My latest article, on the India Farmer’s Protest

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By Ignoring the Farmers, Modi’s Government Risks Bringing Famine Back

By Justin Podur for Globetrotter – March 19, 2021

India’s right-wing government has been deploying all the modern tools of repression against a historic farmers’ protest. Much is at stake. For the people of India, their agricultural system is about to get far more precarious. For its farmers, ruin, and bankruptcy for millions, is all but guaranteed. For the government of Narendra Modi and his elite backers, it’s a crossroads moment; they calculate that their political power is assured for decades if they can refashion the politics of rural India and force dependency upon the farmers.

The farmers are protesting because the three farm bills, which were passed by the central government in September 2020, will dismantle the state-run agricultural procurement system in Punjab and Haryana, the breadbasket states of India.

In its defense, the Modi government has simultaneously claimed that the bills will enable a great modernization and also that nothing will change; the billionaires who will benefit (Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Gautam Adani’s Adani Group) have denied having any interest in entering the newly privatized business.

The billionaires have been set loose in the henhouse. As Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty from the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics reported, India’s top 1 percent in today’s “Billionaire Raj” have a similar share of the national income as the top 1 percent did under the British Raj.

The “Billionaire Raj” is preparing to turn India back from a country of hunger (on the 2020 Global Hunger Index, India is 94th out of 107 countries) to a country of famine.

Agrarian Crisis Rooted in British Colonialism

The roots of India’s agrarian crisis are far deeper than the three new laws. The seeds of the agrarian crisis were planted in the soil of British colonialism.

Precolonial India was characterized by historian H.H. Khondker in 1986 as a moral economy, a “social arrangement which guarantees a minimum subsistence for all.” In Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, he argued that “Mogul India was generally free of famine until the 1770s. There is considerable evidence, moreover, that in pre-British India before the creation of a railroad-girded national market in grain, village-level food reserves were larger, patrimonial welfare more widespread, and grain prices in surplus areas better insulated against speculation.” The Mogul state “regarded the protection of the peasant as an essential obligation,” relying on “a quartet of fundamental policies—embargos on food exports, antispeculative price regulation, tax relief and distribution of free food without a forced-labor counterpart—that were an anathema to later British Utilitarians.” The Marathas, another major pre-British power in India, forced local elites to feed the hungry during famines. The British were horrified, calling this the “enforced charity of hundreds of rich men.” The Sikh Empire ruled in Punjab, where many of the protesting farmers are from. Its rulers enacted land reforms even while fighting the Mughals and the British.

Then the British East India Company took over the collection of revenues in Bengal, and the British Empire spread its tentacles across the subcontinent.

Historian Navyug Gill summarized the British system as follows in an article in Outlook Magazine: the British introduced “caste-based private property, the tethering of revenue demands to cash payments, and embedding agriculture within global circuits of production and consumption… [A]ctual harvests no longer corresponded to taxation rates, and fluctuations in commodity prices meant drastic swings between modest prosperity and widespread impoverishment. A bumper crop could be rendered worthless by uncontrollable forces in far-off parts of the empire, and yet the revenue would still have to be paid. The bane of those who became peasants was being at the mercy of the state as much as the seasons.”

The commodification of food followed—and so did famine.

Providing insights about the extent of famines in India under the British rule, Davis’ book highlights that “[a]lthough the British insisted that they had rescued India from ‘timeless hunger,’ more than one [district] official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only 17 recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.” The British imposed new humiliations: “Requiring the poor to work for relief, a practice begun in 1866 in Bengal under the influence of the Victorian Poor Law, was in flat contradiction to the Bengali premise that food should be given ungrudgingly, as a father gives food to his children.”

As H.H. Khondker noted, British writer W.H. Moreland in the 1923 book From Akbar to Aurangzeb “made a distinction between” “work famines” under British imperialism and precolonial “food famines.” During the pre-imperialism period, people starved because of actual food shortages. Under imperialism, people starved because they were poor, had no employment, and therefore couldn’t be fed under a Victorian morality that said you couldn’t get something for nothing.

An Economist article published in 1883, which was quoted in Dan Morgan’s 1979 book Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply, stated, “A good wheat harvest is still as much needed as ever to feed our closely packed [British] population. But it is the harvest already turning brown in the scorching sun of Canada and the Western States—the wheat already ripe in India and California, not the growth alone of the Eastern counties and of Lincolnshire, that will be summoned to feed the hungry mouth of London and Lancashire.”

Mass death through starvation was the price of enabling the British Empire to build a truly global, militarized economy in grain, under which agriculture in all reaches of the globe could serve imperial designs and food itself could become a weapon. Food insecurity for the colonies purchased food security for the metropole.

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote, “Famines do not simply occur; they are organized by the grain trade.”

Development experiences between India and China are often compared and can be useful here as well.

Pre-colonized China was even better organized than Mughal India. Before the 1839 Opium War, China under the Qing dynasty “had both the technology and political will to shift grain massively between regions and, thus, relieve hunger on a larger scale than any previous polity in world history,” as Davis explained in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Imperialism in China led to famine there too, the largest of which occurred in 1876. The multiple Opium Wars, which forced the Chinese government to pay massive reparations to its invaders and plunderers, shattered the old food security system. The state “was reduced to desultory cash relief augmented by private donations and humiliating foreign charity,” Davis wrote.

In both India and China, the years of imperialism—the commodification of grain—condemned tens of millions to death by starvation.

Food Security in Independent India and China

Post-Independence, newly sovereign India and China both attempted to get their countries back on the path of food security. Both efforts had initially disastrous results. China had a severe post-Independence famine from 1959 to 1961, worse even than the ones under imperialism. China corrected this trajectory and went on to eliminate hunger and, in 2018, to eradicate poverty as well, as reported at the time by Chinese writer Qin Ling and in Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s documentary film “Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty,” which was initially aired on PBS before being pulled in May 2020.

In stark contrast with China, India did not have a famine since Independence, but has tolerated chronic hunger. In the most famous comparison of the two countries, economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen wrote in their 1991 book Hunger and Public Action that:

“Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958–61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”

India’s National Family Health Survey for 2019-20 showed that in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, sometimes touted as an economic model, 39 percent of children under the age of five have had their growth stunted by malnutrition. The report is full of similar achievements, state-by-state, by the current Indian government. Approximately 25 percent of all hungry people live in India, where around 195 million people are undernourished. Thousands per day, perhaps a million per year, die of malnutrition in India, most of whom are children.

A majority of the population lives in poverty.

India’s Flawed Agrarian System

Navyug Gill outlined the limited nature of India’s post-Independence agrarian system in his article about the roots of the farm bill demonstrations. “[W]hat was put in place from the 1950s onwards was a system of rules, quotas and regulations meant only to minimize the worst of colonial depredations. The purpose was to mainly fulfil the growing needs of a famine-stricken country while bringing about a modicum of stability for landholders of varying sizes. In other words, the state modified and re-directed rather than transcended the tensions among national food supply, capitalist imperatives and rural wellbeing.”

Let’s go into the details of these measures, using several interviews conducted in different media with agriculture researcher Devinder Sharma as our source material.

From India’s independence in 1947 until the mid-1960s, India was dependent on food aid from the United States’ PL 480 program. The Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) were established in the 1960s with the intention of getting India off of this dependence on U.S. food aid. The system was built in tandem with the U.S.-sponsored Green Revolution, which sought to use capital-intensive, high-tech, high-input techniques to increase yields. The danger was that in the absence of such a system, higher yields would lead directly to a crash in agricultural prices, the ruination of farmers, and a British Empire-style cycle of disaster.

Two pieces were put in place to protect against this. First, government-run markets, the so-called “mandis,” were set up where the government would purchase the farmers’ grain at a guaranteed price (which would later be called the “minimum support price,” or MSP) if the private sector could not. Second, the government, through the Food Corporation of India (FCI), would “mop up” the surplus production in bumper crop years and move that grain to deficient areas through the public distribution system. The system worked: the Green Revolution yields did indeed materialize. The mandis raised enough in taxes to fund not only the market infrastructure but also a network of village roads and certain rural development funds. Dependence on PL 480 grain was broken. And there were no more famines.

There were, however, flaws with the system. First, as environmental activist Vandana Shiva documented, the environmental effects of the Green Revolution rendered it unsustainable in the long term. Second, environmental unsustainability was matched by financial instability; the imported American model of the Green Revolution was based on saddling farmers with impossible levels of debt.

There were also limitations, including a gap in procurement, as Sharma explains: despite the announcement of the MSP for 23 crops, only two (wheat and rice) are actually procured by the government—and without actual government procurement, the mere announcement of an MSP is meaningless. Infrastructural limitations also reduced the system’s effectiveness, as Sharma goes on to say: the goal was for farmers to have access to a mandi within 5 kilometers, which would have meant setting up 42,000 mandis. But in more than 50 years, only 7,000 mandis have been established.

The result of these limitations is that only 6 percent of farmers access the minimum support price (MSP), while 94 percent are dependent on the market, explains Sharma during an interview with Newsworthy. The fact that so few farmers access the MSP is used by government proponents to argue that the farm bills are removing the last fetters on an efficient market. But, Sharma asks, while quoting figures from the National Crime Records Bureau, if the market system is so good for India’s farmers, why have 364,000 of them committed suicide since 1995? Why do farmers want an assured—and higher—MSP? The analogy with the labor market is clear enough—if the labor market were as good as free-market proponents claim, why would there be a need for a minimum wage, much less unemployment insurance?

The private buyers who want to get into the government business have promised that farmers would get higher prices than the MSP from them. Devinder Sharma asked during his interview why they would have any objection at all to a minimum support price, if they planned to pay more. He points out that the state of Bihar, which did away with its APMC system in 2006, sees farmers trucking wheat and rice into Punjab and Haryana to sell at the (now threatened) minimum support price guaranteed in those states.

The APMCs are accused of being government middlemen, Sharma notes. But the biggest fortunes in the world are already being amassed by middlemen “wearing a tie and a suit,” from Walmart to Amazon, who want “to replace the traditional middlemen” the government has acted as. India’s super-rich, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, are the picture of the American-style, well-connected, monopolist middleman. If the farm bills are not repealed, the new private grain trade will fall into their laps.

Years ago, Canadian agricultural economist Ian McCreary did a study of the Indian food procurement system. In an interview on February 6, McCreary told me that after crunching three decades of numbers, he found the Indian system to be “quite successful in its objectives” of providing stable prices and food security. The government assumed the financial risks, of which there were several. On the one hand, low international prices combined with a bumper crop at home would see India trying to store grain (expensive in India) or export at a loss. On the other hand, importing in a year when prices were high could get extremely expensive. But neither of these problems could be solved by privatization, as McCreary explained: “If the government wanted to contract out the storage, they could have done that within the structure of the current system.” And even after privatization, if prices rose to the point where millions of people couldn’t afford to purchase food, the government would still be responsible for feeding them.

McCreary had concluded that extending government procurement at the minimum support price to pulse crops from drier and less productive regions would benefit both farmers and those who received food through the public distribution system. While he shared concern for the farmers, McCreary was also very concerned about the food security implications of the new farm bills. “Poor consumers are going to be very vulnerable in the event of international prices being driven up.”

The government weighs these implications against opportunities for Reliance and Adani to make profits in a new market. McCreary further said, “When you move from a situation where [the] market is controlled and prices operate within a defined range, to one where you’re exposed to the market, the players that buy and sell grain to arbitrage have [the] potential to make quite a bit of money.”

Privatization of Grain Procurement in Canada

India’s rulers look to the West for inspiration; but in fact, Western agriculture should be an inspiration to no one. The nightmarish consequences of privatized corporate agriculture are poorly understood by those who see only Western agriculture’s productivity and not its real social and environmental costs.

Take the example of Canada. The privatization of government grain procurement in India today under Narendra Modi is analogous to the privatization of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) in 2012 under Canada’s right-wing former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Established in 1935, the CWB was a farmer-run, farmer-funded marketing agency that worked through a “single desk”—private buyers had to buy from the Wheat Board and could not negotiate prices directly with farmers. Farmers earned more. Former National Farmers Union (NFU) president Terry Boehm estimated before the privatization that “Wheat Board marketing and single-desk selling bring hundreds of millions more dollars to farmers each year than they would receive in an open market.” Like India’s system, the CWB was privatized amid half-hearted murmurings about “increased economic opportunities” for farmers through a rapid and deceitful piece of legislation—in this case, called the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act. The elected board was dismissed, the assets turned over to their new owners, a joint venture called G3 Global Grain Group. Within two years of the privatization of the CWB, several of the grain companies increased their profits by billions.

Like the APMC, the CWB wasn’t perfect—some farmers no doubt had believed they would do better on their own, while others complained about a lack of transparency. These farmers, Boehm says, “now labor under a system dominated by multinational grain companies that disclose almost nothing.” Ed Sagan, another NFU member, did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and concluded that an average farmer has probably lost nearly half their income since the CWB was dismantled—a figure confirmed by multiple years of Statistics Canada reports. A chart produced by the union outlines many of the depressing new realities.

Meanwhile, the United States, Canada, and the EU are demanding India produce less locally and provide a bigger market for highly subsidized grain sourced from the metropole. Economist Prabhat Patnaik has noted that “diversification away from food grain production and importing food grains instead from imperialist countries has been a demand of the U.S. and EU for quite some time.”

Looking Beyond the West for Solutions

Neither Canada nor the United States offers any kind of model for agriculture. In the United States, farm incomes are on a continuous decline, and rural suicides are on a continuous rise. Throughout Europe and North America, agriculture is heavily subsidized, with the average U.S. farm receiving subsidies of tens of thousands per year ($61,286 in support per farmer, compared to $282 per Indian farmer, by one estimate). Indian farmers have the suicides, but they will never have the subsidies, nor will they have a fraction of the land per farmer that North American and European farmers have.

The development advice given to developing countries by the IMF and World Bank for the past several decades has been to depopulate the countryside and move the people into cities. People have moved. They were living in cities at the edge of survival, and when COVID-19 hit, they found themselves unable to survive there, leading to the largest urban-to-rural migration in human history. But more than half of the people of India still make their livelihoods from agriculture, which receives a public sector investment of 0.4 percent of GDP (compared, as Sharma points out in an interview with Enquiry, to 6 percent of GDP in tax concessions to the corporate sector annually, a number that has only grown with recent corporate tax cuts).

So what could be done? China recently eliminated rural poverty, but there is little in China’s recent experience, with dedicated government and party cadres helping individual rural families with income-generating and income-supplementing initiatives, that India can emulate.

But there is no reason India couldn’t find its own way to eliminate poverty. There is much that could be done, starting with Sharma’s suggestions: The minimum support price could be extended to more crops, the price raised, and the number of mandis increased to reach the one-per-5-kilometers goal. The state of Kerala has set a minimum price of 20 percent above the cost of production for vegetables—and the prices end up higher than they announce. In PM Modi’s own state of Gujarat, there’s a very successful dairy cooperative called Amul. The cooperative model could be fruitfully extended to provide better livelihoods for farmers. Between work produced by national commissions, peasant movements, economists, and policy analysts, Navyug Gill has pointed out that “real alternative solutions are actually not hard to come by.”

As so often occurs in our neocolonial world, it is the colonial baggage that must be discarded. Once it is, solutions present themselves in abundance.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

The Anti-Empire Project in 2020 and 2021

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2020 has been a hell of a year

It’s been made more tolerable by connecting with you this way – and by hearing from you. If you’ve just signed up, welcome – you can probably tell that these mailings aren’t all that frequent; I am working towards doing something more regular in 2021.

I won’t give you a summary of what’s been happening out in the world – this is just one email after all. But I’ll review what’s been happening with the Anti-Empire Project in 2020. In fact, 2020 is when I changed the name of my blog, podcast, etc. to the AEP. The name change was helpful in focusing on what I’d been trying to do all along, and also gave me a way to invite others into the project.

At the end of 2019, Fernwood/Roseway published my thriller about a group of heroes breaking the siege on Gaza, Siegebreakers. Queen Mob’s Teahouse published my short story, Under the Mountain, about people in Kashmir coping with the intensification of the siege there. In 2020, when I started under the new name, I self-published a novella about someone gradually learning about leftism, The Path of the Unarmed, on Wattpad.

In 2020 my new book, America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo, came out. I’ve been really happy with the responses so far and I’ve had some great conversations and generous reviews. So far I’ve talked about the book with George Galloway on RT Sputnik; and with Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman on By Any Means Necessary;with Netfa Freeman on Voices with Vision; with Joe Emersberger on Counterpunch; The book has been reviewed by Ann Garrison on Black Agenda Report.As well as by Jeremy Kuzmarov in Covert Action Magazine. It’s a long book, with a lot of history and a lot of detail, so you may not have read it yet. I am hoping to change the way Rwanda and the DRC are talked about, so I am hoping that the book keeps rippling out there.

Other writing in 2020: I continued writing for the Independent Media Institute as a Globetrotter fellow, including two pieces about the past and present of policing. I’ve tried harder than in the past to bring the Anti-Empire Project concept to these writings – making them more historically informed and showing continuities in imperial policy from the more overt imperialist era.

The Policing System is Rooted in the Colonial Past Oct 20, 2020
Can we address that British eugenics scandal? Sept 11, 2020
Policing is irrelevant for public safety – here are some alternatives June 19, 2020
Economists’ solutions to health crises can be disastrous March 28, 2020
The people of Colombia are cracking up the walls of war and authoritarianism January 29, 2020

Then there’s been a whole lot of podcasting! I was part of the launch of the Brief Podcast and kept up as a co-host until my work schedule changed. At that point, I started working with a retiree who luckily flexibility – my old history teacher Dave Power, on the Civilizations Series. I don’t know how much you are enjoying it, but I am absolutely loving the research and the chance (and the requirement) of going over the history I learned and filling in the gaps of things I never learned and always meant to. The regular podcast has continued too, and we’ve continued to cover Venezuela, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Haiti — just scrolling back over recent 2020 episodes. Expect more Civilizations, more regular guests and more special correspondents on the Anti-Empire Project as well, in 2021.

Speaking of research, I wanted to mention a few of the sources that I’ve discovered and gravitated towards over the course of 2020 – I’d call them anti-empire projects. You all probably know that Chomsky is a foundation stone for this project. I’ve discovered a couple of other foundation stones – two I only recently found, Domenico Losurdo and Bernard Magubane, and another that I had no excuse for not reading until now, W.E.B. Du Bois. I also read all 2000 pages of Amaresh Misra’s War of Civilizations: India AD 1857, in 2020; discovered Sina Rahmani’s The East is a Podcast, got myself on the Qiao Collective and Dong Feng Collective mailing lists to learn more about China, and most recently Indi Samarajiva. The pre-2020 discoveries that I continued to follow closely: The Yellowhead Institute, Caitlin Johnstone, The Grayzone, are among the daily media roundup.

My views of social media and how to use it have been changing (they’re always changing, but I thought I’d share). I realized that I have gravitated entirely away from “debating” with others online. Others (I think Chomsky included) have said that “debating” is not a very good structure. You’re basically locked in a position yourself, and then you try to assert it against someone else. The reason I don’t like to do this these days is because if I’ve already convinced myself of something, and settled the question, I want to spend my time reading and studying something else, something I haven’t settled. I don’t want to try to hammer someone who clearly disagrees with my own zeal. I do, however, want to share what I’ve learned with people who do – which is why I’ve been thinking more and more about educational resources (like Civilizations, which we see as a resource for history teachers as well as students), pedagogy, writing in different media. In 2020 I was briefly banned (maybe by twitter mistake) from twitter and it reminded me of how precarious we all are on these corporate platforms, and how undignified it is to beg twitter or facebook or youtube to reinstate us. There is Mastodon and Planetary out there, which appear to be great alternatives, but there is a lot of thinking to be done about what can be achieved on a corporate internet and within increasingly corporatized educational institutions. Hope to think with you all about this in 2021 as well.

In 2021 our (Joe Emersberger and my) new book, Extraordinary Threat, about 20 years of US coup attempts against Venezuela, will come out with Monthly Review Press. I’m planning to do some extensive guides to key issues on the blog, and more writing of the type you would imagine. If there are things you’d like to see the AEP do in 2021, please let me know! I’d love to hear.

We lost many people to the pandemic and, really, to imperialism as well, in 2020. We salute them and fight on in 2021. Let me know how you’re doing.

The police system is a colonial system

The policing system wasn’t created by elections and can’t be ousted by one.

Back in June, I sent an article around about the irrelevance of policing for public safety. With the article below, I’ve studied the roots of the policing system in colonialism, and why it keeps delivering counterinsurgency outcomes despite claiming that it is about public safety. Dave Power and I have also been preparing for a series of Civilizations episodes on the US Civil War – those will start next week.

I’m also saying RIP to Robert Fisk, who was one hell of a journalist of a type that almost doesn’t exist any more. I interviewed him back in 2005 when he was promoting his gigantic book about the .

Below, the article on the policing system and counterinsurgency.

https://podur.org/2020/10/22/the-police-system-that-terrorizes-the-poor-and-minorities-is-rooted-in-the-colonial-past/

The Police System That Terrorizes the Poor and Minorities Is Rooted in the Colonial Past

Justin Podur for Globetrotter, October 22, 2020

The Minneapolis City Council’s attempt to defund police may have fizzled out for the moment, but the problem of police violence across the United States is unresolved—and much of it stems from the institution’s colonial, counterinsurgency roots.

Here are seven counterinsurgency features of policing and the inequities in the criminal justice system.

1. Counterinsurgency Tactics Are Everywhere.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, when the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) changed its public transportation fare collection method from tokens to the Presto card, users had a strange experience. Sure, the fare booth was predictably replaced by an inhuman and unforgiving terminal that malfunctions all the time (despite the steep price the province had paid for it). But instead of having less human interaction, TTC passengers found they had more—with fare inspectors who corral passengers into small spaces at stations to test everyone’s cards. In counterinsurgency terms, this is called a cordon-and-search operation.

Another counterinsurgency concept, that of “hearts and minds,” can be seen in a public information campaign to shame fare evasion through posters blanketing subway walls and the sides of buses. Riders were infuriated—not just by the campaign itself but also by abuses and racial discrimination by the fare inspectors. Unsurprisingly, spoofs of the TTC’s messaging followed, as they did in New York City in resistance to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s fare evasion messaging.

There is nothing special about Toronto, New York City, or other transit systems that increasingly use these warlike techniques to police customers; what’s happening with the TTC and MTA is a relatively mild example of what happens when counterinsurgency methods are the first resort for any urban problem that arises.

2. Police Don’t Live in the Communities They Police.

Colonial forces are imposed from outside; this prevents too much natural solidarity between the occupier and the occupied. In the United States, the majority of police don’t live in the communities they serve. One Newark officer from the Fraternal Order of Police put it succinctly: “the community hates the police. And you want to put us right in the middle of that with our families?”

The polling is consistent with the idea that one group of people is policing another. A July 2020 Gallup survey showed that 70 percent of Black Americans support reducing police budgets, while only 41 percent of white Americans do. Out-and-out defunding is more commonly supported by Black Americans (according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of two polls, 45 percent of Black Americans polled support defunding, with 28 percent opposed) and opposed by white Americans (with 61 percent of white Americans opposed to defunding and only 23 percent in support of defunding). The difference in public opinion reflects one group benefiting from police security and another suffering from police violence and surveillance.

As Richard Rothstein showed in his book The Color of Law, the racial segregation of U.S. cities was brought about by methodical legal means, racially explicit zoning, and the destruction of integrated neighborhoods. This segregation, too, has consequences for the police-counterinsurgency alignment.

In author James Ron’s book Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, he compared the methods of state violence used in a “ghetto,” where a hostile population is meant to be contained by powerful state control but where law and morality still limit its enforcement due to the nature of oppressor and oppressed living side-by-side; and on a “frontier,” where even more devastating warfare is unleashed since state power is more tenuous on targeted populations who don’t live among their oppressors, but the bounds of law and morality are weaker.

In the United States, this theory also has applied throughout its history: domestic ghettos are policed, and frontiers are the sites of total war both at home and abroad. But the more police think of cities as the “frontier,” the more violence they will commit against the policed.

3. Police Get Specialized Counterinsurgency Training.

Police officers are encouraged to take weekend courses in a field called “killology,” developed by retired Army Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. There, they learn to see themselves as “front-line troops” in a war, presumably on the civilians they are policing.

A critic of killology courses, Seth Stoughton, says they steep police in the worldview that “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.” Another critic, Craig Atkinson, calls the courses “fear porn.” One such training, “The Bulletproof Warrior,” was taken by Philando Castile’s killer.

4. In a Counterinsurgency, Everyone’s a Criminal.

According to defenders of law enforcement, the thinking is: If you don’t want to be policed, don’t commit crimes, right? But the law creates the criminal.

And the number of laws for police to identify those criminals is growing suspiciously. American University professor Emilio Viano notes, quoting the conservative think tank the American Heritage Foundation, that “the ‘number of criminal offenses in the United States Code increased from 3,000 in the early 1980s to 4,000 by 2000 to over 4,450 by 2008.’ From 2000 to 2007 Congress added 56.5 new crimes every year.” The staggering number of laws is incongruous to American society’s actual concerns, as is evidenced by attorney Harvey Silverglate’s book arguing that the average American commits “three felonies a day.”

In this system, the full weight of the law is available to bring down upon anyone at any time.

And once it is brought down on you, you have no meaningful right to a trial.

5. There’s No Right to a Trial in a Counterinsurgency.

In TV cop shows, the police are constrained by clever lawyers and fair-minded judges in the courtroom—but in reality, cases almost never go to trial. As Professor Viano writes:

“In fiscal year 2010, the prevalent mode of conviction in U.S. District Courts of all crimes was by plea of guilty (96.8% of all cases). The percentage ranges from a relative low of 68.2% for murder to a high of 100% for cases of burglary, breaking and entering. With the exception of sex abuse (87.5%), arson (86.7%), civil rights (83.6%) and murder (68.2%), for all other crimes the rate of convictions by plea of guilty is well over 90%. In the… [2012] U.S. Supreme Court decision, Missouri v. Frye, Justice Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, pointed out the statistics that 97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas.”

The fact that 90 percent of cases don’t go to trial is the outcome of two Supreme Court rulings described by Michelle Alexander in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times:

“The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

Regardless of the innocence of the offender or the senseless overzealousness of law writing and enforcement, it is standard operating procedure that the accused do not get their day in court. Instead, prosecutors threaten the accused with shocking sentences, and have them plead guilty to something less to get them into the life-ruining prison system.

Alexander noted that the criminal justice system is unequipped for any other way: “If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.” The author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness also argued in the New York Times op-ed that “crash[ing] the system just by exercising our rights” could comprise a strategy to combatting the inequities and flaws in the criminal justice system. Blogger Arthur Silber agreed that this strategy could work if done en masse, noting, “[n]othing short of mass non-cooperation has a chance in hell.”

But the price of seeking one’s right to trial is prohibitive. Julian Assange is being publicly tortured right now mainly for doing journalism, but partly also for insisting on his rights to a trial. And Aaron Swartz was hounded to death, driven to suicide by a prosecutor applying the standard operating procedure by threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence for trying to make scientific publications available to those outside of university paywalls.

In cases relating to the drug war, the goal of police and prosecutors is also to get the accused to turn on one another: in exchange for more lenient punishments, suspects are made to become informants against others—another key element of counterinsurgency and its slow destruction of solidarity in the criminalized, targeted society.

6. U.S. Policing Was Developed in Concert With the U.S. Empire.

Consider one of the founding fathers of American policing, August Vollmer. A U.S. Marine who invaded the Philippines in the Spanish-American War in 1898, he set out to “reform” Berkeley’s police when he became its first chief in 1909. He used the scientific techniques of counterinsurgency developed by the U.S. empire in the Philippines (a system described in Alfred McCoy’s book Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State). Vollmer brought in centralized police records, patrol cars, and lie detectors. Vollmer established a criminal justice program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1916 and wrote books including scientific racist theories of “racial degeneration” and crime. He joined the American Eugenics Society and wondered how to prevent “defectives from producing their kind.”

Smedley Butler provides another example. The military man famously wrote that he had been “a gangster for capitalism,” including that he “helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” He had done so by, among other things, establishing Haiti’s first police force when the Marines occupied that country in 1915, as Jeremy Kuzmarov describes in his book Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century. When Butler became police chief in Philadelphia in 1924, he too upgraded police technology and militarized its tactics, including military checkpoints and Marine-style uniforms. The mayor fired him after two years, sending him back to the Marines.

7. Counterinsurgencies Use Auxiliaries.

In counterinsurgency campaigns, state armies and police work with paramilitaries, who do dirty work with plausible deniability.

As Alan MacLeod reported on September 28, there were more than 100 vehicle ramming attacks against protesters since the George Floyd protests started in May, many of which “seem to have the tacit approval of local law enforcement,” given the lack of consequences.

Portland activist Mac Smiff told the Brief Podcast, “We call it a shift change. They’re all the same people… there’s the cops, there’s the sheriffs, there’s the marshals, there’s the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], there’s the Proud Boys, there’s the Patriot Prayer, it just goes on and on. They just take turns.”

It is called impunity: the criminal activities of paramilitaries or proxy forces go unpunished, while the full power of the state is brought down upon the intended victims of counterinsurgency.

The default counterinsurgency mode is a consequence of being ruled by an elite that sees the whole population as the enemy. The model for policing isn’t going to be changed even if Trump is replaced by “shoot them in the leg” Biden. The occupied always challenge the legitimacy of their occupiers: the debate about abolition is not going anywhere.

Join me on Friday Oct 23 at 2pm for Congo Week! And some new writing

It’s Congo Week!

Friends: I consider myself a friend of the Congo and now I get to be a part of an event with Friends of the Congo! The link to the event, about my new book, is here:

Congo Week October 23, 2pm

I’ve also had a few good conversations about the book – with George Galloway on his RT Sputnik show, with Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman on By Any Means Necessary, and with Netfa Freeman on Voices with Vision – I’m on the same program as Mumia Abu Jamal, Margaret Kimberley, and Ann Garrison!

I also want to share some writing about climate change that I’ve been doing. I reviewed the Green New Deal and Beyond by Stan Cox, who’s been on the podcast and who is always insightful, for the Solutions Journal (below). And in a similar vein I reviewed the film Planet of the Humans, which had some important things in it but which overall I didn’t like.

My review of Stan Cox for the Solutions Journal:

The Green New Deal and Beyond by Stan Cox

By Justin Podur

Volume 11 | Issue 3 | September 2020

The original New Deal was conceived and implemented as a compromise to save the system in a period of enormous upheaval. By the end of that period of upheaval, two world wars had been fought and tens of millions of people had died. Some parts of the world got fascism, others communism: the US got the New Deal.

Might the possibility of mass extinction and the end of organized human life impel a similarly desperate compromise from elites? Bigger changes occurred in 2020 than many could have imagined. Quarantines, airplanes grounded, basic income programs introduced. Surprising successes in containing the coronavirus in some countries have been contrasted with notable failures in the US. And in the midst of the pandemic, the US has seen the largest demonstrations in its history, against racial injustice and police abuse. In this rapidly changing context, Stan Cox’s focus on what needs to be done from an environmental perspective and ignoring considerations of “political feasibility” seems prescient. If these times have shown anything it’s that political “feasibility” is a moving target, and that is a good thing.

When feasibilities open up it is important to separate false solutions from real ones. Stan’s previous work – on rationing, disasters, and air conditioning, and now the Green New Deal – is about using the methods of scientific and historical analysis to discard what’s useless. What’s left is a simple, clear program that could, if followed, save the planet.

The first idea Stan slices away is that we can grow our way out of the climate crisis. In 1972 the Club of Rome published the Limits to Growth, which Stan says went over like a “bowl of prune soup at a potluck”. Stan shows how the authors of the Limits to Growth were right – that an economy dependent on continuous growth will eventually overrun some environmental threshold. Even if the climate crisis is surmounted, there will be new ecological crises unless the growth imperative is checked.

Which leads us to the next idea to be pruned: that the market, without any plan or intervention, can resolve the climate crisis. Stan shows how carbon pricing and the creation of carbon markets are simply a form of rationing – by ability to pay. Such mechanisms have failed where introduced, and (along with carbon taxes) proven politically as well as practically toxic.

Next, Stan helps us discard a series of flawed plans. 100% renewables plans, including the most notable ones developed in California by Marc Jacobson, have hidden dangers: they sidestep the key policy of taking fuels offline, emphasizing the secondary consideration of building renewable capacity. Stan reminds us that we have to reduce fossil fuel use whether or not we can replace all the lost energy output with renewables.

And we probably can’t replace all that output. Back of the envelope calculations show that finding land for solar and wind installations is a serious problem – requiring 3x existing agricultural land for solar installations and 6% of all of the US land surface for wind generation, in a few of the Jacobson scenarios. The amounts of storage capacity – batteries, and therefore lithium – required by 100% renewables plans is enough to fuel a new round of colonialism. With the 2019 lithium coup in Bolivia, it already has. The 100% renewable future needs at least 120% of the world’s cobalt and up to 160%, of the world’s lithium reserves – so that’s not happening either.

Jacobson’s plan, Stan also points out, is a plan for energy apartheid, with different classes of global energy citizens based on current consumption. The 100% renewable world will look like the old one, with 9500W per US person, and 760W per Haitian. Stan dismisses this apartheid plan with simplicity, pointing out that the rich need to consume less, not replace every fossil watt with a renewable watt. Ultimately, he writes, we need to run an “energy frugal society, not an energy gluttonous one”.

There is more for the dustbin of history here. Forget about biofuels. These will take land out of food crops – feeding cars and starving people. Forget direct air capture, which takes so much energy to do that it cancels out the climate benefit. Forget about Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), which includes no plan for feeding the society of luxury communists and anticipates unlimited nuclear energy. Driving around in electric cars isn’t going to happen either – not when you consider that it takes energy to build the cars and their giant batteries (there’s that lithium again). The cornucopian fantasies are all premised on an idea of ‘decoupling’ – that you can have economic growth without increased resource use. As Stan discusses extensively, you can’t. Nor can you solve the climate crisis by the aggregate of individual choices to ride a bicycle or go vegan (both of which you should do, of course): to solve a problem of this scale, industrial policy, set and enforced by the state, is a must.

But for all the cutting, Stan is not here to generate despair or nihilism. When all the distractions are removed, we are left with a set of ideas based on energy frugality summarized as “cap and cope”.

These begin with ending subsidies to fossil fuels (“supply side suppression”) “locking companies out of public lands, banning fracking, busting pipelines, stopping oil and gas exports, and depriving dirty-fuel companies of investment”. But these are just prerequisites.

The key mechanism is an “impervious cap on the nation’s total supply of fossil fuel” – set it, and then “it ratchets downward by a fixed amount year by year until it liberates us from fossil fuels entirely.” Enforced by a system of government permits in physical quantities “barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, or tons of coal, not in carbon units or dollars.” Imports and exports of fuels are banned, and importing and exporting goods with carbon footprints will require the surrender of equivalent permits (no moving the problem offshore is allowed in this plan).

That’s the cap. Then there’s the cope, which Stan proposes could take the form of a Victory Plan with a series of public cooperatives, with – of course – rationing and price controls of key goods to ensure a good life for everyone in the transition. And, as every environmentalist has had to do since the 1970s, Stan assures the reader that the future could still be very nice: “Walkable, livable communities will be free of private-vehicle traffic; air, noise, and light pollution; and other dangers. A transformed food system will ensure better nutrition for all. Free neighbourhood public and community clinics will provide preventive medical care, reducing by several sizes the economic and environmental footprint of today’s profit-driven medical industries.”

The resulting book is indispensable for environmentalists. In recent years scientists have opened a discussion about whether the pressure to publish only positive results has damaged the whole scientific enterprise. The analogy to the climate crisis is clear: there has been a proliferation of solutions without enough attention to their fitness for purpose. The Green New Deal and Beyond pares away the distractions and leaves you with climate clarity.

AEP 70: Reading Chomsky’s statement to the Assange Trial

Chomsky’s statement was entered into the record of the Assange Trial

On the last day of defense evidence in the Assange Trial (September 30/20), a statement from Chomsky was read into the record. This is a solo episode where I go over Chomsky’s succinct, remarkable statement about power, propaganda, and the importance of Assange’s work.

latest article – eugenics, a scientific and moral failure no one can save

Can we address that British eugenics scandal?

My latest article was published at AlterNet and elsewhere today via the Independent Media Institute. I’m including it below.

Also don’t forget the podcast: https://podur.org/category/anti-empire-project/. Civilizations is up to episode 17 and 1848, and on the Anti-Empire Project we’ve talked martial arts, Rwanda, Congo, Haiti, Mexico, and even Lithium Imperialism.

OK, on to the article.

Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal?

Justin Podur
September 11, 2020
Produced by the IMI’s Globetrotter Project

The racist analogies have not held up for centuries, and yet they continue to crop up from unqualified and prominent figures today.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been known to have an interest in eugenics, but despite the persistence of support for this discredited idea over the years, eugenics is a scientific and moral failure.

In February, an adviser to Johnson resigned when some old racist posts he wrote in 2014 emerged. The contractor, Andrew Sabisky, called himself a “superforecaster” by trade and trafficked in theories of race and intelligence. Footage resurfaced of Boris Johnson talking about genetic inequality and IQ in 2013. Articles announce that “eugenics is back” every few years (2018, 2016, or 1989), so it is probably the case that eugenics never left. With the political right in the ascendant in many parts of the world, it is inevitable that the pseudoscience of eugenics would be on the rise with it.

Some academics will also follow, as they have from the days when craniometry justified the British Empire. Richard Dawkins, a retired Oxford biologist active on Twitter where he was called a “tedious old racist” in 2018, tweeted in February what was likely a reaction to Sabisky’s eugenics scandal:

“It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”

The comparison of human “races” to dog breeds is so pervasive that it should be answered comprehensively, and the tweet should be picked apart in detail. The comparison has nothing to do with science, as I will show, and should be abhorred by the scientifically minded.

Dawkins’ posture is one where he claims to want to distance himself from eugenics “on ideological, political, moral grounds,” while suggesting that the “facts” are in favor of eugenics. The “facts” in this trope aren’t a matter of argument and evidence but some kind of secret magic that only those with a strong stomach can handle. The less brave and bright resist the “facts” out of fear that they will clash with our “ideological, political” commitments. But as far as eugenics goes, there are no “facts”: eugenics has been an intellectually corrupted project from its inception in the 19th century. Eugenics comes to us from a time when the British Empire was plundering the world and its proponents went looking for evidence to prove racist conclusions they already believed. No one who understands science fears that racists will abuse eugenicist “facts.” As anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes in his book Is Science Racist?: “[T]here is no fear of potential abuse of knowledge. There is simply the collection and dissemination of intellectually corrupted information. That is the legacy of scientific racism.”

Like climate deniers who work in fields of science other than climate and make public statements to try to pretend there is no consensus on the topic, Dawkins used his authority as a retired biology lecturer to tweet claims outside his area of expertise. A scientific organization that has authority on the topic, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), made the following three points in a 2018 statement:

“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”

“Genetics exposes the concept of ‘racial purity’ as scientifically meaningless”

“[T]he invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”

ASHG

Dawkins’ defenders might now argue that his tweet had nothing to do with racism and that it is just about eugenics. That the entire pseudoscientific history of eugenics, pervaded and corrupted with racism, is irrelevant to his claims about “practice” and “facts,” by reference to other species. Dawkins mentioned the breeding of “cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses.” There are different flaws when each of these comparisons is put under the microscope.

Roses? Spraying fertilizer on roses helps them—does it help us? There is almost nothing that works for the plant Rosa gallicanae that also works for us, so that can be quickly dispensed with.

Cows and pigs are bred to be docile, to pack on as much edible meat as possible in a short amount of time, and ideally to go quietly to their deaths. Unless Dawkins envisions a cannibal future, cows and pigs are irrelevant to this analogy with humans. (It is worth mentioning that these are also two of the planet’s three most abused animal species—the chicken, of whom 69 billion were slaughtered in 2018 compared to 1.5 billion pigs and 302 million cows, wins this heart-rending competition.)

That leaves horses and dogs.

Horses were once our choice animal for transportation. Now that we use fossil fuels, most horses today are involved in what the Equine Heritage Institute calls “recreational horse use,” in which the horse is made to carry a person on its back and run fast for our entertainment.

With the other animals eliminated, Dawkins’ argument comes down to the comparison between humans and dogs. Dog breeding has been done for many thousands of years, and dogs have been bred for many jobs.

Does it “work”? Specifically, since the idea is if it works for dogs it could work for humans, does breeding work for the species being bred (dogs, or in Dawkins’ implicit proposal, humans)? Of course not. From the perspective of the dog, it is a nightmare.

A couple of popular internet memes sum up what thousands of years of dog breeding have achieved for the bred species. In one, a stunning photograph of a wolf is shown thinking: “Humans at a campfire… It’s cold and I’m starving, maybe I should ask for some scraps. What’s the worst that could happen?” Below, captioned “10,000 years later,” is a photo of a pug in a knitted hat made to look like a birthday cake. Similarly, photos of a wolf and a pug are used in another meme, where the photo of the wolf says “product of evolution,” and the photo of the pug says “product of intelligent design.”

This latter meme reveals the irony that Dawkins of all people should make the eugenicist claim that dog breeding “works.” In The God Delusion as well as much other work, Dawkins’ principal argument against the existence of God is that evolution can produce more complex forms of life (including human intelligence) than any divine intelligence could. Similarly, the artificial selection of dog breeding has—as the humorous memes demonstrate—propagated traits that are disadvantageous to dogs compared to what natural selection was able to do for the wolf.

The 2008 BBC documentary “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” investigated the UK’s Kennel Club and the breed standards that have led, by breeding exclusively for appearance, to a dog population with hundreds of genetic diseases. What is called “breeding” to achieve these traits is better called “inbreeding,” with brother-sister, mother-son, father-daughter, and father-granddaughter matings regularly made—there are no incest taboos, no health considerations, and no concern for genetic diseases made in awarding prizes at dog shows. Perfectly healthy puppies—like Rhodesian ridgeback puppies that don’t have the ridge, which actually brings with it additional health risks—are killed at birth to maintain the “purity” of the breed. Kennel Clubs and breeders were offended by comparisons of dog breeding to racism, but the shared history is beyond dispute. Kennel Clubs were founded in the late 19th century, after Carl Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, and Arthur de Gobineau had laid the intellectual foundations of scientific racism, and there was the freest exchange of ideas between eugenicists and dog breeders. Also in the late 19th century, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, whose statues have had travails in Montreal and Toronto leading to scolding and arrests, said that “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics… the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful.”

In “Pedigree Dogs Exposed,” the documentarians show old photos of breeds like German shepherds and bulldogs that had long legs and upright postures, contrasting them with the top dogs in those breeds today, whose legs get shorter and shorter as their mobility decreased. Those are the “show dogs.” But “working dogs” aren’t beyond question either. Bulldogs were bred, as the name indicates, for fighting with bulls for entertainment. Pit bulls, for fighting one another. Dobermans, for protecting a rent collector. Is this work that should be done? In reality, breeding dogs for these jobs was of dubious benefit to human society; trying to make the case that it was beneficial to the dogs, as a species, is preposterous. And if that is true for dogs bred solely for work, how much sadder is it for the pedigree dogs bred solely to meet circular aesthetic criteria (one breeder, asked about the morality of killing puppies who lack the ridge, responded: “Well, if it doesn’t have the ridge, it’s not a ridgeback, is it?”)?

Perhaps Dawkins envisions a well-funded eugenics department that could overcome incest taboos and ethics reviews, as well as the small matter of human reproductive freedom, to use inbreeding to create human breeds. But what most eugenicists are really interested in is not such a scientific project. They are interested in the idea of racial differences in intelligence.

But dog breeds provide no insight into how this aspect would work for humans either. Dogs, the outcome of artificial selection, have breeds that can be identified by their genotypes. A paper about the differences between dog breeds and human “races” that appeared in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach in July 2019 stated that about 27 percent of dogs’ genetic variation could be explained by breed. Humans are the outcome of natural selection, and most genetic variation occurs within human groups. Classifications of humans by genotype don’t match up with what racists think of as the different human “races.” The closest science can get to the racist position is the trivial point that people who are close together geographically are (relatively) close together genetically. And even this regional variation can explain only 3.3-4.7 percent of human genetic variation, according to the paper.

It is this regional variation that is being exploited by mail-order genetics companies like 23andMe, which Marks calls “science-lite,” because its users accept the findings they like and reject the ones they don’t, which is probably the intended way to use the test. As for “race,” there is no such thing, except for racism, which is the unscientific belief that there are such things as distinct human “races.”

So, is dog breeding successful? Dog breeding has been disastrous for the dog as a species. Does dog breeding provide evidence that eugenics could work? The analogy between dog breeds and human “races” is broken.

If racists want to push eugenics, the rest of us should realize that they do so without the backing of science, which has moved on, leaving the detritus behind.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

AEP 64: Rwanda threatens Congolese doctor

A sixteen minute solo episode about James Kabarebe, special presidential advisor in Rwanda, and his recent threatening comments towards Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege.

Read my profile of Mukwege from 2013

Why is Rwanda so afraid of Dr. Mukwege? france-rwanda August 14, 2020

A petition from Bukavu – end impunity in Congo August 2020

The UN Mapping Report on human rights violations in DR Congo 1993-2003

Dan Freeman-Maloy on Barrie, Racism, and Palestine (and some podcast updates)

Some of you may have heard of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

My frequent collaborator Dan Freeman-Maloy wrote a letter to Barrie city council asking them not to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism (the item has since been removed from the city council agenda). This letter, written to the municipal council of a relatively small Canadian town, is actually an appropriately indignant introduction to the problems with this definition.

I’m sending the whole thing below. But I wanted to remind you as well that the Civilizations series with history teacher David Power continues along:

https://podur.org/tag/civilizations-series/

And on the podcast in general, we’ve had a lot of important episodes lately, including four on the Meng Wanzhou case:

https://podur.org/tag/meng-wanzhou/

And lots of other good stuff, from the usual suspects like Manuel Rozental to black swans like comedian Amish Patel, and what I hope will be a growing series tentatively called Kung Fu Yoga (I’ll let you work out why that name) with Carl Zha.

https://podur.org/category/anti-empire-project/

Alright, now, as promised, on to Dan Freeman-Maloy. Let me know how you all are doing, too.

https://www.ijvcanada.org/barrie-racism-and-palestine-an-open-letter/

Dear Barrie City Council,

I am writing to oppose in the strongest possible terms your proposed motion on antisemitism (Item for Discussion 8.2, August 10, 2020). I trust that early support for this motion has been based on misunderstanding – I can see how, on first glance, it might seem like a good thing. If passed, however, the motion will have no credibility whatsoever, and those voting for it will have put themselves on the wrong side of one of the defining debates of our time.

The racist graffiti in Ward 2 was both an expression of an underlying racism that exists in Barrie and a reminder of our responsibility to combat it. Coming in the midst of a reckoning with racism across Canadian society, the vandalism offers yet another reason, if any were needed, to look for opportunities to act against racism. Under these circumstances, I can see why this motion might look like a step in the right direction. It is not. The problem is not only that its wording is vague to the point of being meaningless. The motion is worse than meaningless. I urge you to redirect the decent impulses behind early support for this motion in a less harmful direction.

Should the motion pass, people of conscience will have no choice but to view it as a cynical exercise that should be ignored, another in the pile of obstacles to acting decently in an oppressive world. This probably seems like a harsh judgment. Once you review the details, I think you will agree it is fair.

To that end, this letter consists of four brief parts. The first deals with problems of racism that we need to address. The second deals with decent initiatives in this area. The third reviews why, on the face of it, this motion is meaningless. The fourth shows that the motion is in fact worse than meaningless. What you are being asked to participate in is an oppressive maneuver in tolerant guise.

If anything, I am understating the case. Below I will show how you are being asked to join the wrong side of an ongoing debate about the politics of exclusion. Partisans of Israel are overplaying their hand. If you pass this motion, it will force the introduction into Barrie politics of a debate about Palestine that had not been taking place before this ill-advised motion was introduced.

(1) Racism in Barrie

It’s been nearly a century since the days when the Ku Klux Klan made their ignoble appearance in Barrie politics. For its part, the Klan was never as strong here as out west, where thousands rallied around burning crosses in Saskatchewan. But after setting up a burning cross on Bayfield St. in 1926 – where Bayfield meets the 400 and looks down on the lake – the Klan did bomb Mary’s Roman Catholic Church that June. Racism is part of our local heritage. On the theme of anti-Catholic bigotry, I hope it is not too impolite to note that we are one of those few parts of the world in which the Orange Order achieved mainstream respectability, as any with roots in the area will know.

Those of us who grew up as self-identified Jews in late twentieth-century Barrie didn’t face the brunt of racial prejudice. Some bullies could be antisemites, but those I knew in the school system who faced antisemitic prejudice knew it was nothing compared to the bigoted filth they saw directed at Indigenous children. My own memories point in other directions. “I’m not a racist, but I hate Pakis,” is a comment I remember hearing when inter-regionals brought some Central Collegiate sports team into competition with students from Brampton.

I can remember hearing the racist verb “Jewed” used once or twice, but not nearly so often as “gyped.” It should go without saying that the swastikas recently scrawled on Ward 2 playground equipment were the symbols of a Nazi government that targeted Roma or “Gypsies” with the same ferocity that it targeted Jews. While others have tended to be the priority targets of racists in Barrie, this legacy absolutely demands attention, investigation, and to be pulled up by the roots.

We all know that the problems persist. In 2004 the United Nations criticized Canada for failing to come to grips with how “racism has come to imbue the culture, mentalities, behaviours and even the deepest subconscious” of Canadian society, in the words of the Diène Report. After some delays, the federal government put some decent words on paper: in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Report, for example, or the federal Anti-Racism Strategy for 2019-2022. Unfortunately, the federal Anti-Racism Strategy looked more like a branding exercise than a plan of action. The exercise fell flat when the photos emerged of a young Justin Trudeau in blackface.

In any case, the problem persists. Far-right hate groups, we have recently learned, have proportionally more online participation from Canada than from almost anywhere else in the English-speaking West. This was the finding of a June 2020 report produced by the British Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), entitled An Online Environmental Scan of Right-Wing Extremism in Canada. And then we see the nooses at Toronto construction sites. And now we see swastikas scrawled on Ward 2 playground equipment. Action in this area is indeed urgent.

Still, the proposed motion is worse than useless. It is counter-productive.

(2) Some decent initiatives and “the racist iceberg”

The nooses displayed at Toronto construction sites, like the swastikas in Ward 2, are surface manifestations of a deeper problem. Beneath the surface lies what Doudou Diène, the author of the 2004 UN report on racism in Canada, referred to as the “submerged part of the racist iceberg,” the size of which “Canada does not appear to have grasped.”

Every once in a while we are shocked into talking about surface bigotry. There was that moment in 1995 after CBC broadcast the neo-Nazis in the Canadian Airborne Regiment, playing out their master-race fantasies in Somalia. “In this video,” Sherene Razack reminds us, “we see a Black soldier being smeared with faeces spelling out the words ‘I love the KKK,’ then tied to a tree and sprinkled with white flour. He is later made to crawl on all fours and to suffer a simulated sodomizing.” This was the hazing of a Canadian soldier. You can refer back to what was done to Somali youth.

Then, in January 2020, we discover that former Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Mathews was plotting armed action as part of a neo-Nazi organization called The Base. Surface manifestations of white supremacy like this demand an organized fight.

But the sharpest critics of racism in Canada tell us that we are not allowed to be surprised. One of the most important political leaders in this country this century, the late Arthur Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, made this crystal clear. He reminded us that the legal basis on which Indigenous land is stolen is still a Christian doctrine of discovery. Because Indigenous peoples were not Christian their lands were considered up for grabs by Europeans. Manuel dismisses happy Canadian words about tolerance that fail to challenge “the idea that white people have the inherent right to claim title to Indigenous lands, or the lands of black or brown peoples.” Canada cannot address its racism against Indigenous people, Manuel insists, while still using a doctrine of Christian discovery to restrict Indigenous land rights to what he estimates as 0.2 per cent of the Canadian landmass.

Likewise, all the talk about combating anti-Black racism will ring hollow so long as, to take a recent southern Ontario example, a developer like Metrolinx is allowed to profit by stabbing local communities in the back. As Jane Finch Action Against Poverty argued: “Taking away public land and selling it for profit to developers while we sorely need public spaces for programs and services is not only unacceptable it is outrageous and a continuation of the above oppressive, gentrifying and racist policies and practices.” If we care about racism, there is much work to do.

The proposed Barrie motion is not a challenge to racism, however. It is a smear job on people who are trying to deal with horrific problems of exclusion in another context – namely, in Palestine.

(3) Meaningless on the surface

On its own terms, the motion as presented to you looks meaningless, not worse than that. You are asked to support an IHRA definition of antisemitism that reads like well-intentioned hot air. Well, why not?

It is worse than meaningless, but looking only at the 38-word definition included in the motion, it is hard to see why. The 38 words fill out two sentences. Together they mean, well, nothing.

Let’s go through the two empty sentences. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews,” the first sentence begins. Weak, but fair enough. What kind of perception? The first sentence adds only that it is a perception “which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” So far we have an undefined “perception” that may be expressed as hatred – the word “may” tells us that it also may not. So we are working with an undefined perception that sometimes is hateful and sometimes not hateful.

Hoping that the second sentence clarifies things? No. This is it: “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” So now we have an undefined perception which might not be hateful and might not target Jews. Indeed, as worded this definition seems to suggest that there is a form of antisemitism which is expressed as non-hateful rhetoric directed against non-Jewish property. What on earth does any of this mean? “Meaninglessness is not so bad,” you may say; “maybe this is just a sloppy effort in the right direction.”

Actually, it is something much worse than that. It is when you refer to the attached IHRA examples that we move from the meaningless to the harmful.

(4) Telling people how to discuss the Palestine tragedy while presumably knowing little about it

Before going any further, a brief personal note. No particular identity or qualifications are needed to discuss problems of racism. For what it’s worth, however, I condemn this motion with as much concern about antisemitism as anyone in Barrie and with detailed knowledge of debates in this area.

I grew up in loose association with the Barrie Jewish community in the days when it lacked permanent facilities. The Jewish studies classes that my mother taught in the Jewish community’s Sunday school were held at the old Municipal Bank building at Dunlop and Owen, I believe, where I also remember holiday services. Having never been less than fifty per cent of the informal Jewish caucus in any of my public school classes, I was as fixated on antisemitism as anyone I encountered. In the rubble that was once Central Collegiate, I remember arguing with a teacher that Shakespeare deserved none of our respect because, after all, the character of Skylock showed Shakespeare to be an antisemite. (Not that I’d read the play.)

More recently, and I hope with more grounding, I’ve done extensive research into the Canadian politics of antisemitism as part of my postdoctoral work with the Canada Research Chair in Québec and Canadian Studies in Montreal. This builds, from another direction, on my work with the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain, where I did my PhD. And I have been an active affiliate of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) Canada since its establishment.

All of this to say that I dismiss this motion as harmful nonsense based on long-term engagement with debates in this area. The problem, again, is not just that IHRA definition reads like nonsensical hot air. The problem is that its vagueness is not innocent, and that it opens the door in the worst directions.

In the interests of space, I will focus on two of the IHRA examples of what is meant by antisemitism. The IHRA examples are crucial since the IHRA definition on its own is, as we have seen, meaningless. The two bogus IHRA examples of antisemitism that I’ll address are (a) “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; and (b) “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” There are other IHRA examples, some totally legitimate, some equally spurious. But let’s stick with these two – and the silencing of debate about Palestine which they imply.

(A) Definitions of racism and the Palestine question

Crucially, the IHRA does not just say that Israel is not racist. It says that those who argue that Israel is foundationally racist are themselves racist for suggesting anything of the kind. Having failed to produce a meaningful two-sentence definition of antisemitism, the IHRA marches on to tell us all how to discuss racism if we do not want to be accused of racism. In so doing, they charge across the line separating their meaningless definition from their harmful examples.

“Racism” is a loaded term, but let’s review the basics. Step one in all credible analysis of race is the acknowledgement that race is a social rather than a biological construct: this is anti-racism 101. It is, for example, ridiculous to say that you can’t be racist against Jews because Jews aren’t a race. What, and “Hottentots” are? Racism is built on false divisions of humanity. Races are socially real to the extent that racism has made them so. But we are talking bigotry rather than biology.

So, for example, it was racist for the classic British skull scientists, with their many Canadian fans, to claim biological superiority over Indigenous, African, and other peoples, even though the “Anglo-Saxon” race whose superiority they celebrated was a myth. An antisemitic example: the prestigious British skull scientist Robert Knox once wrote that in even the prettiest “gipsy” woman he could find, “the mouth is too large, and the upper jaw, as in the Jewess, quite disproportioned to the lower jaw.” Neither Roma nor Jews are “races.” But this was racism of the crudest kind.

The word racism, however, applies to more than biological racism. For example, Europeans first enslaved Africans as “pagans” before coming up with the biological nonsense that found in biology the justifications for slavery that began with scripture. It is generally accepted that the process was racist even before the days of skull science. Similarly, when early governors of Nova Scotia advertised bounties for any British settler that turned in the scalp of a Mi’kmaq man, they were more likely to invoke the Christian doctrine of discovery than white supremacy. Still we generally describe this as racist. In the same way, thinking people tend to accept that police violence against Black people today can be racist even when those carrying it out don’t believe in biological racism as such.

So can there be Israeli racism towards Palestinians? The Israeli Central Elections Committee (CEC) said yes. In 1984, the CEC disqualified as “racist” an Israeli political party, Meir Kahane’s Kach party, on the grounds that it openly advocated extra-legal violence against Palestinian civilians and the expulsion of all Palestinians from their homes. Kach was not racist in the biological sense. Yet the CEC ruled that it was “racist” to openly advocate attacks on Palestinians, as Kach did, on the basis of exclusive Jewish claims to all of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a similar sense, an effort to strip non-Christians of voting rights in Canada would be considered racist even if it were framed in terms of Protestant or Christian rather than white power.

Now the IHRA is not saying that the Israeli Central Elections Committee was antisemitic when it disqualified Kach as “racist.” It is saying that people who argue that the Israeli goverment itself is foundationally racist are antisemitic. There is a difference between the two positions. But is this a debate that Barrie City Council feels it is prepared to adjudicate? If you would like, we can organize an extended discussion of whether Israeli law itself discriminates unjustly between Jews and Palestinians, as, say, in its naturalization laws or the terms on which Israel leases state lands. But how, presumably knowing little about this debate, can you vote to tell us what position in this debate is acceptable?

Below I turn to the Palestine tragedy, which is the main reason the IHRA efforts are objectionable. But note too how this whole mess devalues genuine concerns about antisemitism. Saying that it is antisemitic to have positions about Palestine that are at the very least plausible does not only smear Palestinian and allied critics. In the process, it also lends weight to the dangerous idea that allegations of antisemitism are always as baseless as this, which they are absolutely not. One can oppose antisemitism with unflinching militancy and also support Palestinian freedom struggles, including where many within those struggles call Israel foundationally racist. It is impossible to maintain the credibility of the fight against antisemitism without admitting this point. Those who blur the lines between anti-Jewish hate and outrage over the Palestine tragedy are playing a dangerous game.

(B) The Palestine tragedy and the Nazi comparison

A brief review. The IHRA is not saying that the Israeli Central Elections Committee was antisemitic for barring Kahane for his racist electoral platform. It is, on the other hand, saying that the UN General Assembly was antisemitic when in 1975 it equated Zionism with racism. But all of this is old news. Let’s bring it up to the present.

According to the IHRA, one of the prominent antisemites of recent years is a man named Yair Golan. Do people know this name, or are you voting on something you have not taken the trouble to investigate?

Golan is a decorated commander of the Israeli army. Until 2016, he seemed the most likely candidate for the top military post in the country, the position of chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Then came Yom HaShoah, Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2016. Golan delivered a speech as part of the official commemorations that caused a stir.

“The Holocaust must lead us to think about our public lives,” Golan said. Golan was startled by the rise of racism in Israeli society. He baldly declared that “if there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016.”

Disagree with this if you like – any of us can. But without even looking into Israeli politics, are you going to vote to declare what Golan said about his own society antisemitic? What if a Palestinian said the same thing? I am not making a case for the historical parallel that Golan drew. I am insisting that for Barrie City Council to tell people what to think about it is offensive, presumptuous, and bizarre.

Your dilemma is simple. If you do not look into the details of what you are voting on it is moral cowardice. If you do look into the details, and vote for the motion anyway, it is something worse.

What was Golan discussing? The debate in Israel at the time focused on the on-camera execution of a wounded Palestinian, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, by the IDF’s Elor Azaria. Al-Sharif lay wounded on the ground in occupied Hebron and Azaria executed him. That day, a rally in support of Azaria was held in Tel Aviv. As the Jerusalem Post (2016/4/22) reported, “the crowd was heavily right-wing, with a large number of ‘Kahane Lives!’ stickers and T-shirts and ecstatic crowds singing hooligan chants calling for ‘death to the Arabs.’ Many of the signs also left little to the imagination, including one held aloft by a young woman that read simply ‘Kill Them All.’”

Azaria felt he was doing his duty. Amnon Abramovich wrote for Israel’s highest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth (2017/02/22), that “Azaria was a victim of the education he received at home and of his political views. It’s enough to take a look at the Facebook posts that his father, his mother, and he himself wrote even before the incident: ‘Kahane was right,’ ‘Kill them all,’ ‘Hit them where it hurts.’” What horrified Golan and many others across the planet was the wide support for Azaria. The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) found 65 percent of Jewish Israelis wanted him exonerated.

What set apart the al-Sharif killing in Hebron was what set apart the Eric Garner killing in Staten Island and the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis: it was filmed. The response from Israeli officials was typical: in 2018 the Israeli Cabinet began introducing measures to prohibit the filming of abuses by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Azaria did less time in prison than Palestinian children caught throwing stones at the Israeli troops who have no business occupying their communities. Before long, Azaria waltzed out of prison to a hero’s welcome in Hebron, greeted by a rally organized by the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit group. “Supporters posed for photos with Azaria and stopped to praise him for his actions while in uniform” (Times of Israel, 2018/07/03).

I ask with outrage about the presumptuousness of the motion before you: on what terms, pray tell, may we discuss these developments? Before answering, do a search for “1 Shot, 2 Kills.” You will find an image on a T-shirt circulating among IDF soldiers after the 2009 massacre in Gaza. It features a pregnant Palestinian woman with her belly in the crosshairs of a rifle. Get it? During another major Israeli massacre in Gaza, in 2014, Ayelet Shaked referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes.” She then served from 2015-2019 as Israeli justice minister. What do you think the effects of this are?

Do a search for “Gaza” and “bed-wetting” and you will find a report by the well-known charity Save the Children. It found in 2015 that three-quarters of Palestinian children in areas of Gaza hard hit by Israeli assaults were wetting their beds and having recurring nightmares. The Israeli assault on Gaza the previous year had resulted in physical injuries for 3,346 Palestinian children, the orphaning of 1,500, and the killing of 551. I do not mean to diminish the trauma for adults. But you can imagine the effects of this single campaign against Gaza, with its six thousand air strikes, on even the sturdiest mind.

Now multiply this by decades. And think about what offensive nonsense it is to sit by Kempenfelt Bay and tell Palestinians on what terms they should discuss it.

Note that I am not invoking Golan’s historical parallel here, although I do have a mind to. All events are unique, and there are few events in recorded history that match the horrors of the Third Reich. That horrifying bar is set terribly high. The abuses by Canadian troops in Somalia, for example, were the work of neo-Nazis, but that does not mean they were another Holocaust. In the same way, we could dismiss the scrawling of swastikas on Ward 2 playground equipment – “hardly a Kristallnacht,” right? But is this not a callous and ridiculous way to think? What kind of Holocaust remembrance is separated so rigidly from the fight against oppression before it reaches the worst levels?

An outstanding historian of Holocaust memory, Peter Novick, identified a tragic outcome of some of the ways in which the Holocaust was later commemorated in North America. While Holocaust commemoration can sensitize people to injustice, Novick argued, it can sometimes have the opposite effect: “compared to the Holocaust, anything else looked not so bad. The comparison, by raising the threshold of outrage, could easily desensitize.” We cannot succumb to this desensitization – not in Canada, not in Palestine, not anywhere. It is a measure of the depths to which this debate has sunk that it does not even rise to the level of the anti-racism of a recent IDF deputy chief of staff.

The matter is plain. As concerns Palestine, the problem in Canada is not that criticism of Israel is getting out of hand. It is that all levels of Canadian government relate warmly to the Israeli government even as it descends into amply documented xenophobia and collective punishment of Palestinians. As concerns anti-racism in general, and in a related way, the problem is that mainstream Canadian politics seem only to deal with problems of social exclusion when forced to or when it is convenient.

On these grounds, I urge you not to pass this motion. Know, however, that if you pass the motion, you will only spark a debate that is long overdue, and in which you will be on the wrong side. Neither the Palestine tragedy nor the wider politics of exclusion get adequate attention in Barrie. If you wish to force a change by pushing on this question, there are those of us who will do our best to oblige.

Sincerely yours,

Dan Freeman-Maloy

AEP 59: The American Trap sprung on Tiktok and Huawei, with Carl Zha

The American Trap is sprung on Tiktok and Huawei

Back with Carl Zha of Silk & Steel podcast, who we last saw in our episode on the India-China border conflict.

We’re thinking of calling this the Kung Fu Yoga series. In this one, Justin has just finished reading the terrifying book The American Trap by Frederic Pierucci (which Carl notes has 100,000 reviews for the Chinese edition so far). Pierucci was jailed for 30 months in the US in a 5-year long ordeal that ended in his company, the French multinational Alstom, selling off its entire nuclear division to General Electric.

We talk about Pierucci’s case in detail and its relevance to the kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou of Huawei and Trump’s ban of Tiktok: the use of the US’s judicial apparatus to seize billions in assets from other countries, including allied countries, and including entire businesses.

Carl thinks China’s only possible response is to build its own tech stack from the bottom up.

Chomsky vs the Media, 2020 version

Chomsky signed a letter about free speech and something called “cancel culture“, which has prompted a small social media wave of responses.

There is a good piece by Jonathan Cook about how focusing on Chomsky’s signature misses the point. But I am going to focus only on Chomsky here.

My argument: Chomsky’s most powerful message is anti-imperialism. Containing that message has been the preoccupation of the propaganda system since the 1960s.

In 1973, they shut down a whole company and pulped the print run of his book with Ed Herman, Counter-Revolutionary Violence.

Mostly, though after the peak of protests, he was just driven out of the mainstream. He published with activist publishers and the alternative media.

Like Z Magazine and ZNet, one of the principals of whom was Michael Albert, who’s now… a podcaster.

Beyond marginalizing him, they also smeared him. Because he compared Indonesia’s Timor massacres to Cambodia massacres, they called him denialist.

A French publisher slapped a free speech essay he wrote on a holocaust denier’s book, and they smeared him about that.

In the 1990s, a new generation of people discovered Chomsky on the web. The web was different then. Not fully sealed up by the tech giants.

Chomsky’s influence grew and some of the alternative media also grew and became mainstream or close. By the time of the Afghanistan War 2001, he could no longer be marginalized.

Indeed it became a good careerist move to make a showy denunciation of Chomsky in the mainstream. It worked for Samantha Power, for example.

A hilarious 2005 interview by Emma Brockes in the Guardian resulted in a very extensive corrections page that was basically a retraction.

Johann Hari, who went somewhat downhill and then turned around and did some good work since, invented a comment by Chomsky at a luncheon.

George Monbiot did the same in the 2010s, and others.

These are just off the top of my head and intended to reveal the particular way that Chomsky was handled by the mainstream in the 2000s: try to introduce inaccuracies and falsehoods; prove your liberal credentials by denouncing Chomsky the leftist.

Chomsky’s influence didn’t stop, but the whole media ecosystem that he analyzed has changed. So has the strategy for containing him.

The strategy today is to select the views that he holds that are closest to the mainstream and amplify those, while de-emphasizing the anti-imperialism.

That’s what the Intercept does when it sends someone to interview Chomsky on how Biden is the lesser evil.

That’s what the new “cancel culture” petition is about.

Yes, Chomsky is a free speech absolutist, he’s a lesser-evilist on electoral politics, he’s a two-stater on Palestine, he broadly prefers nonviolent strategies, and is critical of every state, including those targeted by imperialism.

But can find those views everywhere in the mainstream. They are not why people admire Chomsky and they are not why imperialists hate Chomsky.

Chomsky says that every US president is a war criminal.

Chomsky talks about the US sanctions against Cuba.

Chomsky talks about the US-led counterinsurgency in Colombia.

Activists in every anti-war movement in the US since the Vietnam war have relied on Chomsky’s analysis and arguments; including movements against Israel’s wars in Lebanon & Occupied Palestine.

Chomsky talks about how propaganda systems work and push for war.

Chomsky believes in challenging the reader or audience: in Canada, he talks about Canada’s crimes, because it’s cowardly to denounce crimes you can’t affect while doing nothing about crimes you can affect.

There’s much more. My point: Chomsky is a proven person of principle, impossible to deny. The Biden people, the “cancel culture” people, they want to use that to advance their agendas.

As they do so, they want you to forget the anti-imperialism that is what Chomsky is really about and has been about for 50 years.

This is just the 2020 iteration of the campaign to contain Chomsky’s anti-imperialism.

Whether you’re disappointed that Chomsky signed that letter or newly concerned about cancel culture because Chomsky signed the letter, consider this option – read enough of his work to get a sense of what it is about, and if you like his ideas, principles, and methods try to assimilate them into your world view.