The Hodeidah Tribunal

A fictional story of Victor’s Justice

[Dear Readers: For a few months I’ve imagined writing a speculative novel or novella of a post-genocide world in which a group of heroes travel the world catching the war criminals and enablers behind the current genocide. The last act of the story would be the actual trial, which would give me the chance to show how much of the Nuremberg Trial text applies directly to the situation we find ourselves in today. All of which is to say, this scene is rather stripped of the elements of dramatic writing, but it could nonetheless be considered an excerpt of a future book… ]

A favorite target of the now shattered US empire, the old port city of Hodeidah was hit with saturation airstrikes in the final months of the war that liberated the Middle East from occupation. At the very end, the aircraft carrier USS Trump’s F-35s emptied their bomb bays on a final destructive run, after which the Trump left the Red Sea and ran into ‘mechanical troubles’ in the Mediterranean. It never got home. But Hodeidah was rebuilt – with a set of buildings rebuilt in the old style – and in it, a palace custom-built for the express purpose of holding the proceedings that were about to occur.

In the vast, main hall, the prisoners sat together in a glass-encased defendants’ box to the right.

The panel of judges shuffled inscrutably onto the elevated stage. Wardah and the other prosecutors sat directly across from their legal opponents: Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian lawyers defending the war criminals in the dock, their Western advisors sitting directly behind them. The proceedings were in Arabic, the jurisprudence Islamic, and so the defense team had deemed it best to have Arabs be the faces and voices of the defense and let the Westerners work behind the legal front line.

A 2020 meeting of the Iranian Supreme Court

A pale, thin man with an impeccable haircut sat in the defendant box wearing a familiar smirk. The younger woman beside him leaned forward, twirling her hair and looking bored, appearing confident that nothing would befall her from this silly court. Watching them, Wardah found herself unbothered by their inaudible whisperings and incomprehensible complicities. As the leader of the Yemeni prosecution team, she felt a responsibility to history, to the past, to the living, to the survivors, to the children who would have to rebuild the nation and whose grief cried out for justice. Like hers.

When the room quieted and the bailiff signaled to her that her turn to speak had come, she walked to the podium and looked at the judges, ignoring completely the assembled criminals on display to the side.

“When the first Nazis were defeated, some of them faced a trial. One of the prosecutors, whose words I will quote here today (1), said that that trial had a grave responsibility because the Nazi crimes were so calculated, so malignant, so devastating, that civilization could not tolerate their being ignored because it could not survive their being repeated.

“They were repeated. And that American man, Justice Robert Jackson, said that instead of vengeance, putting the Nazis on trial, was a tribute which Power paid to Reason. Like Resistance fighters in the field who did not shoot down the Israeli Nazi enemy helicopters when they came to evacuate their wounded, like the men of Ansarallah who assured the crew of the Galaxy Leader that they would not be harmed but treated according to Islam, we too will pay tribute to Reason here today and to religion also, by seeking justice instead of vengeance.

“The law, my predecessor said, must not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people, but must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. I could say, evils which leave no screen in the world untouched.

“The men that your honors are here to judge, are, like my predecessor called the German Nazis, ‘living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.’

“Under the banner of ‘Zionism’, these men took from their own people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards their opponents, anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, all Arabs and Muslims, and indeed anyone else who stood in their path, they directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since… the previous trial of this kind. They excited the Western ambition to be a “master race” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They replaced all rules and laws of war ever developed with their own Dahiya doctrine of mass murder of civilians, their Hannibal doctrine of killing their own people, and their Samson option of trying to blow up the world rather than lose the land they stole from others. They have demoralized and morally compromised the entire West beyond recognition. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.

“Like my predecessors at the Nuremberg Trial, we had to do an immense amount of legal work in a short amount of time. Less than a year ago, this Palace of Justice did not exist and the building that had stood here had been bombed. We too may suffer from incomplete research and would have benefited from more time, for the crimes were immense and the evidence for them as well. Our case is adequate for you to judge.

“Also like the last time Nazis were tried, the nature of these crimes is that both prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions carried out by these men and women has left but few real neutrals. Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. We, too, must draw a line between just and measured retribution and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of war.

“These defendants have gone to great lengths to avoid being caught and tried. They did not extend the favor of a trial to the tens of thousands they tortured in their prisons. But they will be given a fair opportunity to defend themselves. We accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of these defendants for their commission.

“And like the previous Nazis, these modern versions are not accused of yielding to the normal frailties of human beings. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar.

“The Israelis performed their crimes and posted them as trophies on social media sites. We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

“The Jewish people should know by now that we Muslims do not hold them in fear nor hate. In our religion they are the people of the book. And if we are not awed by what the so-called ‘Jewish state’ has done to our people in war, Jewish people have long been truly integrated and celebrated in our lands and protected by just rulers of the Ummah. It is Zionism that led a portion of the Jewish people astray. Zionist aggression has left the whole region in ruins. Zionist readiness to pledge the West’s word without hesitation and break it without shame has fastened upon Western diplomacy a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Western arrogance has made the very phrase ‘Zionist’ a taunt – a word which used to be both proudly claimed and banned for use as an insult – that will be thrown at Westerners for generations. The Zionist nightmare has given the word a sinister significance that will linger: the Jewish, no less than the Muslim world has accounts to settle with these defendants.

“The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the central theme of our case, is history. From the Nakba of 1948 to the Naksa of 1967, through to the 1973 war, the invasions of Lebanon starting in the 1970s, Israel seemed invincible. All the Arab armies were vanquished in five days of 1967, overrun by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. All of Palestine from the river to the sea was under occupation. Parts of Syria and Lebanon, a huge part of Egypt. The Zionists built colonies in the lands they occupied and displaced the inhabitants. They committed unspeakable massacres where they went. Aggressive wars, wars of colonization, war crimes, crimes against humanity, which the nations of the world had renounced.”

Wardah looked at her notes, wondering if she was belaboring the point. Hadn’t the war settled the issue? Wasn’t it a different world now? No, she would make this presentation as if she still lived in a world where the most obvious truths about Zionism required nearly impossible standards of evidence. So she continued.

“This war did not just happen – it was planned and prepared for a long period of time and with no small skill and cunning. The authors of this war achieved a stupendous work in organization. Our case will show these defendants all uniting in a plan they knew could be accomplished only through genocide. Their planning of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples – all these are ends for which they acted in concert and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.

“The case as we present it here will be concerned with the brains and authority behind all the crimes. These defendants were of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. But unlike the old Nazis, who used lesser folk as tools, Zionism created through careful design of the education system and media structures, a population that celebrated genocide, that self-organized to deny aid convoys and attack unarmed Palestinians in mobs. This design was a constant work-in-progress and it is the designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with these agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war, whom we hope to reach. As for the masses who participated in the crimes organized by their betters, they must be forgiven after telling their truth in a different set of proceedings, in Palestine, that will follow these. The pursuit of punitive justice against a genocidal majority would not lead us anywhere good, in the view of the prosecution.”

Wardah paused to take a sip of water, before continuing (2).

“One question that we must address first is, why not use the existing tribunals? The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court? Why did we choose to bring the criminals here, to stand trial in our region, rather than in New York, at the United Nations? Because these bodies have failed. When South Africa brought the case, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its genocide after several months. These defendants ignored the order. The ICJ ordered a stop again before the Rafah invasion. The defendants ignored the order. The International Criminal Court prosecutor, after years of inaction, found himself unable to distinguish between aggressor and victim, and asked for arrest warrants against both. The defendants ignored these – they said Israel never signed on and the Americans had a law threatening to invade the Hague if any American were tried at the ICC. These are the courts of racism, the courts of injustice, the courts of inequality. We believe that all are equal before God and our concept of justice cannot accept that some of God’s children are above the law.

“We will leave it to the Palestinian prosecutor to go through the history prior to October 7, 2023. The Deir Yassin massacre and the many other massacres of the Nakba, the crimes of aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing throughout the decades. The way that the Western countries and institutions of international law, human rights, and free expression that were supposed to protect the vulnerable, all conspired to create a separate standard for Israel that let them commit any crime against our people. They are the best authority on this history and they can set it out for you.

“We focus instead on the systematic nature of the crimes committed by these defendants in the post-October 7, 2023 genocide war.

“The South Africans showed video and provided an extensive dossier full of these defendants going on record publicly ordering their soldiers to commit genocide. They said there would be no food, water, or electricity going to the civilian population; they cited biblical passages calling for the murder of women, children, and livestock; they made trophy videos of the destruction of homes, buildings, hospitals, water infrastructure, farmers’ fields. The destruction and stopping of aid trucks became a scene for partying. No attempt was made to cover up. This was the most unashamed, open celebration of genocide we have seen.

“But what the South Africans could not say was what we know: that the Resistance operation of October 7 was not an operation to kill Israeli civilians, but to take military prisoners alive to try to obtain a prisoner exchange, Israeli military captives in exchange for thousands of Palestinian captives who were held – tortured and starved and done to death – in the Zionist prisons until they were liberated at the end of the war. And as the Zionist newspaper Ha’aretz reported on July 7, 2024, in Yaniv Kubovich’s report “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive”, most of the Israeli civilians (3) who were killed on that day were killed by Israel, applying the Hannibal Directive. The genocide was built on a lie, a lie that was taken up, developed, and repeated by some of the defendants here today.

“We are bringing this case before you, your honors, because Western institutions of rights and justice chose to self-destruct rather than hold Israel accountable. We mentioned the ICJ, ICC, UN, and the Western media: all have lost their credibility, which is why we are holding the Tribunal here and in this form. But it is not just these institutions that have lost their credibility. The very conceptions of the conduct of war and diplomacy have been corroded and must be rebuilt from zero. It is for this reason that the prosecution of these defendants is so necessary.

“Regarding the conception of war. The Zionists put forward the following norms for the conduct of war:

All civilians, including children, are fair targets if a claim can be made that they are close enough that killing them is necessary to kill a combatant target. The shorthand they used was, ‘Hamas uses human shields’. Their Israeli army used actual human shields, tying children to military vehicles and forcing them to go into tunnels and houses, but were not held accountable for this.
The Zionists also put forward the notion that they can use any type of weapon, including two thousand pound bombs, for any purpose, including trying to kill an unarmed person in a tent. They removed any notion that a particular weapon might be overkill for the task for which it is used. In their conduct of war, they can use whatever weapons they choose.
In their view, if they can make a claim that any protected group of people or infrastructure might be used by a combatant, that it can be targeted. This includes all hospitals in Gaza, all medical personnel, all journalists, all food supplies, all water supplies, apartment buildings – everything, as per the Biblical quotes about Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites who is to be wiped out man, woman, child, and livestock.
Military censorship and manipulation of information is always present but in the view of the defendants, systematic and structural lying is merely a part of the war. Several of the defendants repeated a completely fake story about Resistance members eating lunch around the corpses of a family they’d murdered. This was before the thousands of trophy photos of Israelis posing with the toys and underwear of families they’d murdered, in the incitement period of the genocide.
In their zeal for extreme force protection, their soldiers target the unarmed and avoid combat with armed combatants. On the other hand, they kill their own soldiers and civilians if there’s any chance they might become captives (who could then be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners). This is the Hannibal Directive we mentioned earlier. They have institutionalized cowardice in war.

“We wish to punish the defendants for all of these: targeting of civilians, systematic lying to incite genocide, destruction of infrastructure, and total disproportion of weaponry. We wish to punish these crimes to eradicate this whole conception of war from history, so that if there are wars that must be conducted in the future, they are conducted according to laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, use weapons that are proportional, do not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, and – even if information is controlled during war – do not use lies to incite genocide.

“In terms of diplomacy, the defendants allowed a successful exchange of prisoners in November of 2023. But then, after a pause, they resumed the war, recaptured the Palestinian prisoners and resumed their torture, and methodically targeted the remaining Israeli captives to kill them. In one operation they murdered three Israeli hostages in cold blood. In another operation they rescued three hostages while killing several others and hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Whenever ceasefire negotiations reached a point of near success, the Israelis would add new clauses and insist on continuing the war as a condition of a ceasefire! These are contrary to the principles of good faith negotiation. To the United Nations, the Israelis sent a buffoon to accuse the countries of the world of terrorism. The West vetoed multiple ceasefire resolutions and when they finally accepted one, they allowed Israel to ignore it.

“We wish to punish the defendants for abusing negotiation and diplomacy to continue the genocide, so that these conceptions of negotiation and diplomacy are also left behind and the world can move forward on better ideas.

“In 1975, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which argued that Zionism was a form of racism. The Israeli representative to the UN stood before the gathered nations and tore the resolution to shreds, just as the Israeli representative took a miniature automatic paper shredder to the UN charter in 2024.

Chaim Herzog rips up the UN resolution 3379, which said Zionism was a form of racism

Israeli Ambassador rips up the UN charter

“As you know, UN Resolution 3379 was repealed in 1991 (4). While the United States was laying waste to Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and dared to propose a “linkage” of Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait with Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, the resolution stating that Zionism was a form of racism was repealed through US pressure. Your honors also know that when our country, Yemen, voted against the US invasion of Iraq, we were told that this was “the most expensive vote we ever cast” and we suffered sanctions for it (5).

“3379 should never have been repealed. But today I am asking your honors to go further. I am asking your honors to rule that Zionism is not just a form of racism, it is a criminal enterprise, one which ultimately requires genocide to continue, and which therefore must be ended. Doing justice here will be a first step.”

Wardah looked at the other prosecutors: her counterparts from Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. To her, they seemed satisfied, and she felt she had presented her case well. The judges gave little away from their expressions, and Wardah again did not favor the criminals with her gaze.

The presiding judge called for adjournment until the next day, when the Iranian prosecutor would present his case.

Notes

(1) The first part of Wardah’s speech is basically a reproduction of Robert Jackson’s opening remarks at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Wardah alternates between quoting between quote marks, paraphrasing with modern updates, and quoting without quotation marks.

(2) If you read Justice Jackson’s speech, the middle part of the speech is the history of the Nazi party, its rise to power, and its conduct of WWII. This section of Wardah’s speech is not a copy/paste with find/replace of Jackson’s speech, but instead a part of the case as it is imagined would be laid out at a tribunal run by the Axis of Resistance.

(3) Ha’aretz was very late to report this. There were some reports in the Israeli media here and there and these were assembled carefully by Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, and The Cradle. I did my own modest assembly of a few Western sources on substack in October.

(4) I made part of a video about Resolution 3379, its rise and fall.

(5) Amply documented. E.g. Ian Williams, “A Costly Vote? Yemen Paid a High Price for 1990 Security Council Veto.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 2010.

The final chapter of the Path of the Unarmed

The Path of the Unarmed is now out.

The whole book is available at Wattpad to read, all 20 chapters. In keeping with my spoilerific philosophy, here’s the last chapter. So, you’ve got the last chapter, the bonus chapter, and the first chapter all by email. Now all you need to do is decide if you want to read the rest.

Hope the big twist brings you some amusement.

-Justin

———–

Chapter 20: If it’s not good for everyone, it’s not good for anyone

As the sun started to get low in the sky, Disarmed sped up his talking to even higher levels of urgency. Always given to extensive and rapid info dumps, he had reached a fever pitch this afternoon.

“Resistance goes back as far as capitalism and empire does. I mean, there were antiwar ideas even in ancient times – and egalitarian ideas and movements too. And in the modern iteration, it goes back at least 500 years when Indigenous people and African people resisted conquest and slavery. People think that leftism started with Marx but even the idea ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’, that’s a much older idea. That’s how people treat their children. It’s how people act in their families. Leftism isn’t some new thing. It’s… it’s…”

“An expression of human egalitarianism, I know.”

“Of course I know you know! But it’s not just egalitarianism. It’s also critical thinking – which was practiced by the ancients too, Socrates, or the Buddhists or in ancient China, they all had logical methods to try to get to the truth. And sociality – solidarity – that’s also basic to being human. So’s freedom! These instincts go back just as far as propaganda and isolation do. So it’s just a matter of harnessing them, organizing them, making space for them in your life. The main point is, if it’s not good for everyone, it’s not good for anyone. Can you remember that? Tell me you can keep that in mind.”

Unarmed looked at the increasingly frenetic and hyperactive Disarmed. “What has gotten into you today? It’s like you’re trying to summarize everything you’ve taught me all at once.”

Disarmed continued without answering the question. “Listen. You might start writing or start a podcast, or a youtube channel or work in the media. If you do that, don’t chase followers, OK? Don’t worry about metrics, followers, views. You can’t worry about that – that’s yet another way of controlling you. The same way we talked about the way that scientists are controlled through funding and awards and jobs – journalists and social media commentators are controlled through views and clicks and followers. Don’t fall for that. Focus on what kind of leftism the people need, what kinds of messages they need that you know and can provide, and don’t worry about the things you can’t control.”

“OK, OK I won’t.”

“Leftists fight bullies. They fight propaganda. They fight for equality, solidarity, and liberty using knowledge and science. They work on educating people and they work on defending the land. Remember what a leftist is when you face all the horrible accusations that inevitably come with being one, and you’ll have the strength to not be demoralized.”

“I don’t feel demoralized.”

“There will be ups and downs! Crises are everywhere! Fascism is on the rise in much of the world. Despairing is all too frequent a temptation. So is nihilism. So is just to follow the temptation to take care about you and yours and forget about everyone else. You can get demoralized and get addicted to things – your phone, social media. But we’re a social species – get out and keep getting out and struggle with others for a better world for all! That’s the way of the leftist.”

“I know, man. You taught me all that,” Unarmed said.

“And.. and..” Disarmed looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“Spit it out,” Unarmed said.

“Don’t screw things up with SJ. She loves you, don’t let your insecurities blow up that relationship, OK?”

Unarmed felt vaguely offended. “Why do you think I’m going to let my insecurities blow things up? Everything’s really good with SJ,” Unarmed said.

“Well, now they are. But in the future…”

“No one knows the future,” Unarmed said. “Except, now I have some questions.”

Disarmed said nothing, suddenly clamming up.

Unarmed moved a step toward Disarmed. “You just showed up at my place one day and started telling me all these things, right at a moment in my life when I was lost. You created this incredibly personalized education program for me, encouraged me to join specific organizations and read specific things. You showed up and went away more or less with perfect timing. And you introduced me to someone who would become my girlfriend, someone who obviously knows you really well and likes you a lot, even though I think you’re a bit too old for her. Is she your ex, or something?”

Disarmed took a step backward. Unarmed moved forward again.

“Since we met I’ve automatically trusted you and believed everything you told me. I’ve always had the feeling you were really invested in what I decided and what I did. I don’t understand why, and today the way you’ve been acting is particularly confusing. Are you planning on leaving town again?”

“I do have to leave town,” Disarmed said.

“OK, well why didn’t you say so? That isn’t the biggest deal, man.”

“I’m not going to be able to be in touch again.”

“That’s a weird thing to say. Are you going to a besieged territory where there’s no communications allowed?”

“It’s hard to explain. But you remember in that Avengers movie where Dr. Strange sees fourteen million scenarios and in only one of them, do the Avengers defeat Thanos?”

“Sure, everyone saw that movie.”

“And Terminator movies where they send someone back from the future to change the past?”

“Yep.”

“And Quantum Leap, that old show where the guy keeps leaping into different lives to try to fix problems?”

“I remember. But not too many people watched that old show – how would you know that I watched it…?”

“Because I am a future version of you,” Disarmed said. “You see, I’ve been traveling through different pasts and trying to teach previous versions of myself what I needed to know and what I missed.”

“So, in the future you come from…”

“Leftism lost. You don’t want me to spell out what that world looks like. Let’s just say we came pretty close before losing and some of us created a time machine to send ourselves back to previous versions of ourselves to see if we could find a way to win.”

“By intervening with earlier versions of yourselves.”

“Right! And so in my future, me and SJ broke up and it was basically my failings – really I think I didn’t have the confidence to be a good partner. That’s why I really want that to work out for you.”

“But our relationship isn’t key to the future.”

“No, I’ve seen scenarios where you break up and still manage to make the world a better place.”

“But we’re unhappy.”

“She’s not unhappy, just you.”

Unarmed laughed. Disarmed didn’t.

Unarmed asked: “The fact that I find that funny and you don’t – shouldn’t we have the same sense of humour?”

“Different stage of life, I suppose,” Disarmed said. “Anyway, now you know the truth. At some point, probably in the middle of speaking, I’m going to just completely blink out and disappear. Poof. And return to my post-apocalyptic, doomed, miserable future timeline. You, though, you’ll have to find your way from here on out.”

“Well, I’d like to thank you – me – for doing this. You’ve given me a lot. The thing is, this capacity for seeing through propaganda and understanding power and politics, it’s a kind of personal power that is useful in life.”

“It’s also a power that can be used for ill – which is why there are, as we’ve mentioned, bullies in left-wing organizations. You must use your abilities with the greatest of integrity. Then you’ll be ready. Perhaps you should change your name.”

“You’re right,” Unarmed said. “My name doesn’t make much sense any more, though your name finally does. I suppose that now I should call myself –”

As Unarmed was speaking, Disarmed blinked out, just like he said he would.

Alone in the room, he faced the future, now with knowledge, methods, a meaningful social life and relations, and a mission. He was ready to contribute to the struggle for a better world.

He was Armed.

Chapter 7: Solidarity instead of charity (sample of Path of the Unarmed)

Chapter 7 of Path of the Unarmed: Solidarity instead of charity

Welcome especially to new subscribers!

I’ve got a new article that I will be sending around, hopefully in the next few days. Until then, though, I thought I would send what I posted tonight, Chapter 7 of POTU. You’ve been hearing a lot about billionaires, who like to talk about how gracious and generous they are. Here’s the discussion about it that the characters have in POTU.

Remember I’ll be posting every Wednesday and Saturday night until all 20 chapters are posted.

[Path of the Unarmed Chapter 7 on Wattpad]

Hope you’re all doing OK in these strange times.

-Justin

——–

Chapter 7: Solidarity instead of charity

“What about getting rich and then giving back to defeat poverty, end child marriage, or otherwise make the world a better place?”

“It won’t work,” Disarmed said. “There are several problems:
“First, the good you can do with charitable donations is usually going to be cancelled out by the bad you do to acquire the fortune in the first place. Take a big charitable foundation – the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. They are trying to cure malaria in Africa, let’s say. So, Bill Gates made his fortune by establishing a monopoly over an aspect of the computer business – he’s done many things to prevent competitors from entering and after doing some creative things (that others could have done and were doing at the time) he probably set computer technology back in order to prevent competition. Same goes for less charitable tech billionaires like the Apple or Google billionaires. Generations ago, robber barons made huge fortunes by establishing monpolies over railway, roads, fossil fuels – they stole land from Indigenous people, defrauded by mismeasuring the oil, broke the law, killed workers for trying to unionize or go on strike. Then they gave money away through charitable trusts.”

“What if there was a clean way to make a billion dollars, and give it back?”

“There isn’t.”

“But what if there was?” Unarmed insisted. “Making solar panels or something.”

“Even to make solar panels, the only way to make a huge fortune would be to charge more than you have to to consumers, pay less than you could to workers, cut corners on materials or taking care of the environment – somewhere, there would have to be a squeeze. If I were in business making something I wanted everyone to have and found I was making huge amounts of money I would pay the workers more, or charge less for the product.”

“Fine, but still. What if my rich uncle died and left me a billion dollars, or I won the lottery. I have no workers, I have no products. Couldn’t I do something good with the money?”
“Of course! Money is a tremendous resource. The wealthy are very good at turning it into power. Leftists know that the people will never have enough money to use to turn into power the same way – but we of course need some money, we all do.”

“So why did you say it wouldn’t work?”

“Because even if you did get the money somehow without destroying something valuable (which I don’t think you could, especially if we include your soul or at least your conscience as something valuable) you would run into the next problem. Charity can provide resources to make really bad problems a bit better, but it could never tackle inequality. The wealthiest billionaires giving away reasonably large fractions of their fortunes can’t provide what a government can provide – universal programs like health care or education that give the same standards to everyone and have the effect of putting ordinary, poor people or working people on the same footing in terms of those services as the wealthy. Charity also won’t get Indigenous people their land back, nor will it stop the criminal justice system from persecuting Black people.

“Wealthy people prefer to give to charity because they can decide where the money goes and what it does. They think they know better than governments. But unlike a wealthy foundation or corporation, people could have a say over what happens in a government – depending on how democratic their government is, they could have a lot of say. But if it’s just a billionaire deciding where he feels like giving money, maybe he’ll think paying surgeons to save people from heart attacks is cool one year and then he’ll want to clean up a river the next – what happens to the heart patients? With public funding there’s continuity.”

“So far you’ve said the problems are that getting rich usually involves doing some harm (or as they say, behind every great fortune is a great crime), that charity cannot tackle inequality or redistribute wealth, and that charity doesn’t have continuity the way public programs do”, Unarmed said.

“That’s right. And there’s two more points,” Disarmed said.

“Charitable programs are used as a way for the wealthy to avoid paying taxes, and it’s taxes that enable governments to run public programs. So in the end, it’s not just making the fortune that’s harmful, it’s all the tax avoidance that the wealthy do – which is a lot of what they do, by the way – that is harmful.
“The last point is that the wealthy don’t just give to create a good program or to solve some problem or even just to avoid taxes. When they give to a school system, they end up taking control of the system. When they give to a conservation area, they end up taking control of the activities that take place there. As one leftist writer once wrote, ‘all this philanthropy seems to provide the wealthy with control over public systems by virtue of giving a small portion of the total money to a program.

Through that small portion of a contribution, they buy control over a whole system (like New York’s public education system, university priorities, or public health systems in various African countries).’”

“Sounds awful. I’ll make sure I look up that obscure writer later.1 I was really hoping that charity could be a shortcut. What about volunteering?” Unarmed asked.

“Volunteering has a lot in common with charity. It comes from a good impulse, but by itself it cannot change the system, unless you count your work to change the world – your activism – as a kind of volunteering, which I suppose it is.”

“I should think so,” Unarmed said. “But here’s the thing,” he continued. “At first I was having trouble understanding your message. But now I am understanding that you are trying to tell me that I will have a better life, even for myself, if I spend my time and energy trying to make the world a better place. And I’ve agreed to that. But since I agreed, I’ve proposed several ideas – first, becoming more spiritual and trying to send good vibes out into the world, second, voting for progressive candidates in elections, third, changing my consumption patterns and becoming vegan, and fourth, making money and using it for charity – that I could do. And while you haven’t exactly shot me down, you’ve said these are all basically false leads and they aren’t what I should be focusing on.

“So, if I do become a leftist, what is it that I’m supposed to do to make the world a better place?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Disarmed said.

My new novella: The Path of the Unarmed

Check out my new novella

Check out my new novella

Hello friends. Hope you’re surviving the global crisis. Let me know how you’re doing.

I’ve published a new novella – in each chapter, the protagonist learns a new lesson about leftism. I’m publishing them one chapter at a time on Wattpad. It’s called The Path of the Unarmed, and you can follow the 20 chapters week by week (I’ll be adding two chapters each week).

Cover art and design by the inimitable Tyson & Maya Kingsbury dyamic duo.

The 21st chapter is also available to mailing list subscribers (that means you! Here’s Chapter 21 – the password is: siegebreakers) but you may want to wait until the whole book is out. Hope you find it fun, and share it with people who might be just learning about leftism.

The Anti-Empire Project Episode 39: Might, the novel, by Brian Dominick

Episode 39: Might, the novel, by Brian Dominick

Brian Dominick is the author of Present as Prologue: A GenZero Novella, which describes the first phase of a youth-led, high-tech revolution in America. We talk about youth liberation, education, capitalism, and the liberatory possibilities and limitations of technological change. Interesting discussion about the idea of youth as a class.

Anti-Empire Project Episode 36: Siegebreakers at York University

The Anti-Empire Project Episode 36: Siegebreakers at York University

On November 19, 2019, York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies hosted a panel called “The Art and Politics in Imagining a Free Gaza: A Discussion of Justin Podur’s new novel, Siegebreakers.” It featured poet, theatre worker, and Associate Professor Honor Ford-Smith; writer and Professor Catriona Sandilands; and Lebanese-Palestinian activist and Executive Director of Canadian Friends of Sabeel, Yara Shoufani. The event began with me reading Chapter 1 of Siegebreakers, and interventions by the panelists followed.

So, if you still haven’t read Siegebreakers, you can let me read the first chapter to you!