It dawned on me, when I read that in the Hamas-Netanyahu deal to exchange hostages for prisoners, many of the "prisoners" were women and children, often arrested and held without charges, in indefinite military detention, that this was more of a "hostages for hostages" deal. That if Hamas is to be condemned for taking innocent civilians hostage, then so too must Israel. And we have to ask ourselves, what is the context in which Hamas specifically, and Palestinians generally, make their choices? And what powers have the most agency in setting the parameters of those choices?
I've decided to only attempt a reply to one paragraph of Bob Bishop's crazyright-wing rant. That should make it more manageable as a blog post. Here is the paragraph in its entirety:
The modern-day Jacobins are a Malthusian death cult. Their goal is about control of your mind and behavior; not submitting makes you a dissident. They exclusively focus onfulfilling Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological needs of survival and safety (i.e., North Korea) to control the masses, leading to idleness and moral decay. At the same time, it ignores the human psyche that strives for psychological and self-actualization (top of Maslow’s pyramid), which creates a more vibrant and prosperous society.
Is it possible that he could have allowed the Hamas attack to happen so as to engineer the crisis that would allow him to destroy Gaza and save his political career and also avoid the consequences being found guilty of his corruption charges? I mean, the question in the post's title is rhetorical. Of course he's a psychopath. Every Israeli and US official saying that Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties is a shameless, psychopathic liar. Is Netanyahu capable of perpetrating a bloodbath to save his own sorry skin? Of course he is. His is the hand on the tiller of this genocidal slaughter.
I don't usually subscribe to false-flag theories. I don't dismiss them out of hand, but generally, in the past, there has always been something implausible about them (usually the numbers of individuals who would have to go along with them and whose silence is therefore an ongoing requirement) that causes me to reject them.
That could also hold true in this instance. But something in the back of my head, ... when I think about the insanely disproportionate level of violence being inflicted on the Palestinians, by an entirely racist political-military establishment, while they continue to lie about minimizing casualties, while they continue to present intelligence-insulting "evidence" of Hamas command centers, while they insanely tell Palestinians to move southwards and then bomb them when they do so, ... I can't help but wonder if the monster Netanyahu is as evil and depraved to have done what I'm thinking.
Such a crazy coincidence how every single step of Israel’s military operations against Hamas in Gaza has looked exactly the same as what you’d expect to see if Israel was trying to permanently drive Palestinians off a large stretch of Palestinian land.
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This isn’t a war against Hamas. It’s not a war at all. It’s a military operation to facilitate an ethnic cleansing.
Hamas isn’t the target, it’s the excuse.
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Israel isn’t bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Hamas, Israel is bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Gaza.
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A new Guardian article says “Israel’s military estimates it has killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters out of a military force it believes is about 30,000 strong.”
If Hamas was using “human shields” as we’ve been told, killing civilians should also yield a huge Hamas fatality rate, since Hamas would be hiding among civilians. Yet the IDF has managed to kill massive numbers of civilians while barely touching Hamas. Maybe they’re just lying about human shields?
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The whole argument for displacing Gazans from the north to the south was to protect their lives, yet now if they try to return to the north they get shot and killed by Israeli forces. What’s the new argument for this one? Are they killing them to save their lives?
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Whenever I say Israel is deliberately killing civilians, half the Israel apologists in my comments are like “NO THEY’RE NOT YOU DAMN LIAR” and the other half are “Yes they are and it’s good.”
Why do we still live in a world governed by sick people capable of such actions? Forget about a "false-flag." The supposed reality of this slaughter and Biden and the US political establishment's support for it, (and the Canadian political establishment as well) is disgusting enough. More people need to sit down and think about ways to actually change this state of affairs.
This is Part III of my look at right-winger Bob Bishop's diatribe about how the "far-left" (which in Bishop's mind includes everyone from corporate tools like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, through to AOC all the way to actual leftists) is trying to destroy US-American society from within through ideological subversion. In Part I I looked at the Soviet defector who inspired Bishop's article. In Part II I started looking at Bishop's claims about far-left domination of the media, the universities and the Justice Department. In this post I'll continue with Bishop's loony-tunes claim that the "far-left" also controls the USA's intelligence agencies.
I plan on continuing with my series discussing Bob Bishop's paranoid right-wing rant. Because the political successes of anti-immigrant, racist, right-wingpoliticians around the world seems to me to be indicative of the vulnerability of significant portions of the human race to his sort of scapegoating politics.
But I just thought that it needs to be said that Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza is a litmus test for one's humanity. When Anglo-American writers wax philosophical about the failures of the societies of Germany, Russia, Japan, for their descent into totalitarianism or militarism, there's this unstated premise that our societies have successfully avoided such errors. This notion is erroneous. When one really takes stock of the amount of blood and trauma unleashed upon countries (mainly in the Middle East) in the USA's "Great Bullshit War on Terror," ... the millions of lives arrogantly destroyed and forgotten by the US imperialists and their lickspittle "alllies," and then add to that the murderous, racist criminality of Israel's assault on Gaza (and on Palestinians in the West Bank) it is clear that these are failed, rotten societies.
Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship. People risked their lives to protest against it. And quite a few did. We in the Anglo-American countries don't risk as much as opponents of Hitler did. We have, though, stupidly allowed our governments and our states to restrict our rights in their GBWT with things like the Patriot Act (in the USA) or the Anti-Terrorism Act (here in Canada). But we still don't risk concentration camps or executions for speaking-out against our governments. Even though the mainstream media is a useless, propagandistic joke, we do have access to other media sources that reveal the extent of the lies and the corruption and the cruelty of our actions in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Israel.
Most of the (small number of) people who read my blog don't support these policies or make apologies for Zionist mass-murder, but significant portions of our societies do. And we do very little to stop them. The Trudeau Liberals' failure to utterly condemn Israel's inhuman slaughter in Gaza is a disgrace. A greater disgrace than their disgraceful standing ovation for a former Ukrainian SS soldier.
If you want to know how civilizations collapse into militarist, racist dictatorships, keep watching our own country. Keep watching our fellow Canadians as they delude and debase themselves, and us.
Greetings and salutations! Last time I managed to say that I wonder how people of at least average intelligence can end up believing things so far apart from each other. If there is a dispute and two people have widely divergent opinions and one of them is right and the other one is clearly wrong and is refuted by obvious realities, how is it that the wrong person in this scenario will still cling to their beliefs? To illustrate this I took an unhinged right-wing rant that I'd recently read and decided to go through it line-by-line.
It's actually the case that I doubt that I possess the unique ability to successfully navigate all the big questions that I deal with. That while other people fall off the tightrope to the left or the right, I myself have managed to stay on the straight and narrow path of truth as the facts show it. Just because Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald were right about "Russiagate" it doesn't mean that I'll follow them to COVID-denialism like Dore or to seriously downplay the fascist tendencies of Trump and his followers as Greenwald does.
Just because a website presents a more accurate depiction of the Russia vs. Ukraine War doesn't mean that I fall into their incoherent Putin worship (praising his "de-nazification" aims while maintaining that this whole war has been cooked-up by the Jews). Just because a blogger presents a compelling, fact-based feminist analysis, it doesn't have to mean that I must follow her into her racist Islamophobia and support for Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza.
You get the picture. On and on I go on the lonely path of wherever the truth takes me. Others succumbed to their particular delusions. But not me. As I said here, there are reasons why I subscribe to some beliefs while rejecting others. But I'll state right here that I doubt myself and I agonize about where I might actually be wrong about some important subjects.
A friend of mine recommended that I read some stuff from US-American union organizer Jane F. McAlevey. Around about the same time, when I was still a subscriber to his YouTube channel, Jimmy Dore had her on as a guest:
In No Shortcuts, McAlevey critiques not only the failed business unionism adopted by most unions, but also what she describes as the “mobilizing” model adopted by many more progressive unions. The book describes a model of “deep organizing,” based on the methods used by the emerging radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions in the 1930s and ‘40s. This was a period when working-class militancy put its stamp on U.S. history. As a result of these militant strikes and struggles, the basic industries of auto, steel, rubber, and electricity were organized for the first time – changing U.S. history. She also discusses the central importance of community organizing as an essential companion piece to powerful workplace organizing.
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McAlevey draws a sharp distinction between three different organizing models: Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing. She describes how “Advocacy,” the dominant method of mainstream union leaders, looks to use the courts and political lobbying to win one-time gains and does little or no mobilizing. It is ineffective and does not raise the consciousness of workers. Otherwise described as business unionism, it looks to work out an agreement with the bosses without mobilizing the workers.
The dominant section of the current union leadership see the power of the union rooted in their own “persuasive skills.” At the same time, they seek to find “common ground” with the boss. They see workers as bargaining chips. They see possible outcomes as limited by the “existing political climate,” i.e., the limits of capitalism. Example of this can be found through a quick glance at the methods of the current leadership of the UAW, the building trades, and Teamsters.
She contrasts this to the “mobilizing” model, which, while giving the appearance of being bolder and more dynamic, is very shallow and ineffective. Its central weakness is that it fails to organize an expanding base among workers, thus failing to develop the overall strength of the labor movement.
One chapter exposes the methods of David Rolf and SEIU Local 775 in Northwest Washington State, and the broader SEIU leadership among health care workers between 2005 and 2007 as a particularly obnoxious example of that strategy. In this campaign the workers were used as pawns in an elaborate scheme to use the union contract to get concessions from the Washington legislature to fund the employers, to then pay for a terrible union contract. In this whole process, the workers were passive by-standers.
Her model, by contrast is a return to “deep organizing” of workers in the workplace as done by CIO and that seeks to transform consciousness and is a starting point to sustained struggle.
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McAlevey stresses that real power rests with the workers themselves. Her deep-organizing model can be broken down into the following steps:
Only strikes can win real gains and we need to build power in the workplace to win a strike
Success depends on workers building networks in the workplace
The first essential step is to identify natural leaders who can build such networks
That involves challenging these leaders to accept the risks and responsibilities
These leaders then need to build powerful teams around them
The strength of these teams needs to be tested through escalating public actions.
Workers need to build support in all areas of their life outside the workplace. The more fundamental the struggle, the stronger the structure that needs to be built. Only then will workers be prepared for what it will take to win.
If you didn't click on it, that review was from Socialist Alternative. (The top of the google search.) Here's some links to some other reviews:
Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts is an exciting book. It tells the stories of important struggles and it tackles the big questions facing the labor movement. McAlevey is a former staffer, organizer, and national leader of the Service Employees (SEIU) on the losing side of a power struggle, then an academic and now a consultant.
Readers will recognize the concepts McAlevey promotes as driving many of the rank-and-file struggles reported in Labor Notes over the years. She explains them well and provides historical context. If on some topics she “bends the stick” too far and misses some important subtleties or complications, she is bending it in the right direction.
McAlevey builds her argument with five cases. She compares the approaches of two nursing home organizing efforts in what she calls “Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle.” She goes into depth on the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012, the successful organizing of giant Smithfield Foods in a right-to-work state, and the development of Make the Road New York, a model of community organizing.
McAlevey argues that a movement needs serious power to win serious outcomes, and this power comes from engaging organic leaders who already have influence. This specifically contrasts with the approach taken by most NGOs, and many unions, who engage with people McAlevey calls “activists” who already support the cause but don’t necessarily have a following. Instead of taking the shortcut of working with activists (which might be sufficient for a mobilising approach and low concession costs), No Shortcuts suggests doing the deeper, harder work, of winning over organic leaders.
The reasoning for this is twofold. Firstly, building majority power in a “bounded constituency” (such as is required for a strike) makes it necessary to reach out to every person in that constituency, regardless of their “preexisting interest in the union”. Real power means a committed majority, and that can’t be achieved by only working with an activist minority that already supports the cause: “because the goal is building majorities of a bounded constituency, organizers are constantly forced to engage people who may begin with little or no initial interest in being a part of any group”.
Secondly, it’s worth taking the time to identify and win over “organic leaders” because they already have influence in a workplace. Rather than find people who are supportive and work to build their influence, you find people who are influential and work to build their support. McAlevey argues that developing these leaders is more valuable than training “random volunteers”, as they start “ with a base of followers”. “They”, she notes, “are the key to scale.” So, although organic leaders don’t necessarily support the union (or the cause), they are a natural target because they have influence in the constituency and will shape the views and behaviour of other constituents.
Is this concept relevant outside union organising? While it makes sense to speak of leaders in a workplace, or in a faith community, does it make sense to talk about leaders in civil society in the same way? Outside the shop floor, are there community member who are also organic leaders — who are influential, with a base of followers?
The answer, probably, is yes. But more importantly, the key distinction here is between activists who may display commitment and “leaders” who can move others to act. Recruiting activists is not the key to scale and, in fact, limits scale. If you are using resources to train and coordinate activists who are very supportive but can’t move others to act, you won’t be able to create the sort of distributed leadership structure that mean you can scale up the operation without saddling a few professional staff with an ever-growing workload. Being able to identify leaders, distinguish activists from leaders, win over leaders and develop them as necessary, is the key to building majority power — because leaders build your capacity to grow to scale.
The part about the difference between "leaders" and "activists" reminded me of a chapter in a book I read in university The Romance of American Communism (which I see came out in a new edition in 2020). There was one interview with a CPUSA member who went from university into the factories to spread the socialist gospel but who found that he was more a bookish nerd than leader of the proletariat. He mentioned how genuine leaders would be talking during some workplace struggle and how on the occasions when he did speak up the natural leader (and the few others who bothered to acknowledge his existence) regarded him with pity.
Speaking of memories of other books, in the chapter where McAlevey contrasts the different methods employed in unions for nursing home unions in New England and Washington State, she mentions the radical, worker-driven local 1199. Seeing that number reminded me of a book by an eloquent weirdo named Martin J. Levitt called Confessions of a Union Buster. Whatever his faults, I don't believe that Levitt fabricated the scene where his union busting firm had a dinner where they invited prospective clients from the nursing home industry and played a pro-union film about the 1199 Local to get them all fired-up about hiring the firm to crush further unionization drives.
In the film (Levitt writes) there is one scene with a close-up of a Black nursing home woman's face and she says "Just give me 11-9-9." Levitt says that the whole room erupted into racist jeers and muttering.
That chapter was pretty eye-opening. I remember hearing in the 1990's that unions were putting resources into organizing new members. The Washington State showed one cynical way of getting this done. Washington State's politicians are fairly sympathetic to unions. (Relatively speaking.) The SEIU convinced employers to let them organize the workers, give them an extra dollar an hour, and in return for a no-strike pledge (promised by the organizers with no input from the workers), taking lots of workplace issues off the table, and successfully lobbying the state legislature to subsidize the wage increase, the SEIU would get more dues-paying members.
Suffice to say, Local 1199 behaved completely different and subsequently gets MUCH better wages and working conditions.
To conclude, I pretty much agree with everything McAlevey says. People need to be "organized" instead of "mobilized." (By which I mean the specific useages of the words as intended by McAlevey.) All my ignored political campagins were dependent upon citizen activism and individual responsibilities. My personal long-term project, "Workers as Citizens" simply acknowledged the importance of a sympathetic political-legal system for successful unionization drives. At one time, unions were illegal, with the class-war reason being obscured by the legal justification that they were conspiracies in restraint of trade. It was "price-fixing" by labour.
It wasn't so much a successful common-law legal challenge that got unions recognized, so much as decades of brutal fighting and the concommitant political pressure that led to victories in Britain, the USA (especially under FDR) and in Canada. I believe that conditions for working class organization are still incredibly difficult today and that we need all the help that we can get. Workplace democracy is another form of individual worker agency that McAlevey says is so important.
I usually don't enjoy stories about worker struggles because, being a pessimist in my own head, I don't need to read about the defeats and sufferings of ordinary people. But McAlevey's book is a clearly written book mainly about victories and how they were achieved.
On pages 61 and 62 McAlevey talks about "settlement costs." What is it going to cost your enemy to concede something? If it costs very little, you might get it without much of a struggle. If it's going to cost them a lot, prepare for a fight. This obvious truth sadly escapes many on the left. As she writes on page 62:
An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street. Others might think that the good frames used for or derived from these occupations will marshal enough emotion to suddenly overwhelm lawmakers with the revelation that the system is unfair and the lawmakers then will institute a set of fair regulations to govern corporate capital.
In her last chapter, "Pretend Power vs. Actual Power" McAlevey talks about narrative frames and how working class organizations have to speak to workers in ways that they understand. And given the oligarchy's massive control of the hegemonic narrative and the resources they pour into sustaining and intensifying it, this means that socialist counter-narratives have an uphill struggle just to survive. I have said this over and over. "Democracy" should be our watchword. It costs us nothing to employ it. We believe in it after all. We don't have to reject words like "socialism" as the NDP stupidly did before incoherently trying to reclaim it a short while later.
This is an important book and a very worthwhile use of your time if you care about justice and an end to oligarchic insanity.
"The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it's growing every day—every single day," Trump claimed. "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."
Now then, what do you suppose Trump means with "the radical right"? Given that quite a few right-wingers claim that the nazis were leftists? Did Trump keep a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table (as one of his ex-wives claimed)? Was Trump's dad in the KKK? Was this guy:
Really an attendee at Trump's January 6th. rally/riot? I can't remember where I got that picture from in January 2020. That appears to be a "Proud Boy" member/supporter behind him. That group was certainly fans of Trump. ("6MWE" stands for "6 Million Wasn't Enough." The object in the eagle's talons is a fasces.) You will occasionally see images of swastikas at both right-wing and left-wing rallies. They are often used by the corporate media to assert that leftists or rightists (whichever group is holding the rally) are tolerating the presence of nazis at their rallies, when, in fact, the people using the swastikas are actually (rightly or wrongly) accusing the government they're protesting of being totalitarian. But that shit-head's t-shirt is clearly PRO-nazi.
The former president vowed to target communists and Marxists—ideological groups that he described as "radical left lunatics"—and "rout the fake news media until they become real."
"The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it's growing every day—every single day," Trump claimed. "The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."
Former U.S. President Donald Trump pledged during a Veterans Day speech on Saturday to "root out" those he described as "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" if he's elected in 2024, an openly fascistic threat that drew comparisons to Nazi rhetoric.
My first reaction every time I see a story about how the dangers of Trump is that if he's so dangerous, why the hell do the Democrats stick with a doddering, unpopular, stupid asshole like Joe Biden? And, of course, they do that for the same reason that they destroyed Bernie Sanders' candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination in 2020. You'll remember at the time that everyone from the Democrats, and the mainstream media were saying how terrifying the prospect of a Trump second-term would be. Bernie Sanders was the most popular politician in the country at the time and he wanted to be the Democrats' standard-bearer. Sane people would think: "Excellent! With Sanders running against Trump we're sure to win!"
CounterPunch (for some reason) saw fit to post a piece of analysis that is the epitome of the way that liberals (or however you want to describe a certain strain of half-assed progressive) tend to describe issues as "complicated" to rationalize their inevitably doomed attempts to please both decent people AND [their more important constituency] powerful psychopaths. It's an essay called "Biden's Choices" by Professor Mel Gurtov.
Now, please darlings: I ain't saying that "Republicans" [or whatever other flavour of extremist right-wing stupidity you choose] haven't also imposed murderous sanctions on Venezuela. As liberals (people I can usually get along with easier than conservatives) you expect right-wingers to be disgusting hypocrites.
But how can liberals square the circle of imposing sanctions on Venezuela for supposed human rights abuses while at the same time cossetting the undemocratic regime of Saudi Arabia, where there is no democracy, half the population have zero political rights, and there is no religious freedom, and there's a death penalty for violations of stupid religious laws, migrant workers are treated like slaves, and so-on and such forth?
It's comforting to know that if empty-headed, senile, corrupt, useless, hypocrite, narcissist, pompous, racist Joe Biden has to step aside, ... the Democratic Party will reach into its huge bag of talent and produce, ... um, ... Kamala Harris? Pete Buttegieg? Any one of these right-wing corporate stooges?
Because if none of those shit-heads inspire enough decent people, it looks like the fraught era of the decline of US hegemony will be managed by Trump, the grifter with the spray-on tan, the yellow comb-over, who couldn't stop telling the world how much he'd like to develop a hard-on and insert it into his daughter's vagina.
Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau can't find it in him to condemn Israel's mass-murder and Pierre Poilievre wouldn't even understand the question.
Last night I finished John F. Melby's The Mandate of Heaven: Record of a civil war CHINA 1945-49 with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (University of Toronto Press, 1968). I was visiting the University of Toronto and (as is common for a university history department) there was a box with a bunch of books that professors were giving away.
At first I thought this was a strange book. There are around 25 chapters that begin with Melby summarizing what happens in the time period to be discussed, followed by his diary entries during that time.
What makes his diary entries relevant is that Melby was a high-ranking diplomat in the United States Embassy in China (Chungking 1944-45, Nanking 1946-48). So he had access to many of the main actors in the drama of the fall of the Kuomintang government and the eventual victory of the Chinese Communist Party.
He has a pleasant speaking voice (as does his co-reader Lalla Ward) and I listen to this book while I'm drawing.
If you really think about the evidence-based scientific view of the world, it is so much more impressive than those of the religions that fabricated (admittedly profound) stories about gods who ruled the Earth and the skies that humans could see from the Earth.
So, even if the Palestinians got their act together like the Western Saharans have largely done, the United States would probably continue to support the Israeli occupation anyway. The U.S. government has provided virtually no incentive for Palestinians to become more moderate. This too has contributed to the rise of Hamas.
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Israel has also brutally suppressed nonviolent protests. When thousands of unarmed Palestinians held demonstrations in 2018 near the fence separating Gaza from Israel, Israeli forces opened fire, killing more than 150 protesters. In 2010, Israeli forces attacked an unarmed international humanitarian aid flotilla on the high seas, killing 10 passengers and crew, including an American teenager. A large majority of U.S. House members signed a letter defending the attack.
Increasingly desperate conditions inside the besieged enclave and the failure of diplomatic means and nonviolent resistance to end the siege only increased the fanaticism of Hamas.
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Even if Hamas was using human shields, Protocol I of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that if one side is shielding itself behind civilians, it “shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians.” (To use a domestic example: If bank robbers were holding hostages and were shooting at people from among them, the SWAT them could not get away with killing the hostages as well by simply saying that the criminals were using human shields.)
The civilian death toll in from Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza has now topped 5,000 people. President Joe Biden and members of Congress are once again blaming Hamas for using “human shields,” yet none of the accounts about the air strikes killing civilians so far indicate that Hamas fighters or officials were doing so. Despite well-documented cases of war crimes by Israeli forces, Biden and a huge bipartisan majority in Congress are pushing to provide even more arms to Israel to kill even more Palestinians.
A sober evisceration of all the sickening drivel being spewed by our degenerate overlords.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
