As 2023 ended, European nations failed to agree on a $54-billion package of assistance for Ukraine at a time when that country was desperately trying to stay afloat and continue its fight against Russian occupation forces. Bizarrely, the failure of that proposal coincided with a surprising EU decision to open membership talks with that beleaguered country.

In other words, no military aid for Ukraine in the short term but a possible offer of a golden ticket to join the EU at some unspecified future moment. Ukrainians might well ask themselves whether, at that point, they’ll still have a country.

One person, right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is largely responsible for that contradictory combo. He singlehandedly blocked the aid package, suggesting that any decision be put off until after European Parliamentary elections in early June of this year. Ever the wily tactician, he expects those elections to signal a political sea change, with conservative and far-right forces — think of them as Donald Trump’s allies in Europe — replacing the parliament’s current centrist consensus. Now an outlier, Orbán is counting on a new crop of sympathetic leaders to advance his arch-conservative social agenda and efforts to cut Ukraine loose.

He’s also deeply skeptical of expanding the EU to include Ukraine or other former Soviet republics, not just because of Russian sensitivities but for fear that EU funds could be diverted from Hungary to new members in the east. By leaving the room when that December vote on future membership took place, Orbán allowed consensus to prevail, but only because he knew he still had plenty of time to pull the plug on Ukraine’s bid.

Ukrainians remain upbeat despite the aid delay. As their leader Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted about future EU membership, “This is a victory for Ukraine. A victory for all of Europe. A victory that motivates, inspires, and strengthens.”

But even if Orbán’s resistance were to be overcome, a larger challenge looms: the European Union that will make the final determination on Ukraine’s membership may not prove to be the same regional body as at present. While Russia and Ukraine battle it out over where to define Europe’s easternmost frontier, a fierce political conflict is taking place to the west over the very definition of Europe.

In retrospect, the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020 may prove to have been just a minor speedbump compared to what Europe faces with the war in Ukraine, the recent success of far-right parties in Italy and the Netherlands, and the prospect that, after the next election, a significantly more conservative European Parliament could at the very least slow the roll-out of the European Green Deal.

And worse yet, a full-court press from the far right might even spell the end of the Europe that has long shimmered on the horizon as a greenish-pink ideal. The extinguishing of the one consistent success story of our era — particularly if Donald Trump were also to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election — could challenge the very notion of progress that’s at the heart of any progressive agenda.

Orbán’s Allies

For decades, Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, has regularly garnered headlines for his outrageous statements and proposals to ban Islam, the Quran, and/or immigrants altogether. In the run-up to the November 2023 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, it looked as if he would continue to be an eternal also-ran with a projected vote total in the mid to upper teens. In addition to the usual obstacles he faced, like the lunacy of his platform, he was up against a reputed political powerhouse in Frans Timmermans, the architect of Europe’s Green Deal and the newly deputized leader of the Dutch center-left coalition.

Buy the Book

To everyone’s surprise, however, Wilders’s party exceeded expectations, leading the field with 23% of the vote and more than doubling the number of Party for Freedom seats in the new parliament.

Although mainstream European parties had historically been reluctant to form governments with the far right, some have now opportunistically chosen to do so. Far-right parties now serve in governments in Sweden and Finland, while leading coalitions in Italy and Slovakia.

Wilders, too, wants to lead. He’s even withdrawn a 2018 bill to ban mosques and the Quran in an effort to woo potential partners. Such gestures toward the center have also characterized the strategy of Giorgia Meloni, the head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who downplayed its fascist roots and pledged to support both NATO and the EU to win enough centrist backing to become Italy’s current prime minister.

But what happens if there’s no longer a political center that must be wooed?

That’s been the case in Hungary since Viktor Orbán took over as prime minister in 2010. He has systematically dismantled judicial, legislative, and constitutional checks on his power, while simultaneously marginalizing his political opposition. Nor does he have to compromise with the center, since it’s effectively dropped out of Hungarian politics — and he and his allies are eager to export their Hungarian model to the rest of Europe. Worse yet, they’ve got a strong tailwind. In 2024, the far-right is on track to win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s far-right party leads the polls in France and the equally intemperate, anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland is running a strong second to the center-right in Germany.

No less ominously, the Identity and Democracy bloc, which includes the major French and German far-right parties, is projected to gain more than two dozen seats in the European parliamentary elections this June. The European Conservatives and Reformists bloc, which contains the Finnish, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish far-right parties, will also probably pick up a few seats. Throw in unaffiliated representatives from Orbán’s Fidesz party and that bloc could become the largest in the European parliament, even bigger than the center-right coalition currently at the top of the polls.

Such developments only further fuel Orbán’s transnational ambitions. Instead of being the odd man out on votes over Ukrainian aid, he wants to transform the European Union with himself at the center of a new status quo. “Brussels is not Moscow,” he tweeted in October. “The Soviet Union was a tragedy. The EU is only a weak contemporary comedy. The Soviet Union was hopeless, but we can change Brussels and the EU.”

With such a strategy, wittingly or not, Orbán is following the Kremlin playbook. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to undercut European unity as part of an effort to divide the West. With that in mind, he forged alliances with far-right political parties like Italy’s Lega and Austria’s Freedom Party to sow havoc in European politics. His careful cultivation of Orbán has made Hungary functionally his country’s European proxy.

Not all of Europe has jumped on the far-right bandwagon. Voters in Poland last year even kicked out the right-wing Law and Justice party, while the far right lost big in the latest Spanish elections. Also, far-right parties are notoriously hard to herd and forging a consensus among them will undoubtedly prove difficult on issues like NATO, LGBTQ rights, and economic policy.

Still, on one key issue they’re now converging. They used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they largely favor a take-over-from-within strategy. And to make that happen, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of “Fortress Europe” to keep out those fleeing the Global South and frontally assaulting that cornerstone of recent EU policy, the Green energy transition.

The Fate of the Green New Deal

In Germany, the far right has gone after, of all things, the heat pump. The Alternative fur Deutschland’s campaign against a bill last year to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with electrical heat pumps propelled the party into second place in the polls (thanks to an exaggeration of the cost of such pumps). The French far right is also on the political rise, fueled in part by its opposition to what its leader Marine Le Pen, in a manifesto issued in 2022, called “an ecology that has been hijacked by climate terrorism, which endangers the planet, national independence and, more importantly, the living standards of the French people.” In the Netherlands, Wilders and the far right have similarly benefited from a farmer backlash against proposals to reduce nitrogen pollution.

A report from the Center for American Progress concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.” Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway are even more pointed: “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”

The European far right, in other words, is mobilizing behind a second Great Replacement theory. According to the initial version of that conspiracy theory, which helped a first wave of right-wing populists take power a few years ago, immigrants were plotting to replace indigenous, mostly white populations in Europe. Now, extremists argue that clean green energy is fast replacing the fossil fuels that anchor traditional (read: white Christian) European communities. This “fossil fascism,” as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have labeled it, marries extractivism to ethnonationalism, with right-wing whites clinging to oil and coal as tightly as Barack Obama once accused their American counterparts of clinging to guns and religion.

Believers in this second Great Replacement theory have demonized the European Green Deal, which is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions 55% by 2030. The overall deal is a sophisticated industrial policy designed to create jobs in the clean energy sector that will replace those lost by miners, oil riggers, and pipeline workers. However urgently needed, the Deal doesn’t come cheap and so is vulnerable to charges of “elitism.”

Worse yet, the backlash against Europe’s Green turn has expanded to efforts in the European Parliament to block pesticide reduction and weaken legislation on the reduction of packaging. As a result of this backlash, Politico notes, “The Green Deal now limps on, with several key policies on the scrapheap.” A rightward shift in the European Parliament would knock the Green Deal to the ground (and even kick it while down), ensuring a further disastrous heating of this planet.

The War of Ideas

The war in Ukraine seems to be about the territory Russia has occupied, the fight over the European Green Deal about politics and the far right’s search for an issue as effective as immigrant-bashing to rally voters. At the center of both struggles, however, is something far more significant. From Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin to Marine Le Pen at the reactionary barricades in Paris, the far right is fighting over the very future of European ideals.

Narrowly, that debate is just the latest iteration of a longstanding question about whether Europe should emphasize expanding its membership or the deeper integration of the present EU. Until now, the compromise has been to set a distinctly high bar for EU membership but provide generous subsidies to the lucky few countries that make it into the club. By turning a cold shoulder to a neighbor in need, after having benefitted enormously from EU largesse since the 1990s, Hungary is challenging that core principle of solidarity.

But Orbán and his allies have a far more radical mission in mind: to transform European identity. Right now, Europe stands for extensive social programs that even right-wing parties are reluctant to consider dismantling. The European Union has also advanced the world’s most consequential collective program on a green energy transition. And despite some backlash, it remains a welcoming space for the LGBTQ community.

In other words, the EU is still a beacon for progressives around the world (notwithstanding the neoliberal reforms that are regressively remaking its economic space). It remains an aspirational space for the countries on Europe’s borders that yearn to escape autocracy and relative poverty. It’s similarly so for people in distant lands who imagine Europe as an ark of salvation in an increasingly illiberal world, and even for U.S. progressives who are envious of European health care and industrial policies, as well as its environmental regulations. That the EU’s policies are also the product of vigorous transnational politicking has also been inspirational for internationalists who want stronger cross-border cooperation to help solve global problems.

In the late 1980s, as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union began to fall apart, political scientist Francis Fukuyama imagined an “end of history.” The hybrid of market democracy, he argued, would be the answer to all ideological debates and the European Union would serve as the boring, bureaucratic endpoint of global political evolution. Since the invasion of Ukraine, however, history is not only back, but seems to be going backward.

The far right is at the forefront of that retreat. Even as the EU contemplates expansion eastward, a revolt from within threatens to bring about the end of Europe itself — the end, that is, of the liberal and tolerant social welfare state, of a collective commitment to economic solidarity, and of its leading role in addressing climate change. The battle between a democratic Ukraine and the autocratic Russian petrostate is, in other words, intimately connected to the conflicts being waged in Brussels.

Without a vibrant, democratic Ukraine, the eastern frontier of Europe abutting Russia is likely to become a zone of fragile, divided, incoherent “nation states,” hard-pressed to qualify for EU membership. Without a powerful left defending Europe’s gold-standard social safety nets, libertarians are likely to advance their attempts to eat away at or eliminate the regulatory state. Without Europe’s lead, global efforts to address climate change will grow dangerously more diffuse.

Sound familiar? That’s also the agenda of the far-right in the United States, led by Donald Trump. His MAGA boosters, like media personalities Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have been pulling for Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders, and Vladimir Putin to send Europe spiraling backward into fascism.

Short on resources and political power, progressives have always possessed one commodity in bulk: hope. The arc of the moral universe is long, Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied so many years ago, but it bends toward justice. Or maybe it doesn’t. Take away the European ideal and no matter what happens in the American presidential election this year, 2024 will be the year that hope dies last.

Copyright 2024 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.

Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.

This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny — a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.

In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises — in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s  — as we then called it  — “cultural imperialism.”

Buy the Book

That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.

One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.

Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.

In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.

Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism — the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.

The Empire Strikes Back!

Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred  — not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.

If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved — temporarily, we hoped — to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11th found us.

Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw — on television, no less — being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.

I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.

It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland — then-American President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.

Buy the Book

Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.

Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.

Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.

True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.

And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.

Warnings from the Fish

Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.

Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”

In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”

What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.

Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, California, a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.

To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.

And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?

Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out

On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.

Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.

To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.

And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?

President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.

Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.

As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.

Copyright 2023 Ariel Dorfman

Via Tomdispatch.com )

It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.

Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.

Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”

The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.

Hat tip Trading Economics

What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.

Murdoch, despite his undeniably mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.

So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.

I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.

I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not so much hired as trafficked.

Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.

The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.

News Corp owns Dow Jones & Company, the latter’s Wall Street Journal, News UK (publisher of the Times of London and a raft of scurrilous tabloids), News Corp Australia, Realtor.com and publisher HarperCollins. Most of Murdoch’s film and television properties were spun off in 2013 and purchased by Disney in 2019. The exception was the television news channel, owned by Fox News, of which Murdoch retained control. His plan to merge News Corp and Fox News was foiled by the opposition of News Corp executives who viewed Fox News as a toxic brand that would sully their name.

That’s right, when Murdoch’s media empire was broken up into three in 2013, one of the three successor companies was the skunk at the party. Fox Cable News had become known as a dirty rotten liar of a television channel, with which even Murdoch’s own colleagues feared to be associated.

Their good judgment was borne out last April, when Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a damaging public libel trial. The anchors of Fox Cable News, which is owned by Fox News and ultimately by Murdoch, had repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting machines delivered inaccurate ballot counts, allowing Joe Biden to claim the presidency even though Donald J. Trump had actually won. This rank falsehood did plausible damage to Dominion’s business, and it seems likely that the company would have won at trial and been awarded even greater damages. Smartmatic, another voting machine manufacturer, has launched a similar suit, and Fox turned over thousands of pages of discovery in April.

Murdoch allegedly believed that he could plead the First Amendment, which attests to a dismal level of knowledge about US law. The First Amendment protects individuals from the US government, it doesn’t give people carte blanche to destroy the reputations of others with malicious lies. And while courts seek a high bar for libel cases in the US because of the First Amendment pledge of free speech, unlike in the UK, they haven’t set them aside entirely, and there have been recent landmark libel cases. I’m only hoping that Dominion opened a floodgate, and that further suits against Fox are forthcoming. It is a cancer in the body politic, of deliberate lies, hatemongering and warmongering on behalf of big capital, and we desperately need to be cured of it as a nation.

To quote Bond, “Welcome to hell, Blofeld.”

On Monday, Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant claimed the resistance counter attacks are being directed by Iran.

“We are in the midst of a terrorist onslaught that is being encouraged, directed and financed by Iran and its proxies,” claimed Netanyahu.

He made his comment following the resistance attacks that led to the death of three Israelis in the Palestinian village of Huwara, which was attacked earlier this year by illegal Jewish settlers backed by occupation forces.

Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker said for years Israel has mocked Arab countries who blamed Israel for every negative incident.

Druker said he was not sure if Netanyahu had made his claims within the framework of an attempt to launch a campaign against  the Iranian nuclear issue because of the outstanding negotiations there, adding that no one believes Netanyahu and Gallant’s claims.

Drucker described Netanyahu’s accusations as “very shameful”, adding that the Israeli right-wing government led by Netanyahu is looking for an “escape goat” or “anyone” to blame for the operations.

For his part, a senior commentator and the head of the Arab desk in Channel 13 News, Zvi Yehezkeli said Iran may have helped with delivering the weapons, but it is not directly involved in the operations, adding that Israel is still at war, “an intifada”, with the Palestinians.

Alon Ben David, a military affairs analyst at Channel 13 indicated that “accusing Iran of directing the [Hebron] operation is a very easy solution, as Iran is not responsible for the complex dilemma in the West Bank, in which there are many Israelis, who live among the Palestinian population.”

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

Social media celebrities lead frustrated young men to targetrefugees

Written bysencerodabasi

There is a wave of anti-refugee rhetoric running amok on Turkish social media. From openly racist statements made by far-right political party leaders to accounts claiming to be “news agencies” circulating disinformation to incite violence, social media is not making life safer for the over 4 million refugees within Turkish borders. There have been several points of escalation in the rhetoric; Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover provided a safe space for the Turkish far-right just like their international compatriots, and the Turkish elections in May 2023 saw refugees targeted by political campaigns. Yet, regardless of those spikes, this trend of increasing hate speech targeting refugees in Turkish social media has a longer history.

An intuitive explanation would be based on the numbers; as the number of refugees increases, so does anti-refugee sentiment. There is, however, little to support this narrative. There is more empirical support for the exact opposite phenomenon: social contact with immigrants leads to more tolerance and positive sentiments rather than increasing hate. While there is no direct data as such in the specific example of Turkey, Zafer Partisi, a far-right political party that promises to kick all refugees out of Turkey, had a vote percentage higher than its national average in only one of the top five provinces with the highest concentration of refugees, and in two of the top 10, according to data from the ministry of interior’s migration management center.

There is much documentation proving exposure to pro- or anti-immigrant narratives in the media affects attitudes toward immigration. Evidence that negative media exposure creates hostility and discrimination against immigrants is strong. The role of social media platforms in this narrative is still being researched. Existing findings suggest that social media is heavily receptive to narratives produced by traditional media, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume the opposite is also true. This forces us to engage with the anti-refugee radicalism in Turkish social media as an independent and very dangerous phenomenon in itself. Obviously, the country’s political atmosphere affects the media just like it affects pretty much everything in Turkey. Social media itself is an agent (or, more accurately, a large collection of agents) in this shift, though, not just a passive receiver.

Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash

Networks of hate

Influencers, streamers, and similar social media celebrities lead hordes of frustrated young men in targeting refugees. Twitch streamer Ahmet Sonuç, known as “Jahrein,” is one such figure. Using his popularity with young men as a gaming streamer, he routinely targets and dehumanizes refugees. Sonuç also targets domestic organizations that do not have a racist outlook toward Turkish refugees, frequently targeting political parties that favor policies for integration and implying that feminist organizations that refuse to frame sexual harassment problems in racist terms deserve harassment. Sonuç’s Twitter account was blocked by the pre-Musk Twitter administration in October 2022 for hateful conduct, but it was restored after the Musk takeover.

Another example as such is the anonymous far-right YouTube content creator known as “Erlik.” Known for pushing militarist alternate histories and conspiracy theories, Erlik uses his Twitter account similarly for claiming the refugees are a demographic danger and praising anti-refugee policies by right-wing governments such as the UK’s, which the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) called out for promoting policies that fueled far-right violence. Erlik is also known for YouTube videos calling feminist women fighting sexual assault fascists, and targeting left-wing and pro-Kurdish social media users, claiming they are tied to terrorist organizations.

Image courtesy Giovana Fleck

The most vile sentiments are coming from anonymous Twitter accounts. Emboldened by their blue check marks, which can now be easily acquired in the absence of any vetting and oversight, these accounts routinely dehumanize refugees and level accusations against the immigrant population in Turkey for any issues, including spreading contagious diseases and, by doing so,  recreate the “dirty immigrants” narrative.

Ajans Muhbir (Informant Agency) is one of the prominent provocateur accounts. It is affiliated with the far-right politician Ümit Özdağ, who is the leader of a newly founded radical right-wing political party Zafer Partisi. Ajans Muhbir’s previous account, with a long history of sharing false and outdated content to target immigrants, was closed by Twitter for violating Twitter rules in the pre-Musk era. But that did not stop the account from fueling the anti-immigrant narrative, which it continues to do under a new name with impunity. There are also non-anonymous accounts routinely engaged in spreading hate. One of these prominent accounts belongs to Ümit Özdağ, who has been using it as a platform to instill fear via videos insinuating that Turkish people will become a minority in Turkey in the future. He has also not shied away from sharing racist conspiracy theories that blame Turkey’s Kurdish minority for the waves of mass immigration. Özdağ’s unchecked hatred-fuelled narrative has attracted scores of Turkish-speaking racists and far-right demagogues of every stripe to his social media platforms.

Özdağ also used his account to praise a human trafficker for taking refugees out of the country’s borders and targeted immigrant doctors by publishing their personal information on Twitter. These narratives should be considered crimes under Turkish law.

The politician consistently has been propogating the idea that Syrian refugees will take over Turkey demographically and make ethnic Turks an oppressed minority, in a way, a translated and localized version of the “Great Replacement” theory —  a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory that originated in France in the early 20th century and gradually spread to the Western world, peaking in popularity in the 1930s. It was relatively forgotten until it resurfaced once more in the 21st century by far-right resurgence.

With the combination of the “blue tick effect” on Musk’s new Twitter that’s aggravating far-right rhetoric around the world and the newfound legitimization in Turkish elections by two parts of the far-right bloc being accepted into both the ruling Justice and Development party and the opposition alliances; it is hard to imagine this social media storm slowing down anytime soon.

Turkey is one of the world’s foremost refugee hubs, with a rather large economy and a significant population that is very active on social media. All these qualities make it almost a laboratory for the interactions between the far right, social media, and refugees. The social media atmosphere in the country should be watched closely by anyone attempting to understand and discern the new relationships that are being formed between the new far right and the new media globally.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

Written bysencerodabasi

Last Thursday, Israelis demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Israel, demanding that the United States pressure Netanyahu to back off his plan to gut the country’s supreme court. They said they feared the change would harm US-Israeli relations.

On Saturday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus, denounced Israel as a racist state. She clarified on Sunday that she only meant that the current Netanyahu government is racist, not that the idea of Israel is. I don’t think that remark will mollify the Israel lobbies, but the episode shows how alienated some corners of the American political scene have become from the horror show in Tel Aviv.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities for the 28th week in a row to demonstrate against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s planned legislation to gut the powers of the country’s Supreme Court. They also announced that they would devote the coming week to disruptions, including of the rails.

These massive protests, in which fully a fourth of the country has taken part personally, and which are supported by a majority, have demonstrated the polarization of the country.

On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.

Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”

He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.

Netanyahu has pledged to hold a vote on Tuesday on an article in the bill that takes away from the Supreme Court its power of judicial review of acts of parliament on grounds that the latter are “unreasonable.” The Court can overrule laws it finds contradict the basic principles of reasonableness set out in Israel’s organic law, which jurists have maintained have the force of a constitution.

If the article passes, as it likely will, the Supreme Court will no longer be able to overrule acts of parliament on these grounds, setting the stage for a tyranny of the parliamentary majority. The court would also not be any longer able to strike down appointments of politicians to high office on the grounds that they have shown a pattern of corruption. Women, gays, Muslims, Christians and other groups fear that the Jewish fundamentalists in the cabinet will then pass laws depriving them of their rights, and that the Supreme Court will not be able to counteract such measures. Others fear that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, will use the provision to ensure he cannot be found guilty and go to jail.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari points out that Israel has only a unicameral legislature from which the prime minister is elected, and therefore has no other checks and balances on government power save for the Supreme Court. Remove the latter, he says, and you have a dictatorship.

The popularity of the leading parties in the current government has plummeted according to opinion polls. The polling suggests that if elections were held today, the opposition would get well over the 61 seats needed to form a government in the 120-member Knesset.

Ironically, the public changed its mind too slowly. Netanyahu’s current majority is firmly ensconced, and despite the enormous weekly demonstrations, the parliament can certainly pass the bill gutting the judiciary if it so desires. It almost certainly will.

The extremist, fascist parties in Netanyahu’s cabinet intend to use the gutting of the Supreme Court as a way to accelerate illegal squatter-settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, and to ensure that there can be no judicial backlash against their plans to colonize Palestinian land intensively with Israeli migrants into the territory, and then to annex it, while keeping the Palestinians stateless and without rights.

In the wake of the recent stabbing attack on a University of Waterloo professor and two students in a philosophy of gender course, we need to talk about the profound power words have to shape our world.

We are both professors at the University of Waterloo who focus on various aspects of gender and language in our research and teaching.

In her book, Call Them By Their True Names, journalist and author Rebecca Solnit argues that we are presently in a crisis of language where words have lost their meaning in a sea of misinformation and inflamed debates. Her response is that we all must be careful and precise with the words we use in order to “oppose the disintegration of meaning.”

In this spirit we will be very precise in our language here: the continued patterns of violence both online and offline against women, racialized, disabled, queer and gender nonconforming people are forms of stochastic terrorism and need to be named as such.

What is stochastic terrorism

At its core, stochastic terrorism is public demonization of a group which incites random violence against that group. Crucial here are the words public, demonization and violence. They work together to silence people either by threat of violence or through violence itself.

When a group of people are publicly and repeatedly demonized, they are dehumanized for the benefit of others. This demonization and distancing is crucial for inciting violence. It makes violence toward certain people, or those expressing certain ideas, more palatable. It distances those enacting the violence from the true horrors of their actions.

When it comes to gender-based violence such demonization is hardly new. It was used to target women and others who did not conform to religious dogma in medieval and early modern witch trials.

More recently, the demonization of women has been a staple of so-called incel doctrines that have informed other acts of violence including the Isla Vista shootings in 2014 and the Toronto van attack in 2018.

James Chow was in the UWaterloo gender studies class, where a professor and two students were stabbed in a hate-related attack.

This is the most detailed explanation and recounting of events from any witness so far — it’s a must listen. The events are terrifying. pic.twitter.com/yHq9hAmhjr

— Ahmar Khan (@AhmarSKhan) June 30, 2023

Social media is awash with influencers like Andrew Tate who spread misogynistic rhetoric to millions. All this combines to create a situation where gender-based violence becomes more likely.

Spreading hate has real consequences

This hatred is spread through public conversations, often on social media platforms that do not adequately regulate hate speech or protect the most vulnerable recipients of that hate speech.

When such ideas spread rapidly and easily in online spaces without consequence it allows them to multiply and gain validation. This combination of widespread, normalized, publicly accessible hatred and dehumanization is central to the forms of violence we see erupting across spaces currently, including in our spaces of learning.

As women scholars who came of age in the shadow of the École Polytechnique massacre, we are well aware of how gender-based violence makes a lasting impact on how we experience and move in the world. The murder of 14 women by a gunman motivated by a hatred of feminists sent a very direct message to Canadian girls and women who witnessed the horror and its aftermath.

At a time when both of us were planning out our post-secondary studies, the message we heard was: you are not welcome in spaces of learning and the threat of violence will always be present. For us and others of our generation, this formative experience served as a basis for many of our feminisms.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

This week, the immediate thoughts and feelings we experienced after the violent attack on members of our university community were all too familiar. They reminded us again that the threat of violence for daring to stand in a classroom and speak is ever-present.

University classrooms can be transformative

Being precise with language allows us to also name what could be. In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, American novelist Toni Morrison defined language as something that delimits the possibilities of our world. Language can oppress and do violence. However, when it is used collaboratively in good faith, it becomes a way to open us all to a better world.

Universities embody this double-edge. They can be sites of violence and silencing that has shaped us in profound ways. They are also sites of risk in choosing to speak at all, in sharing ideas that are new and untested, and in the sense that by inviting new perspectives we risk our well-worn certainties and challenge our fundamental assumptions.

But that is how places of learning become sites of transformation and liberation. This specifically is what we want for our students, now and in the future. The risk is present, but so too is the promise of change. And so we will continue to teach and share insights on issues of gender within our classrooms because the sharing of knowledge is what universities are intended for.

There has always been rhetorical and violent backlash when people express new ideas and challenge established norms. Women, queer, racialized and gender nonconforming students and professors are vulnerable to the violence of what is considered the norm. It is disingenuous and dangerous to pretend it is otherwise.

We must name things for what they are, acknowledge the ways that we are vulnerable, and confront the continued harm done by the unchecked and dehumanizing public forums of the internet. We hope the ongoing threat of violence does not deter younger generations from being curious, examining the world, and sharing their visions for the future.

What we need to do as a public community both inside and outside universities is support our youth by naming hatred and violence for what it is. In doing so, we can expose the consequences of the demonization of others and the weaponized use of language.

Shana MacDonald, Associate Professor of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo and Alysia Kolentsis, Associate Professor, English language and literature, University of Waterloo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com) – “There must be some kind of way out of here…”

As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.”

While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had faced mounting local opposition and this festival was, in essence, a coming-out party for the movement to defend a priceless bit of urban green space from the bulldozer’s blade.

Now, accompanied by the dull hum of drones and the buzz of helicopters overhead, officers of the “peace” descended from all directions, their fingers on the triggers of their semi-automatics. The orders came down with the force of live rounds: “Get on the ground! Now!”

“I was playing ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ funnily enough,” remembers Suede Cassidy frontman Jeremiah Percival. “Around halfway through our set, they started arresting people… pointing AR-15s… traumatizing kids for nothing. It was very stormtrooper-esque. It’s a good reminder to know how fascism is in this country and how it’s very much alive.”

“It was after dark,” recalls Stop Cop City activist Priscilla Grim. “I was walking to see the concert. And I noticed that there was a drone tracking me. And the next thing I knew, men started chasing me, and I fell. They had me turn over on my stomach. And there was the red light of the gunsight to the right of my head. It was… frightening!”

Priscilla and 22 other protesters nabbed that night would go on to be charged with “domestic terrorism” — conduct allegedly “intended to intimidate the civilian population” or to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government of this state” — under a Georgia statute originally meant to deter would-be killers in the wake of the Charleston A.M.E. massacre. “I was completely shocked when I heard that I was being charged with domestic terrorism,” Priscilla told me. “For wearing black! In a forest! It’s absurd. It’s illegitimate. It’s an abuse… And as a survivor of 9/11, I am insulted that the state of Georgia thinks that they can do this.”

The Makings of an American Inquisition

Today, no fewer than 42 such cases are being prosecuted by Georgia’s attorney general. All 42 defendants stand accused of damaging property, not people. The only injuries that occurred were by police and correctional officers on the bodies of the accused. Some were then held for a month or more before being formally charged with a crime.

Georgia is hardly alone. The New York City Police Department recently attempted to charge multiple protesters with “terrorism” after they peacefully occupied a subway station to protest the choking to death of Jordan Neely, an unhoused New Yorker, by an ex-Marine. In an absurd turn of events, the charges were ultimately downgraded from “terrorism” to “criminal trespassing” before being dropped altogether last week.

Buy the Book

And across the country, such police work continues under the guise of counterterrorism. Since the George Floyd movement, it’s been possible to see the makings of a future American inquisition in which the machinery of state is increasingly weaponized against the body politic itself — especially against its most leftwing, most marginalized parts.

Though the fanatics of the far right have been responsible for the preponderance of deadly political violence in recent years, it’s the heretics of the left — antiracists and antifascists, environmentalists and anticapitalists, pro-choice feminists and LGBTQ+ liberationists — who have attracted the most attention from police, prosecutors, and inquisitorial politicians.

It is they who have been profiled as “domestic terrorists,” branded as “violent extremists,” and subjected to terrorism-based sentencing enhancements, often yielding harsher prison terms and crueler punishments than those for their right-wing counterparts. As a result of such disparities, hundreds of participants in the George Floyd protests remain caged in federal facilities to this day.

The Long, Hot Summer of 2020

On May 31, 2020, just days after George Floyd’s murder, President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) all but declared war on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. Attorney General William P. Barr went before the press and promised to deploy federal forces to apprehend “radical agitators,” identify “criminal organizers and instigators,” and “coordinate” with “our state and local partners.”

“The rioting is domestic terrorism,” Barr went on to state, “and will be treated accordingly.”

Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli had a nearly identical message for the media: “Cities across America burn at the hands of antifa and anarchists while many political leaders are refusing to call it what it is: domestic terrorism.” A DHS whistleblower later affirmed that Cuccinelli and others had specifically instructed him to play up “the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups” in his intelligence assessments — and downplay threats of terror from the far right.

And so began a long, hot summer of inquisition into, and counterinsurgency against, the Black Lives Matter movement. By the second week of June, more than 13,643 protest participants had been arrested by state and local authorities. Some, like a group of three teens in Oklahoma City, even faced charges of felony “terrorism” for alleged acts of property destruction.

By the time the protests were over, some 326 people had been apprehended by federal agents, including members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). At least 54 U.S. Attorneys’ offices were involved, as were all 56 of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

In May 2023, new reporting on FBI activities would reveal that the agency had improperly run “batch queries” of foreign intelligence sources for information on 133 individuals, all of whom were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests” in 2020. They were looking for “counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees.” According to recently declassified documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they were also spying on American citizens without “any specific potential connections to terrorist-related activity.”

In 20 of the cases prosecuted at the federal level, there is evidence of direct involvement by FBI agents in the arrests themselves. And in two particularly egregious cases, U.S. Marshals and their deputies functionally acted as judges, juries, and executioners, with “Violent Offender Task Forces” fatally shooting two suspects — antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl in Washington and Black Lives Matter advocate Winston Smith in Minnesota — on sight.

Up until January 6, 2021, the supposed danger posed by left-wing “extremism” continued to be deemed greater than, or at least equal to, the threat of right-wing terrorism. No matter that the right had been responsible for the lion’s share of lethal incidents linked to extremism of any kind.

There were, of course, no terrorism bulletins released ahead of the events of January 6th. Nor would there be terrorism enhancements after the fact awaiting those who participated in the Capitol siege. Such charges were reserved for Americans of a different description.

A Bipartisan Inquisition

The inquisition did not end with Trump’s first term. For all the rhetoric about criminal justice reform — and for all the conspiracy theories claiming that the president had “quietly” pardoned thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2021 — Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has doubled down in a determined fashion on an inquisitorial strategy of counterinsurgency in the name of counterterrorism.

In the White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” released in June 2021, the administration pledged to “disrupt and deter those who launch… attacks in a misguided effort to force change in government policies that they view as unjust.” Subsequent documents, like last fall’s “Strategic Intelligence Assessment,” a joint product of the FBI and the DHS, confirmed what many in the Black Lives Matter movement already knew: that federal intelligence agencies had set their sights on “threat actors” motivated by “real or perceived racism or injustice in American society.”

Over the course of the Biden presidency, the DOJ has prosecuted Trump-era protest crimes with vigor and enthusiasm, while federal prosecutors have expanded the use of terrorism sentencing enhancements, delivering dozens of political prisoners to the doorstep of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A grossly disproportionate share of them have been people of African descent.

The vast majority of federal cases involve offenses against property or “commerce.” At least 17 have faced felony charges for unlawful use of the Internet (for instance, “using an instrument of interstate commerce to incite riots”). One of every three defendants was charged with obstructing “interstate commerce,” one in five with crimes of “civil disorder,” and another one in five for “conspiring,” “attempting,” or “aiding and abetting” some underlying crime they did not themselves commit.

Take the case of a young Black woman named Tia Pugh, of Mobile, Alabama, who was initially charged with two simple misdemeanors for breaking a window on the night of May 31, 2020.

“We were attacked first,” she would recall. “I was getting my people out of there… We get killed for less.” After being tracked down on Facebook, then interrogated by the FBI, she was brought up on felony charges for interfering with the police “during the commission of a civil disorder” which “adversely affected commerce.” Facing more than five years in prison, her sentence was reduced to time served after she spent more than a year in pretrial detention in an Alabama jail.

Though many have seen their charges dropped, others have seen their cases pursued to the bitter end by local prosecutors. Black activist Brittany Martin was, for instance, convicted in 2022 of “breaching the peace” for shouting in officers’ faces during a peaceable assembly in Sumter, South Carolina, in 2020. Although the alleged offense typically carries a maximum penalty of 30 days, prosecutors charged her with a crime of a “high and aggravated nature.” Last spring, she was sentenced, while pregnant, to no fewer than four years behind bars.

Future Enemies of the State

By any measure, the white supremacist movement is now officially acknowledged to pose the deadliest terrorist threat in America. The White House, the DOJ, and the DHS have made much of their commitment to confronting such far-right forms of terror, but the numbers coming from the federal government tell a different story.

On June 6th, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released its annual internal audit, assessing the Department’s strategy to “address the domestic violent extremism threat.” The audit revealed that investigations into white supremacist, “racially motivated,” and “anti-government/anti-authority” activity fell dramatically from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, the number (and share) of investigations involving “abortion-related” (including “pro-choice”) extremism skyrocketed, increasing by more than 800% and surpassing that recorded in any other year on record.

There is little mystery as to who is being targeted by such investigations since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which revoked a pregnant parent’s right to choose. Last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray clarified which side was the most suspect and which side considered the most victimized: “You might be interested to know that, since the Dobbs decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70 percent of our abortion-related violence cases, are cases of violence or threats against pro-life… where the victims are pro-life organizations. And we’re going after that.”

The case of Pilsen Community Books (PCB), a worker-owned bookstore on Chicago’s Lower West Side, is illuminating in this regard. PCB was recently revealed to be the subject of an FBI “assessment,” based on three factors: its status as a “not police friendly place”; its role as a “meeting, planning, and networking venue”; and its recent use by “pro-abortion extremists…to prepare for a pro-abortion direct action.” In other words, it’s a dangerous hotbed of constitutionally protected activity.

“Everything is very much out there in terms of what we believe and what we do,” says worker-owner Mandy Medley. “I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way… Community organizing is not illegal and should not be treated as such.”

Elsewhere, the Department of Homeland Security and its national network of 80 “fusion centers” have been hard at work collecting and aggregating data on “anarchist” or “environmental violent extremists.” And they’ve cast a wide net, even ensnaring writers and artists in their web of surveillance.

State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., inquisitorially-minded Republican politicians have been pressuring the FBI and DHS to crack down ever harder on their ideological adversaries. Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced legislation that would designate “Antifa,” and “any other affiliated group or subsidiary of Antifa” to be a domestic terrorist organization based on its “unlawful conduct” and its belief in “communism, anarchism, socialism… and lawlessness.” That same month, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on “Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence,” at which Greene called for a clampdown on the newest enemy of the state: “The movement that wants to use trans terrorism against Americans.” No mention was made of the very real movement that approves of the use of terror against trans Americans.

One such trans American was Manuel Terán, an indigenous forest defender known as Tortuguita, who was killed by a barrage of 57 bullets one cold January day in that Atlanta forest. While it was a state trooper who fired the fatal bullet, it was DHS, the FBI, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that provided the intelligence for the operation. In the months since Tortuguita’s killing, those very agencies have continued to beat the drums of war, warning of the threat of “violent extremists in Georgia” and singling out those motivated by “anti-law enforcement sentiment.”

In a real sense, it may be that this latest American inquisition has simply come full circle, returning us to our historical roots: to a society where the caging of Black people, the spilling of indigenous blood, and the violent policing of the body politic are the stuff of business as usual — a society where state terror, in the name of counterterrorism, is accepted as a way of life.

On the other hand, if Black Lives Matter and the movement for bodily autonomy are any indication, it may be that we, as a society, have a lower tolerance for state terror than we once did.

Copyright 2023 Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

“What is it, Papa?”

“It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.”

This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust.

“Would they kill me, too?” I asked.

Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn’t happen here.

I must admit that I’m grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to “Unite the Right” marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

Are Queer People the New Jews?

Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn’t have that kind of power.

Now, however, there’s a new extermination campaign stalking this country that would definitely include me among its targets: the right-wing Republican crusade against “sexual predators” and “groomers,” by which they mean LGBTQI+ people. (I’m going to keep things simple here by just writing “LGBT” or “queer” to indicate this varied collection of Americans who are presently a prime target of the right wing in this country.)

You may think “extermination campaign” is an extreme way to describe the set of public pronouncements, laws, and regulations addressing the existence of queer people here. Sadly, I disagree. Ambitious would-be Republican presidential candidates across the country, from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to the less-known governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, are using anti-queer legislation to bolster their primary campaigns. For Florida, it started in July 2022 with DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education act (better known as his “Don’t Say Gay” law), which mandated that, in the state’s public schools,

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

In April 2023, DeSantis doubled down, signing a new law that extended the ban all the way up through high school. Florida teachers at every level now run the very real risk of losing their jobs and credentials if they violate the new law. And queer kids, who are already at elevated risk of depression and suicide, have been deprived of the kind of affirming space that, research shows, greatly reduces those possibilities.

Is Florida an outlier? Not really. Other states have followed its lead in restricting mentions of sexual orientation or gender identity in their public schools. By February of this year, 42 such bills had been introduced in a total of 22 states and are creating a wave of LGBT refugees.

Buy the Book

But the attacks against queer people go well beyond banning any discussion of gayness in public schools. We’re also witnessing a national campaign against trans and non-binary people that, in effect, aims to eliminate such human beings altogether, whether by denying their very existence or denying them the medical care they need. This campaign began with a focus on trans youth but has since widened to include trans and non-binary people of all ages.

Misgendering: As of 2023, seven states have laws allowing (or requiring) public school teachers to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of students if they don’t match their official sex. This behavior is called “misgendering” and it’s more than a violation of common courtesy. It’s a denial of another person’s being, their actual existence, and can have a lethal effect. Such repudiation of trans and non-binary young people significantly increases their chances of committing suicide.

It also increases the chances that their non-queer peers will come to view them with the kind of disrespect and even contempt that could also prove lethal and certainly increases their chances of becoming targets of violence. In 2022, for example, CBS News reported that “the number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021.” It’s no accident that this increase correlates with an increase in high-profile political and legal attacks on trans people. Sadly, but not surprisingly, race hatred has also played a role in many of these deaths. While Blacks represent about 13% of trans and non-binary people, they accounted for almost three-quarters of those murder victims.

Medical care: Laws allowing or even requiring misgendering in classrooms are, however, only the beginning. Next up? Denying trans kids, and ultimately trans adults, medical care. As of June 1st of this year, according to the national LGBT rights organization Human Rights Campaign, 20 states already ban gender-affirmative medical care for trans youth up to age 18. Another seven states now have such bans under consideration.

What is “gender affirmative” medical care? According to the World Health Organization, it “can include any single or combination of a number of social, psychological, behavioral, or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.” In other words, it’s the kind of attention needed by people whose gender identity does not align in some way with the sex they were assigned at birth.

What does it mean to deprive a trans person of such care? It can, in fact, prove to be a death sentence.

It may be difficult to imagine this if you yourself aren’t living with gender dysphoria (a constant disorienting and debilitating alienation from one’s own body). What studies show is that proper healthcare reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, along with other kinds of psychological distress. Furthermore, people who begin to receive such care in adolescence are less likely to be depressed, suicidal, or involved in harmful drug use later in life. As Dr. Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care Clinic at Duke University Hospital, notes, young people who receive the gender-affirming care they need “are happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Their schoolwork often improves, their safety often improves.” And, she says, “Saving their lives is a big deal.”

Denial of life-saving care may start with young people. But the real future right-wing agenda is to deny such health care to everyone who needs it, whatever their ages. In April 2023, the New York Times reported that Florida and six other states had already banned Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care. Missouri has simply banned most such care outright, no matter who’s paying for it.

And the attacks on queer people just keep coming. In May 2023, the Human Rights Campaign listed anti-queer bills introduced and passed in this year alone:

“• Over 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures, a record;

“• Over 220 bills specifically target transgender and non-binary people, also a record; and

“• A record 74 anti-LGBTQ laws have been enacted so far this year, including:

“• Laws banning gender affirming care for transgender youth: 16

“• Laws requiring or allowing misgendering of transgender students: 7

“• Laws targeting drag performances: 2

“• Laws creating a license to discriminate: 3

“• Laws censoring school curricula, including books: 13″

We’re not paranoid. They really do want us to disappear.

Anti-Gay Campaigns in Africa: Made in the USA

Though they’re starting to say the quiet part out loud, even in this country, they’ve been so much less careful in Africa for decades now.

It’s not all that uncommon today for right-wing Christians in the United States to publicly demand that LGBT people be put to death. As recently as Pride month (June) of last year, in a sermon that went viral on Tik-Tok, Pastor Joe Jones of Shield of Faith Baptist Church in Boise, Idaho, called for all gay people to be executed. Local NBC and CBS TV stations, along with some national affiliates, saw fit to amplify Jones’s demand to “put them to death. Put all queers to death” by interviewing him in prime time.

In keeping with right-wing propaganda that treats queer people as child predators, Jones sees killing gays as the key to preventing the sexual abuse of children. “When they die,” he said, “that stops the pedophilia. It’s a very, very simple process.” (The reality is that most sexual abuse of children involves male perpetrators and girl victims and happens inside families.)

Though American “Christians” like Jones may be years away, if ever, from instituting the death penalty for queer people here, they have already been far more successful in Africa. On May 29th, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed perhaps the world’s harshest anti-LGBT law, criminalizing all homosexual activity, providing the death penalty for “serial offenders,” and according to the Reuters news agency, for the “transmission of a terminal illness like HIV/AIDS through gay sex.” It also “decrees a 20-year sentence for ‘promoting’ homosexuality.”

While Uganda’s new anti-gay law may be the most extreme on the continent, more than 30 other African countries already outlaw homosexuality to varying degrees.

It’s a little-known fact that right-wing and Christian nationalist churches from the United States have played a major role in formulating and promoting such laws. Since at least the early 2000s, those churches have poured millions of dollars into anti-gay organizing in Africa. According to Open Democracy, more than 20 U.S. evangelical groups have been involved in efforts to criminalize homosexuality there:

“The Fellowship Foundation, a secretive U.S. religious group whose Ugandan associate, David Bahati, wrote Uganda’s infamous ‘Kill the Gays’ bill, is the biggest spender in Africa. Between 2008 and 2018, this group sent more than $20m to Uganda alone.”

Such groups often employ the language of anticolonialism to advance their cause, treating homosexuality as a “western” import to Africa. Despite such rhetoric, however, quite a few of them are actually motivated by racist as well as anti-gay beliefs. “Of the groups that are active in Africa,” says Open Democracy, “ten are members of the World Congress of Families (WCF), which has been linked to white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe.”

Is MAGA Really Fascism? And Does It Matter?

Back in the late 1980s, I published an article entitled “What Is Fascism — And Why Do Women Need to Know?” in Lesbian Contradiction, a paper I used to edit with three other women. It was at the height of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and I was already worried about dangerous currents in the Republican party, ones that today have swelled into a full-scale riptide to the right. There’s a lot that’s dated in the piece, but the definition I offered for that much-used (and misused) bit of political terminology still stands:

“The term it­self was invented by Benito Mussolini, the premier of Italy from 1922 to 1945, and refers to the ‘fasces,’ the bundle of rods which symbolized the power of the Roman emperors. Today, I would define fascism as an ideology, movement, or government with several identifying characteristics:

“• Authoritarianism and a fanatical respect for leaders. Fas­cism is explicitly anti-democratic. It emerges in times of social flux or instability and of chaotic and worsening economic situations.

“• Subordination of the individual to the state or to the “race.” This subordination often has a spiritual im­plication: people are offered an opportunity to transcend their own sense of insignificance through participation in a powerful movement of the chosen.

“• Appeal to a mythical imperial glory of the past. That past may be quite ancient, as in Mussolini’s evoca­tions of the Roman Empire. Or it might be as recent as the United States of the 1950s.

“• Biological determinism. Fascism involves a belief in absolute biological differences between the sexes and among different races.

“• Genuine popularity. The scariest thing to me about real fascism is that it has always been a truly pop­ular movement. Even when it is a relatively minor force, fascism can be a mass movement without being a majority movement.”

“Having laid out these basic elements,” I added, one “real strength of fascism lies in its ex­traordinary ideological elasticity,” which allows it to embrace a wide variety of economic positions from libertarian to socialist and approaches to foreign policy that range from isolationism to imperialism. I think this, too, remains true today.

What I failed to emphasize then — perhaps because I thought it went without saying (but it certainly needs to be said today) — is that fascism is almost by definition deadly. It needs enemies on whom it can focus the steaming rage of its adherents and it is quite content for that rage to lead to literal extermination campaigns.

The creation of such enemies invariably involves a process of rhetorical dehumanization. In fascist propaganda, target groups cease to be actual people, becoming instead vermin, viruses, human garbage, communists, Marxists, terrorists, or in the case of the present attacks on LGBT people, pedophiles and groomers. As fascist movements develop, they bring underground streams of hatred into the light of “legitimate” political discourse.

All those decades ago, I suggested that the Christian fundamentalists represented an incipient fascist force. I think it’s fair to say that today’s Make America Great Again crew has inherited that mantle, successfully incorporating right-wing Christianity into a larger proto-fascist movement. All the elements of classic fascism now lurk there: adulation of the leader, subordination of the individual to the larger movement, an appeal to mythical past glories, a not-so-subtle embrace of white supremacy, and discomfort with anything or anyone threatening the “natural” order of men and women. You have only to watch a video of a Trump rally to see that his is a mass (even if not a majority) movement.

Why should it matter whether Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Republican Party he’s largely taken over represent a kind of fascism? The answer: because the logic of fascism leads so inexorably to the politics of extermination. Describing his MAGA movement as fascism makes it easier to recognize the existential threat it truly represents — not only to a democratic society but to specific groups of human beings within it.

I know it may sound alarmist, but I think it’s true: proto-fascist forces in this country have shown that they are increasingly willing to exterminate queer people, if that’s what it takes to gain and hold onto power. If I’m right, that means all Americans, queer or not, now face an existential threat.

For those who don’t happen to fall into one of MAGA’s target groups, let me close by paraphrasing Donald Trump: in the end, they’re coming after you. We’re just standing in the way.

Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com