Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 12

Israel A Safe Haven For Jews? Think Again.

"You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back." 

-----------------An old man's placard in Gaza 

Quoted in Noam Chomsky, "Because We Say So," (City Lights, 2015) p. 77

Hand-wringing about "the hostages" in Israel overlooks the fact that all residents in Gaza were already hostages on October 7, and had been for decades as a consequence of deliberate USraeli policy. This is what it means to live in an open-air prison/concentration camp.

As for the recently kidnapped, one does not have to wish them any harm to point out that it doesn't really make much sense to build one's home on a volcano and then wax indignant at having lava in the living room.

Common references to "inhumane" conditions in Gaza, and "neglect" as a reason for them are drastically understated. Such allegedly dispassionate evaluations of Israel's policies of shooting at ambulances, leveling hospitals, and dropping white phosphorous bombs on civilian populations, among other horrors of the Holy State, are a total absurdity. It's like calling lynching an inadvertent unkindness.

For more than ample verification of Israel's crimes in Gaza, see Norman Finkelstein's fine work on the topic, which long pre-dates October 7, 2023. (For example, see "Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.")

Declaring Jewish sovereignty over Arab land in Palestine has been an ongoing disaster for 75 years, even for Jews, who claim to be "redeeming" the land by taking it from indigenous Arabs. 

Israel was supposed to be a safe haven for them, but it is now the most dangerous place in the world for a Jew to be, and has been for some time.

Epic fail.

The (Failed) Israel Experiment

"I'm going to talk about Israel today. And I'm going to talk about Israel as a failed experiment. Let me just run through a quick, relevant history. In the 1940s we kind of Louisiana Purchased Israel in so far as with the Louisiana Purchase the Americans bought the Native Americans' land from the French and expanded our country that way. Turned out in the 1940s the British gave the Israelis - well, created the Israelis - with the Palestinians' land. 

"So they had this extra colony laying around because up until the 1940s the British still owned quite a bit of the world, including my ancestral Ghana. So the British had land they were giving away because they thought it was theirs. It turns out they were a colonial power and they kind of gave their colonial power land to the Jewish people as a recompense for the atrocities that were suffered from the genocide. And it kind of made sense, that history kind of suggested, that there was no land in which Jewish people would remain safe, so we've got to give them a land because they're people, too. I can understand the arguments . . . the problem was we gave them other people's land. 

"Like, I'm actually, I'm for moving Israel. I'll get to that later. But I'm for moving Israel. I like the Michael Chabon solution, where we just kind of put Israel in Alaska, or we kind of cede them New Mexico. Look, if we're going to defend a state, and if we're going to be casual about guaranteeing these people a state, an ever expanding state, because it's the mixing of property rights and birth citizenship, then we should be able to control the land and control the borders, and secure them that way, rather than just be casual with other people's lands and other people's borders. So I would be open to talks about ceding New Mexico, or ceding some land in the United States or that the United States controls, to Israel, and making a New Israel. We've got to move Israel because the current Israel is in a bad spot. We sold someone else's land, or we gave away things that didn't belong to us. It'd be like me selling the Brooklyn Bridge. And that's always going to be a problem . . . 

"So we have some three-quarters of a million people (that) were moved, or have been moved, and now we have two million - about - people in the area that's known as the Gaza Strip, and the problem is those Palestinians are not allowed to really do anything, because it turns out that if you give people - (from whom) you've stolen their land and livelihood - access to doing anything, one of the things they're going to do is figure out how to get their land and livelihood back. And probably take it back - with force. You moved them out with force; they're going to try to take it back with force. So you have blockades, you have sieges, because they're trying to keep two million people from actually building anything, because one of the things that those people will also build is the means to get their land back. And this all happened in 1947 . . .. That's the year my Mom was born. . . This isn't that long ago.

"And we're talking about a good amount of people. . . . Now it's the case that there are blockades such that . . . it precludes the conditions for the people in Gaza to be self-determining. Because one of the things they will use, and this is I think true, if you give them water, if you give them food on demand, if you give them all of the things that are conditions with like full citizenship, they will use that subjective freedom to create the objective conditions for a fight back. Right? And so, in order to keep them from fighting back, we keep them from doing everything that's consistent with self-determination. 

"If they elect leaders we don't like, we invalidate the elections. And I say "we" because I'm not convinced that Israel and the United States aren't the same power. I actually think that we're a colonial power; we are a colony of Israel, and not the other way around. Don't get it confused. A lot of people get this confused, and think that the U.S. runs Israel, but I think Israel runs the U.S.. Israel runs the U.S. insofar as they can say, 'Shut up, and give us money and guns,' and we'll shut up and give them money and guns. And if we say the same thing, they will just ignore us. Or we will be too scared to say the same thing, because our politicians need a lot of money from Jewish people who are not necessarily the same Zionists who are the problematic actors in Israel, but they're not exactly antagonistic to those Zionists, in the way that I would need them to be antagonistic to those Zionists.

"I hear a lot of, 'well, you know, there are multifaceted forms of supporting and fighting against some of the more obnoxious and heinous policies of Israel, and you're just kind of painting the Israelis and their sympathizers with a broad brush.' And I'm saying that the anti-Israel-apartheid side of the Jewish people in the United States are not sufficiently "anti". They're lukewarm "anti". Because they're not talking about we need to abolish Israel and move it to Alaska. 

"Though if there were a significant number of Jewish people that said like, 'there's no two-state solution, a two-state solution is untenable' - and it was part of the culture, and part of the even heterodox Jewish culture, saying 'the two-state solution is untenable; we need to abolish Israel and move it to a place where we actually control the borders.' Which I think is actually a responsible solution. We need to move it to New Mexico; we need to move it to Arizona. I actually think that would be responsible. Just get up and move. New Israel. Give them half of Utah. It could be 'the state the Chosen People choose.'  Right? Because you've got the Mormons (there) who consider themselves chosen. And the Jewish people consider themselves chosen."

"By the way, the distinction between cultural Judaism and Zionism is not a hard and fast distinction. And I didn't really know this until I went to a random synagogue for a Shabbat a few years ago with a buddy. It was just a regular, mainline synagogue, nothing special, and they folded in a prayer for Israel, into the synagogue. And you could say, 'well, it was just peace for Israel,' and actually that prayer was more support for Israel than just peace, but if you want peace without eradicating the conditions of injustice, you're pretty much just praying for an apartheid government. 

"And when I say an apartheid government that's two systems of laws for two different people. Now, it's not a racial apartheid insofar as we're not punishing them because they are browner or Muslim. But we're just saying because they're browner and Muslim, they're going to be more likely to organize against us, so we have to have a different system of laws for them. 

"So it's not the same kind of apartheid as South African apartheid, but it's the same in objective expression. Because I think rightly they (Jewish Israelis) understand that if the Palestinians in Gaza are empowered, and aren't too busy trying to figure out food and water and the hospitals, they will use some of that excess resource, and some of that disposable income and insight, to figure out how to get their land back. And that's something that's untenable for Israel. 

"So they have to keep an apartheid system, in order to keep the Palestinians weak enough . . . You have to keep them weak.

"Gaza's not about autonomy. It's about being able to neuter a population without going full-genocide. Especially when you're a nation that's founded, whose moral authority is - 'we're the response to a genocide' - you can't go full-genocide on the Palestinians, but you also can't have them doing anything, because one of the things that they will do is try to get their land back.  And for people who say, 'It's senseless violence to go shoot up a music festival', well, its not senseless insofar as nobody knows what the conditions, the path forward for a Palestinian autonomy (would be). 

"I'm not one to second guess the leaders of Hamas. It's not necessarily what I would do, but I don't have a workable plan. I don't think there is a workable plan, short of the U.S. saying 'We're not going to support that Israel anymore, we're going to give you a different spot, a different Israel. One that we can control. And that's what our support (from now on) looks like. And if you don't want to go to our New Israel, either when it's in Alaska, it's part of Utah, if you don't want to go to that new Israel, you're on your own. That would be my solution. . . .

"If we're going to displace people, and support the displacing of people, we should support the displacing of our own people for our cause. And if we're not willing to do that, we shouldn't be displacing others like that so casually. And if Zionists say, 'No, we want Tel Aviv and we want Jerusalem, these are holy cities for us,' - I say the world isn't like Burger King; you don't get to have it your way. 

"You want land that's safe and you want secure borders. The U.S. can provide that, but you're not going to be able to pick the land. This idea that you get born into particular property claims, like specific, naturally given property claims, you get born into that by some sort of birth right or religious right - not property claims in general but particular ones - Jerusalem, not like Orem Utah, the idea that you would get those claims is ridiculous. It's a kind of entitlement that I think we've bred among the Zionists, and we need to stop breeding. I can see the argument that as a person, in order to be a free person in the modern world, you need some sort of property, but I don't see the argument that you also get to pick the property you get."

"And so, since I don't have a path forward that is non-violent I'm not going to second guess what Hamas does in the name of violence. Because look, one of the purposes of non-violent civil disobedience is to show the degradation of the oppressors. Non-violent civil disobedience doesn't work when one people just wants you dead. A lot of Zionists would be happy if everyone just miraculously died in Gaza. They just kind of disappeared. They're not particularly useful to the economy in that way, in the same way that, for example, black people were useful to the economy in the American South, or Hindus and Indians were useful to the economy in India. It's not that kind of shutdown when non-violence can work. There's no boycott that will actually help the case. There's no boycott that will force a quality of violence that will show the disproportionate violence and the inhumanity that you're being subject to. And that's the point of non-violent resistance. You're trying to provoke the quality of violence that will show that 'no, the people who are trying to kill us really do think that we're inhuman.' And you can't do that with non-violence in Gaza. 

"But you might be able to do that with violence. So you do a little bit of horrendous violence and then they come back leveling hospitals. They can no longer say, 'well, you're killing children and women.' Well, you're leveling hospitals - indiscriminately. 

"Hamas doesn't have a base of operations that you know of - if you knew you'd send in Mossad and take them out. You don't have it. You're just leveling hospitals to show a vague sense of power. That's a form of terrorism. That's the shelling that's happening right now. I'm not one to say that Hamas was wrong, because I don't know what's right. I know that filling out the paperwork and waving signs isn't going to work. It's not going to get you autonomy; it's not going to get you clean water. You can't do anything. You can't build anything. You have a life, and your children will have a life - a short life in Gaza - because they don't have any of the conditions for a long life, including clean water and a robust self-governing apparatus. It (your life) is going to be over-determined by the needs of a settler power, which is Israel, to make sure that you can't form the quality of organization and industrial capacity that would attack Israel. That's going to be your line . .. . a second class, necessarily subordinated citizen, who can't even, who by design isn't going to be able to coordinate to do anything meaningful.

"And that is the situation of the Palestinians right now. And that isn't going to happen as long as Israel's there. I don't think a two-state solution is viable because Palestinians want their land, and the (Jewish) Israelis feel very entitled to the Palestinians' land. So if the Jewish people need a state to return to then we need to create a different state.

"So it was a failed experiment and we just need to take the loss and carve out a little bit of West Virginia or whatever - give them some of Nebraska or Oklahoma, and call that New Israel, and that'll be that. And if we're not willing to do that, we need to not pooh-pooh the Palestinians, who are rightly fighting for the conditions of their self-determination."

"Like civil self-determination, family self-determination, all of these things are over-determined by the blockade, and the abject control that they're suffering under (Jewish) Israeli rule, and that's the situation right there. Israel won't let the Palestinians do anything, because one of the things that the Palestinians will do is organize to attack Israel. And so I understand the blockade, but I also understand that's not a tenable way to think through like long term, that doesn't actually get rid of the problem. The forever conditions of apartheid aren't going to get rid of the problem. Any time the Palestinians get a little bit of air to breathe, they're going to use that air to try to attack Israel . . . and there's reason for them to do that. And so now Israel has an incentive to make sure that Palestinians don't ever get any sort of disposable anything, the capacity to build and take care of themselves and frustrate the plans of other people. 

"It was a failed experiment in colonialism. We gave people land that wasn't ours to give, and this is the fallout of it. And it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. A two-state solution is not viable. Because it's the Palestinians' land. It's the Palestinians' land. And if we just had a little bit more humility, we would just be honest and think about land we do control, and just ask the Jews to suck it up. Suck it up. Now you go to Utah instead. We tried Israel there, and there going to be like, 'No, we want Jerusalem,' and I'm going to say, 'Sorry. You don't get to cut the cake and choose which slice you get.' Michael Chabon talks about this in his book, "The Yiddish Policeman's Detective Agency" - it came out I'll say 2007ish, where the New Israel is up in Alaska. "

"I think it's a more responsible solution because the problem is the place. The problem is the place. And the fact that it wasn't your land to begin with. 

"And this whole idea that it was a senseless killing, going after the music festival is a senseless killing. I'm like, 'these people never read the end of The Odyssey', where I mean . . . If someone steals your house, throws a party in your house, and you come home, and you mow them down, that's not exactly senseless. They stole your house. At the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus comes in with a bunch of suitors and a party going on, and he like looks around and just mows them all down, because they were in his house, they had no business being there. 

"So this idea, it's not senseless, it's not barbaric, it's actually, it makes sense. And I wish, I wish, I wish I knew how to de-colonize without this kind of violence. I wish I did. I don't. So I'm not going to criticize Hamas leaders who think this is the only way, because it might be the only way. And it's the only reason I'm talking about it. And the more people who actually talk about the situation, I think the better it is for the Palestinian case."

                -----Irami Osei Frimpong
www.thefunkyacademic.com, 9/11/23

Where Housing Is Clean, Beautiful, and Affordable For All

 "It's not 'We have a private (housing) system and in other societies the government is involved.' The truth is the governments are always involved. It's simply a question of how they are involved. How do they participate. If you go to Austria, and in particular to its famous capital city of Vienna, you will be in a city, one of the great cities of the world, where about half the housing is rental, either run by the government - that's a good part of it - or controlled, regulated, and subsidized by the government. It's one of the best housing situations in any modern city. There's virtually no homelessness in Vienna, and there hasn't been, because the government's intervention solved the problem. And by the way, when was that done? Over a century ago. Socialists in Austria set up that public housing program to make sure that nobody spends more for housing than twenty to thirty percent of their income. And that is a guarantee in the law. Right-wing governments have come and gone in Vienna. Left-wing governments have come and gone. They even had a period of time with a Nazi government. No one has dared to touch their public housing program, because there would have been an immediate reaction by an overwhelming majority of the people there. Because, of course, if the government maintains beautiful housing - I've been to Vienna repeatedly - I can tell you first-hand the housing is wonderful, to live in, to feel in (sic), the cleanliness, the landscaping, all of it. But because the mass of people, roughly half, live in government managed rent control, the private housing sector can't go much beyond it, because nobody would go there. So you have, in effect, a controlled guarantee, and it has worked impeccably."

-----Richard Wolff, A Radical Rethink of the Housing Crisis, 
The Zero Hour, 9/17/23

Top Philosopher Calls For An End To The Ukraine Farce

"It's gross that we're giving so many weapons to Ukraine. Like Russia's not going to allow an American proxy state on their border. And I don't blame them. So we're pretty much licensing the murder of Russians, who are defending what they consider their national sovereignty. And we're not admitting that that's what's going to go on, and it's going to go on forever. Meanwhile, this guy Zelensky comes and just . . . . why don't we just give him a big old printing press for U.S. cash? I would say we'd (also) give him a gun factory. It can't be in Ukraine because the Russians will just bomb it. They don't have any productive . . . They don't have an economy. There is no Ukraine economy. Because it's a war zone. Any time they try to build anything the Russians will just bomb it. We just need to admit that Ukraine's going to end up, it should end up possibly like Belarus. That's just how it's going to be. Russia's a real power. We have to recognize them as such, and that is what it is. And let's stop pretending that it's about Ukraine's self-determination. There's no Ukraine self-determination; there's barely a Ukraine. They've now consolidated the media. They took away all private media, so now there's just state media. Zelensky has suspended elections. Let's stop pretending that we're fighting for a democracy in Ukraine. That's untenable. Part of what it is to be a sovereign nation is to be able to defend your borders. Ukraine can't do that, so they're not a sovereign nation. We need to just admit that. It would be the equivalent of Russia giving guns to Puerto Rican separatists. It's ridiculous and absurd and we need to admit that we don't get to unilaterally decide the shape of the world. And if Russia doesn't want an American proxy state on their border and they can convince their people that this is a bad thing for Russia, then that's a forever war that we're funding because we like the idea of Ukrainians killing Russians, even if that just ratchets up the debt." 

 ---------Irami Osei-Frimpong 9/22/23
                "Cornel West, Sure"
         www.thefunkyacademic.com

The Priesthood of Expertise

"Itis difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends onhis not understanding it." 

-----------Upton Sinclair

 

Whose Expertise Is Dead?

In TheDeath of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns thatknowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace itwith popular ignorance. Though this is not entirely possible - no society couldsurvive such a transition - the breakdown in trust between experts andlaypeople underlying this misguided ambition is making the U.S. ungovernable.Experts are held in contempt, sometimes for their errors, but increasinglysimply because they are experts andlaypeople are not. Knowledge inequality is taken to be as contemptible aswealth inequality, on the assumption that those in possession of it considerthemselves smarter and better than the less educated. Aspiring to acquireknowledge and use it to enlighten others, once a noble ambition, now signalselitist arrogance.

 

Furthermore, where once we wereentitled to our own opinions but not our own facts, today proliferating digitaltribes proudly circulate self-justifying"alternative facts" withoutthe inconvenience of being challenged. The Internet, though not the cause ofthis phenomenon, does aggravate it, since the "informationsuperhighway" has degenerated into a galaxy of glittering websites eagerlycatering to popular delusions on a growing range of topics. What now passes for"research" refers to scanning a few algorithm-curated lines thatconfirm one's prejudices, then clicking away satisfied one's half-baked notionshave been proven right. 

 

Easy access to vast troves ofinformation, the debasement of university education into a consumer experiencein which "the customer is always right," and the fusion of news andentertainment into a 24-hour cycle of mind-killing spectacle, all have helpedproduce this situation, writes Nichols, yielding a deeply ignorant publicnevertheless convinced it holds infallible judgment on a nearly limitless rangeof topics.

Formal democratic governance based onexpert advice and popular ratification has therefore become nearly impossible,because increasing numbers of laypeople not only lack basic knowledge, butreject rules of evidence, effectively eliminating any possibility of logical debate.Strength of conviction, not persuasiveness of logic, determines the"winner" of disagreements, with more and more people succumbing tonarcissistic self-congratulation on the grounds that, "I'm passionatelyconvinced I'm right; therefore, how could I be wrong?"

 

In this emerging Dis-United States ofSelf-Righteousness we risk discarding centuries of accumulated knowledge anderoding the disciplines that allow us to acquire new knowledge. No democracy,even the very partial democracy that has existed in the U.S. to date, cansurvive such a trend.

 

The problem actually goes considerablybeyond mere ignorance, observes Nichols, because want of knowledge can beremedied by study, whereas today's popular impulse is to reject study itself onthe grounds that ignorance trumps established knowledge. This is "theoutrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture" that cannot tolerate anyinequality, even that of knowledge. Equal rights has become equal validity ofall opinions, the more crackpot the better, a proposition whoseself-contradictory nature is rarely noted.

 

Furthermore, latter day know-nothingswant to kick away the intellectual ladder that has permitted us to ascend to anage of at least semi-reason: "The death of expertise is not just arejection of existing knowledge," says Nichols. "It is fundamentallya rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundationsof modern civilization." 

 

We need not look far to find evidencesupporting Nichols's thesis. In the Covid 19 era we have seen massive and painfulverification of it, with credentialed grifters and scientifically illiteratetrolls lecturing career virologists and immunologists about the complexities ofviruses and vaccines, all the while insisting on quack treatments as Covid deathssoar. Nurses and doctors confirm that many Covid sufferers willedthemselves to unnecessary deaths clinging to medical delusions.Though this is merely one example among many, the fact that people will dierather than let go of their mistaken opinions hauntingly confirms the validityof the author's main point.

 

Nichols's solution for this dismalstate of affairs is for laypeople to re-engage the effort to be responsiblecitizens in a democracy, follow a variety of reputable news sources, at leastone of which takes an editorial line contrary to one's own views, and recognizethat the public has a need to collaborate with experts, not shout them down.

 

This all sounds eminently sensible, at least for the more literate half of the population, andone can hardly argue with the conclusion that the U.S. public needs to be muchbetter informed. Unfortunately, however, Nichols nowhere takes note of theimpact of elite ideology, which relentlessly pumps a false world view into thepublic mind, one that vastly exceeds in impact all the ravings of crackpot conspiracytheorists put together.

 

Nevertheless, those who debunk the establishment'sself-justifying propaganda are given short shrift by Nichols. For example, hedismisses Ward Churchill without examination because the former ethnic studiesprofessor was fired for plagiarism, a conclusion that is narrowly correct butdisingenuous in the extreme. Churchill's real offense was insulting thenational self-image by comparing "good Americans" working within amurderous U.S. empire to "good Germans" working under the Nazis, amplifyingthe provocation by drawing a parallel with Adolf Eichmann. This produced afamiliar tsunami of public hysteria that culminated in an"examination" of Churchill's published works obviously designed tofind cause to fire him. In the event, four footnotes among thousands in hispublished works were found to be objectionable. This horrifying"plagiarism" largely consisted of Churchill re-using content from hispreviously published books, written in activist settings, sometimes inconjunction with others, where no money or reputational issues were at stake.Ho hum. Such an offense, if it really qualifies as such, is far less seriousthan Dr. King's lifting of whole passages without attribution in his doctoraldissertation, but if we retroactively treat King the way we did Ward Churchillwe will have to make ourselves party to a second assassination. Nichols caresabout none of this, convinced that Churchill deserved what he got. 

 

Here we see - once again - cancelculture wreaking havoc, with Churchill's large body of work detailing centuriesof lawless U.S. governments breaking hundreds of treaties with American Indians(among other important topics) shoved down Orwell's memory hole. Incidentally,the very fact that Churchill taught in an Ethnic Studies Department rather thanan American History Department testifies to the fact that twenty-first centuryhistory experts still cannot face the fact that dozens of indigenous peoplesdid not fortuitously vanish or voluntarily disband to make way for the civilized master race,but were deliberately eradicated. Thedeath of their expertise is long overdue.

 

Nichols also dismisses the work ofanti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, on the basis that her expertise is inmedicine, not arms control and disarmament, and she substitutes a psychologicalexamination of a presumed pathological arms race ("Missile Envy" isthe title of one of her anti-nuclear books) for an examination of thetopic by a relevant expert. She also once falsely claimed on a radio program that,"If Ronald Reagan is re-elected, nuclear war is a mathematicalcertainty."  

 

Only on the second point is Nichols onsolid ground. Obviously, one cannot predict the future of anything on the basisof mathematical certainty, and Caldicott's misuse of her social prestige as adoctor to try to influence how her audience would vote was dishonest andunprincipled. But that single instance hardly invalidates her entireanti-nuclear career.

 

On Nichols's preference forconventional arms control analysis instead of Caldicott's psychologicalapproach equating nuclear arms production to a form of madness ("NuclearMadness" is the title of another one of her books), there is no need tochoose one over the other. The two can fruitfully co-exist, if arms control expertsengage her critique instead of dismissing it. Slaveholders could not ultimately avoid the abolitionist debate, and establishment arms control experts should not be able to avoid such a debate today.

 

Caldicott regards the proliferation ofnuclear plants and weapons much like she does a cancer metastasizing in a human body, objecting to the radioactive contamination resulting from every aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle: mining, milling, waste storage, re-processing, plant decommissioning, etc. Shecredits "psychic numbing" for our ability to complacently livealongside what the late Daniel Ellsberg (an expert!) called the "DoomsdayMachine," a world wired up to explode in terminal war at a moment'snotice. Caldicott's abolitionist views regarding nuclear weapons largely overlap with Ellsberg's, as sheenthusiastically endorsed his book describing our descent to what Lewis Mumford called "the morals of extermination."

 

If it is quackery to see stockpilingthousands of nuclear weapons (many on hair-trigger alert) among eight differentcountries wracked with antagonistic tensions as a form of human madness, thenthis needs to be demonstrated. But Nichols shirks the entire debate - quite unconvincingly - on the basis ofcredentialism, which conflicts with his stated view that democracy requires cooperative discussion between laypeople andexperts. 

 

In other words, if Caldicott's expertise is not relevant to the debate,her interest and concerns surely are, and these cannot be dismissed asthe result of a few casual internet searches. In fact, they make far more sensethan the self-justifying assertions of arms control experts like KennethAdelman (Nichols regards him favorably), who said at his Senate confirmationhearings to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (for Ronald Reagan) that he thathe had never given any consideration tothe possibility of disarmament - the very purpose of the agency he soughtto direct. Whatever the deficiencies ofCaldicott's arguments may be, it remains a mystery why the death of such cluelessexpertise ought to be mourned rather than celebrated.

 

Finally, Nichols also dismisses the views ofdissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, likewise on credentialist grounds, since Chomsky's doctorate is in linguistics rather than foreign policy. The upshot is thatChomsky, lacking the specialized, technical national security expertise thatNichols obtained by skill and training, cannot be expected to adequatelyunderstand the deep knowledge of the field, and therefore his views are simply irrelevant. 

 

But are national security affairsreally a science, impenetrable to laypeople, or can they be understood and insightfullyengaged using no more than common sense, skepticism, and ordinary analyticalability? Chomsky argues the latter, pointing out that, in the social sciences

 

"the cultof the expert is both self-serving for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviouslyone must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can . . . But itwill be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted andjudged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretendedaccomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested andverified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs . . .  it'sexistence has been kept a well-guarded secret. To anyone who has anyfamiliarity with the social and behavioral sciences . . . the claim that thereare certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider tocomprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.

 

Indeed. Where is the repeatedly testedbody of theoretical knowledge informing national security affairs that Nicholsallegedly possesses but laypeople do not? Obviously, none exists, which meansthat Chomsky's supposed lack of foreign policy expertise is simply another dodge. If Nichols's is an expertise worth having, he needs todrop the priesthood guise and engage debate, not just with colleagues, but withall who are interested.

 

A good place for him to start would beto examine Chomsky's review of a prominent part of the expert community thathas long held that laypeople are intellectually deficient by nature, and not merely as a consequence of having fallen into astate of narcissism.

 

For example, the democratic rebellionin 17th century Britain, Chomsky observes, was quickly condemned by experts ofthe day as a monstrous affair of the "rascal multitude," "beastsin men's shapes," inherently "depraved and corrupt." Thesesentiments were handed down to succeeding generations of elite thinkers, sothat by the twentieth-century we have Walter Lippmann advising that the public"must be put in its place," so that the "responsible men"may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." The"function" of these "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," hebelieved, was to be "interested spectators of action," notparticipants, ratifying the decisions made on their behalf by experts andpolicy-makers, then returning to their private concerns. This was said to beinevitable because of the "ignorance and superstition of the masses"(political scientist Harold Lasswell), the "stupidity of the average man"(Rienhold Niebuhr), and the fact that "the common interests very largelyelude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized classwhose personal interests reach beyond the locality" (Walter Lippmann). The"specialized class" is drawn from the experts at articulating theneeds of the powerful, what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci identified as"experts in legitimation." These intellectual saviors were supposedly needed toprotect "us" from the majority, which is "ignorant and mentallydeficient," (Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State) and hasto be kept in its place via a constant diet of "necessary illusion"and "emotionally potent oversimplifications" (Rienhold Niebuhr).

 

Note that these are the sentiments ofthe liberal intelligentsia; conservative theorists are even harsher in theircondemnation. 

 

Given the alleged intellectual backwardness of ordinary people, the expertpolicy prescription was to manipulate them, education being pointless with thelower breeds. Edward Bernays, the Father of Spin, openly declared this:"If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is nowpossible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without theirknowing it." Minority rule was therefore inevitable: "In almost everyact of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in oursocial conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relativelysmall number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patternsof the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the publicmind." And this minority rule was not contradictory to democracy, as onemight think, but an expression of it: "The conscious andintelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses isan important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseenmechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the trueruling power of our country."

 

So . . . . hallelujah?

 

Hardly. Given the obnoxiousness ofthese longstanding views, it is difficult to believe that the widespreadrejection of experts by an ever increasing portion of the general public iswholly unrelated to the open contempt with which ordinary people have beentreated by the "specialized class." Recall that in recent decades these experts have engineered the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top, while blaming the victims for not being educated enough to reverse the trend.

 

To be fair, not all experts share thiscontempt for laypeople, and Nichols is at pains to emphasize that not allexperts are policy-making experts. True enough, but in a class-divided worldexpertise of all kinds skews towards fulfilling the needs of the wealthy, notthose who work for them. At the height of the Covid crisis, for example, CDCrecommendations to "shelter-in-place" were meaningless to workers inmeat-packing plants, but highly valuable to the wealthy, who retreated tosecond homes remote from areas of high contagion - with no loss of income. This is characteristic of social policy under capitalism, where social loss is private gain.

Which means that experts that have the wrong class loyalties,such as those who advise labor unions on how to resist the continual blowscapital directs at workers, command little attention, respect, or resources. This is because the most prominent ideas do not arise by happenstance but are those that keep a certain class in power. To quote labor expert Karl Marx:

 "The ruling ideas arenothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of therelationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas oftheir dominance."

Since public opinion necessarilydiverges from "the ruling ideas," especially on issues of wealth and power, experts perceiveit as a threat to be managed and controlled, not a democratic reality to beintelligently cultivated. Their expertise consists asmuch of rationalizing the needs of the powerful as it does of reasoning one'sway to a justified conclusion. And this, in turn, feeds popular mistrust ofexperts, for as the great Chinese sage Lao-Tse said, “Those who justifythemselves do not convince.”

 

Finally, and most importantly, Nicholsfails to address the stunted moral intelligence of so many experts, who,consumed by the intense demands of their specialized tasks, often end up morallyblinded.

 

A classic example concerns J. RobertOppenheimer. In the final stages of making the atomic bomb he was pressed byhis Manhattan Project colleagues as to the moral implications of their work.Oppenheimer and his colleague Enrico Fermi replied that they were"without special competence on the moral question."

 

Without special competence on the moral question. In other words, the ethical implications of unleashing atomic bombs onan unsuspecting world fell outside Oppenheimer's occupationalspecialty. 

 

Is this not a perfect illustration ofthe dilemma we face in relying on expertise? What good is knowledge divorcedfrom comprehension of its proper direction and use? Oppenheimer's answer to themost important question humanity has ever faced suggests that the moral issue might best be engaged by a different class ofexperts than the bomb-makers, a Department of Extermination Affairs perhaps. He could conceive of no way our common humanity might be the source of a judgment about what to do. 

 

Seventy-eight years later, with no solution to this problem in sight, can we really rest easy with just reading more and trusting experts' hard work and good intentions? Such a modest prescription cannot hope to solve the grave problem of ideologically contaminated expertise.

 

For all that Nichols leavesunaddressed, however,  The Death ofExpertise remains a lucid and compelling description of rising popularidiocy. Pity that the larger picture does not flatter the experts Nichols seeksto defend. 

 

Thus we continue to entrench a social structure ofhighly specialized moral imbeciles governing narcissistic laypeople too mired in delusion to mount an intelligent rebellion.

 

 

Andnow that the crisis has subsided, organized efforts are underway to ban anyfuture pandemic response measures that might interfere with getting andspending.

EveryU.S. military intervention abroad, for example, is portrayed as necessary tostop "another Hitler."

 

However,her claim that in a brief meeting with President Reagan she was able to"clinically" assess his IQ to be 100, is also suspect.

 

Ellsberg stresses that U.S. policy has always been a "first-strike" policy, that is, being ready and willing to initiate nuclear war to knock out Moscow's retaliatory capacity, then threatening annihilation with an overwhelming second strike if they refuse to capitulate. See DanielEllsberg, The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, (Bloomsbury, 2017)

 

." Chomskyquoted in Raphael Salkie, The ChomskyUpdate - Linguistics And Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) p. 140]

 

Commentstaken from Chomsky's "Year 501," (South End Press, 1993) p. 18, and"Deterring Democracy," (Hill and Wang, 1991) p. 253.

 

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845

Oppenheimerquoted in Jonathan Kozol, The Night IsDark and I Am Far From Home – A Political Indictment of the U.S. Public Schools,(Continuum, 1984) p. viii

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Whose Expertise Is Dead?

"Itis difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends onhis not understanding it." 

-----------Upton Sinclair

 

The Death of Expertise

In TheDeath of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns thatknowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace itwith popular ignorance. Though this is not entirely possible - no society couldsurvive such a transition - the breakdown in trust between experts andlaypeople underlying this misguided ambition is making the U.S. ungovernable.Experts are held in contempt, sometimes for their errors, but increasinglysimply because they are experts andlaypeople are not. Knowledge inequality is taken to be as contemptible aswealth inequality, on the assumption that those in possession of it considerthemselves smarter and better than the less educated. Aspiring to acquireknowledge and use it to enlighten others, once a noble ambition, now signalselitist arrogance.

 

Furthermore, where once we wereentitled to our own opinions but not our own facts, today proliferating digitaltribes proudly circulate self-justifying"alternative facts" withoutthe inconvenience of being challenged. The Internet, though not the cause ofthis phenomenon, does aggravate it, since the "informationsuperhighway" has degenerated into a galaxy of glittering websites eagerlycatering to popular delusions on a growing range of topics. What now passes for"research" refers to scanning a few algorithm-curated lines thatconfirm one's prejudices, then clicking away satisfied one's half-baked notionshave been proven right. 

 

Easy access to vast troves ofinformation, the debasement of university education into a consumer experiencein which "the customer is always right," and the fusion of news andentertainment into a 24-hour cycle of mind-killing spectacle, all have helpedproduce this situation, writes Nichols, yielding a deeply ignorant publicnevertheless convinced it holds infallible judgment on a nearly limitless rangeof topics.

Formal democratic governance based onexpert advice and popular ratification has therefore become nearly impossible,because increasing numbers of laypeople not only lack basic knowledge, butreject rules of evidence, effectively eliminating any possibility of logical debate.Strength of conviction, not persuasiveness of logic, determines the"winner" of disagreements, with more and more people succumbing tonarcissistic self-congratulation on the grounds that, "I'm passionatelyconvinced I'm right; therefore, how could I be wrong?"

 

In this emerging Dis-United States ofSelf-Righteousness we risk discarding centuries of accumulated knowledge anderoding the disciplines that allow us to acquire new knowledge. No democracy,even the very partial democracy that has existed in the U.S. to date, cansurvive such a trend.

 

The problem actually goes considerablybeyond mere ignorance, observes Nichols, because want of knowledge can beremedied by study, whereas today's popular impulse is to reject study itself onthe grounds that ignorance trumps established knowledge. This is "theoutrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture" that cannot tolerate anyinequality, even that of knowledge. Equal rights has become equal validity ofall opinions, the more crackpot the better, a proposition whoseself-contradictory nature is rarely noted.

 

Furthermore, latter day know-nothingswant to kick away the intellectual ladder that has permitted us to ascend to anage of at least semi-reason: "The death of expertise is not just arejection of existing knowledge," says Nichols. "It is fundamentallya rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundationsof modern civilization." 

 

We need not look far to find evidencesupporting Nichols's thesis. In the Covid era we have seen massive and painfulverification of it, with credentialed grifters and scientifically illiteratetrolls lecturing career virologists and immunologists about the complexities ofviruses and vaccines, all the while insisting on quack treatments as Covid deathssoar. Nurses and doctors confirm that many Covid sufferers have willedthemselves to unnecessary deaths clinging to medical delusions.Though this is merely one example among many, the fact that people will dierather than let go of their mistaken opinions hauntingly confirms the validityof the author's main point.

 

Nichols's solution for this dismalstate of affairs is for laypeople to re-engage the effort to be responsiblecitizens in a democracy, follow a variety of reputable news sources, at leastone of which takes an editorial line contrary to one's own views, and recognizethat the public has a need to collaborate with experts, not shout them down.

 

This all sounds eminently sensible, andone can hardly argue with the conclusion that the U.S. public needs to be muchbetter informed. Unfortunately, however, Nichols nowhere takes note of theimpact of elite ideology, which relentlessly pumps a false world view into thepublic mind, one that vastly exceeds in impact all the ravings of crackpot conspiracytheorists put together.

 

Those who debunk the establishment'sself-justifying propaganda are given short shrift by Nichols. For example, hedismisses Ward Churchill without examination because the former ethnic studiesprofessor was fired for plagiarism, a conclusion that is narrowly correct butdisingenuous in the extreme. Churchill's real offense was insulting thenational self-image by comparing "good Americans" working within amurderous U.S. empire to "good Germans" working under the Nazis, amplifyingthe provocation by drawing a parallel with Adolf Eichmann. This produced afamiliar tsunami of public hysteria that culminated in an"examination" of Churchill's published works obviously designed tofind cause to fire him. In the event, four footnotes among thousands in hispublished works were found to be objectionable. This horrifying"plagiarism" largely consisted of Churchill re-using content from hispreviously published books, written in activist settings, sometimes inconjunction with others, where no money or reputational issues were at stake.Ho hum. Such an offense, if it really qualifies as such, is far less seriousthan Dr. King's lifting of whole passages without attribution in his doctoraldissertation, but if we retroactively treat King the way we did Ward Churchillwe will have to make ourselves party to a second assassination. Nichols caresabout none of this, convinced that Churchill deserved what he got. 

 

Here we see - once again - cancelculture wreaking havoc, with Churchill's large body of work detailing centuriesof lawless U.S. governments breaking hundreds of treaties with American Indians(among other important topics) shoved down Orwell's memory hole. Incidentally,the very fact that Churchill taught in an Ethnic Studies Department rather thanan American History Department testifies to the fact that twenty-first centuryhistory experts still cannot face the fact that dozens of indigenous peoplesdid not fortuitously vanish or voluntarily disband to make way for the master race,but were deliberately eradicated. Thedeath of their expertise is long overdue.

 

Nichols also dismisses the work ofanti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott on the basis that her expertise is inmedicine, not arms control and disarmament, and she substitutes a psychologicalexamination of a presumed pathological arms race ("Missile Envy" isthe title of one of her anti-nuclear books) for a proper examination of thetopic by a relevant expert. She also once falsely claimed on a radio program that,"If Ronald Reagan is re-elected, nuclear war is a mathematicalcertainty."  

 

Only on the second point is Nichols onsolid ground. Obviously, one cannot predict the future of anything on the basisof mathematical certainty, and Caldicott's misuse of her social prestige as adoctor to try to influence how her audience would vote was dishonest andunprincipled. But that single instance hardly invalidates her entireanti-nuclear career.

 

On Nichols's preference forconventional arms control analysis instead of Caldicott's psychologicalapproach equating nuclear arms production to a form of madness ("NuclearMadness" is the title of another one of her books), there is no need tochoose one over the other. The two can fruitfully co-exist, if arms control expertsengage the critique that their expertise has been captured by ideological dogmathat - over time - can only eventuate in nuclear war. 

 

Caldicott regards the proliferation ofnuclear weapons much like she does a cancer metastasizing in a human body. Shecredits "psychic numbing" for our ability to complacently livealongside what the late Daniel Ellsberg (an expert!) called the "DoomsdayMachine," a world wired up to explode in terminal war at a moment'snotice. Caldicott's nuclear views largely overlap with Ellsberg's, as sheenthusiastically endorsed his book describing our descent to what Lewis Mumford once aptlytermed "the morals of extermination."

 

If it is quackery to see stockpilingthousands of nuclear weapons (many on hair-trigger alert) among eight differentcountries wracked with antagonistic tensions as a form of human madness, thenthis needs to be demonstrated. Nichols shirks the entire debate on the basis ofcredentialism, but he is quite unconvincing in doing so. After all, he himselfcontends that democracy requires cooperative discussion between laypeople andexperts, not dismissal. If Caldicott's expertise is not relevant to the debate,her interest and concerns surely are, and these cannot be piously dismissed asthe result of a few casual internet searches. In fact, they make far more sensethan the self-justifying assertions of arms control experts like KennethAdelman (Nichols regards him favorably), who said at his Senate confirmationhearings to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that he thathe had never given any consideration tothe possibility of disarmament - the very purpose of the agency he soughtto direct.

 

Whatever the deficiencies ofCaldicott's arguments may be, it remains a mystery why the death of such cluelessexpertise ought to be mourned rather than celebrated.

 

Finally, Nichols also dismisses the views ofdissident intellectual Noam Chomsky on credentialist grounds, since his credentials are in linguistics rather than foreign policy. The upshot is thatChomsky, lacking the specialized, technical national security expertise thatNichols obtained by skill and training, cannot be expected to adequatelyunderstand the deep knowledge of the field, and therefore his views arehopelessly confused. This view bears similarity to that of virologists whodecline to debate anti-vaxxers on the grounds that such exchanges only serve tofurther confuse a scientifically illiterate public.

 

But are national security affairsreally a science, impenetrable to laypeople, or can they be understood and beneficiallyengaged using no more than common sense, skepticism, and ordinary analyticalability? Chomsky argues the latter, pointing out that, in the social sciences

 

"the cultof the expert is both self-serving for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviouslyone must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can . . . But itwill be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted andjudged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretendedaccomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested andverified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs . . .  it'sexistence has been kept a well-guarded secret. To anyone who has anyfamiliarity with the social and behavioral sciences . . . the claim that thereare certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider tocomprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.

 

Yes. Where is the repeatedly testedbody of theoretical knowledge informing national security affairs that Nicholsallegedly possesses but laypeople do not? Obviously, none exists, which meansthat Chomsky's supposed lack of foreign policy expertise is simply another dodge. If Nichols's is an expertise worth saving, he needs todrop the priesthood guise and engage debate, not just with colleagues, but withall who are interested.

 

A good place for him to start would beto examine Chomsky's review of a prominent part of the expert community thathas long held that laypeople are intellectually deficient by nature, and not merely as a consequence of having fallen into astate of narcissism.

 

For example, the democratic rebellionin 17th century Britain, Chomsky relates, was quickly condemned by experts ofthe day as a monstrous affair of the "rascal multitude," "beastsin men's shapes," inherently "depraved and corrupt." Thesesentiments were handed down to succeeding generations of elite thinkers, sothat by the twentieth-century we have Walter Lippmann advising that the public"must be put in its place," so that the "responsible men"may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." The"function" of these "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," hebelieved, was to be "interested spectators of action," notparticipants, ratifying the decisions made on their behalf by experts andpolicy-makers, then returning to their private concerns. This was said to beinevitable because of the "ignorance and superstition of the masses"(political scientist Harold Lasswell), the "stupidity of the average man"(Reinhold Niebuhr), and the fact that "the common interests very largelyelude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized classwhose personal interests reach beyond the locality (Walter Lippmann)." The"specialized class" is drawn from the experts at articulating theneeds of the powerful, what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci identified as"experts in legitimation." These intellectual saviors were needed toprotect "us" from the majority, which is "ignorant and mentallydeficient," (Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State) and hasto be kept in its place via a constant diet of "necessary illusion"and "emotionally potent oversimplifications" (Rienhold Neibuhr).

 

Note that these are the sentiments ofthe liberal intelligentsia; conservative theorists are even harsher in theircondemnation. 

 

Since theintellectual backwardness of ordinary people is alleged to be congenital, thepolicy prescription is manipulate them, education being pointless with thelower breeds. Edward Bernays, the Father of Spin, openly declared this:"If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is nowpossible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without theirknowing it." Minority rule was therefore inevitable: "In almost everyact of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in oursocial conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relativelysmall number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patternsof the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the publicmind." And this minority rule was not contradictory to democracy, as onemight think, but an expression of its essence: "The conscious andintelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses isan important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseenmechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the trueruling power of our country."

 

So . . . . hallelujah?

 

Hardly. Given the obnoxiousness ofthese longstanding views, it is difficult to believe that the widespreadrejection of experts by an ever increasing portion of the general public iswholly unrelated to the open contempt with which ordinary people have beentreated by the "specialized class."

 

To be fair, not all experts share thiscontempt for laypeople, and Nichols is at pains to emphasize that not allexperts are policy-making experts. True enough, but in a class-divided worldexpertise of all kinds skews towards fulfilling the needs of the wealthy, notthose who work for them. At the height of the Covid crisis, for example, CDCrecommendations to "shelter-in-place" were meaningless to workers inmeat-packing plants, but highly valuable to the wealthy, who retreated tosecond homes remote from areas of high contagion - with no loss of income.

 

In any event, experts with the wrong class loyalties,such as those who advise labor unions on how to resist the continual blowscapital directs at workers, command little attention, respect, or resources.For as Karl Marx pointed out, the "ruling ideas" of an epoch do notarise by happenstance, but are the ideas of the class that occupies power:

 

"The ruling ideas arenothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of therelationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas oftheir dominance."

 

Since public opinion necessarilydiverges from "the ruling ideas," especially on issues of wealth and power, experts perceiveit as a threat to be managed and controlled, not a democratic reality to beintelligently cultivated.

 

Expertise, in other words, consists asmuch of rationalizing the needs of the powerful as it does of reasoning one'sway to a justified conclusion. And this, in turn, feeds popular mistrust ofexpertise, for as the great Chinese sage Lao-Tse said, “Those who justifythemselves do not convince.”

 

Finally, and most importantly, Nicholsfails to address the stunted moral intelligence of so many experts, who,consumed by the demands of their specialized tasks, often end up morallyblinded.

 

A classic example concerns J. RobertOppenheimer. In the final stages of making the atomic bomb he was pressed byhis Manhattan Project colleagues as to the moral implications of their work.Oppenheimer and his colleague Enrico Fermi replied that they were"without special competence on the moral question."

 

Without special competence on the moral question. A most peculiar turn ofphrase. In other words, the ethical implications of unleashing atomic bombs onan unsuspecting world fell outside Oppenheimer's occupationalspecialty. 

 

Is this not a perfect illustration ofthe dilemma we face in relying on expertise? What good is knowledge divorcedfrom comprehension of its proper direction and use? Oppenheimer's answer to themost important question humanity has ever faced is no answer at all, for itsuggests that the moral question might best be engaged by a different class ofexperts than the bomb-makers, a Department of Extermination Affairs perhaps.

 

For all that Nichols leavesunaddressed, however,  The Death ofExpertise remains a lucid and compelling description of rising popularidiocy. Pity that the larger picture does not flatter the experts Nichols seeksto defend. 

 

We are now drifting towards a world ofhighly specialized moral imbeciles governing narcissistic laypeople tooignorant to defend themselves.

 

 

Andnow that the crisis has subsided, organized efforts are underway to ban anyfuture pandemic response measures that might interfere with getting andspending.

EveryU.S. military intervention abroad, for example, is portrayed as necessary tostop "another Hitler."

 

However,her claim that in a brief meeting with President Reagan she was able to"clinically" assess his IQ to be 100, is also suspect.

 

"DanielEllsberg, The Doomsday Machine –Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, (Bloomsbury, 2017)

 

." Chomskyquoted in Raphael Salkie, The ChomskyUpdate - Linguistics And Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) p. 140]

 

Commentstaken from Chomsky's "Year 501," (South End Press, 1993) p. 18, and"Deterring Democracy," (Hill and Wang, 1991) p. 253.

 

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845

Oppenheimerquoted in Jonathan Kozol, The Night IsDark and I Am Far From Home – A Political Indictment of the U.S. Public Schools,(Continuum, 1984) p. viii

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White Men Worth Watching: UAW President Denounces Exploitation of Auto Workers On Verge of Strike

 "In the Kingdom of God no one hoards all the wealth while everybody else starves. In the Kingdown of God no one else puts themselves in a position of total domination over the entire community. In the Kingdom of God no one forces others to perform endless, backbreaking work just to feed their families or put a roof over their heads. That world's not the Kingdom of God. That world is Hell. Living paycheck to paycheck scraping to get by - that's Hell. Choosing between medicine and rent is Hell. Working seven days a week for twelve hours a day for months on end is Hell. Having your plant close down and your family scattered across the country - is Hell. Being made to work during a pandemic, and not knowing if you might get sick and die, or spread the disease to your family - is Hell. And enough is enough. It's time to decide what kind of world we want to live in. And it's time to decide what we're willing to do to get it."

-------------UAW President Shawn Fein

Source: "Ford Attacks UAW 'PR Events' Day Before Historic Strike," Status Coup News, September 14, 2023

Native Son: Big Bill Haywood

Happy Labor Day!

“[The] barbarous goldbarons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill thegold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.”

                       --------—Big Bill Haywood

Work taught him of injustice early and converted him to socialism.His first boss whipped him when he was only twelve, and the same year hewitnessed a black man handed over to a lynch mob. Three years later he was aNevada miner doing a “man’s work for aboy’s pay,”breaking the loneliness of Eagle Canyon by reading Darwin, Marx, Burns,Voltaire, Byron, and Shakespeare. An older miner’s explanation of the classstruggle capped his education, though it didn’t sink in until the Haymarketanarchists were hung two years later. 

 
After that, he saw scores of men poisoned at Utah’s Brooklyn leadmine, watched a friend’s head crushed against an air drill by a slab of fallingrock, and had his own right hand smashed between a descending car and the sideof the shaft at Iowa’s Silver City mine. 

 
Adored by women and instinctively obeyed by men, he was the mostpopular union organizer in the country. Blessed with the manners of a gentleman, he packed arevolver, cried like a baby when reciting poetry, and delivered thunderousspeeches that ignited crowds of workers like a wick in a powder keg: “Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep,EIGHT DOLLARS A DAY!”

 

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“If I was to come in and takepossession of your property and throw you out, would I be robbing you?”

 

“Youhave a mistaken idea,” Haywood responded, “that the property is yours. I wouldhold that the property does not belong to you. What you, as a capitalist, havepiled up as property is merely unpaid labor, surplus value. You have no vestedright to that property.” 

 

“You mean then,” Weinstock said, “that the coat youhave on your back does not belong to you but belongs to all the people?” 

 

“Thatis not what I mean,” Haywood answered. “I don’t want your watch. I don’t wantyour toothbrush. But the things that are publicly used – no such word asprivate should be vested by any individual in any of those things.  For instance, do you believe that JohnD. Rockefeller has any right – either God-given right, or man-made right, orany other right – to own the coal mines of the state of Colorado?” 

 

“He has aperfect right to them under the laws of the country,” Weinstock replied. 

 

“Thenthe laws of the country are absolutely wrong,” Haywood retorted. 

 

Reported the New York Call on Haywood’s repartee:“The big witness clipped a sizzler across the suave Commissioner. In every oneof these highly amusing clashes on the broad question of right and wrong,Haywood had Weinstock fighting for wind.” 

 

In addition to the jibes, Haywood setout the IWW's ultimate aspiration:

 

“We hope to see the day when all able men will work, eitherwith brain or muscle. We want to see the day when women will take their placeas industrial units. We want to see the day when every old man and every oldwoman will have the assurance of at least dying in peace. You have not gotanything like that today. You have not the assurance – rich man that you are –of not dying a pauper. I have an idea that we can have a better society than wehave got . . .” 

 

The “better society” would be achieved, Haywood told the Commission, when workers owned and operated their industries collectively anddemocratically. “If foremen or overseers were necessary, they would be selectedfrom among the workers,” he said. “There would be no dominating power there,would there? I can conceive of no need for a dominating national, world-widepower...”

 

Commissioner James O’Connell, an official of the American Federation of Labor'smachinists’ union told Haywood that his dream was “Utopian.” 

 

Haywood disagreed.“Really, Mr. O’Connell, I don’t think that I presented any Utopian ideas. Italked for the necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter, and amusement. Wecan talk of Utopia afterwards. The greatest need is employment.” He recommendedto the Commission a virtual blueprint of New Deal programs like the WPA and theCCC that president Franklin Roosevelt took up twenty years later. 

 

Sources: 

 

Roughneck - The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, by Peter Carlson (1983: W, W. Norton), pps. 226-7

 

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - Rebel Girl, (International Publishers, 1955) p. 131-2

Melvyn Dubofsky, Big Bill Haywood (Manchester University Press, 1987) pps. 10-15 

Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais Labor's Untold Story, (Cameron Associates, 1955) pps. 146-51

 

J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble - (Simon and Schuster, 1997) p. 233, 237 

 

Robert K. Murray, Red Scare - A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, (University of Minnesota, 1955) 

 

Mathew Josephson, The President Makers - The Culture of Politics and Leadership In An Age of Enlightenment, 1896-1919, (Harcourt, 1940) p. 400

 

Mari Jo Buhle and Paul and Harvey J. Kaye eds., The American Radical, (Routledge, 1994) pps. 105-11

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The Ultimate Cancel Culture Issue: The Holocaust

 ". . . real Palestinian Deniers are an infinitely greater problem than any alleged Holocaust Deniers . . . Would it hurt us to move beyond simplistic, reductionist explanations in order to arrive at some understanding of material reality that might help our relations with the rest of the world?"

---------Frank Scott, "The Holocaust, Palestine and Israel: Revision, Denial and Myth" (posted on September 7, 2022 on the Legalienate blog, originally published January 1, 2005)

Cancel Culture Sixty Years Ago: The March on Washington

James Baldwin flew all the way from Paris but was not allowed to speak. John Lewis had his speech altered for daring to ask why the U.S. government could indict civil rights activists for civil disobedience in Albany, Georgiabut couldn't find legal authority to bring violent racists to justice, or even just stop appointing racist judges to the bench. His censored text pointedly inquired:  "I want to know - which side is the federal government on?" The Kennedy Administration vetoed these words.  Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle, the Catholic prelate of Washington, agreed with the censorship, refusing to deliver the invocation if the offending speech wasn't changed.  Dr. King also went along, firmly advising the much-arrested and oft-beaten Lewis to submit to the indignity.  Other dignitaries complained about words like "masses" and "revolution." 

Lewis reluctantly agreed to read a watered-down version of his speech while two Kennedy aides stood by ready to pull the plug on the microphone should he revert to his original text.

It's safe to say that James Baldwin would have been even more critical of the government had he been allowed to speak, convinced as he was that the civil rights movement was actually "the latest slave rebellion."  But most critical of all was Malcolm X, who acidly dismissed the event as "the farce on Washington." Said Malcolm:

"The Negroes were out there in the streets . . . .They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington . . .That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution."

No leader had any chance of stopping it: 

"It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in . . . . these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, 'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.' And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'm telling you what they said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it.' They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're running ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'"

And this co-optation worked: 

"This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it . . . became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. . . ."

No dictator could have achieved more thorough control: 

"No, it was a sellout, a takeover. They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown." 

Civil Rights + Black Nationalism = Slave Rebellion

The U.S. civil rights movement emerged from the official hypocrisy of (allegedly) fighting racism abroad (with a segregated military!) during WWII while maintaining Jim Crow at home.  In the wake of foot-dragging on the Supreme Court's desegregation  decision (1954), the hideous murder of Emmett Till (1955), and the siege of Little Rock (1957), militant disaffection and non-violent moral witness burst forth with stunning suddenness and unprecedented depth.

In Greensboro, North Carolina black students sat-in at department store lunch counters, exuding and demanding the dignity that was their due.  In Monroe, North Carolina Robert Williams called for black "armed self-reliance" years in advance of Black Power and fought off white terrorists in furious gun battles that led to his flight from the country as an FBI fugitive.  Escaping by means of a modern-day Underground Railroad to Canada and then Cuba, Williams broadcast scathing denunciations of "rump-licking Uncle Toms" and "Ku Klux Klan savages" via "Radio Free Dixie" from his sanctuary in Havana.  

In Alabama and Mississippi, pacifist "Freedom Riders" toughed out savage beatings at the hands of racist mobs to integrate public transportation. Meanwhile, activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee faced down clubs, bullets, bombs, and jail in the deepest strongholds of the Klan, winning the franchise for all Americans a century after Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda advantage the Kremlin was reaping from such events, the Kennedy administration moved belatedly and reluctantly to support the black freedom movement. While peaceful protesters were beaten and jailed, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch, FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but did nothing to protect the lives of black Americans.  Concerned about his support in Congress, President Kennedy moved to shore-up his Southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent "pinks, radicals and black voters" from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering "a bunch of niggers on a voter drive."  

Yes, segregation finally crumbled, but not before inflicting a century of lynchings, and the federal government only very cautiously abandoned its Dixie allies under intense and sustained popular pressure.  The persistence of racial subordination beyond the dismantling of legal apartheid heralded the growing realization that racism was not simply an anachronism of the ex-Confederate states, as many liberals had supposed, but pervaded the entire nation. In his first northern campaign (1966) Martin Luther King was shocked by the virulence of Chicago prejudice, where ghettoization had achieved an informal apartheid every bit as formidable as legal segregation and the Citizens Councils.  At the peak of civil rights success, devastating riots in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, and Newark made the national character of American racism dramatically plain while serving notice that its abolition demanded something more than programmatic change.  By decade's end the rhetoric of liberal inclusion and the tactics of marching, singing, and sitting-in gave way to the angry rhetoric and armed apostles of Black Power, who echoed Malcolm X's demand for freedom "by any means necessary."