Fillet of a Michelle snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of Newt, and toe of Mitt,
Wool of Ron, & tongue of Jon,
Perry’s fork, Santorum’s sting,
Herman’s leg, an owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
(extracted and modified from Act IV Sc 1 of the Scottish Play)
On Monday 2 August 2010, the Israeli army staged its “tree trimming” provocation at the Lebanese-Israeli truce line in the Lebanese village of Assaniyeh.
Israel “informed” the UNIFIL HQ that it intended to send forces to the truce line in the village and then took action without waiting for a response from UNIFIL or from Lebanon via UNIFIL. According to a report published in Ha’aretz late last week, at UNIFIL HQ the Israelis were informed that the official normally in charge of maintaining official contact between Lebanon and Israel about any military maneuvers at the truce lines was ‘away on vacation.’ Hence, the Israeli move was bound to be interpreted as a provocation, not as an innocent exercise.
It must be inferred from the facts disclosed so far (now more than a week since the incident) that the Israelis expected the Lebanese army would be asleep or not rouse themselves, but the surprise was that the army was alert and fired warning shots into the air when they saw the Israelis approach the fence at the truce line in Assaniyeh.
Whether according to plan, or spontaneously, the Israelis responded with deadly fire, killing three Lebanese soldiers and a civilian Lebanese journalist. The Lebanese then replied and killed the Israeli Lieutenant-General at the scene responsible for directing the conduct of the Israeli military at the scene. After that point, further military engagement broke off.
The following evening, Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Nasrallah disclosed three things during a special nationwide broadcast:
1. that Hizbullah had received advance word from the Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri that the so-called Special Tribunal on Lebanon [STL] intended to name three Hizbulah members in connection with its investigation of Rafik Hariri’s assassination;
2. that the Lebanese army at the truce line in Assaniyeh had taken action without calling upon Hizbullah to mobilise, but aware that Hizbullah was ready to assist the army if and when asked; and
3. that Hizbullah would disclose in a week’s time its evidence of Israeli involvement in and likely responsibility for the assassination of Rafik Hariri.
After the unexpected turn of events during the Assineyeh incident, followed by Nasrallah’s throwing down of this gauntlet, Israeli ‘Defence’ i.e. War, minister Ehud Barak sought support from France and the United States for an Israeli full-scale military assault on Lebanon. It is being reported this morning (Wed 11 August 2010) that French president Sarkozy and US Secretary of State Clinton requested Barak hold back from further attacks for the moment. Meanwhile, Nasrallah’s widely-anticipated Monday evening (9 August 2010) broadcast included a bombshell public disclosure of the existence of Hizbullah’s capabilities to download live in-real-time message traffic between an Israeli command centre on the ground and airborne reconnaissance drones monitoring Rafik Hariri’s motorcade in Beirut on the day he was assassinated. In the wake of this disclosure, the U.S. announced suspension of any further aid to the Lebanese military. The French President Sarkozy was headed meanwhile to Beirut (last night?this morning?)for urgent talks with the Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri.
The Islamic Republic of Iran responded this morning to the U.S. cutoff of military aid to Lebanon by offering to step in and assist the Lebanese armed forces with whatever they might need to ensure the best arrangements for continued defence of the nation from further attacks. Does or would this portend a delivery of medium-range missiles? Iran is said to have produced and to possess these in great profusion, and to have perfected them to a high degree of accuracy.
There is no response yet publicly from the U.S. Doubtless the State Department now has to be assessing whether this announcement
1. has some substance in it that should concern the immediate plans of US-NATO, or;
2. sends a signal to Syria [which may already have some of these missiles stockpiled for delivery to Lebanon precisely in an eventuality such as this], or;
3. serves some other purpose[s].
Last night, meanwhile, leader of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro posted a brief “Reflection” laying out an analysis suggesting that, via the terms and conditions set out in UNSC Resolution 1929 passed at the start of this month, Israel seemed to have extricated itself from the position of having to be the cat’s paw to attack Iran first on behalf of the U.S. (and absorb the first retaliatory measures).
Now it becomes clear why Israel was so keen to get out from under any commitment to any pre-emptive action against Iran this summer. Hizbullah’s measures seem to be based on a strong suspicion that Israel was using the Iran war danger all this past spring and early summer as a cover to prepare a renewed attack on Lebanon this month. The latest events appear to confirm the correctness of that analysis. The timing certainly fits the bill: mid-August upcoming marks the start of Ramadan this year. At this time, the entire Muslim world becomes absorbed in prayers and fasting; much conventional business in the public and private sectors is set aside, possibly including some degree of military vigilance and preparedness.
Finally I got my paws on a copy of Shlomo Sand’s much-ballyhooed work “The Invention of the Jewish People.” There is so much of dubious value and even utter irrelevance that, even after just a few pages, I cannot accept any claims linking him even if only tangentially to the so-called “New Israeli Historians” (Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe et al., widely noticed for their focus on various aspects of the Palestinian side of what happened in Palestine since the early 20th century).
On the contrary, Shlomo Sand must be viewed as representing a category all his own. Rather than simply recycling various versions of either Old Testament or Pentateuch biblical renderings of the “history of the Jews,” he does refer to various facts of how various versions of some kind of historical rendering of what happened with Jewish communities came to be. So, he is acquitted at least in this court of any charges of creating mystery. But he ends up seriously mis-speaking the meaning of events by ignoring the impacts of other developments outside the cloisters in which “history” gets written down. The result is an “historical”-seeming narrative no less deceptive than the standard-issue triumphalist Zionist version. I therefore dub Shlomo Sand the “First of the New Israel Mistorians.”
Watch this space for an ongoing updated review / study of this not unimportant but utimately failed piece of “post-modernism.”
s
Two eecro responses are reproduced below regarding Professor John J. Mearsheimer, “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners,” presented 29 April 2010 at The Palestine Center, Washington, DC, and posted on Information Clearing House 2 May 2010
[URL is: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25362.htm]
a)
Prof Mearsheimer, like millions of his countrymen, still has not learned the fundamental lessons of the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict. What appears to be “Israel” versus Palestine is in fact U.S. imperialism versus Palestine. Israel is the U.S. proxy.
The Palestinians are up against an American empire that has had the suppression of the Palestinian people’s rights in its gunsights from the moment that David Ben-Gurion’s faction of the Zionist movement came into predominance in the middle of the Second World War. In the notorious essay Profs Mearsheimer and Walt delivered to the world a few years back, they called this war criminal the Father of his Country.
The State of Israel was a creation of the American empire. The U.S. empire’s modern form emerged during 1945-47 as the national security state. This entity was not exactly coterminus any longer with the government of the day. On the contrary, it was designed to serve the permanent aims of a ruling elite that, in the millisecond following FDR’s last breath, seized control of the present and future of the U.S. government for what were eventually formulated as so-called Cold War purposes of “defence against the communist menace.”
The most important feature of the national security state was the elaboration of an entire layer of operations above, outside and beyond the control of the official constitutional order of the U.S., that is to say: beyond the control of any part of the judiciary, legislature or executive. That national security state shaped the arrangements that were coalesced in the so-called State of Israel as declared on 14-15 May 1948. It was an outlaw state not in conformity with the arrangements set forth in UN General Assembly Resolution 181, not abiding by the law of return for civilians displaced by conflict as already well-established for centuries in customary international law, and with their nonsensical formula of “Jewish state” given a free pass to pollute the international discourse with an outrageous distortion of the modern principle of nationhood based on citizenship as opposed to purely racial, religious or ethnic definitions divorced from the facts of who comprise the actual citizenry on the ground.
The infamous Israel lobby attacked so vociferously by Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay is not a straw man but it is not a tail that wags the U.S. dog, either. Its interference in the electoral and other duly constituted parts of the U.S. system of government ensures a permanent disconnect between the constitutional order and the mandates of the national security state. Those in charge of the national security state can do whatever they please and the constitutional order is powerless to stop them. The “pro-Israel” congressmen are agents of a process of keeping the U.S.-ian polity disinformed and incapable of playing any of their duly constituted roles when it comes to U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. The main thing they do is RUBBER-STAMP what the national security state has already long since decided, without any messy unplanned eruptions “from below.”
For those who continue to insist that apartheid rule — a system of imposing civil death on a population to keep them enslaved as your workforce, without any rights but also without any of the security of a slave whose welfare is looked after by his master — is the sum-total of the State of Israel’s aims regarding the Palestinians, I must ask: exactly when and by which apartheid laws was the Black African majority’s right to be in and on their own land attacked and-or taken away by the nationalist Afrikaners and their mostly British financiers? From the outset at their First Congress in Switzerland in 1897, the modern Zionist movement’s aim regarding the Arab population indigenous to Palestine was to eliminate their people-hood. Herzl babbled in his diaries about shoving them across the borders “discreetly and circumspectly” but the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 finally called this sort of this what it really was: genocide.
Moreover, this definition was advanced quite properly, on the basis of the experience of the peoples across Europe resisting and finally defeating Nazi fascist occupation. The fact that the State of Israel keeps British Mandate military law on its books to deal with the Palestinians may look like “apartheid,” but the aim is extermination of the Palestinians as a people, not merely their submission to a foreign occupier’s regime of public law and private property.
Professor Weisenheimer and his lot should know better than to continue trying to pull the wool over the world’s eyes. As the late great Malcolm X put it (and my zowj just reminded me): “YOU BEEN BAM-BOOOOOZLED!”
b)
The issue is the United States as a global empire, not as a state pursuing so-called “national interests” as Mearsheimer, Walt and not a few others seem to make out.
The duly constituted government of the United States pursues national interests. The interests of empire are the province of the national security state which operates extra-constitutionally. The United States is an imperial hegemon, the biggest bully on the block who will have or permit no other empires before its own. It is operating in full empire-building mode right now.
That is what accounts for the crazed and frenetic activities of the Zionists. The principal benefit of an “Israel” for the U.S. empire is that a white European-type entity has its nose permanently and continually in the business of the Arab peoples, and operates according to the mandates of Euro-American colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.
The U.S. became the sole guarantor of the Israeli military machine in the wake of the 1956 Suez debacle. That was the swan song of Anglo-French imperialism in the Middle East, an imperial combination that the Israeli state cultivated as an alternative sugar-daddy during the 1950s. In Africa in the 1960s, as new states emerged, Israeli Zionists dared to go where no European colonial power could any longer safely go… but this was now a stalking horse of the interests of U.S. imperialism, to which the Belgian and other old European colonialists now submitted.
Yes, of course: the leaders of the Zionist state believed these things served “their” interest. But objective reality shows this was mainly the interests of maintaining a capability to reinsert colonial and imperial diktat anywhere anytime against the interests of the peoples.
The interest of the peoples of Africa were then and remain today national liberation and genuine independence. The central struggle is between the interests of peoples and the interests of empires and old colonial powers. There is also struggle between or among national governments, but what the peoples do is what’s decisive in our time.
In the chaos that overtook Europe and the Middle East at the end of WW2, the Zionists were very conscious of the need to dress their struggle in the mantle of something progressive-seeming and on the side of the peoples’ struggles, like overcoming centuries of “antisemitism,” etc., and of course there was the wonderful Holocaust victim card available to play. Without the backing of the Anglo-American imperialists and some of their key allies, however, the Zionists wouldn’t have made it to first base, much less accomplished the theft of the Palestinians’ homeland.
That conflict between the interests of peoples and empires is a globalised form of the basic class struggle that drives the entire historical process forward. The issue is the U.S. empire, which deploys Israel as its proxy. Even those so-called “Israeli” nukes are a strategic reserve of the U.S. empire. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t still be stored in Israel.
As far as the Ashkenazi origins of European Jewry are concerned, it is useful solely for demonstrating that there can be no such thing as a PEOPLE called “Jewish” and that the “Jewish” peoplehood claimed by the State of Israel — for those of its citizenry to whom some limited civil rights are granted — is utterly counterfeit. All that is unique to Zionism is the enthusiasm it musters to serve the most reactionary and most fascistic aims of the leading imperial powers.
Israel is against Iran because the U.S. needs to exterminate Iran; all the other positions of the State of Israel are similarly tied to serving a fundamentally U.S. interest. If anyone anywhere really wants to do something about Israel, let them do something about the power and influence of the United States in their own countries, including slugging it out with “their own” ruling elites who have likely been bought and sold many times over by U.S. imperialism. Reining in and-or eliminating US diktat everywhere and anywhere, including Israeli relations, is the single greatest act of solidarity one can manifest on the side of the Palestinians’ struggle today.
(appeared in Dissident Voice 11 May 2010)
In a piece published late last week “On Goldstone’s Bar Mitzvah and Finkelstein’s Book,” Ramzy Baroud, editor-founder of The Palestine Chronicle concludes thus regarding the shift in world public opinion occasioned over the year and a bit since Operation Cast Lead:
” ‘The times they are a-changing,’ wrote Finkelstein [in his most recent volume This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion]. True, and that is a most impressive achievement that was made possible by the likes of Jimmy Carter, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Richard Goldstone, Richard Falk, John Dugard, Finkelstein himself, and the innumerable authors, journalists and bloggers who tirelessly worked to document the truth.
“But it is also the courage of the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere that made it possible for us to take such stances. Our efforts dwarf in comparison to their courage, resilience and sacrifices.” (Emphasis added)
The problem here is the tone of that “But it is also…” leading into that last paragraph. The falseness of the note it strikes recalls to mind the old one-liner: “but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln: how was the play?”
Rereading it aloud several more times convinced me that the world was being rendered upside down here. It put me in mind of the comment by Marx, in the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873), about the difference between his and Hegel’s views of dialectics : “With [Hegel, dialectics] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Far from being the afterthought, or some piece of historical chopped liver as that “but also…” implied, the Palestinians’ resistance to the designs of the U.S. empire in the first place, imposed at their expense since 1947-48, is what opened up that space into which the Carter-Mearsheimer-Walt chorale have only very lately rushed.
The key point is that in the beginning came the Deed. Resistance came first. This has been and remains the case to date.
“[T]he likes of Jimmy Carter, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Richard Goldstone, Richard Falk, John Dugard, Finkelstein himself, and the innumerable authors, journalists and bloggers who tirelessly worked to document the truth” sounds like quite a motley crew. Not a few of them have been long-time defenders, or accommodators at one time or another, of the State of Israel’s seeminglyself-appointed but actually U.S.-authorised “right” to establish themselves on Palestinian territory since 1947-48. Inquiring minds would like very much to know exactly why, over the last half-decade or so, the Carter-Mearsheimer-Walt chorale et al. seem — at least with regard to the occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that Tel Aviv has added to its jurisdiction since June 1967 — to have seen some of the light.
Perhaps a brief historical recap can shed some light on something more closely approximating the true order of things.
- The crushing of the First Intifada and imposition of the 1993 Oslo Accords tainted the hard-fought reputation of the PLO as the sole legitimate voice of the Palestinian people with an undeniable stench of opportunism — but it could not and did not divert the Palestinians from their own nation-building goals.
- The assault on the Second Intifada, from Operation Defensive Shield through the imposition of the Annexation Wall and the imposition of the Road Map took a large tier of new fighting leaders of the Palestinian people from the current generation out of action. Yet, once again, as the 2006 election results proved, it could not and did not deter the Palestinians from seeking new forms in which to organise and perfect their resistance in the post-9/11 conditions of “full-spectrum dominance” over the fate of Arab and other Muslim peoples, imposed by the United States and its proxies in the name of the so-called Global War on Terror.
- Be it in the so-called open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, or the West Bank, or the near-sha’atat of refugee camps in Arab states bordering Israel or the more dispersed sha’atat on the continents of Europe, Asia, North or South America, that true mettle of all the Palestinians — their sumout [steadfastness]– has been seen in the persistence of their struggles for rights. At its most dramatic, it persists daily amid the endlessly-locked-down checkpoint-ridden walled-in and walled-out chaos of life in the West Bank under the Israeli occupier and its “Palestinian” policing arms. It has been seen in the shutting down and expulsion of the CIA station in Gaza City in June 2007. The Carter-Mearsheimer-Walt chorale were busily bemoaning the open-air prison of Gaza “about to explode,” but what was their secret hope? Perhaps an uprising against the leaders and organisers of Palestinian resistance? This resistance blew up the Rafah Wall on 23 January 2008. That action enabled 370,000 residents of the Gaza Strip to walk or drive in disciplined and unhurried fashion into Egypt and return — RETURN?!? — within the next 48 hours.
- Finally, during Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009) it was the Palestinians of Gaza and their sumout which reminded the rest of this world — under the rain of DIME, white phosphorus and who-knows-how-many-other weapons of mass terror — how to live and how to die with dignity. Never can anyone be permitted to forget that the State of Israel stole, borrowed, leased or bought much of this arsenal from the United States during the Bush and earlier administrations. Not surprisingly, meanwhile, the Carter-Mearsheimer-Walt chorale have yet to come clean on the true source of their “disgust” with Israel’s conduct. Was their aim to see the Palestinian resistance prevail, or was their true aim to see its organised quality incinerated once and for all by all that U.S. and Israeli ordnance? Throughout Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s genocidal assault proceeded without a word of objection from the Office of the President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama. On the contrary: he was being advised on US foreign policy by, among others, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Ramzy Baroud’s “but also…” thus serves to draw the veil over a multitude of sins for possibly the next generation. Not the least of these sins is the very real wish of many of the Palestnians’ fair-weather friends that such a dangerously infectious spirit of resistance, and the headache / hangover such a revolutionary example spreads so readily and rapidly around this increasingly connected and networked world, would just go away or otherwise disappear. However, as Karl Marx pointed out in the XIth (and last) of his Theses on Feuerbach (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
It is from where they actually stand — a matter on which they have been denied all choice — that the Palestinians are changing this world.
We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
- Pericles’ funeral oration, Athens, 431 BCE
The 17th Topshee Conference, sponsored by the Extension Department of St Francis Xavier University, convened during the weekend of 25–26 May 2002 on the theme of “Reclaiming Democracy.” As the first significant gathering of social activists from around the Canadian Maritime provinces — including most of the anti-globalisation activists — to unfold since the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the venue offered an excellent opportunity in which to investigate the state of the movement in the wake of the 9-11 Twin Towers attack. (15 June 2002)
The opening session featured a keynote speech by Stephen Lewis, a former Ontario politician who had moved onto the UN stage as IIIV-AIDS ambassador deputized by the Secretary General to various countries on the African continent. The closing 2½ -hour plenary “town hall” next day heard a wide range of views, discussing many themes from his address, which was repeatedly praised without analysis or criticism. The problem was, during the “question and answer” session following the speech, he treated a serious question about Canada-US relations in a shockingly cavalier manner. This stirred an undertone of disagreement that would simmer beneath the conference’s surface all weekend.
Following several others’ remarks on democracy, media and the problems – and asserted “death” – of so-called “alternative media,” the writer intervened to point out that “the conclusion that ‘the alternate press is dying’ needs to be further explored”, and continued:
Modern society is inconceivable without mass media. Media emerged as a social power – the so-called “fourth estate.” This was one of the outcomes of the struggle to replace a system based on feudal privilege with another, promising social equality and purporting to be “democratic.” Many a government touts how it is more or less democratic in form, although most are anything but democratic in practice. Many media today identify “democracy” with these forms. But they keep silent about their content. This has created a serious “credibility crisis.” There is widescale public rejection or suspicion of media reportage about current events. The provision of other media as a so-called “alternative” subsequently proliferated into an industry.
Few of these “alternative” media have been interested to oppose the decay of democracy in practice. There has nevertheless remained democratic space available to reclaim. Establishment media today distort and suppress popular participation. Even so, it does not follow that democratic space has been eliminated. The defence of free expression remains in people’s hands. It has not been reduced to the activity of a collection of isolated saintly individuals. Media in principle remain an indispensable organic component of every genuinely democratic process. They record collective preoccupations and mirror emerging collective concerns. Media-as-such continue as long as there are collectives with issues to sort out and decisions to reach.
When it comes to “alternatives”, the issue is not “what kind of media?”. The issue is: “what kind of collectives?” A newspaper or magazine hoists the “alternative” banner — so what? This in itself reveals nothing about what interests it serves. When it comes to the content of democracy, we come to the nub of the matter. Establishment media have been covering it up, and others have tiptoed around it. Here the issue is not the messenger, but the message. Specifically: whose interests are served by the message?
Yesterday’s keynote emphasised how preoccupations with neoliberal globalisation offered the younger generation little or no future. Globalisation has gravely complicated the search for democratically-based solutions to major problems – in Argentina, Venezuela, etc. The HIV-AIDS crisis in Africa has become a matter of life and death mainly as a result of how globalisation impeded implementation of existing, well-understood, functional solutions.
But Stephen Lewis’s flippant retort to a query about what Canadians could do about the US – playing the situation for laughs with his rhetorical question “Are you on drugs?” — crossed a line. His stated view that Canadians as a people initially accepted the Bush administration’s foreign policy and then became increasingly comfortable with it “since 9-11” was false as a matter of fact. It remains absurd at the level of principle.1
Before the 1990s, there were struggles to democratise access to, and exercise of, rights in the workplace and the community. Many of these were waged by social collectives – such as women – that hitherto had not been well-served by trade unions, elected officials, etc. Then came the anti-social offensive of “balancing the budget” through government cutbacks. Gains that the working people had struggled for decades to establish were now stripped away. Concerns about how to reclaim democracy resurfaced. Then the struggle against globalisation broke out in the open. This linked struggles to affirm rights with struggles against the anti-social offensive of governments on the one hand and anti-imperialist struggles on the other.
Behind these shifts within the Canadian scene, corporate powers – and governments acting in their stead – continued to integrate politically and economically ever more closely with the USA. Today there remains an obscene readiness to tear social safety nets asunder, for example in Ontario and Alberta. In the mad scramble for ever greater opportunities of private profit, for example in forestry and other resource extraction sectors, there is increased pressure to privatise public space (“protected” wilderness), relax statutory requirements for environmental assessments, etc. Behind the decay of formal political democracy is this public sector decay. Standing directly behind are the naked ambitions of pro-US and US-directed corporate power. Some Canadians have responded saying: let sleeping dogs lie; others have responded by agitating for new and improved policies: both are affirmations of impotence.
As a consequence of America’s hegemonic behaviour since the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, “democracy” has become an even more urgent issue for billions of our fellow citizens on this planet. America’s tremendous blind spot — the quest for immortality and its obsession not to become the world’s last superpower — has been increasingly exposed as it develops the role of “sole superpower”. Its interference in everyone else’s affairs has increased. It strives to extirpate anything deemed “a threat”, to shoot first and not even bother to ask questions before or later. It is seized with a profound crisis of justification. It assumes nothing is safe until it’s under the control of American corporate, military or political control.
In the wake of the Bush-Gore election travesty, discussion of the very principles of political democracy has become more sensitive than ever. The debates about complexities of two-party versus multiparty systems, proportional representation, extension of the franchise with guarantees and so on have been replaced by Washington simply commanding various regimes to implement its program. All this has simplified matters. The corruption of its leaders neither eliminates the commitment to democracy from below nor empowers those who would like still to be its advocates with special privileges. Recent developments have redefined what’s what and who’s who. The forces actually renewing that commitment today as those who ask the question: “what is to be done about U.S. imperialism?” with the aim of answering it.
We Canadians have been compelled to live in intimate intercourse with the American empire for – well, forever. It has been so long, and become so familiar, yet something has shifted. Can anyone recall a more dangerous government holding office there, with such a weak (actually fictional) mandate, determined to impose unilaterally such a breadth of changes on the rest of the world? The fact is: people have such concerns, and discuss them widely. Although the media have filtered it out, the development of this discussion has become vitally important to acknowledge and assess.
How have we Canadians survived as a people and as a country? In my opinion, you cannot be Canadian without being a little anti-American. Being Canadian has always been a profoundly un-American activity. Our current situation is that of the fish-bone in the gullet of the American eagle. But it is not as unequal (or pro-eagle) as it sounds. The outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion. If the fish-bone doesn’t move, the eagle may ignore it. But if it shifts the eagle could choke. For the eagle, the potentially lethal consequences foreclose any option that involves swallowing the fish-bone whole. On the one hand, the eagle cannot “play nice” with the fish-bone; on the other, it is the acme of absurdity for the fish-bone to expect gratitude from the eagle. Neither can remain indifferent. Reconciliation is unthinkable before the fish-bone achieves independence from the eagle’s gullet.
The stand taken regarding the US has become a touchstone of democratic organising and activism, as the American empire becomes an issue pervading Canadians’ daily existence at every level, to the point where neither unconsciousness nor continuing to lick The Empire’s boots is any longer acceptable. This empire has its local and international colonial administrators and helpers beyond the USA, including Canadians — those who prefer the status quo under the “Pox Americana” (sic) even as it runs increasingly contrary to the interests of this nation. Skilled enough to leapfrog any threat from “new policy” in a single UN speech, these dogs never sleep, but consistent democratic mobilisation – the struggle to affirm rights – is certain to unmask them.
With the war in Afghanistan and the threat to resume full-scale war against Iraq, this unmasking is increasingly essential. The situation can no more be pushed back to a containable state than toothpaste can be pushed back into a tube. As the Bush administration applies more military toothpaste to arrest social decay, there is ever less accountability, and the waging of war itself becomes an excuse to criminalise dissent on a broad scale as governments assume impunity to invade areas of civil liberty previously deemed inviolate. This already includes arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention of persons of Arab origin or Middle Eastern family connections for the “crime” of being – of being who they are, what they are and where they are.2
Where can we go from here? What future are we bequeathing the coming generations? The answers are intimately bound up with the stand we take regarding the American empire.
-
1. Lewis’s “analysis” may indeed apply among Canadian elites or people surrounding him at the UN. But ascribing such a posture to an entire people cannot be justified. Applied to African-Canadians, for example, or Quebecois, etc. such generalisations would instantly be condemned as racist. Canadians have been demonstrating across the country against the threat to deploy military retaliation since Sept 11 and against the war since the onset last Thanksgiving. They continue to register their opposition to the American course and concern for the future of the country’s sovereignty. That is why this contemptuous dismissal, compounded of an unwarranted cynicism and breezy vulgarity that completely misread the audience’s mood, was met by squirming, intakes of breath, individual repudiations – but not a single ripple of laughter, anywhere in the hall.
2. In the U.S. , some 1,200 such cases have been acknowledged.
Back in the day, the author was a member of the editorial board of shunpiking magazine. This was an independent Nova Scotia-centric and printed periodical of that time which would move largely online after 2003-04. Almost three years after preparing this article, with the aim of expanding this piece as part of a book project about anti-globalisation social movements in Atlantic Canada that he had agreed to assist, he undertook to obtain a record, transcript or any other evidence of Stephen Lewis’ remarks on this occasion. In declining my request, a St. Francis Xavier University official responsible for coordinating the Topshee Conferences indicated that, as a condition of his agreeing to appear, Mr Lewis had specifically mandated that no record of his remarks or his participation at this event either be published or retained by the university or the conference organization.
a haiku
13 September 2001
Airplanes fly into
Buildings — What’s your prob? Go shop!
Keep on shopping man
a double-haiku on the U.S.-Zionist-Western frenzy unleashed by Hamas’ electoral victory (written 26 January 2006)
To those who stole land
by lethal force insisting
victims cease resisting now,
the people say: we’ll talk
talk to you who stole our land
about the date you leave
Recently in an online political publication (http://www.burbankdigest.com/)*, I spotted the following characterisation of Noam Chomsky’s political role :
“Chomsky is a critical left-liberal friend of the zionist outpost. This little episode [of being denied entry into the West Bank by ISraeli Occupation authorities at a Jordanian border point] burnished Chomsky’s ‘anti-zionist’ creds when he’s increasingly being discredited by genuine anti- zionist imperialists worldwide.”
I thought it was one of the most concise descriptions to appear regarding his current objective political role, so I contacted the editor and duly conveyed my appreciation. Another of the publication’s regular subscribers by email, on the other hand, reacted rather less enthusiastically, writing in part:
“It’s frustrating to me when I see people involved in the Palestinian struggle–a cause to which I am also commmitted–who insist on focusing on imposing ideological litmus tests on anyone weighing in on the issue, who talk about eliminating “the Zionist entity”, and so forth. This does nobody any good. I agree with Norman Finkelstein; the real litmus tests are: ‘do you or do you not support home demolitions, ethnic cleansing, killings of children, military occupation?’ I say let’s focus on these basic principles for which there is a broad consensus, enormous legal and diplomatic support, and a great deal of moral appeal. When people lose sight of that, my feeling is that they are losing sight of reality and ultimately, not helping anyone.
“I hope that clarifies where I stand on this. I have no Zionist commitment and personally I would like to see, probably like many other people, a no-state solution where everyone lives in mutual respect and decency. I also would like to see the United States of America, and every other state for that matter, out of existence, but I won’t hold my breath for that.”
The editor shared this correspondence, moving me to send the following reply:
“This fellow’s mindset is 100% American pragmatism. All the talk of what is possible is put forward without any frame of reference except the immediate present. There is no awareness whatsoever that anything is already in transition and that the role of the movement for progressive change is to defend the principles that embody the direction that the progressive side of the movement is already taking and can be seen by all to be taking. The direction that all can see is the widespread increase in resistance to U.S. imperialist dictate and interference.
“Yes, of course: if you think history’s time frame is next Wednesday, it’s true to surmise that Israel and U.S. imperialism will still be around. But if you look at where things were in 1947-48, then 1956 [Suez and US capture of exclusive control of Israeli armed forces], June 1967 war and establishment of occupation regime, then the October 1973 war and oil embargo, then 1982 [Israeli invasion of Lebanon to destroy PLO], then 2000 [South Lebanon Army's exit to Israel from Lebanon], then 2005 [Israeli colonists' exit from Gaza], 2006 [Israeli assault on Lebanon/Hezbollah], 2007 [PA & Dahlan turfed out of Gaza], early 2008 [blowing the Rafah Wall], and 2008-2009 [Operation Cast lead followed by Goldstone etc.], the pattern is that of the rise and imposition of Israeli impunity backed by U.S. imperialism followed by increasingly serious strategic defeats for the “Israel” agenda of U.S. imperialism in West Asia and the eastern Mediterranean at the hands of what Palestinian and patriotic Lebanese resistance.
“The point about Chomsky is his strategic sense of U.S. imperialism. He says that it is dysfunctional, but not that that the resistance of the peoples is unraveling it precisely by zeroing increasingly in on the ball-and-chain that “Israel” has become for U.S. imperialist strategy everywhere around the globe. This posture needs to be exposed because it deceives people and disorganises sections of the progressive movement here or there for longer or shorter periods of time. This posture follows from Chomsky’s specific commitment to present a world in movement without Marxism-Leninism. That’s his greatest treachery. Chomsky personally is not and has never been the issue. American pragmatism, on the other hand, is the ideological bailing wire or Krazy-Glue binding together all the most disparate and desperate characters from the trotskyite and other splittist elements across the ‘Left’ to the libertarian ‘Right.’ “
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* This journal coins memorably sharp turns of phrase at important political moments. For example, the disaster unleashed by the Bush Administration’s extremely disorganised response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 was characterised there as “like 9-11, only add water.”
Epitaph for a coming attraction on the occasion of the election victory of the Palestinian people amid the death-watch in Hadassah Hospital
There’s the old butcher
Carved his last Canaanite
Nothing left but to breathe
By machines, day and night
Wretched and haunted
At the end by the thought
His life’s work gone all for nought
26 January 2006