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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.

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.

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.

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

It’s Congo Week!

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.

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

Can we address that British eugenics scandal?

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.

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.

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

The final chapter of the Path of the Unarmed

The Path of the Unarmed is now out.

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.

Policing is irrelevant to public safety – here are some alternatives

Policing is irrelevant for public safety.

Policing is irrelevant for public safety.

In my latest article, below, I show what criminologists have known and written about for 50 years and what the public does not – that policing is irrelevant for public safety, and that there are things that do work for public safety that we could do instead. But before that, I wanted to point to a few other things we’ve been doing:

The Civilizations Series has just wrapped up 5 parts on the French and Haitian Revolutions, which Dave Power and I studied together. Next up is the movements for South American Independence. 

I did a 3-part series on the Meng Wanzhou case, in which Canada has done a judicial kidnapping of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer who is accused – of trading with Iran and violating US sanctions. Carl Zha (of the Silk and Steel podcast) and I also did a deep dive into the India-China clashes that happened last week. 

We did a show on the Brief about the uprising in the US, with guests Margaret Kimberly from the Black Agenda Report and Benjamin Dixon from the Benjamin Dixon show. 

The Wattpad book, The Path of the Unarmed, about trying to figure out how to live a leftist life, is nearly done (last instalments will be posted by the end of this week – I’ll email with the concluding chapter then.)

This has been quite the 2020 so far, and the second half might be even more dramatic. I won’t be keeping up the same volume starting in July, so you will have a chance to catch up on anti-empire materials if you’ve fallen behind. Stay safe but keep up the good fight, too. Here’s the article, produced by the Independent Media Institute’s Globetrotter Project.

* * *

Policing Is Irrelevant for Public Safety—Here Are Some Alternatives That Are Proven to Work
Justin Podur, for Globetrotter
June 19, 2020

Recent protests, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, call for an end to racist police violence. With their actions, the protesters have also moved beyond many of the stale policing debates of the recent past. Defund, disband, abolish—people who would never have even heard these words in discussions about the police are now seriously considering them.

The breakthroughs in the police debate would not have been possible without the protesters, who have remained steadfast despite being beaten and abused by police everywhere in the United States. But this is not about making a breakthrough in the debate. This is about life and death. To stop police from killing people, 1,000 a year, year after year, changes will have to be made to the system. The protesters will be vindicated only if the changes made are the right ones.

Reform programs will only be successful if they start from the premise that the policing institution has lost its social legitimacy, which it never deserved. Reforms that assume police legitimacy—whether they involve more body cameras, better oversight, a more diverse force, or more prosecution of killers among the police—do not do the job.

Once the police are viewed as an illegitimate institution, we are well on our way. As Mariame Kaba argues in the New York Times, we could do worse than to make a 50 percent cut to police budgets and let the logic of austerity get the job done, as it has with the rest of the public sector. But 50 percent can be bargained down to 10 percent, and 10 percent to 2 percent, as long as police and their advocates can continue to link public safety with policing. The backlash against abolishing police as “politically unrealistic” in light of public safety has begun at the local level where the issue is being debated.

The goal has to be to abolish the class of people who have the legal right to end lives (and to lie to you while you must tell the truth).

Do police currently have the right to kill? Absolutely. Using conservative estimates and public data, writer Lee Camp calculated that police killed an average of 900 people per year—in other words, at least 12,600 people from 2005 to 2019. In this period, Camp writes, a total of three police officers were convicted of murder and had those convictions stand up to appeal. That is less than one-tenth of one percent, but it rounds off cleanly to zero.

The license to kill, above all, must be taken away from police. It survives because of a mystique—helped by ubiquitous cop shows, books, and movies—which is based on three notions: the idea that they are courageous because their job is dangerous, the idea that they keep society safe, and the fact that you can call them in an emergency.

Courage? Yes, policing is the 16th most dangerous job in America, behind logging workers, fishing workers, pilots, roofers, refuse collectors, truck drivers, farmers, steelworkers, construction workers, landscapers, power-line workers, grounds maintenance workers, agricultural workers, construction trade helpers, and the first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers, and repairers. But no worker in any of the top 15 most dangerous jobs has the option of killing when they subjectively feel unsafe—police do.

Safety? Police have no special function keeping society safe. In Alex Vitale’s book The End of Policing, he cites criminologist David Bayley’s earlier book Police for the Future, in which Bayley calls this one of the “best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it.” We have known for 50 years that police don’t help public safety. French anthropologist Didier Fassin, in his 2013 book Enforcing Order, cites the Kansas City experiment of the 1970s:

“This unprecedented study, unique at the time, compared three zones of the city: in the first, ‘reactive,’ crews limited their activity to responding to residents’ calls; in the second, ‘proactive,’ they at least doubled the time they spent on patrol; in the third, serving as a ‘control’ zone, they continued their previous mixture of activity. The results of a full year of operations and measurement appeared identical: neither attacks on persons, whether assault and battery, sexual assaults or muggings, nor attacks on property, whether burglary or damage to vehicles, varied significantly as a result of the different systems implemented; similarly, the experience of crime and the feeling of insecurity as reported by residents and business owners showed no variation between the zones, nor did the level of satisfaction with the police; and it turned out that in all three cases, 60 percent of the officers’ time was spent on activities not directly related to law enforcement, including a quarter bearing no relation at all to police work… Ultimately, it was evident that the patrols used preventatively had no effect on crime, either in terms of offenses recorded by law enforcement or from the point of view of residents’ perception of risk.”

The results were ignored: police kept patrolling for the next five decades. Fassin, who hung out with Paris police as part of his study, made his own calculations of how they spent their time:

“In my experience, time spent in response to calls often amounted to approximately 10 percent of the shift time; it was rare that it rose to 20 percent (five calls per team per night shift was a maximum that was rarely reached), with the rest of the time being devoted to random patrols, and to the administrative recording of actions taken.”

Think Paris is anomalous? Think again:

“A number of studies conducted in the United States reveal that officers on patrol spend between 30 and 40 percent of their time responding to calls (on average five calls per team per hour in cities), only 7–10 percent of which are related in some way to offenses or crimes, and between 40 and 50 percent of their working day on random patrol and paperwork, with the rest of the time devoted to various tasks.”

Here’s how Fassin describes the daily work of the police he observed:

“Cruising around quiet streets and peaceful neighborhoods, the police wait for occasional calls that almost always turn out to be pointless, either because they relate to mistakes or hoaxes, or because the teams arrive too late or bungle the case due to their clumsiness, or because there is no cause for any official questioning or arrest.”

Fassin cites a criminologist from Ontario, Richard Ericson, who in 1982 found that police spent 76 minutes out of an eight-hour shift responding to calls, arguing that “the presence of police officers has become an end in itself.”

So, police have the 16th most dangerous job, and they are irrelevant for public safety—but society needs someone to call in an emergency. This role can be filled by trained civilian workers who will have to learn to solve daily social problems without a license to kill, which could be the direction Minneapolis goes given city councilors’ vow to disband the police in their city. Last year Canada’s Globe and Mail reported about a police force in Yukon that carried no weapons and could lay no charges. Some cities have child protection workers that operate to protect children with greater or lesser degrees of intrusiveness. Social workers can be trained to intervene in domestic disputes and in active mental health crises in the field. They can be deployed in teams that ensure one another’s safety, like in other professions. There are detailed proposals for taking responsibility for safety into the hands of the community—Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes one in Dissent Magazine; Zach Norris reframes the issue in his new book We Keep Us Safe; and Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describe community approaches to safety in their edited volume Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement.

There should be some cultural reforms too. Boots Riley suggests removing police and military consultants, who act like state censors, from movie and TV production. The #MeToo movement led to the creation of an intimacy coordinator role in film production, to ensure that sex scenes could be filmed without sexist exploitation. Studios could be responsive to this movement by drastically reducing their cop show production while removing censors for the shows that remained. This would go some way to reduce police mystique and police worship.

Police advocates may argue there might be some financial losses from abolition. Some police forces “eat what they kill” through civil asset forfeitures, fines, and tickets, keeping taxes low while making poor people’s lives miserable. Overall, however, money will be saved.

Initially, much of the money saved by defunding police would have to go to easing the transition of the people currently in police roles into other jobs. Pensions are a mechanism for taking police off the line for whatever reason, which police organizations use generously indeed. But pensioning every police officer indefinitely, while it would save lives, would not make any resources available for public safety. Instead, governments can provide retirement and retraining packages (the courageous police might look at retraining for one of the 15 more dangerous jobs) for them, as they do with other workers who are laid off.

For the duration of current union contracts, police could be paid to prepare for other jobs or simply to stay home—expensive in the short term, but it would save thousands of lives. After that initial period, the hundreds of billions of dollars that are spent on policing could be redirected to create and expand public services. The possibilities would be limited only by the number of billions that could be moved from police. Social workers, certainly, are a strong candidate to redirect funds toward, as well as free transit and other free basic services (especially health care in the United States).

Criminological data has told us for decades that police are irrelevant for public safety. Other data tells us a lot about what does influence safety. British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their classic 2009 book The Spirit Level show that a large number of social problems, including violence, correlate strongly with inequality. Their work also shows different options for achieving equality: high wages by private employers (as in Japan) or high taxes and redistribution (as in Northern Europe). In the United States, every option for increased equality has been blocked by the wealthy who have—as Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page make clear in their important 2014 study—captured politics. A real Green New Deal would do more for public safety than any conceivable police reform short of abolition.

Author Bio: Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is the author of the novel Siegebreakers.

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

Looking back at the long month of May 2020

May 2020 is over.

May 2020 is over.

With the protests over George Floyd’s murder by police continuing to grow and expand, it is hard to even remember all of the other things that happened in May. A full month of pandemic. Another coup attempt in Venezuela and the arrival of an Iranian tanker there, followed by attempts by the US to close that door again, and more. 

I wanted to tell you of my plan to send a newsletter on a regular basis, maybe the 1st and 15th of the month, with a summary of all the stories we’ve been covering. If there’s an article, I’ll send it; if it’s podcasts, I’ll send those. In this one, there’s a few updates. 

The Path of the Unarmed continues to be updated on Wednesdays and Saturdays at Wattpad: 

https://www.wattpad.com/story/221959553-the-path-of-the-unarmed

In podcasting, Dave Power and I have kept going with the Civilizations Series – we’ve just wrapped up Episode 10 on the American Revolution – the whole series (1-10 so far) is here:

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

In the Anti-Empire Project we’ve done a pair on the green economy:

With Stan Cox on the Green New Deal
With Peter Victor on Managing Without Growth

A couple on Venezuela:

The Silvercorp coup attempt
The Iranian tanker arriving

And a great discussion about Frantz Fanon’s work with my colleague, Stefan Kipfer. 

Over on The Brief: Tracking the Empire:

We concluded our trilogy on India, discussing the crackdown in the lockdown. 
And talked about the Canada-Saudi arms deal, with Anthony Fenton. 

That’s about 10 hours right there, if you haven’t been keeping up, that’s enough for a binge. 

We’ll have plenty more for you by mid-June, with lots in the pipeline, including some more writings. 

Hope to hear from you, and my well-wishes to everyone struggling for justice out there in this moment of rebellion. 
 

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

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

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.