can We Do?” MIT. December 14, 2000). An angry Israeli settler in the audience told him she’d suffered under shelling from Lebanon during certain years in the 1970s. Chomsky told her there was no shelling in the relevant years and she’d been raised to believe something that wasn’t true – directly refuting someone’s claimed “lived experience”. When some new round of Israeli atrocities would happen in Palestine and Israel would claim they were retaliating, Chomsky would always show up with a chronology of the many Israeli atrocities that had preceded the current one. The lesson for me was that there is tremendous value in simply knowing what happened when.

It turns out, again, that this power was also exercised a hundred years before by Marx. During the so-called “Indian Mutiny”, Marx wrote extremely detailed military reports for newspapers and refuted British propagandists by showing they were nowhere near the atrocities they claimed to have witnessed.

Limitations

Because Chomsky did indeed read a great deal and write at least a bit about every place where the US committed crimes (which means everywhere in the world), it’s easy to miss the fact that he did, actually, specialize in a few places and times: The later stages of the Vietnam war. The Central American wars of the 1970s-1980s. Iraq from the first Gulf War onward. Israel/Palestine especially from the 1970s to the late 2000s. Even when talking about other situations, these would be the main examples he would reach for. His book Year 501, published in 1993, spends most pages on the second half of the 20th century. For the most part, when Chomsky uses history, it starts in WW2. People who liked Chomsky or disliked him may not have realized these limitations.

With Israel/Palestine in particular, not really looking at the early Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, the so-called Arab Revolt, and the Nakba, but starting history in 1967, leads to massive distortions. The limited window misses how the Zionists, mostly from Germany and Russia, worked with the British Empire before they went over to the US. Chomsky argued firmly that the US was in charge and Israel subordinate, and the Israel Lobby irrelevant. It’s probably time to revisit all of these views.

Too many interviews

Another limitation: Famous for answering every email, accepting every invitation, and taking every interview, Chomsky probably took too many interviews (we could call Chomsky of the interviews, Chomsky-I). Most of the “gotchas” people have about Chomsky, most of the “I knew it all alongs”, are things Chomsky said in interviews. No matter how good you are in interviews, a claim in a piece of writing that you sat and composed and edited will be of a higher standard (this includes lectures you wrote up beforehand). One writer I met because of Chomsky and Z once said something like “we’re never any better than what we write”.

Chomsky did start slowing down in the late 2000s. I think the last single-authored book that Chomsky wrote – as opposed to collections of articles or interviews – was Failed States, in 2006. I had often written to him – mostly through the Z boards but sometimes through email. I mostly stopped writing to ask him questions, not wanting to add to the burdens of someone in their 80s, whose wife had died in 2008. I can’t understand or relate to people who tried to co-author books with him when he was in his 80s and 90s.

After all, I’d read his books. I should be able to figure out what he would think of a new situation without asking – and I should definitely be able to figure out what I think.

As I became more of a “tankie”, I thought, if Noam were younger, and in these times, he’d probably be one too.

The Consent of the Governed

Chomsky’s theory of politics, explicitly stated throughout his writing, is that all elites, even the most violent, must depend to some extent on the consent of the governed. This theory is why Chomsky’s political work was so focused on attacking propaganda – for it is through propaganda, not solely force, that consent is won.

Gandhi said something similar in his time. How could hundreds of thousands of British rule hundreds of millions of Indians, he asked? Only with the cooperation of Indians themselves. Hence, for Gandhi, and for Chomsky, social struggle was about organizing the withdrawal of consent. When Chomsky himself participated in militancy, it fit this theory – organizing tax resistance against the Vietnam War. Whether seeking reform or revolution, the role of the activist was to threaten or actualize the withdrawal of consent until elites gave up what the people wanted.

It’s a compelling theory and I truly thought it was how the world worked. Chomsky counterposed (again more or less explicitly) the theory of withdrawal of the consent of the governed against what he called “Leninism”, the organization of the working class to overthrow the capitalist (bourgeoisie) through unions, the Party, and ultimately armed struggle. The theory of withdrawal of consent was also counterposed against the idea of national states using armed force to defend their sovereignty (which I think Chomsky understood to be a necessary evil).

In this sense, even if he is on record saying he was not a strict pacifist, the author of an essay praising “The Revolutionary Pacifism of AJ Muste” could be understood to be a proponent of nonviolence theory.

For my part, I have come to the conclusion that most nonviolence theory and ideology is ultimately aimed at the Palestine question and specifically at the delegitimation of Palestinian armed resistance to genocide. I have also come to the conclusion that the Palestinian experience, and specifically the 2018 Great March of Return, are as close to a controlled experiment as exists in human affairs, proving scientifically that nonviolence theory is false.

Through the genocide, the response to the encampments, and the Epstein revelations, Western elites have been open that they don’t give a shit about the consent of the governed. We are cattle to them.

I don’t want to convince or wring reforms from these genocidal pedophiles through the threat of non cooperation. I want them gone. I will be discarding this tenet of “Chomskyism”.

Chomsky-B and Chomsky-E

The Chomsky of the books (let’s call him Chomsky-B) was gone before Chomsky befriended Epstein (let’s call the post-Epstein version Chomsky-E).

From Chomsky-B, I will keep the first principles, demystification of intellectuals, the use of establishment sources for critique, the scientific outlook, the analogical method, and the chronological method. I will discard the theory of the consent of the governed and the nonviolence theory.

Chomsky-E is someone I don’t recognize, someone I never knew.

At the end of Robert Barsky’s 1997 biography, Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent, the biographer describes Chomsky in 1990 at a bar in Scotland after giving a talk to activists and unionists. There were 330 who attended the talk, and Chomsky wrote about them that many were “unemployed working class, activists of one or another sort, those considered to be ‘riff raff’, the kind of people that I like and take seriously.”

What a contrast to flying the private jet with Epstein, the photo with Epstein’s butler in Paris, the Manhattan hotel, the “lovely apartment” in New York, “fantasizing” about the Caribbean island, chatting with Ehud Barak, dinner with Woody Allen, “a great artist”. Michael Albert described Chomsky as honest to a fault, which was also my sense of Chomsky-B. What a contrast with telling journalists that his association with Epstein was “None of your business. Or anyone’s.”

Even with a sharp mind, Chomsky needed to retire, and he did. He should have retired sooner. He retired back into the elite from which he emerged, and that elite turned out to be even more vile than any of us believed.

Notes

1- One evening around 2006 or 2007 a Palestinian academic and I were giving a talk in a small room at an Ontario university. During Q/A, a member of the mostly Arab audience asked us why we hadn’t also included a Jewish speaker on our panel. This wasn’t unusual.

2- Even though the Palestine movement has plenty of quarrels with Chomsky, over BDS, the one-state solution, and the right of return, the fact that Israel/Palestine was a central focus of Chomsky’s meant that most of us found ourselves relating to and reacting to Noam more than Parenti – whose politics on the issue were good, as far as I know, but for whom it was simply not as much of a focus.

3 – With important differences since for Lenin, “we” was always socialists, whereas for Chomsky “we” was the US itself.