Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1145
May 12, 2018
Accuser Of Capitalism
From People And Nature remember past heroes by pausing to reflect, Terry Brotherstone argues in this guest post, marking one hundred years since John Maclean’s speech from the dock.
On 9 May, 2018, it will be 100 years since the Clydeside Marxist revolutionary, John Maclean, stood in the dock in the Scottish High Court in Edinburgh, refused to recognise its authority by making any plea in his defence against a charge of sedition, and instead delivered an audacious, hour-and-a-quarter-long speech denouncing World War I as a murderous capitalist enterprise inflicting death and disaster on the working people of Europe.
“I have taken … unconstitutional action … because of [these] abnormal circumstances”, he said.
John Maclean speaking from the dock. Photo from the Glasgow Digital Library
You can read his speech, with some contextual analysis, in a recent edition here.
The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The sentence was five years with hard labour. When the war ended, and in the light of a growing protest movement in Maclean’s support, and Government fears that his continued persecution might stimulate more serious working-class disaffection – the Russian Revolution was much in their minds – he was released after only a few months.
However, there is little doubt that Maclean’s several terms of imprisonment in the harsh conditions of Scotland’s jails contributed to his early death in 1923, aged only 44.
At the time of Maclean’s 1918 trial, the outcome of the War – which by then had been waged for over three and three-quarter bloody years – was still in the balance. The German Spring offensive, which had been encouraged by Russia’s withdrawal from combat after the October Revolution and the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty of March 3, had not yet been decisively countered.
Maclean was one of a small number of revolutionary internationalists who, from the beginning, had taken an active stand against the war and the abandonment of the commitment of the social-democratic parties of the Second International actively to oppose it: as a consequence, he had been appointed by the Bolshevik government as its consular representative in Glasgow.
His propaganda work in working-class areas, his prosecutor Lord Advocate James Clyde told the jury, had passed over the line at which “discussion of social questions” had become “the deliberate and persistent attempt … to plant the seeds of disunion, disaffection, sedition and mutiny among our people”. Maclean, he said, was encouraging workers “to turn society upside down by means of a general refusal to work … [aimed at] the ruin of the existing structure instead of its repair”. If that were allowed to continue, Clyde asserted, “this country [would face] the same catastrophe – the same betrayal – as overtook Russia”. The jurors must act to prevent “that kind of thing”.
Why today should we once again remember Maclean and begin a new discussion about his political legacy?
In late 1979, on the centenary of Maclean’s birth, the fine journalist, historian and novelist, Neal Ascherson, wrote a piece for The Scotsman newspaper in recognition of the Marxist teacher’s continuing importance in working-class political memory in Scotland: it was headlined “His Sacrifice Does Not Make Him Our Redeemer”. Ascherson was an active campaigner for Scottish devolution, which at that time had been the subject of a Referendum, though, in the event, its accomplishment was to be postponed until 1999.
Devolution was seen as potentially progressive by some radical liberals, aware that British social-democracy had reached a dead end, and concerned at the reactionary implications of the continuing post-imperial delusions of the Westminster establishment. They worried that the political energies of a generation, radicalised by les événements in Paris in 1968 and their aftermath in class struggle in Britain as elsewhere – including the unseating of a Tory government by the miners’ industrial action of 1973-74 – and by the experience of the anti-Vietnam War movement, were being channelled away from what was seen as realisable politics into the revolutionary romanticism of the would-be Marxist sects.
Forty years on, it must surely be recognised that Ascherson was right to warn against the sort of left-wing approach that would make past heroes like Maclean links in a golden chain of revolutionary leaders and thinkers connecting Marx and Engels to their own organisation in the present. And too many Scottish socialists and left-nationalists today seem still to be wedded to this form of misguidedly sectarian historical thinking, seeking to claim Maclean’s authority for their current political campaigns.
But it is also true that times have moved on. We are no longer in a period when limited political modifications to the social system controlled by global capital might seem to offer a way forward, to be prioritised above the longer-term – and difficult – theoretical work involved in analysing the implications of the long delay in bringing to fruition the perspectives first outlined in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto.
The effect of decades that have seen – far from the realisation of socialism – unprecedentedly murderous wars, the degeneration of revolutions into various forms of Stalinism, and the march of the capital system, recently behind the banner of neoliberalism, towards the destruction of the planet and of humanity itself, surely call on us to rethink this history and its meaning for future practice.
Maclean still matters: but not for Scotland alone, or even primarily. His speech from the dock – “I stand here, then, not as the accused but as the accuser, of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot” – speaks loudly across the years about his primary commitment … to socialist internationalism: it was for this that his “sacrifice” was made.
And what the history of the intervening century tells us is that the organisational forms that internationalism has taken since the days of Marx’s International Working Men’s [sic] Association (the First International) in the 1860s have all – in their principal goal certainly – failed.
Maclean, to his credit, was amongst those who recognised that the Second (social-democratic) International (formed on the anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889) had signed its own death warrant when the great majority of its parties voted in their national parliaments for war credits in 1914. After 1917, he acted and spoke out for the Bolshevik revolution and the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. He was specifically invited to the first Congress of the Third (Communist) International in 1919; but, suspicious of the calibre, and in some cases the motives, of its early British supporters, he held back from active participation. Stalinism – which of course he did not, and could not have predicted – was to corrupt it, destroy it as a revolutionary agency and then, in 1943, oversee its dissolution.
Trotsky’s optimism about the practical possibilities in the 1930s of a Fourth International – which thanks to the courage and selflessness of many of its adherents did play an important role in preserving the revolutionary aspiration so deeply compromised by Stalinism – came to nothing from the point of view of actualising the transition beyond the rule of capital to a society based on true humanity. After World War II, “Trotskyism” faced very difficult, unpredicted circumstances and it failed to develop Marxism in ways that could inform the practical revolutionary thinking necessary to meet the challenges of new forms of capitalist domination. Stalinism – born from the ruins of the hopes of 1917 and able to survive apparently promising working-class “national” revolts, notably in Hungary in 1956 – became, it is now clear, the brutal instrument for disciplining the world working class in those parts of the world where it held sway (or exercised decisive influence), in preparation for reintegration into the globalised capital system.
With the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91 and the terminal shock suffered by the triumphalism of so-called neoliberalism in the financial crisis of 2007-09, possibilities for the refoundation of a practical working-class internationalism have reappeared. As the forces of capital generate the reactionary movements they like to describe as “populist” in the UK, many parts of Europe and the USA, and the inheritors of Stalinist political methods act as predator dictatorial oppressors in Russia and China, so the shoots of oppositional struggle to re-emerge.
For all its shortcomings and disappointments, a new period opened up with the “Arab Spring” of 2010 and after. Women and young people are on the march against “Trumpism” in the USA. Students in Britain have joined forces in an unprecedented way with their lecturers in fighting the wholesale marketisation of their universities; and in France they are seeking ways to join with workers in fighting President Macron’s Napoleonic ambitions to press forward with implementing a Francophile version of neoliberalism.
The Women’s March 2018. Photo by Jonathan Eyler-Werve, via Flickr Creative Commons
But this is not – as some headlines have suggested – a rerun of 1968. Much of today’s protest is much more thoughtful and aware that the future it seeks can only come about, not by reforms of this or that aspect of things as they are, but only through working to bring together apparently disparate causes and campaigns into a movement for radical social transformation.
We remember Maclean best – and we pay tribute to him and other working-class “martyrs” most appropriately – by pausing to reflect; by thinking through the implications of their sacrifice for the tasks today, not by looking upon them as “redeemers”. Their struggle does not do our thinking for us. It encourages us not simply to act but also to think. This is surely what Marx meant in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.” And the agency of change Marx uncovered was not “the industrial working class” – the social formation that scarcely existed in the period the Communist Manifesto was written but which to Maclean’s generation and to many of us in the mid-twentieth century looked so self-evidently to be the force for revolution – but labour.
What do Marx’s fundamental insights into the structural antagonism between capital and labour and the immanent need for labour to actualise that opposition to the point of social transformation mean today, when deindustrialisation in the West and the digital revolution have transformed the appearance of labour? How can the historically unprecedented developments in productive forces – developments which as long as capital rules can only be destructive in their overall impact on humanity and the natural environment – be harnessed to the social good and the creation of a socialist world?
Labour protests against Macron’s version of neo-liberalism
Thinkers such as István Mészáros – in my view particularly Mészáros – have wrestled with these questions during the decades since Stalinism’s collapse and, in the UK, Thatcherism’s “triumph”. In Mészáros’s case rethinking began with the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, in which he was involved. Afterwards, he had to take refuge in Britain, and drew from the Hungarian experience the conclusion that Marxism could no longer simply be “applied” – it had to be rethought from its roots. Following the later defeat of the “Prague Spring” and the beginnings of what he was to define as “the structural crisis” of capital in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he launched a major examination of how humanity might make the transition Beyond Capital (the title of his central work published in 1995) to a “social metabolism” that could serve human need.
“The mountain we must climb and conquer,” wrote Mészáros, in a later work, “is many Himalayas on top of one another.” And, “there are no native Sherpas to be exploited for the hard work.” This means that “we” – by which I take him to mean the working class that has emerged from this new period when manual and intellectual labour has been transformed and brought together in its structural antagonism to capital as never before – “must do it ourselves.” And it can only be done “if we are willing to confront the real stakes and the real obstacles.”
Uncritical memorialising of the past heroes of socialism is surely one such obstacle. And some of us of an older generation have to recognise that the “party-building” and related practices, which we devoted so much time to, are another. There needs to be, to cite the title of a recent book by the former secretary of one of the versions of the Fourth International, Cliff Slaughter, a Bonfire of the Certainties. As we abandon old “certainties” and rebuild new practical guidelines, we need to recognise that the agent of the urgently needed change to socialism will indeed be the working class – but that its appearance today comes in new and diverse forms. And that theory has to develop in the closest possible association with – not apart from and preaching “from the outside” to – a multiplicity of oppositional struggles.
John Maclean inspires us to understand that human beings can indeed rise to the challenge of “doing it ourselves”. His record should shame all those Labour “leaders” who have devoted themselves, in one way or another, to the service of capital and its warmongering. But neither he nor any other figure from our past can do the job that needs to be done for us.
Terry Brotherstone lectured in history at the University of Aberdeen until retiring in 2008. He is now a research fellow there. He has published articles on Chartism, “Red Clydeside”, the 1956 crisis in the Communist Party of Great Britain, the North Sea oilworkers’ industrial actions in the years after the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, and other topics. He has been President of the University and College Union Scotland. He was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party until its disintegration in 1985, after which he wrote regularly for the weekly Workers Press. He is a member of the editorial board of the Glasgow-based journal of socialist theory, Critique.
■ Accuser of capitalism – John Maclean’s speech from the dock
■ People & Nature site contents
On 9 May, 2018, it will be 100 years since the Clydeside Marxist revolutionary, John Maclean, stood in the dock in the Scottish High Court in Edinburgh, refused to recognise its authority by making any plea in his defence against a charge of sedition, and instead delivered an audacious, hour-and-a-quarter-long speech denouncing World War I as a murderous capitalist enterprise inflicting death and disaster on the working people of Europe.
“I have taken … unconstitutional action … because of [these] abnormal circumstances”, he said.
I am a socialist, and have been fighting and will fight for an absolute reconstruction of society for the benefit of all. I am proud of my conduct. I have squared my conduct with my intellect, and if everyone had done so this war would not have taken place.
John Maclean speaking from the dock. Photo from the Glasgow Digital Library You can read his speech, with some contextual analysis, in a recent edition here.
The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The sentence was five years with hard labour. When the war ended, and in the light of a growing protest movement in Maclean’s support, and Government fears that his continued persecution might stimulate more serious working-class disaffection – the Russian Revolution was much in their minds – he was released after only a few months.
However, there is little doubt that Maclean’s several terms of imprisonment in the harsh conditions of Scotland’s jails contributed to his early death in 1923, aged only 44.
At the time of Maclean’s 1918 trial, the outcome of the War – which by then had been waged for over three and three-quarter bloody years – was still in the balance. The German Spring offensive, which had been encouraged by Russia’s withdrawal from combat after the October Revolution and the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty of March 3, had not yet been decisively countered.
Maclean was one of a small number of revolutionary internationalists who, from the beginning, had taken an active stand against the war and the abandonment of the commitment of the social-democratic parties of the Second International actively to oppose it: as a consequence, he had been appointed by the Bolshevik government as its consular representative in Glasgow.
His propaganda work in working-class areas, his prosecutor Lord Advocate James Clyde told the jury, had passed over the line at which “discussion of social questions” had become “the deliberate and persistent attempt … to plant the seeds of disunion, disaffection, sedition and mutiny among our people”. Maclean, he said, was encouraging workers “to turn society upside down by means of a general refusal to work … [aimed at] the ruin of the existing structure instead of its repair”. If that were allowed to continue, Clyde asserted, “this country [would face] the same catastrophe – the same betrayal – as overtook Russia”. The jurors must act to prevent “that kind of thing”.
Why today should we once again remember Maclean and begin a new discussion about his political legacy?
In late 1979, on the centenary of Maclean’s birth, the fine journalist, historian and novelist, Neal Ascherson, wrote a piece for The Scotsman newspaper in recognition of the Marxist teacher’s continuing importance in working-class political memory in Scotland: it was headlined “His Sacrifice Does Not Make Him Our Redeemer”. Ascherson was an active campaigner for Scottish devolution, which at that time had been the subject of a Referendum, though, in the event, its accomplishment was to be postponed until 1999.
Devolution was seen as potentially progressive by some radical liberals, aware that British social-democracy had reached a dead end, and concerned at the reactionary implications of the continuing post-imperial delusions of the Westminster establishment. They worried that the political energies of a generation, radicalised by les événements in Paris in 1968 and their aftermath in class struggle in Britain as elsewhere – including the unseating of a Tory government by the miners’ industrial action of 1973-74 – and by the experience of the anti-Vietnam War movement, were being channelled away from what was seen as realisable politics into the revolutionary romanticism of the would-be Marxist sects.
Forty years on, it must surely be recognised that Ascherson was right to warn against the sort of left-wing approach that would make past heroes like Maclean links in a golden chain of revolutionary leaders and thinkers connecting Marx and Engels to their own organisation in the present. And too many Scottish socialists and left-nationalists today seem still to be wedded to this form of misguidedly sectarian historical thinking, seeking to claim Maclean’s authority for their current political campaigns.
But it is also true that times have moved on. We are no longer in a period when limited political modifications to the social system controlled by global capital might seem to offer a way forward, to be prioritised above the longer-term – and difficult – theoretical work involved in analysing the implications of the long delay in bringing to fruition the perspectives first outlined in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto.
The effect of decades that have seen – far from the realisation of socialism – unprecedentedly murderous wars, the degeneration of revolutions into various forms of Stalinism, and the march of the capital system, recently behind the banner of neoliberalism, towards the destruction of the planet and of humanity itself, surely call on us to rethink this history and its meaning for future practice.
Maclean still matters: but not for Scotland alone, or even primarily. His speech from the dock – “I stand here, then, not as the accused but as the accuser, of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot” – speaks loudly across the years about his primary commitment … to socialist internationalism: it was for this that his “sacrifice” was made.
And what the history of the intervening century tells us is that the organisational forms that internationalism has taken since the days of Marx’s International Working Men’s [sic] Association (the First International) in the 1860s have all – in their principal goal certainly – failed.
Maclean, to his credit, was amongst those who recognised that the Second (social-democratic) International (formed on the anniversary of the French Revolution in 1889) had signed its own death warrant when the great majority of its parties voted in their national parliaments for war credits in 1914. After 1917, he acted and spoke out for the Bolshevik revolution and the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. He was specifically invited to the first Congress of the Third (Communist) International in 1919; but, suspicious of the calibre, and in some cases the motives, of its early British supporters, he held back from active participation. Stalinism – which of course he did not, and could not have predicted – was to corrupt it, destroy it as a revolutionary agency and then, in 1943, oversee its dissolution.
Trotsky’s optimism about the practical possibilities in the 1930s of a Fourth International – which thanks to the courage and selflessness of many of its adherents did play an important role in preserving the revolutionary aspiration so deeply compromised by Stalinism – came to nothing from the point of view of actualising the transition beyond the rule of capital to a society based on true humanity. After World War II, “Trotskyism” faced very difficult, unpredicted circumstances and it failed to develop Marxism in ways that could inform the practical revolutionary thinking necessary to meet the challenges of new forms of capitalist domination. Stalinism – born from the ruins of the hopes of 1917 and able to survive apparently promising working-class “national” revolts, notably in Hungary in 1956 – became, it is now clear, the brutal instrument for disciplining the world working class in those parts of the world where it held sway (or exercised decisive influence), in preparation for reintegration into the globalised capital system.
With the collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91 and the terminal shock suffered by the triumphalism of so-called neoliberalism in the financial crisis of 2007-09, possibilities for the refoundation of a practical working-class internationalism have reappeared. As the forces of capital generate the reactionary movements they like to describe as “populist” in the UK, many parts of Europe and the USA, and the inheritors of Stalinist political methods act as predator dictatorial oppressors in Russia and China, so the shoots of oppositional struggle to re-emerge.
For all its shortcomings and disappointments, a new period opened up with the “Arab Spring” of 2010 and after. Women and young people are on the march against “Trumpism” in the USA. Students in Britain have joined forces in an unprecedented way with their lecturers in fighting the wholesale marketisation of their universities; and in France they are seeking ways to join with workers in fighting President Macron’s Napoleonic ambitions to press forward with implementing a Francophile version of neoliberalism.
The Women’s March 2018. Photo by Jonathan Eyler-Werve, via Flickr Creative Commons But this is not – as some headlines have suggested – a rerun of 1968. Much of today’s protest is much more thoughtful and aware that the future it seeks can only come about, not by reforms of this or that aspect of things as they are, but only through working to bring together apparently disparate causes and campaigns into a movement for radical social transformation.
We remember Maclean best – and we pay tribute to him and other working-class “martyrs” most appropriately – by pausing to reflect; by thinking through the implications of their sacrifice for the tasks today, not by looking upon them as “redeemers”. Their struggle does not do our thinking for us. It encourages us not simply to act but also to think. This is surely what Marx meant in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.” And the agency of change Marx uncovered was not “the industrial working class” – the social formation that scarcely existed in the period the Communist Manifesto was written but which to Maclean’s generation and to many of us in the mid-twentieth century looked so self-evidently to be the force for revolution – but labour.
What do Marx’s fundamental insights into the structural antagonism between capital and labour and the immanent need for labour to actualise that opposition to the point of social transformation mean today, when deindustrialisation in the West and the digital revolution have transformed the appearance of labour? How can the historically unprecedented developments in productive forces – developments which as long as capital rules can only be destructive in their overall impact on humanity and the natural environment – be harnessed to the social good and the creation of a socialist world?
Labour protests against Macron’s version of neo-liberalism Thinkers such as István Mészáros – in my view particularly Mészáros – have wrestled with these questions during the decades since Stalinism’s collapse and, in the UK, Thatcherism’s “triumph”. In Mészáros’s case rethinking began with the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, in which he was involved. Afterwards, he had to take refuge in Britain, and drew from the Hungarian experience the conclusion that Marxism could no longer simply be “applied” – it had to be rethought from its roots. Following the later defeat of the “Prague Spring” and the beginnings of what he was to define as “the structural crisis” of capital in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he launched a major examination of how humanity might make the transition Beyond Capital (the title of his central work published in 1995) to a “social metabolism” that could serve human need.
“The mountain we must climb and conquer,” wrote Mészáros, in a later work, “is many Himalayas on top of one another.” And, “there are no native Sherpas to be exploited for the hard work.” This means that “we” – by which I take him to mean the working class that has emerged from this new period when manual and intellectual labour has been transformed and brought together in its structural antagonism to capital as never before – “must do it ourselves.” And it can only be done “if we are willing to confront the real stakes and the real obstacles.”
Uncritical memorialising of the past heroes of socialism is surely one such obstacle. And some of us of an older generation have to recognise that the “party-building” and related practices, which we devoted so much time to, are another. There needs to be, to cite the title of a recent book by the former secretary of one of the versions of the Fourth International, Cliff Slaughter, a Bonfire of the Certainties. As we abandon old “certainties” and rebuild new practical guidelines, we need to recognise that the agent of the urgently needed change to socialism will indeed be the working class – but that its appearance today comes in new and diverse forms. And that theory has to develop in the closest possible association with – not apart from and preaching “from the outside” to – a multiplicity of oppositional struggles.
John Maclean inspires us to understand that human beings can indeed rise to the challenge of “doing it ourselves”. His record should shame all those Labour “leaders” who have devoted themselves, in one way or another, to the service of capital and its warmongering. But neither he nor any other figure from our past can do the job that needs to be done for us.
Terry Brotherstone lectured in history at the University of Aberdeen until retiring in 2008. He is now a research fellow there. He has published articles on Chartism, “Red Clydeside”, the 1956 crisis in the Communist Party of Great Britain, the North Sea oilworkers’ industrial actions in the years after the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, and other topics. He has been President of the University and College Union Scotland. He was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party until its disintegration in 1985, after which he wrote regularly for the weekly Workers Press. He is a member of the editorial board of the Glasgow-based journal of socialist theory, Critique.
■ Accuser of capitalism – John Maclean’s speech from the dock
■ People & Nature site contents
The Real Victor
The Uri Avnery Column discusses at the work of Raviv Drucker.
I was a Member of the Knesset at the time. Two days after the end of the war, Eshkol asked me to meet him in his office in the Knesset building.
He listened to what I had to say, and then he answered with a fatherly smile:
I objected feebly that this may be true about an ordinary deal, but not when the fate of nations is concerned.
(The Trade Minister, Haim Zadok, a very clever lawyer, soon gave me another lesson in the Zionist mentality. I asked him what part of the newly occupied territories the government was ready to give back. He replied: "Simple. If possible, we shall give back nothing. If they press us, we shall give back a small part. If they press us more, we shall give back a large part. If they press us very hard, we shall give back everything." At the time, giving back meant giving back to the King of Jordan.)
There was no effective pressure, so Israel kept everything.
I Remembered this episode when I watched the second episode of Raviv Drucker's outstanding TV series about Israel's past Prime Ministers. After Ben-Gurion came Levy Eshkol.
Drucker portrays Eshkol as a nice and bumbling politician, a weak person who happened to be in office when the most fateful war broke out with results that have shaped our destiny to this very day. Little Israel became a regional power, with large occupied territories north, east and west. Eshkol was pushed around by his rebellious generals, made decisions against his will under duress. So Israel's present situation was shaped almost by accident.
All Drucker's facts are scrupulously correct, and like the chapter about Ben-Gurion, this one, too, is full of new disclosures, new even to me.
Yet I think that Drucker's characterization of Eshkol is not completely accurate. True, Eshkol was an amiable person, modest and moderate, but underneath it all there was a hard core, an obstinate belief in the Zionist ideology.
Before becoming Prime Minister by the general consent of the Labor Party, when Ben-Gurion had become intolerable and was kicked out, Eshkol was in charge of settlements. His determination to settle Jews on the land owned by Arabs was unshakable.
Between us a curious relationship developed. I was the enfant terrible of the Knesset, a one-man faction in extreme opposition, hated by the ruling Labor Party. I was seated in the Knesset hall just under the speaker's podium, an ideal place to interrupt the speaker.
Eshkol was an abominable speaker, the despair of the stenographers. His sentences had no beginning and no end. When I interrupted him with a remark, he forgot what he was going to say, turned towards me and answered in a friendly way, driving his party colleagues mad.
But I had no illusions. It was under his government that the Knesset enacted a law that was quite openly designed to close down my weekly magazine, which was detested by the ruling party (a fact that induced me to run for the Knesset).
When The 1967 Middle East crisis started, Eshkol - then both Prime Minister and Minister of Defense - indeed hesitated to act. Israel was threatened by three Arab armies, America's consent to an Israeli attack was not assured. The crisis lasted for three weeks, and the anxiety of the Israeli population intensified from day to day.
Eshkol looked like an unlikely war leader. At the height of the crisis, he decided to make a radio speech to lift the spirits of the nation. He read from a prepared text - prepared too much. An advisor had improved the manuscript, changing some words. When he reached these words, Eshkol stumbled. It sounded like indecision, and immediately a public conviction was formed: Eshkol must go, or at least give up the Defense Ministry.
A group of women (nicknamed "the Merry Wives of Windsor") demonstrated in the streets, Eshkol surrendered and Moshe Dayan became Minister of Defense.
The army, which for years had been superbly armed and prepared by Eshkol, won a crushing victory. Dayan, the picturesque one-eyed ex-general became the great victor, the dream of women around the world, though his contribution had been minimal.
When it all ended, Eshkol's stature in the public mind remained low. While the case can be made that he was the real victor, all the glory went to the glamorous generals. Israel became a militarist state, the generals became national heroes, Dayan, who was quite incompetent, was venerated.
And Then, less than two years after the war, Eshkol suddenly died. These were the fateful two years, in which the surprising results of the war had to be dealt with.
There was no real debate. My friends and I advocated the creation of a Palestinian state and found no support - neither in Israel nor throughout the world. When I visited Washington DC, everybody was adamantly against it. Even the Soviet Union (and the Israeli Communist party) took up the idea only years later.
One of the arguments against it was that the "Arabs of the West Bank" (God forbid calling them Palestinians) wanted to return to the King. So I went to see all the prominent local leaders in the West Bank. At the end of every conversation I asked them point blank: If you had the choice between returning to Jordanian rule or creating a Palestinian state, what would you choose?" Every one of them said: "a Palestinian state, of course."
When I brought this up in a Knesset debate, Dayan, then still the Minister of Defense, answered that I was lying. When I brought it up again in a debate with the Prime Minister, Eshkol supported his minister.
But then Eshkol did something that only an Eshkol could do: his advisor for Arab affairs called me and asked for a meeting. We met in the Knesset Member's cafeteria. "The Prime Minister has asked me to find out on what you base your assertion," he told me. I recounted my conversations with the various Arab leaders in the occupied territories. He drew up a meticulous protocol and summed it up: "I agree with MK Avnery on every detail. However, we both agree that a Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as capital is unthinkable. Since the government has decided to keep East Jerusalem in any peace agreement, the idea of a Palestinian state is irrelevant." (I have just transferred this document to the National Archive.)
The extreme right already demanded the annexation of all the occupied territory to Greater Israel, but they were then far from power, and few took them seriously.
What remained was the vague "Jordanian Option". The idea was to return the West Bank to King Hussein, on the condition that he let us have East Jerusalem.
That was a crazy idea, resulting from a total ignorance of Arab reality. The king was a scion of the Hashemite family, the family of the prophet Muhammad. The idea that he would give up the third holiest place of Islam, the place from which the Prophet himself had ascended to heaven, was ludicrous. But Eshkol, like all the other ministers, had no idea about Islamic or Arab affairs.
The Only Israeli Prime Minister who knew Arab Palestinians was hardly mentioned in Drucker's series: Moshe Sharett.
Sharett was Israel's second Prime Minister. When Ben-Gurion decided to abdicate and settle in the Negev, Foreign Minister Sharett was chosen by his party to succeed him. It took Ben-Gurion about a year to decide that he wanted to be Prime Minister after all, so he returned to the Defense Ministry, and after some time to the Prime Minister's office.
Sharett was the opposite of Ben-Gurion in almost every respect. It is no accident that Drucker hardly mentions him. He was considered weak, indeed negligible. While Ben-Gurion was decisive, bold and even adventurous, Sharett was considered a coward and widely despised.
But Sharett, who came to Palestine from Ukraine at the age of 12, had lived for two years in Arab neighborhoods. Unlike all other Prime Ministers, he spoke Arabic, thought Arabic and understood the Arabs. He even looked faintly Arab, with a well kept mustache.
When Ben-Gurion returned from his Negev self-exile, he had the idea of invading Lebanon, installing a Christian leader as dictator, and turning it into the first Arab state to make peace with Israel. Sharett, still Prime Minister, thought this a stupid idea. But he did not dare to stand up to Ben-Gurion publicly. He went home and wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion, in which he listed everything that was wrong about the idea. The plan was abandoned.
A generation later, Ben-Gurion's favorite, Ariel Sharon, then Minister of Defense, executed Ben-Gurion's plan, with exactly the results Sharett had prophesied. But it did not help to resurrect Sharett's reputation.
Sharett was also a very vain person. Once we met at the foot of the Metsada (Masada) mountain, at the start of the very arduous climb to the top. It took him an hour and 5 minutes, quite a feat for a man of his age. Yet, by mistake, I reported in my paper that it took him 105 minutes. He was so enraged that he sent me an official letter demanding a correction and an apology. I complied, of course.
Sharett died early, a bitter and disappointed man. Still, I think that he, too, deserved a chapter in Drucker's excellent series.
I was a Member of the Knesset at the time. Two days after the end of the war, Eshkol asked me to meet him in his office in the Knesset building.
He listened to what I had to say, and then he answered with a fatherly smile:
Uri, what kind of a trader are you? In a negotiation, one offers the minimum and demands the maximum. Then one starts to negotiate, and in the end one reaches an agreement somewhere in the middle. And here you want to offer everything before the negotiation even starts?
I objected feebly that this may be true about an ordinary deal, but not when the fate of nations is concerned.
(The Trade Minister, Haim Zadok, a very clever lawyer, soon gave me another lesson in the Zionist mentality. I asked him what part of the newly occupied territories the government was ready to give back. He replied: "Simple. If possible, we shall give back nothing. If they press us, we shall give back a small part. If they press us more, we shall give back a large part. If they press us very hard, we shall give back everything." At the time, giving back meant giving back to the King of Jordan.)
There was no effective pressure, so Israel kept everything.
I Remembered this episode when I watched the second episode of Raviv Drucker's outstanding TV series about Israel's past Prime Ministers. After Ben-Gurion came Levy Eshkol.
Drucker portrays Eshkol as a nice and bumbling politician, a weak person who happened to be in office when the most fateful war broke out with results that have shaped our destiny to this very day. Little Israel became a regional power, with large occupied territories north, east and west. Eshkol was pushed around by his rebellious generals, made decisions against his will under duress. So Israel's present situation was shaped almost by accident.
All Drucker's facts are scrupulously correct, and like the chapter about Ben-Gurion, this one, too, is full of new disclosures, new even to me.
Yet I think that Drucker's characterization of Eshkol is not completely accurate. True, Eshkol was an amiable person, modest and moderate, but underneath it all there was a hard core, an obstinate belief in the Zionist ideology.
Before becoming Prime Minister by the general consent of the Labor Party, when Ben-Gurion had become intolerable and was kicked out, Eshkol was in charge of settlements. His determination to settle Jews on the land owned by Arabs was unshakable.
Between us a curious relationship developed. I was the enfant terrible of the Knesset, a one-man faction in extreme opposition, hated by the ruling Labor Party. I was seated in the Knesset hall just under the speaker's podium, an ideal place to interrupt the speaker.
Eshkol was an abominable speaker, the despair of the stenographers. His sentences had no beginning and no end. When I interrupted him with a remark, he forgot what he was going to say, turned towards me and answered in a friendly way, driving his party colleagues mad.
But I had no illusions. It was under his government that the Knesset enacted a law that was quite openly designed to close down my weekly magazine, which was detested by the ruling party (a fact that induced me to run for the Knesset).
When The 1967 Middle East crisis started, Eshkol - then both Prime Minister and Minister of Defense - indeed hesitated to act. Israel was threatened by three Arab armies, America's consent to an Israeli attack was not assured. The crisis lasted for three weeks, and the anxiety of the Israeli population intensified from day to day.
Eshkol looked like an unlikely war leader. At the height of the crisis, he decided to make a radio speech to lift the spirits of the nation. He read from a prepared text - prepared too much. An advisor had improved the manuscript, changing some words. When he reached these words, Eshkol stumbled. It sounded like indecision, and immediately a public conviction was formed: Eshkol must go, or at least give up the Defense Ministry.
A group of women (nicknamed "the Merry Wives of Windsor") demonstrated in the streets, Eshkol surrendered and Moshe Dayan became Minister of Defense.
The army, which for years had been superbly armed and prepared by Eshkol, won a crushing victory. Dayan, the picturesque one-eyed ex-general became the great victor, the dream of women around the world, though his contribution had been minimal.
When it all ended, Eshkol's stature in the public mind remained low. While the case can be made that he was the real victor, all the glory went to the glamorous generals. Israel became a militarist state, the generals became national heroes, Dayan, who was quite incompetent, was venerated.
And Then, less than two years after the war, Eshkol suddenly died. These were the fateful two years, in which the surprising results of the war had to be dealt with.
There was no real debate. My friends and I advocated the creation of a Palestinian state and found no support - neither in Israel nor throughout the world. When I visited Washington DC, everybody was adamantly against it. Even the Soviet Union (and the Israeli Communist party) took up the idea only years later.
One of the arguments against it was that the "Arabs of the West Bank" (God forbid calling them Palestinians) wanted to return to the King. So I went to see all the prominent local leaders in the West Bank. At the end of every conversation I asked them point blank: If you had the choice between returning to Jordanian rule or creating a Palestinian state, what would you choose?" Every one of them said: "a Palestinian state, of course."
When I brought this up in a Knesset debate, Dayan, then still the Minister of Defense, answered that I was lying. When I brought it up again in a debate with the Prime Minister, Eshkol supported his minister.
But then Eshkol did something that only an Eshkol could do: his advisor for Arab affairs called me and asked for a meeting. We met in the Knesset Member's cafeteria. "The Prime Minister has asked me to find out on what you base your assertion," he told me. I recounted my conversations with the various Arab leaders in the occupied territories. He drew up a meticulous protocol and summed it up: "I agree with MK Avnery on every detail. However, we both agree that a Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as capital is unthinkable. Since the government has decided to keep East Jerusalem in any peace agreement, the idea of a Palestinian state is irrelevant." (I have just transferred this document to the National Archive.)
The extreme right already demanded the annexation of all the occupied territory to Greater Israel, but they were then far from power, and few took them seriously.
What remained was the vague "Jordanian Option". The idea was to return the West Bank to King Hussein, on the condition that he let us have East Jerusalem.
That was a crazy idea, resulting from a total ignorance of Arab reality. The king was a scion of the Hashemite family, the family of the prophet Muhammad. The idea that he would give up the third holiest place of Islam, the place from which the Prophet himself had ascended to heaven, was ludicrous. But Eshkol, like all the other ministers, had no idea about Islamic or Arab affairs.
The Only Israeli Prime Minister who knew Arab Palestinians was hardly mentioned in Drucker's series: Moshe Sharett.
Sharett was Israel's second Prime Minister. When Ben-Gurion decided to abdicate and settle in the Negev, Foreign Minister Sharett was chosen by his party to succeed him. It took Ben-Gurion about a year to decide that he wanted to be Prime Minister after all, so he returned to the Defense Ministry, and after some time to the Prime Minister's office.
Sharett was the opposite of Ben-Gurion in almost every respect. It is no accident that Drucker hardly mentions him. He was considered weak, indeed negligible. While Ben-Gurion was decisive, bold and even adventurous, Sharett was considered a coward and widely despised.
But Sharett, who came to Palestine from Ukraine at the age of 12, had lived for two years in Arab neighborhoods. Unlike all other Prime Ministers, he spoke Arabic, thought Arabic and understood the Arabs. He even looked faintly Arab, with a well kept mustache.
When Ben-Gurion returned from his Negev self-exile, he had the idea of invading Lebanon, installing a Christian leader as dictator, and turning it into the first Arab state to make peace with Israel. Sharett, still Prime Minister, thought this a stupid idea. But he did not dare to stand up to Ben-Gurion publicly. He went home and wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion, in which he listed everything that was wrong about the idea. The plan was abandoned.
A generation later, Ben-Gurion's favorite, Ariel Sharon, then Minister of Defense, executed Ben-Gurion's plan, with exactly the results Sharett had prophesied. But it did not help to resurrect Sharett's reputation.
Sharett was also a very vain person. Once we met at the foot of the Metsada (Masada) mountain, at the start of the very arduous climb to the top. It took him an hour and 5 minutes, quite a feat for a man of his age. Yet, by mistake, I reported in my paper that it took him 105 minutes. He was so enraged that he sent me an official letter demanding a correction and an apology. I complied, of course.
Sharett died early, a bitter and disappointed man. Still, I think that he, too, deserved a chapter in Drucker's excellent series.
May 11, 2018
Inner London Buddha
Christopher Owens reviews a work of poetry.
Posthumous releases are tricky.
The best ones celebrate the life and work of the artist, while letting a smidgen of guilt form in the mind of the reader that they did not pick up on them in the artist's lifetime. All too often, however, some can lean more heavily towards guilt tripping rather than celebration.
The cover of Inner London Buddha looks like it could easily be from that school. A figure with straggly long hair, unkempt facial hair (resembling a young Pig Champion from US hardcore legends Poison Idea) looking forlong but also aware that he could be broken if he gives into his desires. All in tasteful black and white.
It's the sort of image that would resonate with the alienated but, crucially, the title injects a certain humour to proceedings. This is not 'Closer' nor 'Your Funeral, My Trial.' This seeming contradiction encourages you to pick the book off the shelf. And when you start reading, you're hooked.
Little is know about Mick Guffan, who died in 2006. Born in Cork, he moved to London in his teenage years and worked as a builder. His poetry is a mix of observation, confession, unapologetic sexuality and bravado. There's a solid working class ethic in his work that one or two reviewers have focused on, almost as a reaction against the gentrification of the arts for an exclusively middle class audience by an exclusively middle class audience.
It's a nice concept and, with him being dead, let's hope that his work manages to reach a wider audience.
With most of the poems barely lasting a page, Guffan manages to enthuse the writing with a downtrodden, melancholic feel that is uniquely Irish. A kind of melancholia found among those who left the country in their youth for pastures new, and never felt truly settled.
Take the poem 'Crumbling' as an example:
"Closed signand
a man sobbing.
A grown man.He was inconsolable.
It's the little things."
Depending on your mood, you can interpret this in a few different ways. Is this purely a piece of observation, or is it confessional. Is there a sneering tone? Is it sympathy? Is it bewilderment? You can take so much from it.
What I take from it is the narrator sees a certain kinship with the crying man, but chooses to keep his distance from him, lest he be dragged into a well of despair.
Another such example is 'Forked Road':
"It was another dayand it wasnot a problem."
Three lines, and it's the pause between the second and third line that's telling the reader everything they need to know. It clearly is a problem for the narrator, as this is clearly not just another day, but a day where they must decide the path they must take in order to achieve something. That old Irish saying of the road rising with you comes to mind as well. Knowing that the road is long and uncertain, but still delaying the inevitable.
It's tempting to compare Guffan to Charles Bukowski, due to their similar approaches to poetry and subject matters. But I think it's an unfair comparison. Bukowski was writing from the perspective of someone who knew everything was crap, and with this transcendental approach, was free to write about his vices. It was very male. Whereas Guffan allows for ambiguity in his writing, plus his constant work as a builder shows him to be someone caught on the bottom rung of society, working to survive as opposed to living.
At £12, ' Inner London Buddha' is a steal. What are you waiting for? Get it.
Mick Guffan, Inner London Buddha Tangerine Press ISBN-13: 978-1910691243.
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
Posthumous releases are tricky.
The best ones celebrate the life and work of the artist, while letting a smidgen of guilt form in the mind of the reader that they did not pick up on them in the artist's lifetime. All too often, however, some can lean more heavily towards guilt tripping rather than celebration.
The cover of Inner London Buddha looks like it could easily be from that school. A figure with straggly long hair, unkempt facial hair (resembling a young Pig Champion from US hardcore legends Poison Idea) looking forlong but also aware that he could be broken if he gives into his desires. All in tasteful black and white.
It's the sort of image that would resonate with the alienated but, crucially, the title injects a certain humour to proceedings. This is not 'Closer' nor 'Your Funeral, My Trial.' This seeming contradiction encourages you to pick the book off the shelf. And when you start reading, you're hooked.
Little is know about Mick Guffan, who died in 2006. Born in Cork, he moved to London in his teenage years and worked as a builder. His poetry is a mix of observation, confession, unapologetic sexuality and bravado. There's a solid working class ethic in his work that one or two reviewers have focused on, almost as a reaction against the gentrification of the arts for an exclusively middle class audience by an exclusively middle class audience.
It's a nice concept and, with him being dead, let's hope that his work manages to reach a wider audience.
With most of the poems barely lasting a page, Guffan manages to enthuse the writing with a downtrodden, melancholic feel that is uniquely Irish. A kind of melancholia found among those who left the country in their youth for pastures new, and never felt truly settled.
Take the poem 'Crumbling' as an example:
"Closed signand
a man sobbing.
A grown man.He was inconsolable.
It's the little things."
Depending on your mood, you can interpret this in a few different ways. Is this purely a piece of observation, or is it confessional. Is there a sneering tone? Is it sympathy? Is it bewilderment? You can take so much from it.
What I take from it is the narrator sees a certain kinship with the crying man, but chooses to keep his distance from him, lest he be dragged into a well of despair.
Another such example is 'Forked Road':
"It was another dayand it wasnot a problem."
Three lines, and it's the pause between the second and third line that's telling the reader everything they need to know. It clearly is a problem for the narrator, as this is clearly not just another day, but a day where they must decide the path they must take in order to achieve something. That old Irish saying of the road rising with you comes to mind as well. Knowing that the road is long and uncertain, but still delaying the inevitable.
It's tempting to compare Guffan to Charles Bukowski, due to their similar approaches to poetry and subject matters. But I think it's an unfair comparison. Bukowski was writing from the perspective of someone who knew everything was crap, and with this transcendental approach, was free to write about his vices. It was very male. Whereas Guffan allows for ambiguity in his writing, plus his constant work as a builder shows him to be someone caught on the bottom rung of society, working to survive as opposed to living.
At £12, ' Inner London Buddha' is a steal. What are you waiting for? Get it.
Mick Guffan, Inner London Buddha Tangerine Press ISBN-13: 978-1910691243.
Christopher Owens reviews for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland.Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter @MrOwens212
May 10, 2018
How Robert Mueller Tried To Entrap Me
From the pages of Organized Rage the Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate writes of how Robert Mueller tried to entrap him.
Robert S. Mueller III.
Is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in mid-May to lead the investigation into suspected ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and various shady (aren’t they all?) Russian officials, the choirboy that he’s being touted to be, or is he more akin to a modern-day Tomas de Torquemada, the Castilian Dominican friar who was the first Grand Inquisitor in the 15th Century Spanish Inquisition?
Given the rampant media partisanship since the election, one would think that Mueller’s appointment would lend credibility to the hunt for violations of law by candidate, now President Trump and his minions.
But I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor. My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.
When Mueller was the acting United States Attorney in Boston, I was defense counsel in a federal criminal case in which a rather odd fellow contacted me to tell me that he had information that could assist my client. He asked to see me, and I agreed to meet. He walked into my office wearing a striking, flowing white gauze-like shirt and sat down across from me at the conference table. He was prepared, he said, to give me an affidavit to the effect that certain real estate owned by my client was purchased with lawful currency rather than, as Mueller’s office was claiming, the proceeds of illegal drug activities.
My secretary typed up the affidavit that the witness was going to sign. Just as he picked up the pen, he looked at me and said something like: “You know, all of this is actually false, but your client is an old friend of mine and I want to help him.” As I threw the putative witness out of my office, I noticed, under the flowing white shirt, a lump on his back – he was obviously wired and recording every word between us.
Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court. Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him. (That “lead,” of course, was provided by a fellow that we lawyers, among ourselves, would indelicately refer to as a “scumbag.”)
This experience made me realize that Mueller was capable of believing, at least preliminarily, any tale of criminal wrongdoing and acting upon it, despite the palpable bad character and obviously questionable motivations of his informants and witnesses. (The lesson was particularly vivid because Mueller and I overlapped at Princeton, he in the Class of 1966 and me graduating in 1964.)
Years later, my wariness toward Mueller was bolstered in an even more revelatory way. When he led the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, I arranged in December 1990 to meet with him in Washington. I was then lead defense counsel for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who had been convicted in federal court in North Carolina in 1979 of murdering his wife and two young children while stationed at Fort Bragg. Years after the trial, MacDonald (also at Princeton when Mueller and I were there) hired me and my colleagues to represent him and obtain a new trial based on shocking newly discovered evidence that demonstrated MacDonald had been framed in part by the connivance of military investigators and FBI agents. Over the years, MacDonald and his various lawyers and investigators had collected a large trove of such evidence.
The day of the meeting, I walked into the DOJ conference room, where around the table sat a phalanx of FBI agents. My three colleagues joined me. Mueller walked into the room, went to the head of the table, and opened the meeting with this admonition, reconstructed from my vivid and chilling memory: “Gentlemen: Criticism of the Bureau is a non-starter.” (Another lawyer attendee of the meeting remembered Mueller’s words slightly differently: “Prosecutorial misconduct is a non-starter.” Either version makes clear Mueller’s intent – he did not want to hear evidence that either the prosecutors or the FBI agents on the case misbehaved and framed an innocent man.)
Special counsel Mueller’s background indicates zealousness that we might expect in the Grand Inquisitor, not the choirboy.
Why Special Prosecutors Are A Bad Idea
The history of special counsels (called at different times either “independent counsel” or “special prosecutor”) is checkered and troubled, resulting in considerable Supreme Court litigation around the concept of a prosecutor acting outside of the normal DOJ chain of command.
The Supreme Court in 1988 approved, with a single dissent (Justice Antonin Scalia), the concept of an independent prosecutor. Still, all subsequent efforts to appoint such a prosecutor have led to enormous disagreements over whether justice was done. Consider Kenneth Starr’s obsessive four-year, $40-million pursuit of President Bill Clinton for having sex with a White House intern and then lying about it. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s 2006 pursuit of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is not as infamous, but it should be. Fitzgerald indicted and a jury later convicted Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, for lying about leaking to the New York Times the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Subsequent revelations that there were multiple leaks and that Wilson’s CIA identity was not a secret served to discredit Libby’s indictment. Libby’s sentence was commuted. Libby’s relatively speedy reinstatement into the bar is seen by many as evidence of his unfair conviction. Considered in tandem, the campaigns against Democrat Clinton and Republican Libby raise disturbing questions about the use of special or independent prosecutors.
Yet despite the constitutional issues, the most serious problem with a special counsel is that when a prosecutor is appointed to examine closely the lives and affairs of a pre-selected group of targets, that prosecutor is almost certain to stumble across multiple actions that might be deemed criminal under the sprawling and incredibly vague federal criminal code.
In Mueller’s case, one can have a very high degree of confidence that he will uncover alleged felonies within the ranks of the inner circle of the President’s men (there are very few women to investigate in this administration). This could well include Trump himself.
I described this phenomenon long before Trump began his improbable rise, in my 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” (Encounter Books, updated edition, 2011). I explained how federal “fraud” statutes were so vague that just about any action in the daily life of a typically busy professional might be squeezed into the elastic definition of some kind of federal felony. Harvard Law Professor (and, I should note, my former professor and subsequent longtime friend and colleague) Alan Dershowitz has beaten me to the punch, making the case in a raft of articles and on TV and radio that none of the evidence thus far leaked to or adduced by investigative reporters constitute federal crimes.
But Mueller’s demonstrated zeal and ample resources virtually assure that indictments will come, even in the absence of actual crimes rather than behavior that is simply “politics as usual”. If Mueller claims that Trump or members of his entourage committed crimes, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily so. We should take Mueller and his prosecutorial team with a grain of salt. But a grain of salt seems an outmoded concept in an age when both sides – Trump and his critics – seem impervious to inconvenient facts. The most appropriate slogan for all the combatants on both sides of the Trump wars (including, alas, the reporters and their editors) might well be: “Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up.”
Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and First Amendment lawyer and writer, is WGBH/News’ “Freedom Watch” columnist. He practices law in an “of counsel” capacity in the Boston law firm Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP. He is the author, most recently, of T hree Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (New York: Encounter Books, updated edition 2011). The author thanks his research assistant, Nathan McGuire, for his invaluable work on this series.
Robert S. Mueller III. Is special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in mid-May to lead the investigation into suspected ties between Donald Trump’s campaign and various shady (aren’t they all?) Russian officials, the choirboy that he’s being touted to be, or is he more akin to a modern-day Tomas de Torquemada, the Castilian Dominican friar who was the first Grand Inquisitor in the 15th Century Spanish Inquisition?
Given the rampant media partisanship since the election, one would think that Mueller’s appointment would lend credibility to the hunt for violations of law by candidate, now President Trump and his minions.
But I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor. My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.
When Mueller was the acting United States Attorney in Boston, I was defense counsel in a federal criminal case in which a rather odd fellow contacted me to tell me that he had information that could assist my client. He asked to see me, and I agreed to meet. He walked into my office wearing a striking, flowing white gauze-like shirt and sat down across from me at the conference table. He was prepared, he said, to give me an affidavit to the effect that certain real estate owned by my client was purchased with lawful currency rather than, as Mueller’s office was claiming, the proceeds of illegal drug activities.
My secretary typed up the affidavit that the witness was going to sign. Just as he picked up the pen, he looked at me and said something like: “You know, all of this is actually false, but your client is an old friend of mine and I want to help him.” As I threw the putative witness out of my office, I noticed, under the flowing white shirt, a lump on his back – he was obviously wired and recording every word between us.
Years later I ran into Mueller, and I told him of my disappointment in being the target of a sting where there was no reason to think that I would knowingly present perjured evidence to a court. Mueller, half-apologetically, told me that he never really thought that I would suborn perjury, but that he had a duty to pursue the lead given to him. (That “lead,” of course, was provided by a fellow that we lawyers, among ourselves, would indelicately refer to as a “scumbag.”)
This experience made me realize that Mueller was capable of believing, at least preliminarily, any tale of criminal wrongdoing and acting upon it, despite the palpable bad character and obviously questionable motivations of his informants and witnesses. (The lesson was particularly vivid because Mueller and I overlapped at Princeton, he in the Class of 1966 and me graduating in 1964.)
Years later, my wariness toward Mueller was bolstered in an even more revelatory way. When he led the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, I arranged in December 1990 to meet with him in Washington. I was then lead defense counsel for Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who had been convicted in federal court in North Carolina in 1979 of murdering his wife and two young children while stationed at Fort Bragg. Years after the trial, MacDonald (also at Princeton when Mueller and I were there) hired me and my colleagues to represent him and obtain a new trial based on shocking newly discovered evidence that demonstrated MacDonald had been framed in part by the connivance of military investigators and FBI agents. Over the years, MacDonald and his various lawyers and investigators had collected a large trove of such evidence.
The day of the meeting, I walked into the DOJ conference room, where around the table sat a phalanx of FBI agents. My three colleagues joined me. Mueller walked into the room, went to the head of the table, and opened the meeting with this admonition, reconstructed from my vivid and chilling memory: “Gentlemen: Criticism of the Bureau is a non-starter.” (Another lawyer attendee of the meeting remembered Mueller’s words slightly differently: “Prosecutorial misconduct is a non-starter.” Either version makes clear Mueller’s intent – he did not want to hear evidence that either the prosecutors or the FBI agents on the case misbehaved and framed an innocent man.)
Special counsel Mueller’s background indicates zealousness that we might expect in the Grand Inquisitor, not the choirboy.
Why Special Prosecutors Are A Bad Idea
The history of special counsels (called at different times either “independent counsel” or “special prosecutor”) is checkered and troubled, resulting in considerable Supreme Court litigation around the concept of a prosecutor acting outside of the normal DOJ chain of command.
The Supreme Court in 1988 approved, with a single dissent (Justice Antonin Scalia), the concept of an independent prosecutor. Still, all subsequent efforts to appoint such a prosecutor have led to enormous disagreements over whether justice was done. Consider Kenneth Starr’s obsessive four-year, $40-million pursuit of President Bill Clinton for having sex with a White House intern and then lying about it. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s 2006 pursuit of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is not as infamous, but it should be. Fitzgerald indicted and a jury later convicted Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, for lying about leaking to the New York Times the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Subsequent revelations that there were multiple leaks and that Wilson’s CIA identity was not a secret served to discredit Libby’s indictment. Libby’s sentence was commuted. Libby’s relatively speedy reinstatement into the bar is seen by many as evidence of his unfair conviction. Considered in tandem, the campaigns against Democrat Clinton and Republican Libby raise disturbing questions about the use of special or independent prosecutors.
Yet despite the constitutional issues, the most serious problem with a special counsel is that when a prosecutor is appointed to examine closely the lives and affairs of a pre-selected group of targets, that prosecutor is almost certain to stumble across multiple actions that might be deemed criminal under the sprawling and incredibly vague federal criminal code.
In Mueller’s case, one can have a very high degree of confidence that he will uncover alleged felonies within the ranks of the inner circle of the President’s men (there are very few women to investigate in this administration). This could well include Trump himself.
I described this phenomenon long before Trump began his improbable rise, in my 2009 book “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” (Encounter Books, updated edition, 2011). I explained how federal “fraud” statutes were so vague that just about any action in the daily life of a typically busy professional might be squeezed into the elastic definition of some kind of federal felony. Harvard Law Professor (and, I should note, my former professor and subsequent longtime friend and colleague) Alan Dershowitz has beaten me to the punch, making the case in a raft of articles and on TV and radio that none of the evidence thus far leaked to or adduced by investigative reporters constitute federal crimes.
But Mueller’s demonstrated zeal and ample resources virtually assure that indictments will come, even in the absence of actual crimes rather than behavior that is simply “politics as usual”. If Mueller claims that Trump or members of his entourage committed crimes, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily so. We should take Mueller and his prosecutorial team with a grain of salt. But a grain of salt seems an outmoded concept in an age when both sides – Trump and his critics – seem impervious to inconvenient facts. The most appropriate slogan for all the combatants on both sides of the Trump wars (including, alas, the reporters and their editors) might well be: “Don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up.”
Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and First Amendment lawyer and writer, is WGBH/News’ “Freedom Watch” columnist. He practices law in an “of counsel” capacity in the Boston law firm Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP. He is the author, most recently, of T hree Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (New York: Encounter Books, updated edition 2011). The author thanks his research assistant, Nathan McGuire, for his invaluable work on this series.
A Doctor In Derry
Dr
Anne Mc Closkey, MB, draws on her experience in Derry in a contribution to the debate around the 8th Amendment.
To work as a doctor in Derry, in an area with according to the City Council’s own figures has 60% child poverty, trying to help people through the worst that this government can inflict upon their lives and human dignity is a very privileged, if at times challenging career.
I spend good part of my time in the surgery helping women control their fertility, manage crisis pregnancies, cope with pregnancy loss or illness, deal with domestic conflict including sexual violence and care for children with often complex medical problems. Through all of this, I can honestly say that in my experience I know of no case where abortion, which is the direct and intentional killing of the preborn child, would have helped. For some of my patients the opposite is the case.
I’m old enough to have lived through the war which was fought on our streets and in our countryside, and know that choice, the decision take a course of action, often depends on factors over which we have only limited control. In a free and just society, it is much easier to choose well.
The abortion debate should never be about criminalisation, but about education, empowerment and support, so that both lives are protected. We who lived through the prison struggles know that criminalisation doesn’t work. In the case of abortion provision, the only criminals are those who profit from an industry which destroys lives, not those whose choices are constrained by poverty or oppression.
As a lifelong Republican, Feminist, Leftie, I’m astonished at the almost unopposed narrative among my erstwhile political allies that a pro-life stance is regressive and anti-woman. It is an analysis which pits women’s freedom and progress against her maternity, and her children. It erroneously, or deceptively, conflates her health and wellbeing with her “choice” to destroy her child.
The fact that the repeal campaign in Ireland is being funded by some of the most right-wing and monetarist institutions on the planet underlines that this debate is not really about women’s health and wellbeing, but more their supremacist priorities-a cull on the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities, those who are deemed not truly human. Only free people thought slavery was a good idea, and only those who have already been born advocate for abortion.
It is an uncomfortable fact for the repeal campaign that Ireland is one of the safest places worldwide for mothers to give birth. The sepsis which took the life of Ms Halappanavar is the leading cause of maternal mortality in Britain, and killed five pregnant women in 2015 there. Even had this lady’s care been exemplary, which it was not, she may not have lived. But the law is clear, that in her case, the delivery of her 16 week gestation child was appropriate and legal, not a direct abortion but life-saving treatment for the mother. Such procedures are standard medical care in all Irish hospitals.
Shockingly, of the two million abortions carried out in Britain in the last decade, only sixteen were one under ground C , that is to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency, whereas 98% are for risk to the physical or mental health of the mother, which translates as abortion on demand –one in five of all pregnancies.
Robust research now shows that mental health problems, including completed suicide are many times commoner in women who have undergone abortion than in those who carry their babies to term.
We can rail against human biology, and the design which forms and nurtures the genetically new human offspring inside the mother’s womb, but we can’t change it.
With the development of ultrasound and MRI scanning, we now have a window on the developing baby which was not available in the past. The overwhelmingly beautiful story of how each and every one of us was formed is googleable! Ignorance is no longer an excuse.
The narrative that the new baby is merely a part of the mother before birth is biological balderdash. Two half cells, one from each parent come together at conception to form a new and genetically distinct human embryo. It’s where each one of us began. If the developing child is part of the woman’s body, and subject to her autonomy alone, what then is a father?
The narrative that men are not co-creators of new life and equal partners in parenthood, but mere inseminators, and their preborn children only “tissue”, a “parasite”, a “choice”, is one which many men do not accept.
Abortion is also a tool beloved of those who abuse and sexually exploit women and children, including for profit. Recent high profile court cases on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrate the deeply misogynistic ideas about women and their value in society which have been tolerated for too long.
Of course, this referendum is not about the hard cases so beloved of a morally bankrupt media and political class. Not about the “fatal foetal abnormalities” (to use that inaccurate and offensive term,) not about rape, incest, not about the rare and emotive scenarios without which the repeallers have no case.
The question being put to the Irish people on 25th May is very simple. They will be asked if they consent to the removal of all constitutional protection for unborn children.
We have been told that what is envisaged is abortion on demand up to 12 weeks gestation, and for as yet unspecified health grounds up to the time of viability, that is 24 weeks. This referendum is not about trusting women-it’s about trusting politicians.
It has been estimated that over 100,000 people in Ireland are alive today because of our laws protecting the dignity of human life. How many of these are our friends, colleagues, family members? The one hundred million females missing worldwide is testament to a failed ideology.
There is a well-funded and highly influential lobby in this country waging a battle for hearts and minds. Republicans recognise that the only legitimate authority comes from the people. This referendum has people are more engaged and angry than they have been in a long time. In every town and village across the land, a truly grassroots movement is building to protect our people, and our constitution. A deep cultural regard for mothers and children is deep in our psyche as a nation. I have canvassed door to door for weeks on end now, and the contempt for the government is palpable. People understand that the political class who gave us austerity, bail-outs, water charges, homelessness, a shambolic excuse for a health service, are now trying to revoke the right to life of future generations in an attempt to balance the books, and they are outraged.
This is the most important civil rights question of our time; whether to remove all constitutional protection for the preborn from our constitution, and allow politicians to decide their fate, or to keep the Eighth, and afford the right to life to all equally. Irish people in the 26 counties have the protection of a referendum. Shamefully no political party has campaigned for we northern Irish people to have a vote on this issue, ach sin scéal eile.
We Irish don’t have to follow the failed models of other nations, but, “relying on our own genius and traditions” can forge a better way. The most basic right, upon which all other rights depend, is the right to life.
Our revenge should be the laughter of all our children-not just that of the planned, the privileged and the perfect.
Anne Mc Closkey works as a GP in Derry. Lifelong republican and community activist, mother and grandmother, stood as Independent candidate in 2016 Assembly election, polling over 3k 1st preference votes, founder member of Cherish all the Children Equally, a republican progressive organisation founded to give pro-life socialists and Republicans a voice and to campaign against repeal of the constitutional right to life in 8th amendment.
To work as a doctor in Derry, in an area with according to the City Council’s own figures has 60% child poverty, trying to help people through the worst that this government can inflict upon their lives and human dignity is a very privileged, if at times challenging career.
I spend good part of my time in the surgery helping women control their fertility, manage crisis pregnancies, cope with pregnancy loss or illness, deal with domestic conflict including sexual violence and care for children with often complex medical problems. Through all of this, I can honestly say that in my experience I know of no case where abortion, which is the direct and intentional killing of the preborn child, would have helped. For some of my patients the opposite is the case.
I’m old enough to have lived through the war which was fought on our streets and in our countryside, and know that choice, the decision take a course of action, often depends on factors over which we have only limited control. In a free and just society, it is much easier to choose well.
The abortion debate should never be about criminalisation, but about education, empowerment and support, so that both lives are protected. We who lived through the prison struggles know that criminalisation doesn’t work. In the case of abortion provision, the only criminals are those who profit from an industry which destroys lives, not those whose choices are constrained by poverty or oppression.
As a lifelong Republican, Feminist, Leftie, I’m astonished at the almost unopposed narrative among my erstwhile political allies that a pro-life stance is regressive and anti-woman. It is an analysis which pits women’s freedom and progress against her maternity, and her children. It erroneously, or deceptively, conflates her health and wellbeing with her “choice” to destroy her child.
The fact that the repeal campaign in Ireland is being funded by some of the most right-wing and monetarist institutions on the planet underlines that this debate is not really about women’s health and wellbeing, but more their supremacist priorities-a cull on the poor, the disabled, ethnic minorities, those who are deemed not truly human. Only free people thought slavery was a good idea, and only those who have already been born advocate for abortion.
It is an uncomfortable fact for the repeal campaign that Ireland is one of the safest places worldwide for mothers to give birth. The sepsis which took the life of Ms Halappanavar is the leading cause of maternal mortality in Britain, and killed five pregnant women in 2015 there. Even had this lady’s care been exemplary, which it was not, she may not have lived. But the law is clear, that in her case, the delivery of her 16 week gestation child was appropriate and legal, not a direct abortion but life-saving treatment for the mother. Such procedures are standard medical care in all Irish hospitals.
Shockingly, of the two million abortions carried out in Britain in the last decade, only sixteen were one under ground C , that is to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency, whereas 98% are for risk to the physical or mental health of the mother, which translates as abortion on demand –one in five of all pregnancies.
Robust research now shows that mental health problems, including completed suicide are many times commoner in women who have undergone abortion than in those who carry their babies to term.
We can rail against human biology, and the design which forms and nurtures the genetically new human offspring inside the mother’s womb, but we can’t change it.
With the development of ultrasound and MRI scanning, we now have a window on the developing baby which was not available in the past. The overwhelmingly beautiful story of how each and every one of us was formed is googleable! Ignorance is no longer an excuse.
The narrative that the new baby is merely a part of the mother before birth is biological balderdash. Two half cells, one from each parent come together at conception to form a new and genetically distinct human embryo. It’s where each one of us began. If the developing child is part of the woman’s body, and subject to her autonomy alone, what then is a father?
The narrative that men are not co-creators of new life and equal partners in parenthood, but mere inseminators, and their preborn children only “tissue”, a “parasite”, a “choice”, is one which many men do not accept.
Abortion is also a tool beloved of those who abuse and sexually exploit women and children, including for profit. Recent high profile court cases on both sides of the Atlantic demonstrate the deeply misogynistic ideas about women and their value in society which have been tolerated for too long.
Of course, this referendum is not about the hard cases so beloved of a morally bankrupt media and political class. Not about the “fatal foetal abnormalities” (to use that inaccurate and offensive term,) not about rape, incest, not about the rare and emotive scenarios without which the repeallers have no case.
The question being put to the Irish people on 25th May is very simple. They will be asked if they consent to the removal of all constitutional protection for unborn children.
We have been told that what is envisaged is abortion on demand up to 12 weeks gestation, and for as yet unspecified health grounds up to the time of viability, that is 24 weeks. This referendum is not about trusting women-it’s about trusting politicians.
It has been estimated that over 100,000 people in Ireland are alive today because of our laws protecting the dignity of human life. How many of these are our friends, colleagues, family members? The one hundred million females missing worldwide is testament to a failed ideology.
There is a well-funded and highly influential lobby in this country waging a battle for hearts and minds. Republicans recognise that the only legitimate authority comes from the people. This referendum has people are more engaged and angry than they have been in a long time. In every town and village across the land, a truly grassroots movement is building to protect our people, and our constitution. A deep cultural regard for mothers and children is deep in our psyche as a nation. I have canvassed door to door for weeks on end now, and the contempt for the government is palpable. People understand that the political class who gave us austerity, bail-outs, water charges, homelessness, a shambolic excuse for a health service, are now trying to revoke the right to life of future generations in an attempt to balance the books, and they are outraged.
This is the most important civil rights question of our time; whether to remove all constitutional protection for the preborn from our constitution, and allow politicians to decide their fate, or to keep the Eighth, and afford the right to life to all equally. Irish people in the 26 counties have the protection of a referendum. Shamefully no political party has campaigned for we northern Irish people to have a vote on this issue, ach sin scéal eile.
We Irish don’t have to follow the failed models of other nations, but, “relying on our own genius and traditions” can forge a better way. The most basic right, upon which all other rights depend, is the right to life.
Our revenge should be the laughter of all our children-not just that of the planned, the privileged and the perfect.
Anne Mc Closkey works as a GP in Derry. Lifelong republican and community activist, mother and grandmother, stood as Independent candidate in 2016 Assembly election, polling over 3k 1st preference votes, founder member of Cherish all the Children Equally, a republican progressive organisation founded to give pro-life socialists and Republicans a voice and to campaign against repeal of the constitutional right to life in 8th amendment.
May 9, 2018
FIFA World Cup 2018: Sport For The people, Not For Governments And Big Business!
From People And Nature Moscow students call for solidarity.
This is a statement from the Moscow State University Student Initiative Group, forwarded by friends in Moscow. Please circulate and re-post it.
Russia will host the 2018 FIFA World Cup – a grandiose event both in terms of tens of thousands of fans from around the world, and for big business and the Russian government.
As is often the case with events of this scale, the organisers do not hear the voices of ordinary people, even if there are thousands of them. This time, it is planned to hold the FIFA Fan Fest in Moscow in an extremely inappropriate place, near Moscow State University (MSU). Students, graduate students, staff and local residents are protesting this decision.
“The World Cup is no reason to humiliate the university”. Photo from the MSU Initiative Group facebook page The noise and the security measures will affect badly the educational and research activities and the life of the campus with 6500 inhabitants, 37,000 students and 9000 professors and researchers.
Faculties are to shorten the courses and the exam sessions; researchers are being forced to take holidays. Dormitory residents are either to suffer from the noise or to risk eviction. Citizens are to suffer from a transport collapse caused by the installation of a strict gating system around territory that has always been open to public. The green territory around our University was not designed to host a festival with 25,000 football fans.
After the protests, the zone was moved a little further from the main building. This is a fake response. This placement will damage the University. We demand to move it away from the University district. Not considering the opinion of the university community, and making it suffer in order to organise a commercial event, is an insult to all of us.
So we collected more than 4500 signatures on petition, wrote letters to FIFA representatives and picketed government buildings in Moscow. Now our efforts are met with stiff resistance from responsible persons.
We are convinced that sport exists for people, not for profit. Our voices will only be heard when they are united.
Send an open letter from your organisation to Gianni Infantino, President of Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), or representative of FIFA in your country, and join our demand to move the fan fest.
Spread the information, use #noFanFestMSU in social networks.
Please, send a copy to MSU Student initiative group: mail@igmsu.org or through our spokesperson Alexander Bykov Aleksandr.s.bykov@gmail.com
This is a statement from the Moscow State University Student Initiative Group, forwarded by friends in Moscow. Please circulate and re-post it.
Russia will host the 2018 FIFA World Cup – a grandiose event both in terms of tens of thousands of fans from around the world, and for big business and the Russian government.
As is often the case with events of this scale, the organisers do not hear the voices of ordinary people, even if there are thousands of them. This time, it is planned to hold the FIFA Fan Fest in Moscow in an extremely inappropriate place, near Moscow State University (MSU). Students, graduate students, staff and local residents are protesting this decision.
“The World Cup is no reason to humiliate the university”. Photo from the MSU Initiative Group facebook page The noise and the security measures will affect badly the educational and research activities and the life of the campus with 6500 inhabitants, 37,000 students and 9000 professors and researchers. Faculties are to shorten the courses and the exam sessions; researchers are being forced to take holidays. Dormitory residents are either to suffer from the noise or to risk eviction. Citizens are to suffer from a transport collapse caused by the installation of a strict gating system around territory that has always been open to public. The green territory around our University was not designed to host a festival with 25,000 football fans.
After the protests, the zone was moved a little further from the main building. This is a fake response. This placement will damage the University. We demand to move it away from the University district. Not considering the opinion of the university community, and making it suffer in order to organise a commercial event, is an insult to all of us.
So we collected more than 4500 signatures on petition, wrote letters to FIFA representatives and picketed government buildings in Moscow. Now our efforts are met with stiff resistance from responsible persons.
We are convinced that sport exists for people, not for profit. Our voices will only be heard when they are united.
Send an open letter from your organisation to Gianni Infantino, President of Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), or representative of FIFA in your country, and join our demand to move the fan fest.
Spread the information, use #noFanFestMSU in social networks.
Please, send a copy to MSU Student initiative group: mail@igmsu.org or through our spokesperson Alexander Bykov Aleksandr.s.bykov@gmail.com
Selective Outrage
Stanley L. Cohen writing in Counterpunch is disdainful of the Don Trump's faux concern for children targeted by chemical weapons in Syria.
Photo by Marcin Monko | CC BY 2.0
Not once, but twice, Donald Trump seized upon the specter of alleged chemical use, by Bashar al-Assad, to punish Syria with missile attacks. With predictable and expedient faux rage, he risked elevating a seven year horror into a cataclysmic nightmare; at least that’s the common political sentiment.
Perhaps, this calculation is more than a bit frayed given the certainty of a choreographed agreement between Trump and Putin before the attacks began.
To be sure, only a political novice would overlook the bargain that enabled Trump to stage his domestic political show and afford Putin ample time to move his forces to avoid his own domestic fallout should any of the US missiles have missed their Syrian mark and fallen, instead, upon a Russian fighter jet or pilot.
Pardon my cynicism, but I have little doubt that when it comes to the Middle East, or elsewhere, neither of these autocrats sees much beyond their own political and economic self-interest no matter what flag their rhetoric comes draped in. It’s not just the way of the times, but the accomplished trait of each.
Perhaps, I’m being a bit too harsh on Trump, in particular. No doubt he was moved by images of Syrian children swept up in the crosshairs of military carnage that, for years, has denied them the laugh of youth in their native land.
Indeed, given his long and, very public, strong support of Muslim and Arab communities throughout the world, only a hardened skeptic would deny the president his just dues for his latest public tear-drop.
Can it be convenient overlook that I fail to recall candidate Trump’s criticism over thousands of Palestinian civilians and children slaughtered by repeated attacks from Israel upon Gaza, typically utilizing chemical weapons as a mainstay of their onslaught?
And have I missed Trump’s displeasure over hundreds of Palestinian kids, some as young as 13, detained by Israel without any modicum of due process or trial during his tenure in office? Or his pointed challenge to the policy of kidnapping children from their homes in the middle of the night to be subjected to endless Israeli interrogation without legal counsel and with sexual harassment the seeming mainstay of the inquisition? And has his human rights concern over Syrian children not earned Trump the benefit of the doubt for his marked silence, these last few weeks, over Israel’s use of prohibited weapons of war and the outright assassination and cripple of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian youth on the border of Gaza?
Pardon my haste, however, consistency would seem to indicate that righteous indignation over attacks upon Syrian civilians would somehow not end up as so much companion silence when the victims are Palestinian.
But then again, Trump’s calculated quiet is not so unlike that of many world leaders who display almost pious devotion to Israeli power yet absolute indifference to Palestinian pain.
And what of those, with clear eyes and aching heart, who sit and watch, night after night, paralyzed with disbelief, for decades, as millions of stateless people have been relegated to little more than a passing historical footnote.
Hardened by the mayhem that has, by now, grown so rote and stale at their side, many nod their heads in disgust and, with needless surrender, turn off the light and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day, a better one… or so they hope. It won’t be… unless we act.
Soul is not just pain we feel when faced with the hurt of the moment. It’s not a devotion to shed tears at the next image, offense, or slay sure to come. Nor is it made of voice alone… one that prevails at the tenth, fiftieth or hundredth outrage. Eventually, it can become so much a passé piqued cheer heard but among our own choir… and little elsewhere.
For some, history has a way of freezing moments in surreal times; of providing ample opportunity to nod in denial, as if we did not know when, all the while, we did know yet did not care. Or maybe we did… but did not dare to act.
Jews recall the box cars and ask where we were as furnaces overflowed with the ash of humanity. The Khmer Rouge farmed with the feed of millions while a world deadened by a river of Asian blood saw none and moved on. In Rwanda, the machete defined our passing view while the swing of sharpened steel proved to be but a shadow beyond belief… one shriek and done.
Time and time again, we have proved that ours is a collective journey filled with endless promise but, alas, one often framed with narrow pretext and sheer denial.
For those of us ensconced from the safety of afar, it will always be better, tomorrow, as reality passes by leaving spectators free to decide what price is worth the cost… while others always pay.
Romance knows no age. It warms the heart no matter its touch or language. Suffer knows no difference. It’s a universal travel that reduces all to the lowest common denominator no matter the stone of its path. A dead child, a crippled woman, a funeral wail is a universal rite of mourn that knows no narrow race, faith or class. It’s the draw that connects all who pass-on, from this world to the next, and leave behind those stunned, no matter what their status, lost for all their days yet to come, desperate for reason, rhyme, and purpose. It never arrives. Memories may dim. Love never leaves.
How does one explain away the loss of laugh, the slip of smile, the end of endless hope; you can’t. But yet in Gaza for many after a decade of siege, attack, and boundless slaughter there is now only one way home… in victory or in death. What else can be said when martyrdom becomes an all too welcome respite to an endless life of suffer?
For weeks, now, Gaza has stood against the world. Armed with little more than purpose and determined principle, tens of thousands have willingly walked from the safety of their prison cell to the courtyard of casualty. With dozens murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds crippled, the best and brightest of Gaza… its young, its women its elderly… have thrown caution to the gas filled wind facing off against ruthless snipers, drones and tank fire. No Israeli has been injured.
Yet, the Great March of Return continues. For Gaza, there is simply no choice. For us, there is.
For more than a decade, we have seen the rise of BDS… a powerful, peaceful, world-wide movement that, despite the insipid Israeli chant to the contrary, has not only educated hundreds of millions to the plight of Palestine but has cost the pariah state billions of dollars in lost revenue. It’s not enough.
By design, BDS was intended to open a new, peaceful attack upon Israel… outside of the occupied territories… while decisions on the nature and extent of resistance on the ground is, as it must, left to Palestinians to determine for themselves.
Of necessity, over the years, Palestinian resistance has embraced a wide range of ever changing strategy and tactics. Decades ago, at times, it included pitched battles and spectacular isolated attacks. With the intifadas came popular uprisings that ran the gamut from mass boycotts and labor strikes to attacks with rocks and Molotov cocktails. In their deadliest days, they included martyrdom operations and isolated rocket and sniper fire.
In the years since, as Israel has increasingly resorted to mass slaughter, extrajudicial assassination, collective detention and community siege, the résistance has, per force, continued to evolve to meet ever changing exigencies.
At times militant and fierce, some Palestinians have embraced their international and lawful right to armed struggle… be it as individuals or as a member of a movement or a group. Many have chosen a mask and rock over silence in an ever present clash not just for land, but collective dignity. Hunger strikes have ensured that thousands detained behind bars have, still, the freedom to speak with command and purpose. Others have elected peaceful challenge with the slap of a hand or turned their voice to song or psalm to ensure that those who follow will know well from where they come.
Today, outside of Palestine, there are millions who, through their collective voice and determination, tell the world Palestinians are not alone as they struggle to reclaim their home and obtain the equal justice that is a birthright for all who walk this earth.
By BDS, mass protest, and petition this movement of Muslims, Christians, Jews and non-believers, alike, have united to challenge the Israeli narrative in creative ways that are companion to the resistance on the ground in Palestine. Yet, there is more to do.
No Israeli political leader, politician, or other mainstay of that state should receive calm passage through any of our own. Where they walk, where they talk, what they say must be challenged by protest at each and every step along the way. Their lobbyists, PR firms, corporate partners, banks and funded think tanks must understand that to support Israel is to invite a boycott of their own.
Political leadership in our own countries must come to realize that our collective resolve carries a political price for their willing, blind obedience to Israel. Visiting academics, scientists and artists that fail to challenge Israeli apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing, themselves, must understand that the sale of their soul is not a purchase of ours.
Not all that long ago, the world community came together, as one, to break the back of apartheid in South Africa. It did not happen overnight. Nor was it accomplished through the prism of one view or a single overarching political strategy or without great personal sacrifice.
Resistance demands diversity in thought and action. It is a lesson learned… and taught… by those among us that have blazed a long, and often difficult, path in the march of freedom throughout the world. The challenge to Israel is, today, no different.
History has shown that, without the ever-present voice of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King’s legacy would be very different than the one we honor now.
Those who find comfort in Gandhi’s passivesalt march, yet deprecate the notion that throughout his journey he understood militant resistance was, at times, a necessary means to liberation, do not know the reality of the steps he took along the way.
Offered a chance to end his imprisonment after 17 years if only he renounced violence as a legitimate means of fighting apartheid, Mandela refused and returned to his cellfor ten more years.
This is by no means a call to arms or a plea for violence. It is, however, a verse of solidarity and love for our Palestinian brothers and sisters on the front lines of occupied Palestine.
In the darkest of their hour, they are not alone.
Today, throughout the world, their family in resistance stands with, and for, them as they struggle for their freedom by any means necessary.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rightsactivist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
Photo by Marcin Monko | CC BY 2.0Not once, but twice, Donald Trump seized upon the specter of alleged chemical use, by Bashar al-Assad, to punish Syria with missile attacks. With predictable and expedient faux rage, he risked elevating a seven year horror into a cataclysmic nightmare; at least that’s the common political sentiment.
Perhaps, this calculation is more than a bit frayed given the certainty of a choreographed agreement between Trump and Putin before the attacks began.
To be sure, only a political novice would overlook the bargain that enabled Trump to stage his domestic political show and afford Putin ample time to move his forces to avoid his own domestic fallout should any of the US missiles have missed their Syrian mark and fallen, instead, upon a Russian fighter jet or pilot.
Pardon my cynicism, but I have little doubt that when it comes to the Middle East, or elsewhere, neither of these autocrats sees much beyond their own political and economic self-interest no matter what flag their rhetoric comes draped in. It’s not just the way of the times, but the accomplished trait of each.
Perhaps, I’m being a bit too harsh on Trump, in particular. No doubt he was moved by images of Syrian children swept up in the crosshairs of military carnage that, for years, has denied them the laugh of youth in their native land.
Indeed, given his long and, very public, strong support of Muslim and Arab communities throughout the world, only a hardened skeptic would deny the president his just dues for his latest public tear-drop.
Can it be convenient overlook that I fail to recall candidate Trump’s criticism over thousands of Palestinian civilians and children slaughtered by repeated attacks from Israel upon Gaza, typically utilizing chemical weapons as a mainstay of their onslaught?
And have I missed Trump’s displeasure over hundreds of Palestinian kids, some as young as 13, detained by Israel without any modicum of due process or trial during his tenure in office? Or his pointed challenge to the policy of kidnapping children from their homes in the middle of the night to be subjected to endless Israeli interrogation without legal counsel and with sexual harassment the seeming mainstay of the inquisition? And has his human rights concern over Syrian children not earned Trump the benefit of the doubt for his marked silence, these last few weeks, over Israel’s use of prohibited weapons of war and the outright assassination and cripple of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian youth on the border of Gaza?
Pardon my haste, however, consistency would seem to indicate that righteous indignation over attacks upon Syrian civilians would somehow not end up as so much companion silence when the victims are Palestinian.
But then again, Trump’s calculated quiet is not so unlike that of many world leaders who display almost pious devotion to Israeli power yet absolute indifference to Palestinian pain.
And what of those, with clear eyes and aching heart, who sit and watch, night after night, paralyzed with disbelief, for decades, as millions of stateless people have been relegated to little more than a passing historical footnote.
Hardened by the mayhem that has, by now, grown so rote and stale at their side, many nod their heads in disgust and, with needless surrender, turn off the light and go to bed. Tomorrow is another day, a better one… or so they hope. It won’t be… unless we act.
Soul is not just pain we feel when faced with the hurt of the moment. It’s not a devotion to shed tears at the next image, offense, or slay sure to come. Nor is it made of voice alone… one that prevails at the tenth, fiftieth or hundredth outrage. Eventually, it can become so much a passé piqued cheer heard but among our own choir… and little elsewhere.
For some, history has a way of freezing moments in surreal times; of providing ample opportunity to nod in denial, as if we did not know when, all the while, we did know yet did not care. Or maybe we did… but did not dare to act.
Jews recall the box cars and ask where we were as furnaces overflowed with the ash of humanity. The Khmer Rouge farmed with the feed of millions while a world deadened by a river of Asian blood saw none and moved on. In Rwanda, the machete defined our passing view while the swing of sharpened steel proved to be but a shadow beyond belief… one shriek and done.
Time and time again, we have proved that ours is a collective journey filled with endless promise but, alas, one often framed with narrow pretext and sheer denial.
For those of us ensconced from the safety of afar, it will always be better, tomorrow, as reality passes by leaving spectators free to decide what price is worth the cost… while others always pay.
Romance knows no age. It warms the heart no matter its touch or language. Suffer knows no difference. It’s a universal travel that reduces all to the lowest common denominator no matter the stone of its path. A dead child, a crippled woman, a funeral wail is a universal rite of mourn that knows no narrow race, faith or class. It’s the draw that connects all who pass-on, from this world to the next, and leave behind those stunned, no matter what their status, lost for all their days yet to come, desperate for reason, rhyme, and purpose. It never arrives. Memories may dim. Love never leaves.
How does one explain away the loss of laugh, the slip of smile, the end of endless hope; you can’t. But yet in Gaza for many after a decade of siege, attack, and boundless slaughter there is now only one way home… in victory or in death. What else can be said when martyrdom becomes an all too welcome respite to an endless life of suffer?
For weeks, now, Gaza has stood against the world. Armed with little more than purpose and determined principle, tens of thousands have willingly walked from the safety of their prison cell to the courtyard of casualty. With dozens murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds crippled, the best and brightest of Gaza… its young, its women its elderly… have thrown caution to the gas filled wind facing off against ruthless snipers, drones and tank fire. No Israeli has been injured.
Yet, the Great March of Return continues. For Gaza, there is simply no choice. For us, there is.
For more than a decade, we have seen the rise of BDS… a powerful, peaceful, world-wide movement that, despite the insipid Israeli chant to the contrary, has not only educated hundreds of millions to the plight of Palestine but has cost the pariah state billions of dollars in lost revenue. It’s not enough.
By design, BDS was intended to open a new, peaceful attack upon Israel… outside of the occupied territories… while decisions on the nature and extent of resistance on the ground is, as it must, left to Palestinians to determine for themselves.
Of necessity, over the years, Palestinian resistance has embraced a wide range of ever changing strategy and tactics. Decades ago, at times, it included pitched battles and spectacular isolated attacks. With the intifadas came popular uprisings that ran the gamut from mass boycotts and labor strikes to attacks with rocks and Molotov cocktails. In their deadliest days, they included martyrdom operations and isolated rocket and sniper fire.
In the years since, as Israel has increasingly resorted to mass slaughter, extrajudicial assassination, collective detention and community siege, the résistance has, per force, continued to evolve to meet ever changing exigencies.
At times militant and fierce, some Palestinians have embraced their international and lawful right to armed struggle… be it as individuals or as a member of a movement or a group. Many have chosen a mask and rock over silence in an ever present clash not just for land, but collective dignity. Hunger strikes have ensured that thousands detained behind bars have, still, the freedom to speak with command and purpose. Others have elected peaceful challenge with the slap of a hand or turned their voice to song or psalm to ensure that those who follow will know well from where they come.
Today, outside of Palestine, there are millions who, through their collective voice and determination, tell the world Palestinians are not alone as they struggle to reclaim their home and obtain the equal justice that is a birthright for all who walk this earth.
By BDS, mass protest, and petition this movement of Muslims, Christians, Jews and non-believers, alike, have united to challenge the Israeli narrative in creative ways that are companion to the resistance on the ground in Palestine. Yet, there is more to do.
No Israeli political leader, politician, or other mainstay of that state should receive calm passage through any of our own. Where they walk, where they talk, what they say must be challenged by protest at each and every step along the way. Their lobbyists, PR firms, corporate partners, banks and funded think tanks must understand that to support Israel is to invite a boycott of their own.
Political leadership in our own countries must come to realize that our collective resolve carries a political price for their willing, blind obedience to Israel. Visiting academics, scientists and artists that fail to challenge Israeli apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing, themselves, must understand that the sale of their soul is not a purchase of ours.
Not all that long ago, the world community came together, as one, to break the back of apartheid in South Africa. It did not happen overnight. Nor was it accomplished through the prism of one view or a single overarching political strategy or without great personal sacrifice.
Resistance demands diversity in thought and action. It is a lesson learned… and taught… by those among us that have blazed a long, and often difficult, path in the march of freedom throughout the world. The challenge to Israel is, today, no different.
History has shown that, without the ever-present voice of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King’s legacy would be very different than the one we honor now.
Those who find comfort in Gandhi’s passivesalt march, yet deprecate the notion that throughout his journey he understood militant resistance was, at times, a necessary means to liberation, do not know the reality of the steps he took along the way.
Offered a chance to end his imprisonment after 17 years if only he renounced violence as a legitimate means of fighting apartheid, Mandela refused and returned to his cellfor ten more years.
This is by no means a call to arms or a plea for violence. It is, however, a verse of solidarity and love for our Palestinian brothers and sisters on the front lines of occupied Palestine.
In the darkest of their hour, they are not alone.
Today, throughout the world, their family in resistance stands with, and for, them as they struggle for their freedom by any means necessary.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rightsactivist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
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