Chris Hedges's Blog, page 567

Qatar Crisis Widens Fissures Among U.S. Allies

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—At a time when the United States hopes to exert maximum pressure on Iran, a regional bloc created by Gulf Arab countries to counter Tehran looks increasingly more divided ahead of the anniversary of the diplomatic crisis in Qatar.

The sheer lack of cooperation by the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council already has seen the U.S. limit some military exercises and send Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the region to urge allies to end the boycott of Qatar, a tiny, gas-rich nation.

The council consists of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. On June 5 last year, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with Egypt, cut ties to Qatar, citing its close links with Iran and what they said was Qatar’s support for extremist groups in the region.

They launched the economic boycott, stopping Qatar Airways flights from using their airspace, closing off the country’s sole land border with Saudi Arabia and blocking its ships from using their ports.

Amid the dispute, Qatar restored full diplomatic ties to Iran. And just like Iran after the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear deal with Tehran, Qatar appears to have no interest in ceding any ground, having already decried the demands as an affront to its sovereignty.

Ahead of the anniversary, Qatar’s Government Communication Office began sending messages out with the hashtags “movingforward” and “Qatarstronger.”

That leaves the Gulf Cooperation Council adrift at a time of regional tension.

The GCC long has been viewed as a regional counterweight to Iran and crucial for the U.S. military. Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. Kuwait is home to U.S. Army Central. UAE military bases host American fighter jets, drones and soldiers, while Dubai’s Jebel Ali port is the Navy’s busiest foreign port of call. Qatar’s massive al-Udeid Air Base holds the forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command.

While hosting no troops, Oman does allow U.S. forces access to its bases and serves as a crucial go-between for U.S. and Western diplomats and Iran. Saudi Arabia also relies on U.S. military support for its ongoing war in Yemen against Shiite rebels there.

The Qatar dispute has seen a public reordering of the GCC.

Saudi Arabia and the neighboring UAE have taken on an increasingly neoconservative foreign policy, as seen in their military intervention in Yemen. Ties between Abu Dhabi’s powerful crown prince, 57-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Saudi Arabia’s assertive 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have grown closer. Bahrain, long dependent on Saudi money to aid its troubled economy, cast its lot with the kingdom and the UAE.

Kuwait, ruled by 88-year-old Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, has sought to mediate the dispute. It hosted a GCC summit in December that it hoped would bring the bloc together. Instead, it only saw the UAE and Saudi Arabia upstage it by announcing its own closer union.

For Oman and its 77-year-old ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the country has sought to maintain its own separate diplomatic identity from the larger GCC. The sultanate’s ports also have become a crucial lifeline to Qatar.

Both Kuwait and Oman feel the pressure of the diplomatic dispute. The two countries have yet to prepare for the coming generational leadership shifts that await them. There is no clear successor to Sultan Qaboos, while an internal dispute among the branches of Kuwait’s ruling family remains likely.

The two also undoubtedly have seen the criticism by Saudi and Emirati media of Qatar’s ruling emir, 38-year-old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, which has included promoting exiled Qataris as possible leaders for the country. Open criticism of ruling families is extremely rare among Gulf Arab nations, even during border disputes in the 1990s that saw some skirmishes.

Threats of military action also circled Qatar in the early days of the crisis. The troops and equipment of Saudi Arabia and the UAE dwarf those of Kuwait, Oman and Qatar’s armed forces.

Gulf Arab nations have relied on U.S. military power as a safety net since President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 pledge to use force to defend its interests in the Persian Gulf. The aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War cemented that, as has America’s reliance on Gulf bases for its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, it remains unclear what options the U.S. would have in a confrontation between Gulf Arab nations themselves, although one does not look imminent.

Gulf states also have grown increasingly wary of President Donald Trump. He initially came out in support of the nations boycotting Qatar, only later to back off. Investigations into Trump also have touched the UAE and Qatar, while nations involved in the dispute have spent millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists and influence peddlers.

For now, the crisis has improved ties between Qatar and Iran. The Islamic Republic immediately opened its airspace to Qatar Airways after the boycotting nations blocked its routes, as well as sent food and other goods into the capital of Doha. In return, Qatar has restored full diplomatic relations with Iran, with which it shares a massive offshore natural gas field.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — Jon Gambrell, the acting Gulf news director for The Associated Press, has reported from each of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and other locations across the world since joining the AP in 2006. Follow him on Twitter at @jongambrellAP. His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz.

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Scores of Immigrants Dead After Boat Sinks Off Tunisia

MADRID—A boat carrying migrants toward Europe sank off the coast of Tunisia and at least 46 people drowned, though dozens more could be missing, the North African nation’s defense ministry said Sunday.

The ministry said 68 people were rescued overnight after the boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea near Kerkennah island, off Tunisia’s eastern coast. Authorities said the vessel was believed to have been carrying about 180 passengers.

Rachid Bouhoula, the defense ministry press officer, said a rescue and recovery operation continued in the waters around the island.

The ministry said earlier that those rescued included 61 Tunisians and seven people from other countries. In recent months, Tunisia increasingly has become a point of departure for Europe-bound migrants fleeing poverty and conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.

Earlier Sunday, Turkish officials reported that nine migrants, including six children, drowned when a boat capsized in the eastern Mediterranean near the town of Demre in the southern province of Antalya. Turkey’s coast guard rescued four others and a fifth migrant was saved by a passing fishing vessel. The migrants’ nationalities have not been identified.

At the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, more than 857,000 people reached Greece from Turkey. A 2016 deal between Turkey and the European Union has dramatically reduced the numbers of migrants coming into Greece.

Spain’s maritime rescue service announced Sunday that it had rescued a total of 240 people trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa over the weekend, and one person had apparently drowned. It said the migrants were in 11 small boats attempting the perilous crossing from Africa to Spain.

The U.N. says at least 660 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean so far this year. Through the first four months of 2018, a total of 22,439 migrants reached European shores, with 4,409 of them arriving in Spain.

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Volcanic Eruption Kills at Least 25 in Guatemala

EL RODEO, Guatemala—the Latest on the deadly volcano eruption in Guatemala (all times local):

10:40 p.m.

Authorities in Guatemala say 18 more people have been confirmed killed by a volcanic eruption, raising the death toll to 25.

Disaster agency spokesman David de Leon said late Sunday the bodies were found in the community of San Miguel Los Lotes. Seven deaths were confirmed previously.

Rescuers have struggled to reach rural residents cut off by the eruption, which has also injured at least 20. Authorities have been unable to account for an undetermined number of people and say they fear the death toll could rise.

The Volcan de Fuego, or “volcano of fire,” exploded in a hail of ash and molten rock shortly before noon Sunday, blanketing nearby villages in heavy ash. Then it began sending lava flows down the mountain’s flank and across homes and roads around 4 p.m.

Its Agenda Stymied, the House Tea Party Fades

WASHINGTON—The Republican newcomers stunned Washington back in 2010 when they seized the House majority with bold promises to cut taxes and spending and to roll back what many viewed as Barack Obama’s presidential overreach.

But don’t call them tea party Republicans any more.

Eight years later, the House Tea Party Caucus is long gone. So, too, are almost half the 87 new House Republicans elected in the biggest GOP wave since the 1920s.

Some, including current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, joined the executive branch. Others slipped back to private life. Several are senators.

Now, with control of the House again at stake this fall and just three dozen of them seeking re-election, the tea party revolt shows the limits of riding a campaign wave into the reality of governing.

Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., who was president of that freshman class, objects to the tea party brand that he says was slapped on the group by the media and the Obama administration. It’s a label some lawmakers now would rather forget.

“We weren’t who you all said we were,” Scott said.

He prefers to call it the class of “small-business owners” or those who wanted to “stop the growth of the federal government.” Despite all those yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and anti-Obama health law rallies, Scott said the new Republican lawmakers wanted to work with the president, if only Obama would have engaged them. “We didn’t come to take over the country,” he said.

Yet change Washington they did, with a hard-charging, often unruly governing style that bucked convention, toppled GOP leaders and in many ways set the stage for the rise of Donald Trump.

By some measures, the tea party Republicans have been successful. The “Pledge to America,” a 21-page manifesto drafted by House Republican leadership, outlined the promises. Among them: “stop out of control spending,” ”reform Congress” and “end economic uncertainty.”

They forced Congress into making drastic spending cuts, in part by threatening to default on the nation’s debt, turning a once-routine vote to raise the U.S. borrowing limit into a cudgel during the annual budget fights.

Republicans halted environmental, consumer and workplace protection rules, and that rollback continues today.

Perhaps most notably, the GOP majority passed $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that Trump signed into law, delivering on the tea party slogan penned on so many protest signs: “Taxed Enough Already.”

But former Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said the “most egregious failure” was the GOP’s inability to undo the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

Huelskamp said the class never really stuck together. When he arrived that first week in Washington in January 2011, he was stunned to find the leadership slate already set with then-Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, as speaker-in-waiting, facing little resistance.

“That was a sign: The establishment in Washington was happy to have our votes, but not to follow our agenda,” said Huelskamp, who lost a primary election in 2016 to a political newcomer and now runs the conservative Heartland Institute. It was “just a clear misunderstanding of what the people wanted.”

Over time, budget deals were struck with Democrats, boosting spending back to almost what it was before the revolt. Combined with the tax package, the GOP-led Congress is on track to push annual deficits near $1 trillion next year, as high as during the early years of the Obama administration when the government struggled with a deep recession.

Maya MacGuineas, president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Republicans talked a good game promising to balance the budget, but with control of Congress — and now the White House — they failed to tackle the tough tax-and-spending challenges needed to get there.

“That’s a whole lot of talk and zero follow through,” she said.

Other proposals to improve transparency in government — a pledge to “read the bill” and post legislation three days before votes — remain works in progress. House bills are typically made public, but sometimes just before midnight to conform with the three-day rule.

Frustrations within the ranks grew, and the new class splintered. Not all of them had been favorites of their local tea party groups. Some joined other conservatives to form the House Freedom Caucus, which nudged Boehner to early retirement in 2015.

Former Florida Rep. Allen West, among the more prominent class members who lost re-election and is now a Fox News contributor living in Texas, said the challenge for House Republicans heading into the fall election is, “Who are they? What do they stand for?”

House Republicans are wrestling with a midterm message at a pivotal moment for a party that Boehner says no longer exists.

“There is no Republican Party. There’s Trump’s party,” Boehner said at a recent policy conference in Michigan.

Boehner’s successor as speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., also is stepping aside. He was a conservative up-and-comer long before the tea party, but has run into many of the same challenges Boehner faced in managing a fractured majority. He will retire after this term.

In fact, there are an unusually high number of House Republicans retiring this year, including nearly a dozen from the tea party class. Several are running to be governors or senators, though some have already lost in primaries. Others, including Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., another rising star, are simply moving on. Some resigned this year amid ethics scandals.

Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, says every movement “goes through phases.” As the group looks to elect the next “Tea Party 100” members of the House, it’s seeking “tested and proven” candidates beyond the “citizen legislators” who powered the early days.

Another 2010 leader, South Carolina’s Tim Scott, now a senator, says he has no problem with the tea party label that’s now etched in history.

But he reminds his colleagues as they campaign that to keep the majority they must also eventually govern and that “promises made should be promises kept.”

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Many With Breast Cancer Don’t Need Chemo, Major Study Finds

CHICAGO—Most women with the most common form of early-stage breast cancer can safely skip chemotherapy without hurting their chances of beating the disease, doctors are reporting from a landmark study that used genetic testing to gauge each patient’s risk.

The study is the largest ever done of breast cancer treatment, and the results are expected to spare up to 70,000 patients a year in the United States and many more elsewhere the ordeal and expense of these drugs.

“The impact is tremendous,” said the study leader, Dr. Joseph Sparano of Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Most women in this situation don’t need treatment beyond surgery and hormone therapy, he said.

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, some foundations and proceeds from the U.S. breast cancer postage stamp. Results were discussed Sunday at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago and published by the New England Journal of Medicine. Some study leaders consult for breast cancer drugmakers or for the company that makes the gene test.

Moving Away From Chemo

Cancer care has been evolving away from chemotherapy — older drugs with harsh side effects — in favor of gene-targeting therapies, hormone blockers and immune system treatments. When chemo is used now, it’s sometimes for shorter periods or lower doses than it once was.

For example, another study at the conference found that Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda worked better than chemo as initial treatment for most people with the most common type of lung cancer, and with far fewer side effects.

The breast cancer study focused on cases where chemo’s value increasingly is in doubt: women with early-stage disease that has not spread to lymph nodes, is hormone-positive (meaning its growth is fueled by estrogen or progesterone) and is not the type that the drug Herceptin targets.

The usual treatment is surgery followed by years of a hormone-blocking drug. But many women also are urged to have chemo to help kill any stray cancer cells. Doctors know that most don’t need it, but evidence is thin on who can forgo it.

The study gave 10,273 patients a test called Oncotype DX, which uses a biopsy sample to measure the activity of genes involved in cell growth and response to hormone therapy, to estimate the risk that a cancer will recur.

What the Study Found

About 17 percent of women had high-risk scores and were advised to have chemo. The 16 percent with low-risk scores now know they can skip chemo, based on earlier results from this study.

The new results are on the 67 percent of women at intermediate risk. All had surgery and hormone therapy, and half also got chemo.

After nine years, 94 percent of both groups were still alive, and about 84 percent were alive without signs of cancer, so adding chemo made no difference.

Certain women 50 or younger did benefit from chemo; slightly fewer cases of cancer spreading far beyond the breast occurred among some of them given chemo, depending on their risk scores on the gene test.

Will People Trust the Results?

All women like those in the study should get gene testing to guide their care, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the oncology society. Oncotype DX costs around $4,000, which Medicare and many insurers cover. Similar tests including one called MammaPrint also are widely used.

Testing solved a big problem of figuring out who needs chemo, said Dr. Harold Burstein of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Many women think “if I don’t get chemotherapy I’m going to die, and if I get chemo I’m going to be cured,” but the results show there’s a sliding scale of benefit and sometimes none, he said.

Dr. Lisa Carey, a breast specialist at the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, said she would be very comfortable advising patients to skip chemo if they were like those in the study who did not benefit from it.

Dr. Jennifer Litton at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, agreed, but said: “Risk to one person is not the same thing as risk to another. There are some people who say, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m never going to do chemo,'” and won’t even have the gene test, she said. Others want chemo for even the smallest chance of benefit.

Adine Usher, 78, who lives in Hartsdale, New York, joined the study 10 years ago at Montefiore and was randomly assigned to the group given chemo.

“I was a little relieved. I sort of viewed chemo as extra insurance,” she said. The treatments “weren’t pleasant,” she concedes. Her hair fell out, she developed an infection and was hospitalized for a low white blood count, “but it was over fairly quickly and I’m really glad I had it.”

If doctors had recommended she skip chemo based on the gene test, “I would have accepted that,” she said. “I’m a firm believer in medical research.”

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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The Second Sight of W.E.B. Du Bois

Chris Hedges gave this talk Friday at the Left Forum in New York City.

W.E.B. Du Bois, more than any intellectual this nation produced in the first half of the 20th century, explained America to itself. He did this not only through what he called the “color line” but by exposing the intertwining of empire, capitalism and white supremacy. He deftly fused academic disciplines. He possessed unwavering integrity, a deep commitment to the truth, and the courage to speak it. That he was brilliant and a radical was bad enough. That he was brilliant, radical and black terrified the ruling elites. He was swiftly blacklisted, denied the professorships and public platforms that went to those who were more obsequious and compliant. Du Bois had very few intellectual rivals—John Dewey perhaps being one, but Dewey failed, like nearly all white intellectuals, to grasp the innate violence and savagery of the American character and how it was given its natural expression in empire.

Regeneration and purification through violence is the credo of the American empire. D.H. Lawrence, like Du Bois, saw it, and said, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” The pillars of American capitalism are genocide and slavery. America was not blessed by God. It was blessed, if that is the right word, by producing the most efficient killing machines and trained killers on the planet. It unleashed industrial violence on its enemies abroad and empowered armed white vigilante groups and gun thugs—the slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues (the armed wing of the Democratic Party), the Baldwin Felts and Pinkertons—to perpetrate a domestic reign of terror against blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers. The ideological descendants of these killers have mutated into white hate groups and militarized law enforcement that terrorize immigrants and undocumented workers, Muslims and people of color trapped in our internal colonies. This bloody visage is the true face of America.

“Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is,” Du Bois wrote. “We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot.”

Du Bois warned that in times of widespread unrest, this indiscriminate violence, familiar to poor people of color and those we subjugate abroad today in the Middle East, becomes the primary mechanism for internal social control. As the empire disintegrates under unfettered corporate capitalism, futile and costly military adventurism, political stagnation and despotism, we will learn the truth Du Bois elucidated.

Du Bois, early in his career and already recognized as one of the foremost sociologists in the country, attacked Booker T. Washington’s odious accommodation with the white segregationists in the South and industrial elites in the North. He derided Washington’s advocacy of vocational training for blacks at the expense of intellectual pursuits. The white capitalist Molochs, who funded and promoted Washington and his collaborationist scheme to train blacks to take their spots on the lowest rung of industrial society, turned on Du Bois with a vengeance. The underclass, then and now, was to be taught what to think, not how to think. They would be endowed with just enough numerical literacy to serve as serfs in the capitalist system. The capitalists were determined to maintain what Du Bois called “enforced ignorance,” an enforced ignorance now being visited on a dispossessed working class with the degrading of public education, funding of vocational charter schools, and withering away of the humanities.

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” he warned, an eerie forecast of the age of Trump.

He would always remain a double outsider. And this status as an outsider, coupled with his prodigious intellectual gifts and uncompromising honesty, allowed him to expose the hypocrisy of the country’s most revered institutions and beliefs.

“The history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races,” he wrote, “and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history.”

Du Bois was amazingly prolific. He authored 16 seminal texts of sociology, history, politics and race relations including “The Philadelphia Negro,” his revolutionary study that established the field of urban sociology; “Souls of Black Folk” that laid the foundations for modern African-American literature and history; and his 1935 classic, “Reconstruction,” that portrayed American democracy through the eyes of disenfranchised Southern blacks. He was the editor from 1910 to 1934 of Crisis, one of the country’s leading intellectual and civil rights journal. Cornel West calls him the “American Gibbon,” after the British historian Edward Gibbon, who chronicled the fall of the Roman Empire and used it as a warning to all empires.

But I want to begin today by looking at one of his often overlooked essays, “The Souls of White Folk,” from his book “Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil.” He wrote this essay in 1920. White Europeans and Americans were struggling to cope with the suicidal slaughter and barbarity of World War I. Yet, as Du Bois pointed out, none of this savagery was a surprise to blacks in the United States or the victims of colonialism—10 to 12 million blacks died under the brutal colonial rule of the Belgian King Leopold in the Congo.

It was Belgium, not the Congo, however, that was held up as the victim of horrible atrocities due to German occupation after the war. “Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo?” Du Bois asked. Racism, he saw, was not only endemic to capitalism and imperialism but deformed historical narratives, the stories that got told and those that did not. In the United States, the year before the essay was published, 66 black men and women, mostly in the rural South, were lynched. Another 250 died in urban riots, usually instigated by white vigilante mobs, in the North and in the Arkansas Delta. They could have told you, if they were asked, what America was.

“As we saw the dead dimly through the rifts of battle smoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture,” Du Bois wrote in the essay.

Du Bois attended the Versailles Conference that imposed punitive reparations on Germany, crippling its economy and setting the stage for fascism. But to Du Bois the decision by the victorious European powers to blithely carve up Africa, Indochina and the Middle East in open disregard for those who lived there was far more criminal. Self-determination, he saw, was only for white Europeans and Euro-Americans. He would help convene a Pan-African Congress to protest the renewed subjugation of people of color. The war, Du Bois argued, had nothing to do with democracy and freedom. It was a struggle between imperial powers for the ability to plunder the “dark world’s wealth and toil,” which is also, of course, what our wars in the Middle East are about.

Du Bois knew, like Karl Marx, whom he greatly admired, that the market economy was designed to make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. The idea that a class of black capitalists and entrepreneurs, or black politicians such as Barack Obama, would somehow rectify social and racial inequality within capitalism was absurd. These tokens would serve the capitalist and imperialist system, which, he said, had to be overthrown and replaced with socialism.

Outcasts are gifted, Du Bois wrote, with a “second-sight” or what he called a “double-consciousness.” It was, he wrote in “The Souls of Black Folk,” the sensation “of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” This gives to outcasts, as it did to many Jewish intellectuals in Nazi Germany, the ability to see behind what Du Bois called the veil. This sight is imperative not only for the outcasts, but for the nation. Those blinded by privilege and the myth of whiteness cannot fathom reality, or understand themselves, without these outcasts. The more the voices of these outcasts are shut out, the more collective insanity grips the country. By silencing the voices of the oppressed, we ensure our own oppression.

“I have been in the world,” Du Bois said, “but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways.”

The endemic violence that plagues the country stuns many white elites, but this violence is a daily reality to Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and, of course, poor Americans of color.

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Du Bois asked. “Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

“It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time,” he wrote. “No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike—rather a great religion, a world-war cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts.”

Du Bois saw redemption, certainly at the end of his life, not within the bowels of the empire but in liberation movements outside the empire struggling for freedom. He was arrested for “subversive” activities in 1951 and had his passport revoked for years. His books were removed from library shelves and eliminated from course curriculums. He remained steadfastly defiant. On Dec. 1, 1961, he formally joined the Communist Party. Soon after he left the United States to spend the rest of his life in Ghana.

Du Bois had a particular characteristic I especially admire. He was rooted in the reality of those he wrote about. He listened. He methodically interviewed poor blacks, whether in “The Souls of Black Folk” or “The Philadelphia Negro,” where historian Herbert Aptheker has estimated that Du Bois spent some 835 hours interviewing some 2,500 households. This gave his work a reportorial authenticity and freshness that eluded most other sociologists and philosophers who pondered the great questions ensconced in their academic enclaves.

There comes a time, Du Bois wrote, when the oppressed erupt in paroxysms of rage, much like jihadists in the Middle East. Those who never took the time to investigate the long, slow drip of collective humiliation and suffering are shocked. The rage, because it appears to have no context or rationality, is seen as incomprehensible, the product of racial or religious mutations. We see this with the Israeli reaction to the nonviolent protests in Gaza. The press, little more than courtiers to the elites, dutifully certifies the rage as incomprehensible. Because it is incomprehensible it must be violently crushed. Du Bois writes:

It is difficult to let others see the full psychological meaning of caste segregation. It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development. … It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. They get excited; they talk louder; they gesticulate. … They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may actually seem funny to those outside looking in. They may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfigurement, and find themselves faced by a horrified, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their own very existence.

Du Bois would hardly fare better today. His radical critique of empire and capitalism would make him even more of a pariah in the academy and on the airwaves. The corporate state, assured they can keep us entranced with their electronic hallucinations and spectacles, along with the inane trivia and gossip masquerading as news, do not see him or other radical theorists as a threat. They orchestrated the post-literate society, the “enforced ignorance,” that perpetuates their power. We have his books. Read them while you still can.

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Why Pro-Israel Advocates ‘Heart’ Roseanne

Actor Roseanne Barr has some unexpected supporters; the Democratic Party’s decision to take legal action against WikiLeaks put the first amendment at risk; meanwhile, Coca-Cola’s claims about water are proved false. These discoveries and more below.

Roseanne Barr Is Convenient Scapegoat for Right-wing Racism and Anti-Semitism

Pro-Israel advocates embraced the disgraced Hollywood star despite – or possibly because of – her history of deranged outbursts.

Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore

Telephone culture is disappearing.

By Suing WikiLeaks, DNC Could Endanger Principles of Press Freedom

In April, the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party, announced that it was suing WikiLeaks and Julian Assange–along with a number of other defendants, including the Trump campaign and Russian operatives–for their alleged involvement in the theft and dissemination of DNC computer files during the 2016 election.

Ivanka’s Full Frontal

Last Sunday Ivanka Trump posted a curiously timed photo of herself nuzzled up to her son on the heels of news that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had lost 1,500 children at the immigration border.

Under Trump, the Israel Lobby Is a Hydra With Many Heads

Since Trump took office, the Israel lobby has mobilized four other powerful lobbies: Christian evangelicals, the alt-right, the military-industrial complex and Saudi Arabia.

Coke Claims to Give Back as Much Water as It Uses. An Investigation Shows It Isn’t Even Close.

When Coca-Cola announced plans earlier this year to recycle the equivalent of 100 percent of its packaging by 2030, the company touted the effort as building on its success with sustainable water use.

The End Of The First American Republic: The Collapse Of The Democratic Party

The last clearly identifiable period during which the Democratic Party was a positive influence on the country was during the Johnson administration.

The Exam Room Secrecy That Puts Women at Risk

The problem of male power over female patients.

Last Straw For Plastic Straws? Cities, Restaurants Move To Toss These Sippers

Slurping up smoothies, sodas and slushies through disposable plastic straws could one day become a thing of the past.

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Thousands March in New York Gun Protest

NEW YORK—Thousands of demonstrators have marched across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge in a protest against gun violence.

A student-led group called Youth Over Guns organized Saturday’s protest. The group formed after the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February.

The protesters marched across the bridge and then rallied in lower Manhattan. Most wore orange to show their support for gun violence awareness.

Aalayah Eastmond, a survivor of the shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, addressed the crowd. Actresses Julianne Moore and Susan Sarandon also were in attendance.

The march was one of several taking place around the country to protest gun violence and urge lawmakers to pass gun restrictions.

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Israeli Forces Kill Palestinian Nurse, Injure 100 Protesters

Ma’an News Agency reports:

Israeli forces shot and killed a 21-year-old Palestinian woman paramedic on Friday, as she was treating injured protesters during ongoing demonstrations along the Gaza border with Israel, in the southern Gaza Strip. The Gaza Ministry of Health reported that 21-year-old Razan Ashraf al-Najjar, from the Khan Younis-area town of Khuzaa, was shot in the stomach as Israeli forces deployed near the border fence opened fire on a group of five paramedics, including al-Najjar, as they were aiding injured protesters near the fence. The spokesperson of the ministry, Ashraf al-Qidra, added that more than 100 protesters were injured on Friday, 40 of them with live ammunition, while the others suffered from tear-gas related injuries. Al-Najjar was one of at least two medics who had been killed by Israeli forces since the “Great March of Return” began in Gaza on March 30th. Since then, over 110 more Palestinians have been killed, including journalists and children.

For the Israeli army to shoot unarmed Palestinians who posed no danger to anyone simply because they were in a zone declared off limits within Gaza is a war crime. Shooting unarmed civilian nurses is certainly a war crime:

Article 24 of the 1949 Geneva Convention I provides:

Medical personnel exclusively engaged in the search for, or the collection, transport or treatment of the wounded or sick, or in the prevention of disease, staff exclusively engaged in the administration of medical units and establishments … shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.

The practice has nevertheless been sanctioned by the Israeli supreme court, a stark illustration of the Israeli establishment’s spiral down into a form of Central European fascism and supremacist ethnic nationalism.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions were enacted to prevent the recurrence of common practices of the Nazis in Europe.

While there had been exchange of fire between Israeli fighter jets and some small rockets of the Islamic Jihad organization in Gaza earlier this week, the Friday march involved unarmed civilian activists. No clashes occurred and al-Najjar was on Gaza soil wearing clothing marking her as a paramedic. Israeli snipers have very good scopes and her death, or the injuries to a hundred other civilians, was unlikely to have been an accident. Israeli snipers have in the past been caught on camera rejoicing over their long-distance shooting of defenseless Palestinians in Gaza.

Update: The Palestinian Medical Relief Society released a statement:

Today the Palestinian Medical Relief Society mourns the loss of one of our own. 21-year old volunteer medic Razan Al Najjar was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper yesterday in Gaza as she was attempting to provide first aid to an injured protester. She was shot to the chest, the bullet ripping through the white vest with red emblem and PMRS logo that was marking her as medical personnel. Yesterday, 3 other PMRS first aiders were injured by live bullets: Rami Abu Jazar, Mahmoud Fa’wur and Mahmoud Odeh. In total, Israel has injured 223 paramedics since the end of April, 29 of them with live ammunition.

Haaretz and Israeli human rights groups also reported on these events:

Razan Al-Najjar volunteered as a paramedic, treating Palestinians wounded by the IDF at the Gaza fence. Now she’s dead, reportedly shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. She was 21 years old.

זיכרונה לברכה – may her memory be for a blessing https://t.co/33xrbzheIj pic.twitter.com/aRTx4X4PiX

— IfNotNow