Chris Hedges's Blog, page 299

Bernie Draws Massive Crowds in California

Generating comparisons to his 2016 insurgent run for president that saw overflow crowds in nearly every town he visited, Sen. Bernie Sanders drew a “yuge” crowd to a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday as the 2020 presidential candidate made his first swing through the country’s most populous state of California over the weekend.

The Los Angeles Times put the estimated number of attendees at the rally in a sprawling city park at 12,000 people, but others suggested the number was much higher.

According to Heavy.com‘s reporting from Saturday evening:

The rally took place … at the Grand Park downtown, across from City Hall. Exactly how many people attended isn’t yet known, but the numbers are significant since the park can hold from 25,000 to 50,000 people, depending on the setup. On top of that, 22,000 RSVP’d on Facebook for Sanders’ event in LA, and crowd size photos show a significant turnout. In fact, so many people showed up that an overflow crowd formed on the steps of City Hall across the street. An early report shared that 15,000 might have been there tonight, but it’s not yet clear if this is accurate or includes overflow crowds.

“I look around at this enormous crowd,” Sanders declared to those gathered in Grand Park, “I think not only are we going to win California, we’re going to win the Democratic nomination.”

Thank you to our “yuge” crowd who came out to our rally in Los Angeles today. This is what we mean when we say we are building a nationwide movement that will transform the country. #BernieInLA pic.twitter.com/T74cFVtj9Z

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 24, 2019

On Friday night, Sanders held a major rally in San Diego’s Waterfront Park, which was filled to capacity with nearly 4,000 people. And with a Sunday afternoon rally scheduled at San Francisco’s Fort Mason park, which can also accommodate many thousands of people, The Nation magazine’s John Nichols said the size and energy of Sanders’ crowds should not be ignored:

 

The @BernieSanders crowds keep getting bigger. This is a significant political development. He is generating the sort of enthusiasm—in a key state: California—that is usually seen on the eve of a major primary. If Sanders sustains this energy, it changes every 2020 calculation. pic.twitter.com/XmxHWMBd0a

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 24, 2019

As Charles Davis noted for the Guardian, “The reason for the California tour – Sanders’ first since announcing his new run for president – is simple: math. America’s most populous state has the most delegates up for grabs, and its voters can begin casting ballots 2 February, the same day as the Iowa caucuses.”

And the LA Times‘ Melanie Mason reports:

With its earlier primary on March 3 — and mail ballots going out a month prior — California is considered by the Sanders campaign to be among the crucial “first five,” lumping the Golden State in with traditional early nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

By holding successive rallies this weekend in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Sanders is signaling plans to mount an aggressive bid for California, capitalizing on his demonstrated fundraising prowess and cadre of devoted followers such as Johnson. A midday rally in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Park had the feel of a laid-back family reunion, with attendees being greeted by a row of volunteers offering “high-fives for Bernie.”

During his speech in Grand Park on Saturday, Sanders commemorated the victims of the recent terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, where two mosques were targeted by a man espousing Islamophobic and anti-immigrant hate. Under his administration, Sanders indicated, the kind of racist vitriol and xenophobia that has become a hallmark of President Trump—who has repeatedly praised autocrats would be a thing of the past.

“As president of the United States, I will not have kind words to say about authoritarian leaders around the world who espouse bigotry and hatred,” Sanders told the crowd. “Together we will make the United States the leader in the world in the fight for democracy and human rights.”

 

.@BernieSanders comes out in Los Angeles. We are the many. #BernieInLA pic.twitter.com/lZEiwQvFh1

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) March 23, 2019

Asked about the many other candidates in the Democratic field, rally attendee David Seigel told the LA Times, “They’re almost all good, in my opinion.” While the 60-year-old computer analyst from Beverly Hills told the newspaper Sanders was his first choice, he put Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as a close second. Regardless of whom ultimately wins the primary, Seigel said he will vote for whichever Democrat faces off against Trump next year.  “That’s not even a question,” he said.

Watch the full Grand Park speech (starts at approx. 43:03):

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Still Revolutionary at Age 100

Legendary poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turns 100 years old on Sunday, can be described by nearly enough epithets for every year he’s been alive. Just take a look at three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s recent description of the centenarian in the New York Times:

Poet, retail entrepreneur, social critic, publisher, combat veteran, pacifist, poor boy, privileged boy, outspoken socialist and successful capitalist, with roots in the East Coast and the West Coast (as well as Paris), Ferlinghetti has not just survived for a century: He epitomizes the American culture of that century.

Specifically, he has been a unique protagonist in a national drama: the American struggle to imagine a democratic culture. How does the ideal of social mobility affect notions of high and low, Europe and the New World, tradition and progress? That struggle of imagination underlies the art of Walt Whitman and Duke Ellington, Emily Dickinson and Buster Keaton. It also underlies a range of American issues, from the segregation of public schools to the reality of human-caused climate change. Those political issues involve our interbreeding of the highbrow and the vulgarian in a supercharged process whose complexities defy simplifying terms like “culture wars.”

The founder of the San Francisco landmark City Lights bookshop rang in the turn of his very own century as his adopted city—he’s originally from New York—celebrated “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day,” one of many centennial celebrations held throughout March in his honor.

Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, who once worked at City Lights and has been a lifelong friend of Ferlinghetti, writes about the city’s festivities, “Lawrence turns 100 today and poetry owns the Barbary Coast in a wild romp of readings at bars, galleries, and other watering holes in North Beach around Broadway and Columbus where City Lights Bookstore still stands as the best rebuke to the slick mindlessness of capitalist culture that now overwhelms Ferlinghetti’s once beloved bohemian San Francisco.”

While the journalist and the poet have recorded several of their conversations, their most recent discussion, produced by filmmaker Stephen French, can be found in the media player below. In it, Scheer and Ferlinghetti talk about the beginning of City Lights and its roots in an egalitarian desire to both promote and protect writers, as well as provide a safe space for local artists to congregate.

https://www.truthdig.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Dont-Sell-Out-A-conversation-with-Robert-Scheer-Lawrence-Ferlinghetti-V7.mp3

“What Lawrence represents is the ultimate uncompromising spirit,” says Scheer, “not in the sense of some pompous asshole who says, ‘I know the truth and here it is,’ but in the sense of saying, ‘I am a bullshit detector … whose main concern is that the average person and artists and poets and everybody not get fucked over.” Below is a video about City Lights, the San Francisco mainstay that was a literary home to Beats such as Allen Ginsberg—City Lights published his famous poem “Howl”  in 1956, a publication that the founder says “put City Lights on the map”—and has continued to play an important role in protecting free speech, especially dissent, since its founding in 1953.

In addition to the Beats, writers such as former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Karen Finley, among many others, found both support and inspiration at City Lights throughout its several-decades-long run.

Scheer, who describes himself as a “wannabe Beat poet,” also tells Ferlinghetti in the earlier conversation, “You were part of a post-WWII generation [that] knew even the good war was a horror.” This is in large part why the journalist says he “found a home at City Lights,” where he began reading about Vietnam and, with Ferlinghetti’s support, traveled to Southeast Asia to do some of the earliest critical reporting on the war.

Scheer speaks about Ferlinghetti at the 2010 Bay Area literary festival, Litquake, where the poet was awarded the Barbary Coast Award. (Steve Rhodes / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On top of the many hats Ferlinghetti has worn throughout his life, he always wears that of a World War II veteran, as Scheer notes. His experiences during the war led the poet to become an “instant pacifist,” in his words. Here’s an excerpt of Ferlinghetti’s retelling of his time in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing from a Scheer Intelligence episode.

When we went over to Nagasaki, it was total devastation. It was like a landscape in hell. What was left of bodies had all been cleared away by the time we got there, which was about seven weeks after the bomb had been dropped…. It was acres of mud, with bones and hair sticking up out of it. And as I’ve said before, it really made me an instant pacifist. Up to that time, I’d been a good American boy, in the boy scouts, etc…Nagasaki really woke me up.

But Ferlinghetti isn’t only concerned with the politics of his past, but also of the present. A recent poem he’s written about the United States’ 45th president, “Trump’s Trojan Horse,” is a condemnation of a White House from which Trump’s “men burst out to destroy democracy and install corporations as absolute rulers of the world.”

On Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday, his new novel “Little Boy” is being published by Sterling Lord.

Little Boy’s story begins, abruptly, with Ferlinghetti’s mother abandoning her newborn son after his father dies of a heart attack. A beloved, childless aunt whisks baby Lawrence off to France. The story rushes forwards, with dizzying circumlocutions, from there. The patchwork of biographical narrative and freewheeling forays into societal commentary (“the icebergs melting and all that and humankind the temporary tenant floating toward the precipice unable to stop itself and its self-destruction”) makes the book feel like a memoir.

That’s not a word Ferlinghetti uses to describe his new book. “I object to using that description,” he says. “Because a memoir denotes a very genteel type of writing.”

Little Boy is in many respects a challenging read about a hardscrabble experience. But it’s not without its genteel moments – as when Ferlinghetti describes his early years living with his aunt, who at one point was hired as the governess of a wealthy east coast family. The Bisland residence was an enormous mansion in Bronxville, New York, just north of Manhattan. Ferlinghetti describes how the classically educated family patriarch, Presley Bisland, would fire questions at him – “Young man, you’ve been to school – who was Telemachus?” – and ask him to recite poetry for him at the dinner table in exchange for cash.

What’s been clear for several decades now to anyone paying attention to history-in-the-making, is that the poet, publisher, activist, veteran, rebel—again, the list is endless—has left an indelible mark on America’s political and literary landscapes that will likely last hundreds of years, if not more.

Read more about Ferlinghetti in the following short biography from City Lights’ website:

A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry counters an elitist conception of art and the artist’s role in the world. Although his poetry is often concerned with everyday life and civic themes, it is never simply personal or polemical, and it stands on his grounding in tradition and universal reach.

Ferlinghetti was born in Bronxville, New York on March 24, 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti, an immigrant from Brescia, Italy, and Clemence Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he took a degree in journalism, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He was a commander of three different submarine chasers in the Atlantic and saw action at the Normandy invasion. Later in the war, he was assigned to the attack transport USS Selinurin the Pacific. In 1945, just after the atomic bomb obliterated Nagasaki, he witnessed firsthand the horrific ruins of the city. This experience was the origin of his lifelong antiwar stance.

Ferlinghetti received a Master’s degree in English Literature from Columbia University in 1947 and a Doctorate de l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, after he settled in San Francisco, he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism.  In 1953, with Peter D. Martin, he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. For over sixty years the bookstore has served as a “literary meeting place” for writers, readers, artists, and intellectuals to explore books and ideas.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series, extending his concept of a cultural meeting place to a larger arena. His aim was to present fresh and accessible poetry from around the world in order to create “an international, dissident ferment.” The series began in 1955 with his own Pictures of the Gone World; translations by Kenneth Rexroth and poetry by Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov were soon added to the list.

Copies of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems were seized by authorities in 1956 and Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with selling obscene material. He defended Howl in court, a case that drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation writers, many of whom he later published. (With a fine defense by the ACLU and the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, he was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

In the 1960s, Ferlinghetti plunged into a life of frequent travel––giving poetry readings, taking part in festivals, happenings, and literary/political conferences in Chile, Cuba, Germany, the USSR, Holland, Fiji, Australia, Nicaragua, Spain, Greece, and the Czech Republic––as well as in Mexico, Italy, and France, where he spent substantial periods of time.  A resolute progressive, he spoke out on such crucial political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race, farm-worker organizing, the Vietnam War, the Sandanista and Zapatista struggles, and the wars in the Middle East.

Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at a number of exhibitions and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. In the 1990s he was associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including a 2010 retrospective at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Italy, and a group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016. His works are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Arts and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and most recently exhibited at a one-man show at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery in July 2016.

He was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998. He has been the recipient of numerous awards: the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the Authors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2003, he was was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 the National Book Foundation gave him the inaugural Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In Italy, his poetry has been awarded the Premio Taormino, the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, and the Premio Cavour.

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) continues to be one of the most popular poetry books in the U.S., with over 1,000,000 copies in print. A prolific author, Ferlinghetti has over a dozen books currently in print, and his work has been translated into many languages. Among his poetry books are These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993(1993), A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), Americus Book I(2004), Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007), Time of Useful Consciousness (2012), and Blasts Cries Laughter (2014), all published by New Directions. His two novels are Her (1960) and Love in the Days of Rage (2001). City Lights issued an anthology of San Francisco poems in 2001. He is the translator of Paroles by Jacques Prévert (from French) and Roman Poems by Pier Paolo Passolini (from Italian.) In 2015 Liveright Publishing, a division of W.W. Norton, published his Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1960-2010). In 2017, New Directions published an anthology of his work titled Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems, and his latest book is a novel, titled Little Boy (Doubleday, 2019).

Cruise Ship in Trouble; 1,300 Passengers Being Evacuated by Helicopter

HELSINKI—Rescue workers off Norway’s western coast rushed to evacuate 1,300 passengers and crew from a disabled cruise ship by helicopter on Saturday, winching them one-by-one to safety as heaving waves tossed the ship from side to side and high winds battered the operation.

The Norwegian newspaper VG said the Viking Sky cruise ship issued a mayday call as bad weather hit Saturday and engine problems caused it to start drifting toward the rocky shore. Police in the western county of Moere og Romsdal said the crew, fearing the ship would run aground, managed to anchor in Hustadsvika Bay, between the Norwegian cities of Alesund and Trondheim, so the evacuations could take place.

Rescue teams with helicopters and boats were sent to evacuate the cruise ship under extremely difficult circumstances. Norwegian media reported gusts up to 38 knots (43 mph) and waves over 8 meters (26 feet) in an area known for its rough, frigid waters.

Video and photos from people on the ship showed it heaving, with chairs and other furniture dangerously rolling from side to side. Passengers were suited up in orange life vests but the waves broke some ship windows and cold water flowed over the feet of some passengers.

Norwegian public broadcaster NRK said the Viking Sky’s evacuation was a slow and dangerous process, as passengers needed to be hoisted one-by-one from the cruise ship to the five available helicopters.

“I was afraid. I’ve never experienced anything so scary,” Janet Jacob, among the first group of passengers evacuated to the nearby town of Molde, told NRK.

She said her helicopter ride to safety came amid strong winds “like a tornado,” prompting her to pray “for the safety of all aboard.”

American passenger John Curry told NRK that he was having lunch as the cruise ship started to shake.

“It was just chaos. The helicopter ride from the ship to shore I would rather not think about. It wasn’t nice,” Curry told the broadcaster.

NRK said one 90-year-old-man and his 70-year-old spouse on the ship were severely injured but did not say how that happened.

Norwegian media said the majority of the cruise ship passengers were British and American tourists. By 6 p.m., some 100 people had been rescued and were being taken to a nearby sports hall.

Later, reports emerged that a cargo ship with nine crew members was in trouble nearby, and the local Norwegian rescue service diverted two of the five helicopters working on the cruise ship to that rescue.

Authorities told NRK that a strong storm with high waves was preventing rescue workers from using life boats or tug boats to take passengers ashore.

“It’s a demanding exercise, because they (passengers) have to hang in the air under a helicopter and there’s a very, very strong wind,” witness Odd Roar Lange told NRK at the site.

Rescuers are prioritizing the nine crew on the cargo ship who need to plunge into the choppy ocean waters before being winched onto helicopters, according to Per Fjeld from the Joint Rescue Center Southern Norway.

“These people cannot be lifted from the ship because of the rough seas,” he said.

Norwegian authorities said late Saturday that the evacuation would proceed all through the night into Sunday.

The Viking Sky was on a 12-day trip that began March 14 in the western Norwegian city of Bergen, according to the cruisemapper.com website.

The ship was visiting the Norwegian towns and cities of Narvik, Alta, Tromso, Bodo and Stavanger before its scheduled arrival Tuesday in the British port of Tilbury on the River Thames.

The Viking Sky, a vessel with gross tonnage of 47,800, was delivered in 2017 to operator Viking Ocean Cruises.

___

Sheila Norman-Culp contributed from London.

Hannity and Maddow: Across the Street but Worlds Apart

NEW YORK—For Sean Hannity, the “witch hunt” was finally over. Rachel Maddow considered it the start of something.

The diametrically opposed opinion hosts, who vie for the distinction of the most popular in cable news, were the windows through which many Americans digested Friday’s news that special counsel Robert Mueller had concluded a nearly two-year investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. While his report, or even a summary, has not been released, television news still had hours to fill talking about it.

Fox News Channel’s Hannity, a close Trump ally, focused on reports there will be no additional indictments from Mueller.

“The left’s favorite conspiracy theory is now dead,” Hannity said. “It is buried, and there was no collusion, no conspiracy, no obstruction. The witch hunt is over and there will be no further charges.”

He lamented that lives were ruined by the investigation and said that people who have been prosecuted or convicted had committed “process crimes.”

The accusations against Trump were “what we always said, a hoax, a lie conceived by hate.”

While Hannity’s Fox colleague Tucker Carlson suggested it was a night Americans “should be celebrating the great news” that no crime was apparently found regarding collusion, Hannity said citizens should be outraged by the amount of time and money spent on the case. He promised a reckoning in the coming weeks of politicians and media figures he claimed were guilty of a rush to judgment, and his first target was U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Schifty Schiff” read the words onscreen behind him.

“What is Maddow and all the other MSNBC conspiracy theorists, what are they going to ever do now?” he said.

As he talked, Maddow was doing the same. Unlike most evenings, when the two figures work in studios across Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue from each other, Maddow had rushed to a studio in Tennessee where she had spent the day trout fishing.

“Finally, it happened,” she said. “In terms of what that means and what Mueller has found, we know only the smallest little bits. This is the start of something, not the end of something.”

In meticulous fashion, she detailed how the news that Mueller’s investigation had concluded was reported and what a letter by Attorney General William Barr meant about what will be released to the public. Democrats in Congress have already demanded the full report be released and that they see background materials; Maddow read a letter by Schiff about that on the air.

“Right now we mostly have just a ton of questions, as to what Mueller’s report says, who gets to see it, who gets to decide who gets to see it and when,” she said.

It wasn’t until 16 minutes into her program that she discussed the reports that there will be no new indictments from Mueller.

Many Fox News Channel guests, not just Hannity, focused on that detail on Friday evening. Former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski called it “a very clear signal that this entire hoax is over.”

Still, some Fox personalities, including Chris Wallace and Harris Faulkner, had to caution guests that Mueller’s report hadn’t been seen yet. “To say that somehow this clears the president seems like the height of rushing to judgment,” Wallace said. He dismissed the idea that those prosecuted had been charged of process crimes, saying they were very serious.

Meanwhile, on CNN, analyst and frequent Trump critic Jeffrey Toobin had an answer to colleagues who warned Trump and his supporters against prematurely celebrating.

While he isn’t necessarily in the clear, the fact that the president’s sons or son-in-law Jared Kushner were not indicted “is unambiguously good news for him,” Toobin said.

Anti-Brexit Marchers Swarm London Streets, Demand New Vote

LONDON—Anti-Brexit protesters flooded into central London by the hundreds of thousands on Saturday, demanding that Britain’s Conservative-led government hold a new referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union.

The “People’s Vote March” snaked from Park Lane and other locations to converge on the U.K. Parliament, where the fate of Brexit will be decided in the coming weeks.

Marchers carried European Union flags and signs praising the longstanding ties between Britain and continental Europe. The protest drew people from across Britain who are determined to force Prime Minister Theresa May’s government to alter its march toward Brexit.

May also is coming under rising pressure from her own Conservative Party to either step down or set a date for her resignation as her political support continues to wilt. The coming week is seen as crucial as political rivals jockey for position to succeed her.

Conservative Party legislator George Freeman tweeted that a new leader is needed.

“I’m afraid it’s all over for the PM. She’s done her best. But across the country you can see the anger. Everyone feels betrayed. Government’s gridlocked. Trust in democracy collapsing. This can’t go on. We need a new PM who can reach out & build some sort of coalition for a Plan B,” he tweeted.

Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, invited to help lead the march in favor of a second referendum, called the crowd gathered in central London impressive and unified.

“There is a huge turnout of people here from all walks of life, of all ages and from all over the country,” he tweeted. “We are a Remain country now with 60 percent wanting to stop the Brexit mess.”

Police did not provide a crowd estimate. Independent legislator Chuka Umunna and others supporting a second Brexit referendum estimated the crowd at 1 million.

More than 4 million people endorsed an electronic petition this week in favor of revoking Article 50, the act that formally triggered the Brexit process.

The march comes as May, who opposes a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership, is easing away from plans to hold a third vote on her troubled Brexit withdrawal plan, which has been strongly rejected twice by Parliament.

In a letter to lawmakers on Friday night, May said she might not seek passage of her Brexit withdrawal plan in Parliament next week. The embattled leader said she would only bring her EU divorce plan back to Parliament if there seems to be enough backing for it to pass.

“If it appears that there is not sufficient support to bring the deal back next week, or the House rejects it again, we can ask for another extension before 12 April, but that will involve holding European Parliament elections,” she said.

May’s changing stance reflects the plan’s dismal chances in the House of Commons after two prior defeats.

She also says she would need the approval of House Speaker John Bercow to bring the plan back for a third time. Bercow has said a third vote would violate parliamentary rules against repeatedly voting on the same thing unless May’s Brexit divorce plan is altered.

Almost three years after Britons voted to walk away from the EU, the bloc’s leaders this week seized control of the Brexit timetable from May to avert a chaotic departure on March 29 that would be disruptive for the world’s biggest trading bloc and deeply damaging for Britain.

EU leaders at a summit in Brussels set two deadlines for Britain to leave the bloc of nearly half a billion people or to take an entirely new path in considering its EU future.

They agreed to extend the Brexit date until May 22, on the eve of the EU Parliament elections, if May can persuade the British Parliament to endorse her Brexit divorce deal.

Failing that, they gave May until April 12 to choose between leaving the bloc without a divorce deal or deciding on a radically new path, such as revoking Britain’s decision to leave, holding a new referendum on Brexit or finding a cross-party consensus for a very different kind of Brexit.

Despite May’s letter to lawmakers, it was not clear what path her minority government would take this week.

The anti-Brexit marchers on Saturday included 63-year-old Edmund Sides, who spent the last three weeks walking from Wales to London in order to take part.

Sides, a geologist, said he wanted to be able to speak to people along the way, encouraging families that have been split between Leave and Remain to mend their fences and talk.

“The whole country isn’t doing enough of that,” he said.

He is worried about the vicious tone that Brexit arguments have started to take and worries about national cohesion.

“People fear the atmosphere is very dangerous in this country,” Sides said.

___

Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

The 1942 Internment of Japanese-Americans Holds Lessons for Today

With detention camps along the U.S. southern border and the president’s revised Muslim ban upheld by the Supreme Court, Karen Korematsu thinks it’s important for people to know the history of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, two thirds of them native-born citizens, who were incarcerated during World War II without due process. Korematsu, director of the Fred Korematsu Foundation, a civil rights educational organization, travels the country to talk to students about her father, Fred Korematsu, who refused to go to the camps. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him and upheld the government’s internment order in a 6-3 vote.

Korematsu wants people to know how Japanese-Americans were treated after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She hopes that by teaching history, a similar fate for others can be prevented.

Korematsu was an adviser for an exhibit titled “Then They Came For Me.” Currently on display in San Francisco until the end of May, the exhibit next moves to Chicago and New York. It features photos of the internment camps, including some by Dorothea Lange, work by incarcerated Japanese-American artists and historical documents. The exhibit includes such artifacts as Fred Korematsu’s letter thanking his American Civil Liberties Union attorney for taking his case; trunks the prisoners took to the camps; and a jacket given to a man sent to a prison camp marked with “E.A.,” for “Enemy Alien.”

PHOTO ESSAY | 5 photosphoto essay

Such artifacts make the internment real to people, says Korematsu, who talked with Truthdig writer Emily Wilson about how Japanese-Americans were temporarily housed in horse stalls, the parallels between what’s happening now and what happened in 1942, and why Japanese-Americans rarely talked about the internment.

Emily Wilson: What reactions are you getting to the exhibit?

Karen Korematsu: People really hadn’t seen one like it before. Many of the photographs were blown up to give them more impact. Somebody commented to me about a photo of a young boy peeking out through the suitcases. Many people didn’t realize that children and babies were also put in prison camp, as well as the elderly and the infirm. Even if you were in a hospital, they pulled you out and put you in a prison camp. That’s inhumane. It’s appalling to see that age range, from baby to elder, and people need to see this to see the inhumanity and the violation of human rights of mostly Americans without due process of law.

Also, it brings relevancy, with the artifacts—like the trunks people had and information about my father’s case, and asking “What would you have done?” As I crisscross this country, people ask me, “Why didn’t they protest?” Well, they were put in prison, and there was no time. You could have refused, like my father, but that was a federal offense, and people were just plain scared. Especially people like my grandparents, who were stateless—they were born in Japan. I think of my grandmother, who had worked very hard raising four boys, and they hear the Imperial Army of Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor, and then they’re told, “You can only take what you can carry in your two hands, and the rest you have to leave behind, and you only have 48 hours.” You could try to sell, maybe 10 cents on the dollar, or try and give things to a friend or neighbor, but in some cases, people didn’t think the Japanese were coming back, because they were gone three or four years.

EW: What are the parallels you see now with the detention centers on the border and the Muslim ban?

KK: The most appalling factor to those camps along the border is the separation of families. They did that in 1942—they separated families. The day after Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounds up over 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry and takes them to Department of Justice camps, and their families don’t even know what’s happened to them. After 9/11, in 2001, they did the same thing to Muslims—the government rounded up people and put them in Department of Justice prisons, and their families didn’t know where they went. That was 2001, and here we are doing same thing in 2019, where they’ve separated families and the parents don’t know where the children are.

This is why this is so important, because we need to learn the lessons of history so that we stop repeating history.

EW: How have you seen Japanese-Americans get involved?

KK: The day after 9/11, my father was one of first people to speak up, because his Supreme Court case was cited as a possible reason to round up Muslim Americans and put them in concentration camps. The Japanese American Citizens League said, “No, you cannot do this. This is what you did to us in 1942.” So at least now what we have is other civil rights organizations that can speak up. In 1942, there were not the organizations to do that.

EW: What about with the Muslim ban?

KK: On Jan. 27, 2017, was President Trump’s first executive order. That was the Muslim ban. That was 1.0. Then, because there was so much pushback, especially by the Japanese-American community, it became 2.0—the immigration ban. Then there was pushback there. So the government waters down the impact with the euphemisms, then the immigration ban became 3.0—the travel ban, and [it] included Venezuela, just to kind of say, “This is not about Muslims.” The day after the first Muslim ban, Japanese-American started speaking up, to say, “This is wrong,” and that’s when everybody went to the airport. It would have been so heartwarming for my father to see all these attorneys holding signs—some of them were real estate attorneys, but they wanted to help you. That was so great. Finally we had all these people come together who wanted to help others because they were being targeted and their civil rights were being violated. My father’s favorite audience to speak to was attorneys, because he knew they would have the tools to help fight any injustice, and that was a perfect example.

EW: You didn’t hear about your father till you were in high school and a friend mentioned him in a report she was doing. Why didn’t people talk about the camps?

KK: The Japanese-American community at large didn’t talk about the incarceration. You have to understand that Japanese-Americans are put into prison camps without due process of law. They are stripped of their dignity and treated like animals—they were first put into horse stalls. As my father said, horse stalls are for horses, not for people. They didn’t have their own food, and they were stripped of their possessions. The inhumanity was so appalling. I think about my grandmother, this lovely, dignified woman who came from Japan and looked at America as the land of opportunity and was excited to be here, but she had to endure all that. In the lavatories, there was no privacy—there were open latrines, there were no partitions, the showers were all communal. Can you imagine? When the war was over and the camps were closed, all that was given to these people was $25 and a bus ticket, and that was it. And they were supposed to start over from that. So they went to churches and Buddhist temples, and families lived together and tried to support each other. All the Japanese-Americans wanted to do was to get on with their lives and to prove they were good Americans citizens or [that] they loved this country. They left Japan because they believed in this country. How do you tell your family that you were stripped of your dignity and possessions and had to endure these inhumane conditions? That’s not something you share with your family, especially your grandchildren. How do you explain that—that our own government treated American citizens this way?

EW: Is there anything that makes you hopeful?

KK: When I talk to students, they give me hope. My father gave me this charge of education five months before he passed away. I don’t know if I’ll see peace in my lifetime, but I’m hoping [that] through [the students], we make change in the way that we treat people.

Students are very interested when I talk to them about it. I use my father’s story as a springboard to launch the other information. I start from a personal perspective of how I learned of my father’s Supreme Court case as a junior in high school from a friend giving a report. Personal stories are what resonate with these young people. I tell them in elementary school that around December 7, the teacher would talk about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and say that “the Japanese are very bad people and they bombed Pearl Harbor and killed 2,000 Americans.” Then the students would blame me and bully me and say, “Go back to Japan—you don’t belong here.” It happened to my brother, who’s four years younger, too. I tell students I’m bound and determined to change that, and Fred Korematsu’s story is about one man who made a difference, and so can they.

Speaking the Unspoken

“This Woman’s Work”

A book by Julie Delporte

Julie Delporte’s raw and devastating graphic memoir, “This Woman’s Work,” chronicles the 35-year-old author’s struggle to decipher what befell her as a small child. She often seems to be still swallowed whole by grief.[image error]

This Woman’s Work
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Delporte was assaulted as a little girl by an older cousin. She grew up in France, the daughter of nonartistic parents, and moved alone to Montreal at 22, where she began writing autobiographically tinged graphic memoirs that chronicled her distress. Her previous works, “Journal,” and “Everywhere Antennas,” have drawn much praise for the evocative colored pencil sketches that seem to float on a larger page of empty white space. The illustrations are roughly drawn, almost childlike at times; her small cursive handwriting seems to disappear before our eyes, and her brief utterings are often cryptic. She allows us to fill in the blanks. She purposely leaves taped-on edits on certain pages showing us the messiness of her process.

In most drawings of herself, Delporte’s eyes are closed tightly as if she can’t look at the world directly. She begins her narrative by quoting Goliarda Sapienza, the Italian novelist who wrote about women unrestrained by conventional notions of femininity: “Words unspoken fester inside us.” We sense Delporte’s goal in “This Woman’s Work” is to finally speak the unspoken words. She is only partially successful.

Delporte recalls her father’s stinging words: “Whenever anything was poorly done, my father would joke, ‘must be a woman’s handiwork.’ “ The drawing that accompanies her father’s hurtful words shows us a young woman that appears to be Delporte. She is sloppily dressed and seen from behind, walking away briskly. Is she running away? Or just dreaming about doing so?

The story travels back and forth in time. We see her in Brussels in 2016, living on her own. There is a man in her life, but we learn nothing about him, nor will we learn about any of the others. Men seem to be a mere backdrop for Delporte. She is wary in their presence. Delporte reveals that she wanted to get pregnant that summer. We see her and her lover sitting up in bed, but there is an aloofness, perhaps hostility, between them. It appears they have just made love. But the atmosphere is suffused with disappointment. She writes of what he did not tell her that night in reference to the child they thought they might create:

“I’ll take care of her

You’ll be able to draw

I’ll change the diapers

I’ll even nurse her.”

She is fearful about marriage and motherhood and how it will infringe on her ability to produce art.

But fantasies of motherhood mock her. There are sketches of mothers holding small children cradled tenderly in their arms. They are often followed by disturbing references to the disastrous fates that befell these mothers. Some died in childbirth; others retreated to the suburbs and the tyranny of domesticity; and still others had children who  brought them only distress. We see Delporte conflating motherhood with disaster repeatedly and her sketches seem to grow more vibrant with this assertion. She asks, “How old was I when I started feeling cheated simply by being a girl?”

When she approaches her own history, her eyes close again. We see a drawing of a little girl, about 10, lying in bed with a short dress pulled up, leaving her private parts exposed. Next, we see her leaving the bed and putting on her socks. There is a close up of one eye, stunned and wide open. She writes that she resents how her family whitewashed this event as “kids just being kids.”

She does not say much about her parents or her family, except that “I often look at my family tree and wonder which of these women were raped.”

She seeks solace in reading about women who have been able to live without men. Women who were artists like herself. The life of Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist who invented the “Moomin” comic strip series, captures her imagination. Jansson was a lesbian who lived with her lover for 45 years in a seemingly idyllic union. She never wanted any children, fearing, like Delporte, that they would interfere with her ability to make art. Jansson too lives with a “constant desire to learn how to make things. Beautiful objects, more tangible than a text or drawing.” Jansson’s Moomins were fluffy figures who could protect all children from harm. Delporte was enchanted by one of the Moomin characters named Snufkin, a philosophical vagabond of sorts who fished, played the harmonica, and was able to embrace life in the moment. Delporte wonders if Snufkin was able to be so carefree because he was a boy Moomin.

Delporte is also smitten with Amy Berkowitz’s work and her biting revelations about chronic illness and sexual violence. She studies the paintings of Paula M. Becker, a German painter, the first woman artist to paint nude self-portraits of herself, using a haunting simplicity of form. Becker died at 31 from a postpartum embolism. Delporte scrutinizes the majesty of Louise Bourgeois’ paintings that looked at domesticity, sexuality, and the body’s need to protect itself from outside harm. And she mourns for her peer, Genevieve Castree, who died from pancreatic cancer. Castree’s work as a graphic artist delved into the anxiety women feel about finding a space for themselves in a world that entangles them elsewhere. But these are other woman’s voices; not her own.

Delporte remains flustered and asks “What do men want from me?” She is staring nervously at her silent cellphone, hoping a guy she is attracted to will call. He does not.

She returns to fantasies about worlds without men. She thinks of the beguines, flocks of females who lived in harmony without men centuries ago. Sometimes they drank rum together at night while sharing poetry. Delporte laments that there are no recorded accounts of their intimate lives. Yet men seem necessary to her despite her protestations. She asks herself nervously, “What men would be able to live with a feminist.… What men would I be able to live with?”

Another day she is picking mushrooms with a friend beneath an enormous canopy of trees, and mentions something nonchalant about God and the beauty of the trees. It is only then that we realize she has never spoken about God before, and now seems content to give him only a brief and wary nod.

Delporte’s work is a depiction of unresolved anguish. Her sketches and brief searing captions feel like ambiguous messages sent to us from a distant planet, one filled with primal pain. We feel a kinship with her reverence for female liberation, but truthfully, even this admirable goal crumbles as we witness her joyless life and the absence of laughter. She resists tackling the complexity of human desire. She never reflects a sophisticated understanding of the dramatic tension and wondrousness that sometimes exist between men and women, and the sacrifices required to survive in that realm. Words like negotiation and confrontation would probably terrify her. She sees compromise as a sellout and this blindness paralyzes her. Delporte does not realize that human relationships need not be sacrificed in order to create art. In fact, each arena can and does fuel the other. But she twirls like a butterfly off the page, leaving us with her 10-year-old face lying listlessly on her childhood bed. Her eyes are closed.

 

The U.S. Deserves Its Own Nuremberg Trials

Are Americans capable of committing atrocities on the same scale as Germans did under Nazi rule? That is the question that University of San Francisco ethics professor Rebecca Gordon and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer grapple with in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.” Gordon, author of “Mainstreaming Torture” and “American Nuremberg,” posits that if America’s actions in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, were to be scrutinized the way Nazi Germany’s crimes were probed in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. would likely also be found guilty of crimes against humanity.

Gordon begins her comparison by exploring the main charge levied against Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, which was committing a crime against peace due to Germany’s breach of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which, she explains, “essentially outlawed war.” American prosecutors in the mid-20th century insisted that this initial crime was the unlawful act from which all other crimes committed by the Nazis originated.

“By comparison,” the author tells Scheer, “I look at the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to make an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.

“It’s very clear from the documentary record that exists that the main reason people were being tortured [by the U.S. before the Iraq War began] was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq,” Gordon says.

Throughout the so-called war on terror, the ethics expert says, the U.S. has also violated several rules set forth in just-war theory, including what constitutes collateral damage and proportionality, in its slaughter of countless Iraqi civilians.

“We took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed and cosmopolitan countries in that part of the world—which was Iraq—and we essentially did what [U.S. military officials] used to say they wanted to do to North Vietnam: bombed it back to the Stone Age,” Gordon says.

Listen to Scheer and Gordon discuss a range of moral issues that Americans for several generations have swept under the rug as the government both openly and secretly commits crimes in their name abroad. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. The intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Rebecca Gordon. And she has her doctorate in ethics and social theory. I teach ethics at USC; you teach at the University of San Francisco, which is a Catholic school, so presumably with all their difficulties they’re still concerned about ethics. And actually we have a good pope, in major ways, who’s dealing with the subject I want to talk to you about: the ethics of war making, and the violence that has been unleashed on the world. And you wrote two very important books, maybe the most important in some ways. One is called Mainstreaming Torture, and another is called American Nuremberg. So the question I want to ask you, you know, because we’ve always treated the crimes of others, particularly the Germans, the worst crimes of modern history, as an aberration in the development of the human race. Those people went berserk, crazy, and they were evil; now we have another category, Muslims are evil, they do terrible things. We’re recording this on a day where in New Zealand, some 48 people trying to practice their religion were killed. So we see a lot of crime against Muslims, as there was obviously a lot of crimes against Jews and other people. And in your writing, you’re very clear that the crimes of Nuremberg, of the Nazis, are a low level of evil. But the real question is, the Germans are so much like Americans. They were–largest number of immigrants in this country were Germans; they’re a white, Anglo-Saxon population; they’re highly educated, probably the highest level of music and science at that point. And can it happen here?

Rebecca Gordon: And that, of course, is the question many of us have been asking at least since the election of 2016, and probably before that. And the answer in some ways, of course, is that it did happen here with the invasion of the Americas by people from Europe, and the destruction of all the peoples who were living here at the time. So there has been a genocide on this continent and in South America that, you know, we just forget about, because it happened a while ago. But coming to Nuremberg, what I was trying to do in the book is to say how important the principle was that was established at Nuremberg, which is that international law is real law. And when you break international law, there are genuine consequences, and people can and should be held accountable. So what I looked at was the conduct of this so-called War on Terror in the post-September 11th period, and asked: Could the United States be accused of the same categories of crimes for which the Nazi leadership were held accountable? And there were three categories that were established by the prosecution, and these were crimes against peace; ordinary war crimes, which had already been well described in the body of international law; and a new category, crimes against humanity, which was created in order to take in the enormity of what had been done in Europe by the Nazis. But what was very interesting is that it was Americans who insisted that the first of these crimes should be crimes against peace. So what’s that? That means making an aggressive war. It means starting a war that was not a war of self-defense, that was not a war of so-called necessity, but making an aggressive war. Why was that illegal? It was illegal because Germany and the United States and many other countries in Europe had signed a treaty in 1928 called the Kellogg–Briand Treaty, which essentially outlawed war. It said that nations will not use war to settle their disputes. And the argument that the U.S. prosecutors made was that all the other crimes that the Germans committed actually sprang from this first crime of making this aggressive, unnecessary, illegal war. And so by comparison, I look at the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to make an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. And just as the Nazi crimes arose from this making of a war that was wrong and illegal, the U.S. crimes–and specifically now because my area of expertise is torture, I look at the reasons why the United States became involved in torture. And in the beginning, it’s very clear from the documentary record that exists, that the main reason people were being tortured, both in the CIA dark sites and also at Guantanamo under the Department of Defense, was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq. And so the other crimes–

RS: But wait, let’s be very clear about that. This would be like the Nazis saying, Jewish bankers destroyed our economy and colluded with Western powers, and therefore made life untenable in Germany. That was the vicious scapegoating argument to justify Nazi expansion and destruction of other societies. So this thing of whether Bush–you know, it’s kind of become part of folklore–they lied us into the war in Iraq. But what you’re saying, and very clearly, the very idea of going to war in Iraq over the 9/11 incident, which not only did Saddam Hussein have–

RG: Nothing to do with.

RS: –nothing to do with, but actually he was opposed to Al-Qaeda, and it was the one country where Al-Qaeda could not operate in, was Iraq. But instead of going to war with Pakistan, or going to war, you know, elsewhere–no. We–

RG: Or Saudi Arabia.

RS: Well, of course, Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 hijackers–

RG: Came from.

RS: –came from. You could actually make an argument to go into–hey, you attacked us, you supplied the money and so forth. No, we whitewashed the Saudi Arabia thing and went to war with Iraq. So your analogy, listeners should understand, is very precise. It is inventing an excuse, a defensive excuse, to engage an offensive invasion.

RG: Exactly. And from that spring all of these other kinds of crimes. So then I look at ordinary war crimes, and if you go over the Geneva Conventions and the various other laws of war, you can see that there are a number of categories of crimes. Many of them have to do with failing to make the distinction between civilians and fighters, combatants. And of course the Bush-Cheney administration very early on decided to create a third, nonexistent category called unlawful combatants. But this designation doesn’t exist in the International Red Cross’s understanding; it doesn’t exist in the Geneva Convention’s. It was just a convenient way of saying this particular group of people, whoever it is that we choose to capture, detain forever, torture–they have no legal standing in the world. They exist outside of international law.

RS: So let me pick up on that also. And I don’t want to lose the earlier thread of the invention of war, and connecting with this incredibly important work you’ve done on torture. And you made the statement, which I think people should ponder: the reason we were torturing these people was not to get information about a future attack. We already had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and everything, we knew everything about it, and so forth. The real reason for it was to invent an alibi for the invasion, to get somebody to say Saddam Hussein was backing them. And I think that’s a very important–a reason, by the way, to read your book, Mainstreaming Torture; let me give a plug here. But this other argument is also interesting, the whole idea of the noncombatant. And we are doing this interview at a time when Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, is in prison–

RG: Yes.

RS: –again, because they want to fabricate a story about WikiLeaks and all that, and get everybody off the hook for all of the crimes and torture and everything they’ve done. But the interesting thing is, if you look at what did WikiLeaks–and they were just like in the position of the Washington Post with the Pentagon Papers, they’re the publisher–what did Chelsea Manning reveal? She revealed the death of noncombatants, including journalists. So why don’t you develop that a little bit, because that is so critical to the moment, that no one–no one has been prosecuted for those attacks that she revealed with the data. But she is now sitting in prison.

RG: And this is, of course–the fate of whistleblowers all over the world, and certainly in this country, is exactly that. That the matters that they have revealed disappear in a story that becomes about the crimes of the revealer. And of course in the war in Iraq, there was tremendous amounts of civilian death. And it falls into a number of categories; one category is those people who had actually been detained and were being held by U.S. forces. And for example at Abu Ghraib, we know–which is the prison outside of Baghdad that had been Saddam Hussein’s major torture site, and which the U.S. decided in its wisdom would be the perfect place to hold detainees, and where we know a group of reservists ended up torturing people. But the real torture was going on upstairs, by the employees of various C.I.A. contractors, and by the C.I.A. itself. And that’s where people actually died. So there’s that whole category of people, but that’s a much smaller category than the category of ordinary civilians whose lives were either ended or destroyed by the regular U.S. use of warfare in places like Fallujah and other cities. So that we took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed, and cosmopolitan countries in that part of the world–which was Iraq–and we essentially did what they used to say they wanted to do to North Vietnam, bombed it back to the Stone Age. And so in just war theory, there are these rules about discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, and you are permitted a certain number of civilian deaths as long as they are side effects of your attempt to go after some legitimate military target. And this is called collateral damage; it’s, collateral means on the side, right? But in fact, in Iraq, we don’t know because there are many different counts, but anywhere between 500,000 and a million people have died in the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. And when you lay that against the 3,000 people who died on September 11th, none of whom were killed by anyone even from Iraq, you also see that we have violated another rule of just war theory, which is proportionality. We have destroyed human life out of all proportion.

RS: And let me just–you know, it’s so difficult to grapple with these questions. And you are teaching at one of the major Catholic universities here.

RG: It’s a Jesuit university, and that’s a little different. And these are the left-wing Jesuits.

RS: I’m not putting down your school. [Laughter] Hey, I teach ethics at the University of Southern California–

RG: Enough said.

RS: –and clearly, yes, we are ethically challenged at this moment. I was about to actually celebrate the pope in this regard. And so there is a certain necessity for being consistent in the application of these principles, or they mean nothing.

RG: Exactly.

RS: And I think that’s the body of your life’s work, to remind us of that. So in a sense, you are at a good place where you’re teaching. I’m just wondering, how is this disregarded so widely? I mean, people make a big deal about don’t kill the unborn child. You know, I could see arguments about that. But if that’s the beginning of a consistent, pro-life position, yes, it makes certain sense. If it’s the end of a pro-life position, and then you end welfare and you don’t care what happens to the baby and so forth, you’re into a deep immorality. And it seems to me you’re at a very interesting place. Because for better or worse, this pope seems to be the only one able to challenge, let’s call it U.S. imperialism or imperial ventures, on a moral basis.

RG: I think that’s right. He certainly is doing a better job of that than either of his last two predecessors.

RS: Or the major–

RG: Other major, yeah. No, I think that’s right. And I think, you know, it’s interesting that at USF, we have Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. We have people who are training to be second lieutenants when they leave university in the U.S. Army. And I have had students tell me, I had a student from Guam who told me, you know, Professor Gordon, I know that when they send me to basic training, they’re going to try to take me apart and change me from being a person into being a soldier. And I just want you to know that I’m not going to let them do that to me. He said, but you know, ROTC was my ticket off the island, and I have a duty now to follow through with my promise. And I just, my heart broke for him. Because what they do to you in basic training is actually a slightly lighter version of what they do when they train torturers. Everyone who becomes a torturer–and people don’t just torture on a whim; people are trained to be torturers. And part of that training involves being brutalized first yourself, and having survived that ordeal, you emerge with this sense of yourself as an elite person who therefore has the right, as a superior being, and now the skills, to turn around and abuse and torture people who come along behind you. And the U.S. has its own methods of training, and its own locations where this happens.

RS: [omission for station break] I’m back after our break with Professor and Doctor Rebecca Gordon. And we were just talking about how we train people to be torturers. And this is fascinating, because if you don’t consider this question, that you’re getting basically good people to do horrible things, you’re missing the whole point. But I just want to say something about the good German. Because the basic appeal of Hitler was the solid–you know, he was going to make Germany great again. And this is, I’m not demonizing Germans here, but Donald Trump’s father was obviously familiar with this in his lineage, in that tradition. And the whole appeal, even though this dictator Hitler was this funny-looking guy, hardly the Aryan model–was to a notion of order. And even in the concentration camps, keeping direct bookkeeping of how many teeth you pulled and gold you found in the teeth, and so forth. But it’s not–manners. They had the manners. And what bothers me about the very simplistic Trumpwashing that we’re going through now, that Trump is uniquely evil–it’s all about manners. He’s crude, he’s boorish, he’s a misogynist, he says these things, he does these things, he grabs people’s private parts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That’s not his crime. His crime is he’s continuing a tradition of bombing people who we have no right to bomb. And so I want to push this a little bit more, the whole question of manners. Because what Nuremberg did is unmask the manners. And this was also true in the Eichmann trial that Hannah Arendt talked about, when she talked about the banality of evil. Evil can be masked by manners. Smile while you learn to kill, right?

RG: That’s exactly right. And I especially know, when you talk about the meticulous records that they kept, this is a hallmark of torture regimes all over the world. This very careful record-keeping, this documentation of the work that’s been done–because there’s no shame about the work. The process of becoming a torturer includes developing a sense of yourself as doing something uniquely courageous, uniquely necessary, a unique sacrifice that you as the torturer, more in sorrow than in anger, are being forced to do by the tremendous evil that confronts you. And so you’re absolutely right that especially among upper-class liberals in the United States, the objection to Trump is his manner, and his manner is crude and obnoxious, as you say. But what he’s really doing is not only continuing to kill people, and in fact increasing the number of drone strikes, for example, over the already great number that the Obama administration–

RS: A man of impeccable manners. Barack Obama. I even feel that way about Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton’s on television, I smile. I like him. He’s warm, he’s encouraging. And then I forget, he’s the guy that ended the welfare system, for example. Yes.

RG: Exactly. Exactly right. And you know, Trump is now with his, I don’t know if you’ve taken a look at his so-called budget, but he’s planning to take away our Medicare and Medicaid, just in case you might have wanted to have healthcare. Obviously, that’s dead on arrival. But nonetheless, the point is that he is masking what he is actually doing by distracting us with this bombastic display. And in fact, one of his officials in the EPA actually recently said exactly that, that they’ve been able to make all these regulatory changes because every time it looks as though the press is going to notice, Trump fires off a tweet, and everybody’s like, ooh, shiny!

RS: This is a really important point. Because if you look at the Nuremberg Trial or you look at the Eichmann trial, these people all hid behind manners. They were well spoken, they were well educated, and they were following a Charlie Chaplinesque figure, a ludicrous figure; Hitler was certainly a, yes, he was a more ludicrous figure than Trump, in terms of manners and style and everything. But his popularity was largely based on being a sort of comic figure, in a way. He inspired a whole nation of logical, scientific, well-educated–probably the best-educated population in the world. And so I’ve had this experience, I’ve talked to people in the business community and they say well, you know, but Trump is good for business. And we did have a mess before, and then look at what’s happened to unemployment, and so forth and so on. And so we are really at the limit of manners as a guide. And that’s really what Nuremberg is about. Nuremberg was unmasking manners. Now, we didn’t continue after that; we had the brief Eichmann trial. But what we didn’t really ever do in this country–and this is why I want people to listen or to read your book, better to read it, although listening is great–we never really took apart the Nazi experience. Because we wanted the ex-Nazis and other Germans to be our allies in the Cold War. So we have never had that investigation of how an incredibly well-educated, Christian, law-and-order nation goes into madness.

RG: Not only that, we never did what the next step was supposed to be, which is establish a venue in which U.S. war crimes could also be examined in World War II. And there were a number of people who developed the Nuremberg principles, and worked on the original trial, who really honestly believed that this would be the prelude to establishing an international court for trying offenses committed during war, and expected that the United States would in fact be held accountable, not only for the firebombing of German cities, but for the destruction of up to 60 Japanese cities which were constructed of wood and paper and reduced to ashes, in a campaign that really very few people in this country even know about. Although Robert McNamara actually describes it in that excellent documentary–

RS: The Fog of War, yeah.

RG: —The Fog of War.

RS: And it’s excellent because you see that McNamara was involved in designing the bombing of Japan and Germany. But also, I mean–like, we talk about Korea. Oh, North Korea, animals, and Kim Il-sung and his progeny–nobody I ever run into knows we leveled every single structure in North Korea during the Korean War. Again, a war that was not needed; it was an attempt to get a Chinese communist who had come to power the year before. I mean, it’s bizarre. Then you look at what we did to North Vietnam, and the carpet bombing, and everything. So this is critical. American exceptionalism–I’ve mentioned this a number of times on this podcast–to my mind, is a really, it’s the most profound problem that American people have to face.

RG: It’s a vicious idea. And it’s been taken up in different ways by both the liberal democratic world, and by the, you know, the hard right in this country. The idea that by definition, the United States can do no wrong, because we are the leader of the so-called free world. Which is a locution I don’t even understand anymore, given that we’re not competing anymore with the unfree communist world that supposedly we were in opposition to. But the idea that–and this was the argument, actually, that the Bush administration made about torture. By definition, the United States is a country that does not torture. Therefore, whatever it is that you are observing, it cannot be torture, because that would be a logical contradiction, because we are the nation that doesn’t do that. And it’s almost impossible to enter into that understanding of the world, because no amount of evidence that you can present to the person who believes that is going to break that worldview. And so American exceptionalism allows us not only to have military bases in over 100 countries around the world; not only to conduct secret wars that the people in this country don’t even know about–we just suddenly woke up and said, oh my gosh, we’re having a war in Somalia! Who knew. And not to mention Yemen–I was very heartened to see that the Senate had actually voted with the House to reprimand the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But leave that aside. This whole idea that we are a unique bearer of human rights and democracy in the world–it’s very hard to break, because it’s a concealed, hermetically sealed worldview that people imbibe in grade school. And they imbibe it as they grow up, and it takes a lot of effort to break through. And one of the sad things that I see, especially with younger people that I’ve worked with in organizations like War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, is that once you’ve broken through, it then becomes very hard to imagine that the United States is not permanently and always going to be the hegemon. It almost, having made the effort and understood the danger the U.S. actually presents to the world, it becomes almost impossible to recognize when the U.S. actually loses one. And I think it’s very important we claim our victories.

RS: Well you know, you hit it clearly with this, the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any serious oppositional role. [With] control of the House now, there should be hearings about what are we doing in these different countries. And instead they’re actually criticizing Trump for being, kind of selling out by getting out of Afghanistan, or not fighting more aggressively in Syria. And we’ve actually sort of lost the peace movement, in a way, is a theme I get back to once in a while here. And we forget, actually, most of the terrible wars since World War II have been fought under democrats, and financed enthusiastically. So I want to get back to basic moral principles, because they don’t mean anything if you’re not consistent. You have to call out people on the left or on the right, you have to call out war crimes, you have to call out the attacks on homosexuals, black people, Jewish people–anybody, any other, and so forth. It’s something that Jesus reminded us of in the tale of the Good Samaritan, if you can believe that Luke is the word of God, and not the others, [Laughter] where the Good Samaritan doesn’t appear. I don’t want to get into your whole Catholic university thing here. But it’s interesting to me, this notion of consistency. Because it’s painful to be consistent. It requires examining the motives of people you voted for. And this was the problem of Germany: people forget Hitler was elected. People forget Germany had all the trappings of a–

RG: Of a democracy.

RS: –of a democracy. And more important, the conceit that somehow education–education, and manners–will prevent genocide is a lie. Maybe it’s time to recognize this whole notion of American greatness is the end of thought; if you are by definition great, there’s nothing to question. And it seems to me that main religions that we’ve had, their one demand that they have in common is you must question not only your nation’s morality, but your own. The devil is in you. We have to struggle with this devil, we have to struggle with these forces. Yet as a nation, we think America the beautiful absolves us all. And that’s what you’re saying in your torture book. That basically, you take these young recruits that have a very limited knowledge of our history, and you convince them that they are the agents, really, of a higher power.

RG: Absolutely right. And in doing that, you pervert the very virtues that we say the United States is supposed to represent. The virtue of courage, for example, becomes the courage to suppress your squeamishness at causing pain to another human being. And justice becomes the idea that you give the punishment first and the trial later, if ever. Right? And this is exactly what we see in the way our detainees have been treated. And honestly, another locus of this that we don’t often recognize is what goes on on the U.S. soil prisons and jails in this country, where we have 2.2 million people locked up in cages, and where torture is a regular feature of prison life. It’s no accident that the reservists who were downstairs at Abu Ghraib, they were from West Virginia, and most of them in their civilian life were prison guards. They were corrections officers. And there’s a famous email that one of the ringleaders, Charles Graner, sent home which said: The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me loves to see a grown man piss himself. And that is exactly the attitude of the people who are caging up 2.2 [million] largely, vastly disproportionately, black and Latino, Latinx, people in this country today. And so torture actually is a red thread that runs through the entire history of the United States, beginning with the Native American population. Slavery itself would not have been as successful as it was at allowing the amassing of capital–which is, you know if you’re a good Marxist, the congealed labor of these unpaid, captive people, who when they got to the United States, or what was not even yet the United States, would not work unless, the farmers figured out, they were caused physical pain. And it was the use, the concerted, intentional, well-documented use of physical pain in the cotton fields a century later that forced people to develop a physical technology of their bodies that allowed them, in the course of 40 years, to multiply by eight times the amount of cotton a human being could pick in a day, because the alternative was to have the skin taken off your back with a whip.

RS: You know, increasingly in my life I have been a bad Marxist. And I’ve embraced some truths that seemed to come out of these religions that, growing up, really frightened me or were intimidating, and also were on the wrong side. But let’s take it back to the pope, let’s take it back to the Jesuit school, University of San Francisco, where you teach. There’s a wisdom that I daresay Karl Marx did not sufficiently embrace. It is that we all have a capacity for evil. That we have virtue; we care, we bring children into this world, we nurture them, we care about others, we can cry over a refugee. On the other hand, the 2.2 million–I’ve been on Death Row quite recently interviewing Kevin Cooper, who I believe is an innocent man. And fortunately, the governor of California has suspended the death penalty, and I think Gavin Newsom deserves great credit for his courage. But–and it is a cage, and we don’t care; we don’t care about these people. And we don’t care about the people we bomb, and we don’t care–they’re expendable, they’re throwaway people. You want them out of sight, out of mind. It’s very deliberate. And the problem is, if Marxism were accurate [Laughter]–I don’t know, not too many people care, anyway, but since the two of us are talking about it–you know, if it was just the economic motive, we’d probably do better. The libertarians, for instance–to the degree that they’re right, they’re right, yes. But the wars don’t make sense. And growing that cotton that way didn’t ultimately make sense. And slavery didn’t make sense. Except–except if we have a barbaric part of our nature, if we have a need to exploit others. Not just for economic reasons; if power corrupts. And this, not to quote Marx, but to quote Jefferson or Washington, these people who came to power in this great experiment of ours, with all its contradictions–I repeat this ad nauseum on these podcasts. All their, yes, white, male, I got it, I got it, slave owners, the whole thing–they were on to a wisdom about their own corruption. And the reason we have the First Amendment, the reason we have all the amendments, the reason we have separation of powers, is that power corrupts.

RG: Absolutely.

RS: And what comes through in these torture stories and so forth–I talked, I have one student, just like you, I’ve had students go off to these wars. I had one who ended up at Abu Ghraib and at Guantanamo, a reserve officer. He was outside with the families. I’m not going to compromise his privacy. But he told me what shook him up was he was being told all these things about the people inside the jail, but his job was to herd the families that were trying to visit. And he could not deny that there was some kind of humanity going on with these people inside, or why would all these people care so much about them. And I think we need to be reminded of our own capacity for evil. I think that’s what Nuremberg was about, that the people who commit evil don’t present as evil and are not inherently more evil than we are.

RG: Exactly.

RS: And we have to struggle with this. And the good liberals who accommodate this, and say well, you know, Barack Obama had to do this with the drones, and governor so-and-so had to kill these people even though he didn’t believe in the death penalty–we have to challenge that. Because that is the fount of evil.

RG: So, my favorite virtue, Aristotle calls it phronesis, or practical wisdom. St. Thomas Aquinas calls it prudentia, prudence. But what it really is, is that capacity of the mind that allows you to actually understand the moral questions that are in front of you. And not to be fooled by the fog of American exceptionalism, by the distraction of a Trumpian tweet, but to be able to actually examine and really see, in this case, the effects of U.S. policy on actual human beings around the world. And this requires a kind of courage to be willing to accept that your own self-understanding, and the understanding of your people, your country, might be wrong. But it also requires a willingness to look, to actually see and examine what’s in front of you. And if there’s one virtue I would like to see developed, and that I try to develop in my own students, it’s this virtue of practical wisdom, where you actually are responsible for what the effects of your actions can reasonably be foreseen to be. And this is something that we in the United States really don’t have. It’s trained out of us, we don’t have it. And part of it, yes, is that capacity to understand that the ability to do evil things exists in all of us, and it’s also to understand that when you multiply that capacity by the technological and economic power that a country like the United States has, the results–well, the results could be the end of human society, because of climate change. I mean, the results are so terrible, and we need to be able to see it. Because we can’t stop it if we can’t understand it, we can’t diagnose it. And I worry that we’re not going to be able to.

RS: If you could learn about Aristotle in this way we just did for a few minutes, and why some of these older thinkers matter, that was it. And I do want to say, we’ve smashed America a little bit here. And I think the great thing about America is that it could produce generals like George Washington, who warned us about the impostures of pretended patriotism; generals like Dwight Eisenhower, who warned us about the military-industrial complex; and a guy named Major Danny Sjursen, who I’ve had on this podcast, who writes for Truthdig, who now comes out of the military and tells us that the barbarism in Iraq and Afghanistan is comparable to these dangers that were warned against. So that’s Rebecca Gordon. She teaches at the University of San Francisco. Her books are Mainstreaming Torture and American Nuremberg. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. And we couldn’t have done this broadcast without the able assistance of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, where [name unclear] presided over these proceedings. Thank you very much.

RG: Thank you, it was a pleasure.

 

 

What’s in the Mueller Report?

The following is an adapted excerpt from “The Mueller Papers: Compiled by Strong Arm Press with an Introduction by Ryan Grim.”

It was the firing heard round the world. With one move, on the advice of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Donald Trump fired James Comey on May 9, 2017. It would change the course of the Trump presidency.

Comey, delivering a speech in California, learned of his termination when it flashed across cable news. Trump, under pressure to explain his decision, blamed a Justice Department official named Rod Rosenstein, a man Trump himself had appointed to his position. In explaining the firing, Trump released a memo Rosenstein had written, at Trump’s request, that listed Comey’s failures over the years.

It was Trump’s second impulsive move, and it may have been his most consequential. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, much to Trump’s dismay, had recused himself from oversight of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That meant the authority fell to Rosenstein, the next-highest ranking official in the Department of Justice. Infuriated by Trump’s attempt to pin the blame for Comey’s firing on him, Rosenstein used the power he had at his unilateral disposal to do the one thing that could cause Trump more damage than anything else: He created the position of Special Counsel, and filled it with former FBI director Robert Mueller.

“Bob Mueller is one of the country’s great, great pros,” Comey said during his 2017 Senate testimony.

The product of Mueller’s year and a half of investigation is now complete and was delivered Friday to the Department of Justice. It may never be made public, but the investigation has already produced some of the most extraordinary documents made public by a prosecutor in the United States, opening a rare window into the world of big money, high-stakes politics and foreign lobbying, a world that normally operates in dim Georgetown restaurants or in hotel bars in exotic locales.

Those documents are to be found in Mueller’s legal filings. “Mueller has spoken loudly, if indirectly, in court — indictment by indictment, guilty plea by guilty plea. In doing so, he tracked an elaborate Russian operation that injected chaos into a U.S. presidential election and tried to help Trump win the White House. He followed a GOP campaign that embraced the Kremlin’s help and championed stolen material to hurt a political foe. And ultimately, he revealed layers of lies, deception, self-enrichment and hubris that followed. Woven through thousands of court papers, the special counsel has made his public report,” wrote Chad Day and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press, after an exhaustive review of his filings.

President Trump repeatedly dubbed the Mueller probe a “Witch Hunt” propelled forward by a “Fake News Media” and a Deep State hellbent on undermining his administration. Readers can decide for themselves how legitimate the inquiry was.

As it relates to the Trump presidency specifically, the mandate of the investigation related to whether he or senior members of his campaign actively colluded with the Russian government’s attempts to undermine Hillary Clinton, and whether Trump or his associates tried to cover up such activity and obstruct the investigation into it. If they did, what did they have to gain from it? No charges have been filed against anyone in the Trump orbit for colluding with Russian government officials.

Of more general importance is the integrity of our elections themselves. The peaceful transfer of power, an underappreciated innovation of our politics, rests on faith in the fairness of democracy and of our elections. Mueller’s filings, if heeded by lawmakers typically bored by the issue of election security, may be the first step toward earning back that trust.

This article was produced by the  Independent Media Institute .

White Nationalism’s Most Powerful Accelerant

This article has been adapted from an essay originally published on Substack .

Some years ago, the summer after college, I had a job at a small airport shuttling rental cars. One of my coworkers was a guy my age with whom I was friendly. He was modest and nice, and I enjoyed processing cars with him. One morning, we were the first to our garage, and with nothing else to do, he asked if I had seen any videos about the Amero, the currency that would replace the dollar once America was united with Canada and Mexico as part of a plot by the New World Order, or NWO.

That was in 2009, but it might as well have been a century ago. We’ve sunk much lower since then, when I witnessed a seemingly normal, intelligent person seduced by a far-right conspiracy theory, circulated by the kind of lunatics who claimed the U.N. was invading and Obama was a secret Muslim. As my experience at the garage hinted, the internet is now the world’s largest subduction zone, where an endless column of young, mostly white, males is overtaken and crushed by the unstoppable force of far-right extremism. We as a society are going to be living with the effects of this radicalization for the rest of our lives.

***

The subject of far-right radicalization was something I was thinking about a lot last week. Last Tuesday, I published an essay about how young white men were becoming Nazi terrorists through YouTube videos and social networks, in a process that took them deeper and deeper into an abyss of radical racial hatred. That following Friday, a white supremacist massacred 50 Muslims and wounded 50 more at a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The killer bade farewell to his fellow racists on gutter site 8chan, disseminating his inane “manifesto” via Twitter before livestreaming the atrocity on Facebook, via head-mounted camera.

Surely police analysis will reveal more in the weeks to come as detectives retrace the shooter’s descent into terrorism, but in a sense, it remains unnecessary; we do not need to learn any more of the particulars to know all we need to know. There are no answers to be found in a painstaking examination of one racist killer’s life story that could not already be surmised. Even his name is irrelevant.

All that matters is that this mass murderer, like so many who have preceded him of late, is a young man moved to violence by an international ideology of fascism—exhilarating, purpose-driven, meaningful. Ultimately, intoxicating. This ideology has entered the mainstream over the last decade to a degree unseen in my lifetime, finding adherents at the highest levels of power around the world. And the primary accelerant fueling this inferno is the internet.

Like razor-sharp boomerangs, the glories of Silicon Valley have turned in mid-air and shot backward, slicing through us and hurtling into a dark past. Violent misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, gay-bashing, anti-black racism—you name it, you can find it, in ever more plentiful amounts online. The biggest tech platforms you can name—Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit—serve up this kind of poison on an industrial scale, mushrooming and expanding at a rate that makes catching up with the spread almost impossible. Worst of all, those consuming this hatred, which has exploded into an epidemic over the past ten years, are still mostly boys.

The influencer economy recognizes that the old ways of advertising are not effective in reaching younger people. Today, affinities are based on the perceived authenticity of the speaker. And when these new, trusted internet icons preach far-right dogma, the results are predictably fatal. As put in a 2018 report by the Data & Society Research Institute, it is these “polished, well-lit microcelebrities” and the “captivating videos” they produce that radicalize viewers:

Content creators … claim to provide an alternative media source for news and political commentary. They function as political influencers who adopt the techniques of brand influencers to build audiences and “sell” them on far-right ideology. … Online celebrities can often convey deceptively subversive and powerful messages. Indeed, one reason YouTube is so effective for circulating political ideas is because it is often ignored or underestimated …”

Plugged into a technological ecosystem where it is possible to infinitely circle the drain, never hearing a word contrary to those of the charlatans, quacks and bigots promoted therein, radicalization is not some byproduct; it is the product.

The problem for these budding white nationalists is that their paths grow increasingly unsatisfying, even as their beliefs grow more extreme. True believers will never be truly fulfilled, because the gulf between the far right’s promises and what it actually delivers is too vast. And this leads to shame.

If the dissonance between fantasy and reality penetrates the radicalized Nazi’s occluded field of vision, he can only feel embarrassed at not living up to whatever Aryan ideal he’s supposed to embody. And if, as psychiatrist James Gilligan writes, “All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem,” it is not hard to see how the ultimate destination for some of these men will be an attempt at redemption via carnage.

Charlottesville ended with a pudgy white supremacist driving a car into a crowd. Dylann Roof, who GQ’s Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah described as “a child both of the white-supremacist Zeitgeist of the internet and of his larger environment” in the Cotton Belt, came to see massacring old women in a historic black church as an act of self-defense. Robert Bowers made one final post on the white supremacist social network Gab before opening fire on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, concluding, “Screw the optics, I’m going in.”

All of these men were radicalized on the internet.

***

What are we to do in such a state of chaos?

For a start, from the grassroots up, it is necessary to expose what the far-right and their sycophants actually believe as they amplify their message across this new network of communication. Exposing how they really think and talk has been the mission of a noble band of activists and educators, as seen in the recent demolition of the white power hate group Identity Evropa. This effort needs to extend to those “alt-lite” figures who successfully pass themselves off as less extreme, such as popular YouTube personalities Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin. Working as pilot fish for more extreme figures, their efforts, in concord with the YouTube algorithm, rapidly draw viewers toward more extreme fare. And there’s seemingly nothing they fear more than demonetization, deplatforming and an overnight plunge back into obscurity, à la Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center demonstrated through its successful bankrupting of the Aryan nations in the 1990s, the most effective means of ensuring the success of anti-fascist activists is via financial pressure. Deprived of any safe haven from which they can make money, such figureheads for the movement will fade away. Deprived of the oxygen currently offered by Big Tech and payment processors, the futures of Yiannopoulos auctioning off his portraits and Richard Spencer having his credit card rejected will be theirs, too.

Counterprogramming is possible, too. The most hardcore adherents to such ideologies are not beyond hope, given countervailing evidence. YouTube vlogger Natalie Wynn’s “Contrapoints” is a remarkably produced series that has helped deradicalize a number of nascent fascists, while former extremists such as Christian Picciolini or Arno Michaelis do important work in helping white nationalists exit the vicious cycle. If people can be radicalized simply by immersing themselves in the internet cesspool, then at least some of them can be deradicalized by leaving such unhealthy environs.

The greater problem remains structural, far bigger than the fate of any individual sleaze monger. Educating those susceptible to their messaging as to why these voices are so toxic will be a harder struggle, given the sheer scale Big Tech offers. It will not be easy to do so without meaningful action by the tech industry, which only now seems to be somewhat recognizing that they have become to America today what sidewalk display cases were to Nazi Germany. Whether the U.S. political system is up to the challenge is highly dubious, but I am heartened by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden’s immediate and tenacious workto stop the spread of the Christchurch shooter’s video and extract answers from Facebook.

I see no contradiction between justice being served against the worst progenitors of right-wing extremism and empathy being exercised for the souls of those seduced. If far-right extremism is but a symptom of a national sickness, then the source of those issues is still upstream from the dead end of such violent hatred. And that’s our responsibility to combat—wherever and whenever we encounter it.