Antiwar writings

The Ossington Circle Episode 11: Trumpism and Capitalism with William I. Robinson

I interview sociologist William I. Robinson about the relationship between Trumpism, capitalism, and fascism and what leftists could do in this environment.

The Ossington Circle Episode 10: Surviving Trump with Luke Elliott-Negri

I interview New York-based labor activist and graduate student Luke Elliott-Negri. We discuss the role and importance of organizing, of third parties, of local electoral work, and of labor unions in surviving the new Trump Era.

Cold War Museum

Ever feel like you’re living in a museum?

Three Lessons this Leftist Takes from Trump’s Victory

I have been surprised by two electoral events in a few months: Trump’s election victory and the Colombian referendum on the peace accords. Both votes were very close, had low participation rates, and were expected to go the other way. If I were a closer watcher of British politics, I would no doubt have been equally surprised by the Brexit vote. In trying to learn from my own errors of analysis, I have come to these conclusions.

1. This is a world of bubbles.

One important and constant argument made on the left is for the need for independent media. The reason we believe in devoting resources and energy to creating and supporting independent media is to try to reduce our dependence for information on analysis on corporate media sources. Whether those sources support Democrats or Republicans, whether they are liberal or conservative, their corporate values and their business models trump the political considerations of their journalists or editors.

We used to focus our analysis of media bias against the corporate, agenda-setting media and especially their flagship newspaper, namely the New York Times. The NYT would receive the most criticism, not because it was the most biased, because there have always been many outlets to the right of it, but because it had the most influence. With the decline of newspapers and more and more people getting their information from different media – TV, social media, other web sources – audiences fragmented.

That fragmentation process is now complete. The agenda-setting media set agendas for only one bloc of Americans. Another bloc, the one that just elected Trump, uses a different set of media – one with its own set of assumptions and biases.

So my daily media routine goes like this: I use a carefully curated Twitter feed, following journalists and writers that I like and trust. When I have analyzed what I end up reading via Twitter, it seemed to me that I was clicking a lot of links to The Guardian, The Intercept, and Al Jazeera.

I make a daily round of outlets that I like and contribute to – Znet, TeleSUR, Ricochet, rabble, and some foreign outlets like El Tiempo in Colombia. I avoid material that depresses me except when I’m doing direct research on a topic. Because I don’t like to be made miserable constantly, I also look for news that is already presented with some analysis or even comedically – like John Oliver’s show. Because I actually want to write and do things, I don’t have time for much more than this or I would be consuming news all day.

In other words, I live in a bubble of my own selection. Being in that bubble is helpful to me because I know I have a community of people who I respect, who are like-minded and I get to spend time reading their insights. But left media outlets don’t have systematic surveying of every part of the US. For that kind of resourced, comprehensive coverage, I looked to the corporate media for insight – the NYT, CNN, etc. I relied on their news and their polling and tried to build my own analysis from there. And consequently, I was completely wrong.

I don’t think that there’s some alternative like scanning every bubble or spending lots of time interacting with media that supported Trump. You can get insights from inside your bubble. Arlie Russell Hochschild did serious research on what was driving support for Trump, and delivered it straight into my bubble on Democracy Now. Michael Moore predicted a Trump victory. The starting point though has to be that there is very little that forms a common basis for a national conversation – there are several different conversations going on with different assumptions and starting points. Fox News and Clear Channel on the one hand and the NYT and MSNBC on the other are all corporate media, but their audiences don’t understand each other and underestimate each other.

2. The poll that matters is the election.

Campaign strategists and voters relied on polls, and the polls were wrong. Politicians use polls to try to campaign scientifically, focusing attention where they can make gains according to how they are polling in the elections. But the polls are pseudo-science. In the last three elections I have followed closely (Canada 2015, Colombia referendum, and this last US election) I had a completely incorrect idea of what was going to happen because I relied on the polls.

With everybody, politicians and public alike, watching the polls, the election becomes more like a pseudoscientific exercise about watching percentage points go up and down and less like a public conversation about politics, policies, and laws.

3. The conservative base is not growing.

In Canada 2015, Stephen Harper lost the election with nearly the same number of votes (5.6 million) with which he won a majority in 2010 (5.8 million). Trump won the presidency in 2016 with 60.3 million votes, while Romney lost in 2012 with 60.9 million. In both countries the conservative base is not growing, but slowly shrinking. When they lose it is not because their base grows, but because the other side gets more votes (in the cases of Trudeau and Obama, a lot more votes).

Obama (2008, 2012) and Trudeau (2015) were able to generate enthusiasm that Clinton was not. Perhaps Sanders would have generated that kind of enthusiasm, but he did not win the nomination. Many leftists who want substantive moves towards greater equality and peace were excited about Sanders, but neither Obama nor Trudeau really promised such moves. They won anyway. The Democratic Party might not see a move to the left as the best strategy after this loss.

Trump may have won by promising to make America great again, but he is incapable of solving or even understanding any of the problems we face. Solutions for environmental, social, and international crises will have to come from the left. Surviving the Trump presidency will be a challenge.

Independence of thought will be an important survival skill.

Free Homa Hoodfar

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 26/16: Homa Hoodfar was released from prison.

At the end of August, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif traveled to six Latin American countries: Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela. On what was mainly a business tour, Zarif discussed megaprojects like the Grand Interoceanic canal. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said that “Iran has such a position that it can pick its political friends and trade partners and does not have to cooperate with a specific country or region in the world.” After the successful diplomatic conclusion of the nuclear agreement last year, Iran is pursuing a foreign policy to break the isolation that the US has sought to impose on it.

Good for Iran. The economic sanctions did nothing but harm and those in the US and elsewhere who fantasize about war with the country, after so many decades of destruction in the region, should be made to wait in frustration. Latin American countries who have suffered so much under imperialism have every reason to forge closer relations. And businesses like Boeing, currently hammering out a multi-billion dollar (perhaps $25 billion) deal with Iran for passenger planes, have no special reason to not do business with Iran, despite attempts by US legislators to stop the deal.

In recent decades, as efforts to demonize Iran in the West have proceeded, sensible people have stepped forward to try to point out some basic truths: Iran is a vast, diverse country of nearly 80 million people; These people cannot be reduced to racist caricatures about Islam; From a foreign policy perspective, Iran has good reasons to want stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; Western cooperation with Iran could help the region, while demonization can only do more damage.

People with an even deeper knowledge of Iran published scholarship that undermined these caricatures and stereotypes. Homa Hoodfar is one such scholar. Hoodfar is a 65-year old Iranian-Canadian dual citizen and professor at Concordia University in Montreal. A quick look at her publications shows nuanced research and careful analysis, presenting specifics of what women in the region are actually doing and the decisions they make, rather than blanket statements and polemics. Her fellow scholar, Sherene Razack, describes Hoodfar’s research in some detail in a Globe and Mail article.

Her imprisonment occurred on one of her frequent visits to the country in February 2016. Her plan was to visit family and conduct some archival research. In March, her place was raided, her passports and belongings confiscated. She spent from March to June being interrogated, and on June 6, she was imprisoned. She has been in solitary confinement. Her health is deteriorating, and she has been hospitalized. There has still been no charge, only a newspaper article on June 24 claiming that Hoodfar was “dabbling in feminism and security matters.”

The idea that this 65-year old ethnographic scholar was “dabbling in security matters” is preposterous. As for “dabbling in feminism”, that is no crime even in Iranian law. Writing in The Guardian, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has pointed out that “Hoodfar’s treatment contradicts Islamic legal principles. In an Islamic system of criminal justice, the accused are innocent until proved guilty, and are entitled to certain rights including access to counsel and an adequate defence, freedom from torture or inhumane treatment, and a fair and speedy trial.”

For many reasons, anti-imperialists want to see diplomacy replace warmongering, to see Iran’s isolation broken. But it is impossible to overlook something deeply rotten about Iran’s judicial and prison system. Iran is one of the touchstones for the mass executions of prisoners. Iran’s prison system is where another Iranian-Canadian woman, Zahra Kazemi, was tortured and murdered in 2003. British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was just sentenced to five years for supposedly trying to topple the regime. The court authorities have been violating Iran’s laws over the entire course of this case, doing end-runs around Hoodfar’s lawyer, ignoring bail requests, and keeping her in isolation.

If Iranian government officials want to hold their heads up in their diplomatic encounters in Latin America and elsewhere, they should stop tormenting a friendly 65-year old scholar and let her return to Canada. Anybody who is talking to the Iranian government about anything should impress upon them the need to immediately free Homa Hoodfar.

First published simultaneously on ZNet and Countercurrents.org

The Ossington Circle Episode 5: Indigenous Resurgence with Glen Coulthard

I interview Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. We discuss the revolutionary theories of Frantz Fanon, the relevance of one revolutionary experience for another, the indigenous resurgence, and the importance of solidarity.

The Ossington Circle Podcast Episode 2 – Syria, Environment, War, and Refugees

This episode of the podcast is a lecture given on a panel at York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies on January 28, 2016. The panel was on Environment, War, and Refugees, and the lecture was on Western policy and the war in Syria.

War is still not the answer: Antiwar sentiment may mostly have evaporated, but war is as horrible as ever

The unelected Saudi monarchy began the year by executing 47 people. It continues to bomb hospitals, homes, and civilians in Yemen as it has done for nearly a year. In October of last year, a few weeks before the election, the Turkish state almost certainly arranged bombings in Ankara that killed more than one hundred people at a peace demonstration. The ruling party won the election, have now accelerated their own war on the Kurdish population of their country, and are targeting anti-war academics. Egypt’s current dictatorship came to power in a coup and cemented its power with a major massacre in August of 2013. Israel has spent the months since October extrajudicially executing Palestinians. When the Swedish Foreign Minister mentioned the possibility of investigating these executions, a former educational secretary in Israel suggested that the Swedish Foreign Minister should be assassinated.

All of this is to say, a quick regional roundup of very recent atrocities suggests that there are few governments in the region that have not lost the moral authority to govern. If Syria’s dictator, Assad, must go, perhaps these other governments must, as well.

But how? What if, in a moment of republicanism, the US decided on regime change in the Saudi Kingdom? What if in a fit of sympathy for the Kurds, Washington were to draw up a plan to bomb Turkey from the air until it withdrew from the Kurdish areas? Or to bomb Cairo, until Sisi resigned and elections were held? Or to bomb Israel until it ended the occupation of Palestinian lands?

Or, if they wanted to avoid open warfare, perhaps Washington could sponsor some republican armed groups in Saudi Arabia, provide advanced weapons and conduct assassinations on behalf of the Kurds and the Palestinians, arm and train the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, all in the name of helping the oppressed?

All of these would be horrible ideas, with horrible outcomes. The result would be tremendous death and suffering, and the intended beneficiaries of these policies, the ordinary people in these countries, would suffer the most. What’s more, it’s not clear – whatever the moral authority of the targeted regimes – that the US (or any other government) has the moral authority to go around deciding, through violence, who governs. Instead, as painful and long as the road to liberation is, it is the task of the oppressed people in the region to liberate themselves from dictatorship and occupation. What outsiders in the West can offer is not war, but solidarity – often in the form of stopping the West from helping (or being) the oppressors.

This used to be somewhat widely understood. After World War II, a body of international law was created and one of the intentions motivating it was to prevent war. International aggression was deemed the supreme crime of WWII, the crime from which all the other crimes flowed. When the US went to war in Vietnam, the antiwar movement spelled out a series of arguments, none of which depended on the angelic nature of the Vietnamese communists that the US was fighting or the Soviet Union that was supporting them. Those arguments included legal (international law), moral (aggression was the wrong means, for the wrong ends, and would cause harm to people), and practical (war would be harmful to US interests, create more enemies, be costly in economic terms and in lives). The US ruling class blamed the antiwar movement for a “Vietnam Syndrome” that constrained the US’s ability to fight wars.

Antiwar arguments held through the 1980s, through decades of covert operations. They were present in 1990/1 when the US first attacked Iraq. There were cracks in the antiwar bloc in 1999, when the US went to war in Kosovo, but among leftists, the antiwar idea remained strong. Even in 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, the opponents of war held to all three lines of argumentation – legal, moral, and practical, despite the horrible nature of the Afghanistan’s Taliban government that was targeted by the US. The movement peaked in 2003, in the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with millions of people in the streets and the declaration that global public opinion was a second superpower – again, despite the horrible dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Antiwar arguments continued to be made in spite of the nature of the governments targeted. Antiwar movements sought alternatives to aggression, especially the use of international law and diplomacy. They also made a deeper critique of the arms industry and war profiteering, of the power politics of regime change, of racism and indifference to the lives of people bombed, and of war propaganda and deception.

In 2011, the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya faced no meaningful antiwar opposition. Leftists split like they hadn’t in decades over a question that had not arisen even with governments at least as bad or worse than Gaddafi’s (Saddam Hussein, the Taliban) by human rights measures. Hillary Clinton was able was able to quote Julius Caesar (who was writing about a country that his Roman army destroyed and annexed using genocidal warfare, including kidnapping and publicly murdering the opposing general at a parade) and say “we came, we saw, he died”, as a kind of joke. The moves from the beginning of the civil war to the establishment of a no-fly zone to regime change and Gaddafi’s lynching all proceeded with almost no debate or dissent and with amazing speed. A “Libya Cure” was found to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.

Today, the Syria civil war rages with about 10 countries participating, some of whom, including the US, are fighting on both (or perhaps more accurately multiple) sides. The number of people in the West – including leftists – who are arguing that war is not the answer, is almost zero. The number of people – again including leftists – who see war as the answer if it can meet this or that imaginary criterion is much higher. People who oppose regime change through war are ridiculed as naive or unprincipled.

But are they (we) ridiculous? Has the record of war really changed so much since 2011? Did Libya really disprove the many arguments that antiwar movements used to hold to? Is Syria a case of the success of war as a strategy for accomplishing something? Something other than more war and more destruction?

Here are some easy predictions: In the years ahead, we are promised austerity, poverty, violence, and ecological catastrophe. If societies want to deal with any of these problems, they will also have to deal with the problem of war, because through all this, we will also have war. As a result, people will need to develop antiwar movements. The arguments that those movements will rely on will be the same ones that are mocked today, the very same ones that used to be more widely accepted, but have somehow been forgotten.

First published at TeleSUR English Jan 28, 2016

2015 in review (at this blog)

A report on 2015 activities for readers of this blog.

I spent a fair amount of time working on a couple of books, that I am hoping you will be able to read in 2016. Although I type fast, and write fairly fast, I haven’t got the knack for getting books done fast. The truth is that the Demands of the Dead was started in 2000, and published in 2014, and Haiti’s New Dictatorship was started in earnest in 2006, and published in 2012. The two books I am working on now have start dates around 2010 and 2014. There’s a first draft of one and a half a draft of the other.

Always trying to improve my writing, so I took a MOOC at the University of Iowa on How Writers Write Fiction. It was a good time.

The Ossington Circle, Season 2, did not come out in 2015. It is in the works, and we do have plans to get the show going again in 2016. We’re going to try to raise our game on the show, with better equipment and a different style. We’ll see how we do.

I taught a course on online anonymity – how to encrypt your email, protect your chats, etc. at WISC. I also met the good people at toronto crypto in 2015, which was a good connection to make.

Mostly I focused on writing my TeleSUR columns, which covered the conflicts that I have studied and written about here: Iraq/Syria, Palestine, the DRC and neighbours, Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and India. If I had something to say about an issue in North America, I also did a column about it.

Here are the TeleSUR columns:

Escalating violence in Burundi TeleSUR English December 14, 2015
Elections theater TeleSUR English November 26, 2015
The end of universal jurisdiction TeleSUR English November 13, 2015
Silent Compromises on Israel TeleSUR English October 28, 2015
Syria and Iraq: The Limits of Bombing TeleSUR English October 19, 2015
The Uses of ISIS TeleSUR English September 25, 2015
A breakthrough in Colombia’s peace talks TeleSUR English September 23, 2015
Modi’s Decline and India Dangers TeleSUR English August 31, 2015
The Dominican Republic Deportations TeleSUR English August 16,2015
The US State Murder of an Activist TeleSUR English July 25, 2015
#HackedTeam & Colombia TeleSUR English July 20, 2015
The Beginning of the End for Kagame? TeleSUR English June 26, 2015
Israel’s battles in sports, law and science TeleSUR English June 17, 2015
ISIS is the child of chaos, not religion TeleSUR English May 29, 2015
We are all Farkhunda TeleSUR English May 13, 2015
Profiting from Egypt’s Dictatorship TeleSUR English April 29, 2015
The Filimibi Affair and #Telema TeleSUR English April 14, 2015
The North American, All-Administrative University TeleSUR English March 24, 2015
Online privacy is worth the extra work TeleSUR English March 2, 2015
The Rojava Revolution: Interviewing Sardar Saadi TeleSUR English February 13, 2015
Taylor Swift’s Millions Aren’t Worth a Single Prison Term TeleSUR English Jan 30, 2015
#IStandWithPanzi TeleSUR English Jan 12, 2015

I also did a few columns for Ricochet, which had a great 2015 that I was proud to be part of. Usually Canada-related, of course, but the last one was more on ‘the world for readers in Canada’.

For Venezuela’s Bolivarians, victory even in defeat Ricochet Media December 7, 2015
NDP Purge of pro-Palestine candidates plays into Harper’s hands Ricochet Media August 25, 2015
Why leftists should read John Ralston Saul – critically Ricochet Media May 21, 2015
York strikers show the way – now let’s build a truly public university Ricochet Media Mar 30, 2015

Thanks for stopping by and reading in 2015, and hope to have interesting things for you to read in 2016.