Voyage of the Damned: Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Voyage of the Damned
Blowing Up Boats and Breaking Down Bullshit

Jim Kavanagh

Thug Life

The Trump administration campaign of killing boatmen in the waters near Venezuela, part of its larger project of regime change aggression against the country, breaks, and blatantly defies, the most fundamental principles of American and international law. It’s a crime, and all of its perpetrators, from the grotesque thug Hegseth, to any sub-thug Admiral, to any officer, airmen or seaman who pushes the fatal button, to the ur-thug commander-in-chief who encourages and is responsible for it, should be prosecuted and imprisoned.

Proudly exhibiting videos of small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters being blown to bits under the entirely unproven and entirely irrelevant claim that they were transporting drugs, killing at least 87 people so far, including  men who were clearly surrendering with their hands in the air and survivors clinging to wreckage, is not a good look. I hope the families of those killed, some of whose bodies have washed ashore, find a venue through which they can bring criminal charges against and/or sue the shit out of the United States Government and any and all of its personnel involved.

The thuggery here Is so blatant, and its perpetrators so stupid, that it’s elicited unwanted attention and reaction, including explicit discomfort from a Congress that’s for decades been extraordinarily and cowardly reluctant to impinge on Presidential war-making prerogatives. There’s been a congressional viewing of a double-tap video showing “two survivors, shirtless, cl[inging] to the upturned hull” of a wrecked boat before being blown up by a second strike ordered by Adm. Frank M. Bradley. According to the account of “two people with direct knowledge of the operation” cited by the Washington Post (and kinda-sorta challenged by others), Bradley was following a spoken directive by  Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody.” Predictably, Republican congressmen like Tom Cotton found the action “righteous” while Democratic congressmen found it “disturbing” and “troubling,” although they “declined to weigh in” on whether this strike actually “constituted a war crime.”

Speaking for the administration, Vice President J.D. Vance made clear the Trump administration’s contemptuous indifference to any consideration of American actions in relation to “war crime” and other such standards:

War crime, schmor crime. You can’t really think we bother about such things.

Of course, the whole debate about a double-tap second strike avoids and obscures the main point: Any strike on small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters is illegitimate on every level. It’s no more legal or ethical to blow up people in boats in the Caribbean you claim are carrying narcotics than it is to shoot down a guy on the street corner you claim has drugs in his pocket. Nobody with a brain takes this seriously. The whole blatantly deceitful boat-strike campaign is pure murder, part of a larger, blatant regime-change campaign against Venezuela that is pure imperialist aggression.

https://x.com/AdHaque110/status/1995816543884542075?s=20

Disobedient Spirits

One of the more contentious moments in all this came with the short video done by six Democratic lawmakers (Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan, and Maggie Goodlander), all of whom were military or intelligence officers. Speaking “directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they warned them that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” and reminded them that: “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”

This admonition that military and intelligence personnel “can” and “must” refuse illegal order, provoked fury from Trump, who called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” although it’s a well-known, black-letter element of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—as his own Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders, It would be a crime to do so.” (my emphasis).

Indeed, Pete Hegseth himself knows and has clearly stated this legal standard: “The military’s not gonna follow illegal orders…If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There’s a standard. There’s an ethos.”

It’s just one of those standards that, once you get in power, you don’t give a shit about.

Nonetheless, we should recognize that it’s quite radical for sitting lawmakers to make such statements. When soldiers start disobeying orders en masse—which is exactly what the Democratic six are urging US soldiers and sailors to consider doing—things get seriously out of hand. Entire units and missions start to collapse under constant threat of mutiny. The last time mass refusal of orders happened seriously in the U.S. armed forces was in Vietnam, and it inevitably developed into situations where orders were refused with the toss of a grenade.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing you should expect and accept when an illegal order to commit a war crime or crime against humanity is issued, whether for a specific incident or a whole campaign—i.e., an imperialist aggression in Vietnam or Venezuela.

More pointed responses to the Democratic six are along the lines of “What illegal orders are you suggesting our troops have to disobey? Please don’t pretend you’re giving an abstract lesson in civics. You are former military and intelligence officers who obeyed every order you were given without question and have decided now to emphasize the necessity of disobeying illegal orders, in a discourse framed with urgency about what “this administration” is doing. Everybody knows you’ve got something specific in mind. Say it.

Pardon me for suspecting that these CIA and military Dems are not at all ready to accept the radical consequences of what they are advocating. Do all or any of these six want to be a little more concrete and say whether the military—every single member from the Admiral down to button pusher, the mass refusal you need to challenge a criminal military campaign—must refuse orders to blow up small, unarmed, civilian boats far from and unable to reach American waters (a more “completely unlawful and ruthless” order than which it’s hard to imagine)? Or will they continue “declining to weigh in”? Are they interested in encouraging and engaging in urgent, ethical, constitutional action that might actually disrupt a war crime in progress, or in rhetorically demonstrating how ethically, and constitutionally, and impotently cowardly concerned they are in contradistinction to their Republican colleagues? How much of a shit do they actually give?

Alumni Relations

Which brings me to another example of oh-so-concerned “oppositional” discourse that hit closer to home for me: the December 5th NYT op-ed, “What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes,” by Phil Klay. Klay is a former Marine and the winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his book of short stories about war, citizenship, and faith. As the LA Times puts it, he’s a Marine who’s “become more of a philosopher.” He is also an alumnus of the high school I went to, and I was alerted to his op-ed through my classmates’ mailing list.

I’ve written about Regis High School before, in my essay on Anthony Fauci, also an alumnus. I’ll repeat a bit here, because it informs Klay’s work and my response. Regis is a unique institution. It is an academically selective, full-scholarship (tuition-free), all-boys Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is widely considered the best Catholic high school (and one of the best overall) in the country. It gives a strong education, in my day literally classical—Homer and Caesar in the original Greek and Latin. It’s an education based on Catholic and Jesuit ethical values (which, of course, have changed over the years), and Klay is definitely engaged in an ongoing meditation on those values. It’s an education that, at its best, lays the foundation for logical and critical thinking, and prepares students for good liberal arts colleges and professional careers. For many middle-strata Catholic kids in New York—like this guy—it has been a life-changing experience. So, its alumni are unusually loyal, and proud and aware of each other’s accomplishments.

I caught a little more of the “critical” edge from that and subsequent education, and, as with Anthoy Fauci, my response to Klay’s column was less uncritical than the responses of my fellow alumni—such as, “Must read—not often do we get St. Augustine's advice in the New York Times!” and “Nothing less than what we should expect from a National Book Award recipient. Now if only the people reveling in Trump-sponsored gladiatorial matches would read it––and somehow internalize it.” 

Using a story from St. Augustine’s Confessions, Klay builds his essay on sharply and aptly analogizing the Trump administration’s “snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up” to the Romans’ “cruel gladiatorial games” that made the spectators “drink in savagery” and “imbibe madness,” turning them into the moral monsters that initially repelled them. This, we must consider, is “what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” how his “moral shaping of the electorate” will leave us with results “we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.” This, “the Trump administration’s celebration of death” pushes beyond legal and constitutional questions, and “even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory.” It’s a “wounding of the national soul” that Klay finds “hard to watch.”

I’m right there with the “snuff film” critique of the Trump/Hegseth boat attacks; it’s the theologized fluff talk about Trump’s “wounding of the national soul” I find hard to swallow.

It’s fine and necessary to criticize the Trump administration for these crimes. It’s not fine to ignore—to deliberately and determinately fail to address and account for—the fact that, whatever “President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation,” that “soul” was ruined and damned long before Donald Trump came down the escalator.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, (both now Democratic Party favorites), Barack Obama, Hillary ”We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha.”) and Bill Clinton, Madeline (*500,000* dead children “worth it”) Albright, Joe (“I am a Zionist”) Biden, etc. “morally shaped the electorate” and “wounded the national soul” to accept at-whim presidential assassinations, including double-taps.

What’s the point, besides demonstrating your theological-philosophical pretension finesse, of pinning the damnation of the American soul on Trump, who has yet to catch up with the body count of any of his forerunners?

I’ve characterized the present American polity a couple of times as a ship of fools. Even so, it was all-ahead-full for quite a while. But for some time now, under a succession of calamitous captains, we’ve been on a true voyage of the damned and, if we’re not blown out of the water (a real possibility), we will sink from the weight of the crimes we’ve committed against others and ourselves. If we even have time, we better figure out the personnel and baggage that got us here—all of it—and throw them overboard.

Klay makes a nice point about the result of 9/11: “Something dangerously seductive. America had found moral purpose again.  We can forget everything else, including why and how it happened, and embark on our purposeful and righteous campaign as the good guys, fighting the War on Terror.  Everyone, Phil Klay first of all, recognizes how disastrous that was. Substitute “Donald Trump” for “Terror” and you’ve got the liberal attitude since 2016, with at least the same level of righteous certitude.  How’s that working out?

Here's a couple of Obama’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassinations—aside from the murder of a 16-year-old American boy who “should’ve had a more responsible father”—per Amnesty International: “On a sunny afternoon in October 2012, 68-year-old Mamana Bibi was killed in a drone strike that appears to have been aimed directly at her.” And:2 “Earlier, on 6 July 2012, 18 male laborers, including at least one boy, were killed in a series of US drone strikes in the remote village of Zowi Sidgi. Missiles first struck a tent in which some men had gathered for an evening meal after a hard day’s work, and then struck those who came to help the injured from the first strike. Witnesses described a macabre scene of body parts and blood, panic and terror, as US drones continued to hover overhead.” Et. al. 

But we did not see those assassinations and double taps because, under Obama, “The USA…refuses to release detailed information about individual strikes.”  We didn’t see them because Obama and his “priest”/consigliere John Brennan were not as stupid as Trump and Hegseth to show it and boast about. Not as stupid, but no less culpable.

We didn’t see it because the Democratic-aligned media did not make sure you saw it and did not make a case out of it, but, rather, wrote positive, appreciative stories in Phil-Klay terms about the Augustinian angst of these morally complex protagonists.

The “priest” reference is not flippant. In 2012, the New York Times did a revealing  portrait of Obama and Brennan’s intimate pas de deux executing deadly extrajudicial and extraterritorial drone strikes via their Tuesday Kill List meetings. It was a relationship saturated with the same kind of theological and moral anguish, in exactly the same terms, that Phil Klay embraces. Obama was “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” John Brennan was “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the ‘just war’ theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict...Guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama …signs off on every [drone] strike.”

Isn’t it so much better, didn’t it leave the soul of the nation unwounded, when, unlike the crude and stupid duo of Trump and Hegseth, the educated, erudite team of Obama and Brennan conjured up a “blessing” from Christian philosophers before blowing up civilians in distant lands? That’s the kind of morally anguished and self-aware leadership we Americans, and the Mamana Bibis and Venezuelan fishermen of the world, are missing.

Of course, with the hectic pace of operations and all, the Obama-Brennan disputationes had to be rather brief, since Obama “approves lethal action without hand-wringing.” Obama, you see, is “a realist who was never carried away by his lies own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.”

“Lawyerly mind” (or perhaps “Jesuitical”), “carving out [from “just war” theories] maneuvering room.” Isn’t that precious? In other words, all the theologizing moral anguish was bullshit cover for Obama acting as the dedicated, deadly American exceptionalist and imperialist and Zionist (‘cause that’s a huge part of Iraq, et. al.) that he was, that Trump is, and that anyone whom the ruling class permits to become the American president will be. It’s not “the Trump administration” that started imperialist America’s “celebration of death.”

No Favorite

Obama’s extrajudicial, extraterritorial assassination policy indisputably paved the way for Trump’s boat attacks, just as Obama’s 2015 designation of Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" paved the way for Trump’s (or whoever’s) possible military attack.

Here’s what I wrote about this, in a 2013 essay, when Jesuit Fr. Joe McShane, then president of Fordham University—John Brennan’s and my undergraduate alma mater—awarded Brennan an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters against the protest of  otherwise “morally shaped” students and former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, also a Fordham alumnus (OMG, it is a Jesuit conspiracy!):

Because of the precedent Obama and Brennan have set, such decisions are going to continue to be made by one or two persons in a room as they see fit…These two men, that is, have taken a definitive, and probably irreversible, step in transforming the American President into an Emperor. But, of course, as long as he has a priest by his side, that’ll be OK.

Obama set the soul-wounding precedent that Trump is following. Now, the Trump administration is showing Americans their snuff videos of boats being blown up, hoping, as Klay worries, that some of its base will “imbibe the madness.” And some do, though it seems far from a net political benefit. Then, the Obama administration hid their kill shots from Americans, and its base was quite content not to see them, while blithely accepting their deadly result.

In other words, the Obamacan base was being fed not nasty snuff images but a constant stream of supercilious horseshit, and was, by that, “morally shaped” to “give the president his freedom of action…that we will still have to reckon with.” And if members of that base don’t recognize, renounce, and account for what their hero did, and what they did by cosseting that hero in their minds while limiting themselves to statements showing how culturally and morally superior they are to those in the other “base” who haven’t read Augustine and Aquinas, then they are just sad, sanctimonious, and politically debilitating hypocrites.

It's become the dominant, easy strategy of liberal commentators to pick loud, rhetorically crude reactionary targets to demonize, while explicitly or implicitly embracing the pernicious but rhetorically sophisticated liberal imperialists, who end up committing crimes both those liberal commentators and the reactionaries they disdain support.

The only thing different about the Trump administration is its crude, blatant, boasting about its imperialist violence. The Obama administration, like all U.S. imperialist administrations, was the same pig, with better lipstick, and deserves no less contempt for covering its porcine violence with deceitful moral pretensions. You will have no political credibility if you don’t acknowledge this.

Phil Klay, who I can’t say is naive, but who joined the Marine Corps in 2005, “because I thought military service would be an honorable profession,” and thinks that the Trump administration is only now “turn[ing] a noble vocation into mere thuggery” should maybe have relied less on the Christian theologians than the nation’s most-decorated marine, Smedley Butler, who knew over 90 years ago that being a marine meant being “a gangster for capitalism.”  Thinking on all that with my Jesuit training, I gotta wonder if there has been an order that more clearly called for Augustinian disobedience than the order to deploy to Iraq. Isn’t deployment the first order—in relation now to Venezuela, Iran, or Palestine—that we must call on all military personnel to disobey?

Klay is of the school that thinks Trump is “tarnishing” the uniform and “wounding the soul” of the nation by his proud broadcasting of the images of imperialist violence. I’m of the school that thinks it’s a good thing that arrogant crimes and the imperialist soul of the nation are shown to the world in all their naked glory. I think seeing that is more likely to encourage soldiers to refuse orders and the public to support that refusal. This is the beneficial Trump effect I wrote about here:

Trump is diminishing the aura of the presidency, and generally gumming up the works. As Rob Urie puts it: “The most public political tension now playing out is between those who prefer the veil of ‘system’ against the venal vulgarity of that system’s product now visible for all to see. What Mr. Trump’s political opponents appear to be demanding is a better veil.” Not I. The lipstick is off the "presidency" and the whole political beast it sits atop of. Good. Let's have no nostalgia for a time when a smooth operator was picking your pocket with a smile while you were transfixed by his mellifluous patter.

It’s not about Trump or Obama or St. Augustine. It’s about the imperatives of capitalism, imperialism, and Zionism that drive American policy. The last thing we need is theologized, morally anguished commentary that obscures those fundamental forces. The first thing we need is to drop our illusions and figure out how to fight and defeat those forces persistently attacking the citizens of the U.S. and the world from many directions and both American political parties.

Crimes of the boat-attack type have been a standard part of bipartisan American imperialism (that’s the category, not from St. Augustine) for as long as we have lived (You don’t have to go back to Smedley Butler. Has everyone forgotten Vietnam?). Until and unless oh-so-well-educated, philosophically astute Americans renounce their previous favored imperialist heroes who committed those crimes, they should not be surprised when their carefully targeted professions of moral disappointment and superiority will be widely perceived, with reason, as sanctimonious hypocrisy.

Really, please, get how much, and how many, people are put off by this. It doesn’t work!

So, let’s assume everyone’s good-faith desire to do something more than virtue signal by parsing the Constitution and/or the Church Fathers to show how much smarter and nicer one is than Donald Trump. I invite Phil Klay and the six Democratic “seditionists” who boldly and correctly denounce the Trump administration’s aggressions, to join me in explicitly calling for every American military officer or soldier to disobey any order to attack civilian boats, or to participate in any attack or invasion of Venezuela, and to accept, without reservation, whatever wounds to the soul, ego, ships, planes, or personnel of the armed forces of the United States that will necessarily inflict. While we’re at it, let’s also encourage disobedience to any order to participate in the insulting, colonialist, Trumpian ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza/Palestine or in any military action in support of Zionist colonialism.

Let’s all put ourselves on the line with the soldiers we are asking to—saying they must—disobey orders and disrupt the whole of the U.S. imperialist mission in Venezuela and Latin America (and, for good measure, the Middle East) with at least scores, preferably hundreds and thousands, of military resisters. That’s what will gum up the works which Trump, the current captain of the imperialist ship, along with a bipartisan congressional crew, is cooking up in the name of our nation, and that’s exactly what we must want to see, and help make, happen. Let’s, in other words, do what the logic of your purported ethical, constitutionalist position demands: encourage mutiny.

And, with all my Jesuit training, I don’t give a shit what St. Augustine calls it.

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Mamdani Musings

Mamdani Musings

Jim Kavanagh

So, New York City, the most Zionist city in the world outside of Israel and the capital of capital, has elected a new Muslim immigrant mayor who is a professed anti-Zionist and socialist. How cool is that?! Let's consider.

First of all, yes, the role that Mamdani has played as part of the surprising, unprecedented, and quick, sea change in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel and Zionism—the normalization of not just “criticism of Israel” but explicit anti-Zionism within American political discourse—is important. As I’ve argued previously, there is nothing more important.  And, yes, Mamdani’s campaign has been a key reflection and driver of that change. It's indisputable that his “I'm not going to visit Israel” moment was a turning point in his campaign, and therefore an inflection point in the national political discourse.

At that moment, it became clear in New York that Mamdani was winning because he refused the Zionist loyalty test, and it became clear to the entire country that Zionist loyalty was becoming a political detriment that would be increasingly difficult to hide or overcome.  Anti-Zionists now say, “If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere,” while, astonished and infuriated, and after spending at least $22 million, the Zionists have to lament, “If we can’t make it there, we’re in trouble everywhere.”

Whatever ultimately comes of it, this victory of anti-Zionism is, in itself, an unprecedented and good advance in the ideological and political framework of the country, a positive         moment, a good political thing. And, have no doubt: It is the thing that Mamdani’s opponents are most upset about.

Let’s also recognize that, for the purpose of defeating Zionism in the world, Mamdani’s victory will have little to no practical effect. For one thing, it’s a local election. Because it’s New York, it’s of national ideological and political significance, but he’s still only the mayor of one city. Beyond the beneficial ideological effect of his victory, Zohran Mamdani can’t do much to change U.S. policy towards Israel and Zionism. He can institute BDS-type policies—divesting from Israel bonds, revoking contracts and partnerships with the Israeli government, municipalities, and companies, etc.—and most boldly, as he suggested, arresting Netanyahu if he sets foot in the city.

For another thing, Mamdani’s “anti-Zionism” is a little evanescent. There’s no reason to deny his career-long statements about Palestine: “It is Palestine that brought me into organizing, and it is Palestine that I will always organize for,” or his undeniably courageous refusal to endorse Israel as a “Jewish state,” which logically makes him (though I’m not sure he’s ever explicitly called himself) ”anti-Zionist.”

At the same time, there is no reason, either, to refrain from asking how his anti-Zionism relates to the entirely unforced Zionist-friendly decisions he is making.

It seems starkly contradictory, for example, to keep as police commissioner the uber-Zionist, uber-wealthy, oligarch heiress, Jessica Tisch.

This is the top cop who denounced as “antisemites,” and led the NYPD attack against, pro-Palestine, anti-genocide Columbia student protestors, and who “promised” the ADL that “the NYPD will …remain on the front lines of this fight” to treat anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

This is the police commissioner who sent her senior NYPD staff to a training session which “cast the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety…, focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism…categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘all eyes on Rafah.’”

This is a police commissioner who has the NYPD engaged in continuous joint training and intelligence-sharing with Israeli law enforcement and military forces, including the International Liaison Program, which maintains a NYPD detective post in Israel.

Israel: the 51^st state and 79^th precinct.

Sure, Zoran might say that, as mayor of New York City, he couldn't be expected to exclude everyone with Zionist thoughts from his administration. But the police commissioner is not a trivial administrative post; it’s one that deeply affects how pro-Palestinian politics can be expressed in the city. And Jessica Tisch is no casual, unthinking Zionist–by-default, but a committed, militant Zionist.

There are a thousand nasty battles over his professed anti-Zionism that are to come, with the NYPD and the federal government. To take the very difficult one, on which he has ostensibly staked out a determined anti-Zionist position: Will Zohran Mamdani be counting on Jessica Tisch to—almost certainly in defiance of federal authority—arrest Benjamin Netanyahu? Or has his “anti-Zionism” surrendered that battle in advance? One may like to keep an open mind about how that challenge will be resolved by Mamdani, but it seems to me it already has been.

Perhaps even more telling, because it cannot be excused by the exigencies of, nor will its effects be limited to, New York City—is Zohran’s decision to oppose a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries. It’s not even that Jeffries’s likely opponent, Chi Ossé, has such a strong anti-Zionist position; it’s that Jeffries has been so sycophantic to Israel that he’s been nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur,” and everyone understands he represents the worst of sold-out Democratic Zionism. Whether Mamdani wants to support Ossé or not, trying to prevent him from challenging Jeffries reads as a gratuitous defense of the rightly despised decrepit Democratic Party apparatus, including its intransigent Zionism, which Mamdani’s campaign was all about disrupting.

We cannot help but notice, as Steve Salaita puts it, that such decisions have “a detrimental effect on anti-Zionist consciousness.  Instead of inspiring (or reinforcing) a stronger stance against Israel, the campaign… [is] once again defending the appeasement of Zionists as a necessary condition of political success.”

The second radical leg of Mamdani’s signature political project is his professed “socialism.”

Again, it’s a good thing that Mamdani helped to normalize the idea of socialism, which has been growing among people whose lives are being increasingly constricted by capitalism. His campaign has demonstrated that some version of "socialist" discourse and policy, presented forthrightly, wins.

Of course, you don’t have to be a Marxist theoretician to understand that Mamdani’s (the DSA’s, AOC’s and Bernie’s) concept of “democratic socialism” is the mildest version of social-democratic reform, and that his proposed “municipal socialist” policies—rent freezes, free buses, childcare, public groceries— represent no radical threat, and nothing particularly new, to New York or American capitalism. (I urge everyone to see one of Mamdani’s best campaign videos, an homage to Vito Marcantonio, an Italian-American who represented NYC’s East Harlem in Congress for seven terms as a lifelong socialist, in a historical context where there was a real socialist movement.)

In today’s capitalist America, any attempt by a politician like Mamdani to re-introduce a concept of basic “sociality,” of concern for the general welfare of the people and society—let alone the vigorous socialist politics that once had purchase in American local and national politics—is furiously portrayed and attacked as an attempt to turn the country into “North Korea, with a dash of Sharia.” (I kid you not. I can’t make this shit up.)

As the capitalists and Mamdani know, there’s no such thing as socialism in one city. The mild, socially aware reforms Mamdani may be able to achieve would be of concrete help to a lot of people, and are worthy of support, but they will be contained within the limits of New York City and national capitalism. Only if the Mamdani victory became a building block of a national movement not just to reform, but to consciously confront and overturn the dictatorship of capital, would it be a threat.

As the man himself said:

Mamdani’s increasingly uncritical implication in the Democratic Party is reflected in his legacy-Democrat transition team, whose most radical member, Lina Khan, has progressives all aflutter. That, combined with his defense of Democratic leadership in the person of Jeffries, smells more of ambitious Democrat team spirit than revolutionary socialist fervor.

As the capitalist dictators understand quite well:

https://x.com/FiorellaIsabelM/status/1986089972940652702?s=20

Let’s, please, not forget that we’ve seen the emergence of “socialism” before—not long ago by any but American memory standards, and in a context where it was taken much more seriously by even mainstream pundits.

When I started posting political commentary online, I chose the above February 2009 cover of Newsweek, when the financial crisis made everyone, on a national level, recognize the failures of capitalism and the need for state intervention and for managing social wealth in a different way—you know, more for the benefit of the whole of society than the 1%.

Propelled by immense popular and political support (more than Trump just came in with), Barack Obama walked through the door that had opened to socialism and promptly shut it in the face of the working class, promising the banksters that he would stand as "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And he, indeed, helped transfer mass amounts of wealth to them, while evicting homeowners and demolishing small (especially black) businesses.

I continue to use that icon because I don't want people to forget what happened, when something else was possible.

Because of the legacy of Obama's failure to change things fundamentally, as he could have, a failure that the Democratic Party refuses to recognize, and continued to embrace through Biden, more millions of people ever year—especially working-class and non-white people (read those links and weep)—were driven to the false hope of “anti-establishment” Trump and the “anti-government” Republicans.

Mamdani needs to remember the first video that marked him as a possible winner—the one where he listened respectfully to non-white, working-class New Yorkers who voted for Trump. It was Obama and the Democratic Party that made that happen. Any professed “socialist” or “progressive” politician or movement that does not recognize, and say, and persuade people that they understand that—and I suspect Mamdani, now settling into the AOC-Bernie-progressive Dem nest, will not—is going to end up doing it again.

Zohran Mandani, even if he professes (as Obama did not) to want to open a door to socialism, will find it virtually impossible to find that door today in the fortified capital of Capital, especially if he’s dragged down by the dead weight of the “We’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is” party he’s clinging to.

Mandani is not the radical jihadist or the revolutionary socialist of the fevered tabloid dreams. He’s another Obamacan reformist. Whether he’s more sincere and less of a con man, we shall see.  His professed commitments to the most unradical, basic social ethic at home and anti-colonial ethic internationally turned the reactionary capitalist-Zionist American ruling class of New York City and America apoplectic. They know very well, however, that his ability to realize any but the most minimal of his stated goals will be constrained by their class power and by Zohran’s self-confinement within the Democratic Party wing of the political apparatus that their class provides.

Sure, wait and see. I’m an old-school native New Yorker, and I “know the score by now.” Without promoting him or expecting anything more from him than AOC 1.5, I voted for Mamdani—for the pleasure of watching Shmuley's and Rappaport's heads explode, if nothing else. I hope he gets, and think he might, a couple of the moderate reforms he’s proposing, and maybe, relative to his poor predecessor and with the help of such as Soros, he’ll succeed as mayor and be wound up for higher office.  I will not be surprised, however, if, as Obama's pitchfork management paved the way for Trump, Mamdani’s paves the way for the next Giuliani or Bloomberg.

Whatever Zohran Mamdani does in New York, and wherever he goes from here, the system needs a revolutionary change nationally that's not going to come from him.

 ________________________

Fighting Fake Stories: The New Yorker Serves Up A Doozie

State Department

On July 8^th, The New Yorker published a short piece by Adam Entous, under the graphic above, titled “The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama.” In the article, Entous purports to tell us the heretofore unknown inside story of how the Obama administration came to the surprising realization that Israeli settlements were taking over the West Bank. In the kind of irony The New Yorker might best appreciate, the magazine’s latest promotional tag line is: “Fighting Fake Stories With Real Ones,” and this Adam Entous article is the epitome of fake.

As Entous narrates it, in 2015, the third year of Obama’s second term, as his “Presidency was winding down,” a gentleman called Frank Lowenstein—who was, and still is, the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State—stumbled upon a map of West Bank settlements “that he had never seen before.” Though Lowenstein—as, you know, Special Envoy for Palestinian Negotiations and all—had seen “hundreds of maps of the West Bank” and had one “adorning” his office, this “new map in the briefing book” was a revelation to him. It showed clearly that “not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.”

Shocked, shocked, Lowenstein scurried off to show the map to Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him: “Look what’s really going on here.” After studiously having the map’s information “verified by U.S. intelligence agencies,” Kerry then unfurled the map on a coffee table in the White House for President Obama to see. As Ben Rhodes, “one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers,” recounted, Obama, too, was “shocked” at Israel’s “systematic” use of settlements to “cut off Palestinian population centers from one another.”

Resist This: The United States Is At War With Syria

The United States is at war with Syria. Though few Americans wanted to face it, this has been the case implicitly since the Obama administration began building bases and sending Special Ops, really-not-there, American troops, and it has been the case explicitly since August 3, 2015, when the Obama administration announced that it would “allow airstrikes to defend Syrian rebels trained by the U.S. military from any attackers, even if the enemies hail from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” With the U.S. Air Force—under Trump, following Obama’s declared policy—shooting down a Syrian plane in Syrian airspace, this is now undeniable.  The United States is overtly engaged in another aggression against a sovereign country that poses no conceivable, let alone actual or imminent, threat to the nation. This is an act of war.

As an act of war, this is unconstitutional, and would demand a congressional declaration. The claim, touted by Joint Chiefs’ Chairman, Gen. Dunford, that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda provides constitutional justification for attacking the Syrian government is patently false and particularly precious. In the Syrian conflict, it’s the Syrian government that is the enemy and target of al-Qaeda affiliates; it’s the U.S. and its allies who are supporting al Qaeda. The authorization to fight al-Qaeda has been turned into an authorization to help al-Qaeda by attacking and weakening its prime target!

No Laughing Matter: The Manchester Bomber is the Spawn of Hillary and Barack’s Excellent Libyan Adventure

PA via AP

On November 20, 2015, two jihadi militants attacked the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, seizing about 100 hostages and “leaving bodies strewed across the building.” When it was over, 22 people (including the attackers) had been killed. As the New York Times reported:

Mali has been crippled by instability since January, 2012, when rebels and Al Qaeda-linked militants — armed with the remnants of late Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s arsenal — began advancing through the country’s vast desert in the north and capturing towns.

Not much has been made in American and Western media of this attack. Most of the dead were Malians, Russians, and Chinese—and, hey, it was in Africa; Shit happens. Especially there. How many people reading this even remember that it happened? Follow-up analysis? It was Africa. That kind of coverage. (I did post about it at the time, making many points that unfortunately bear repeating here.)

Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked," to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, As Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”

Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by "the West" to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.

The Democrats’ Theater of Discipline

I must say: I’m surprised.

Not that Hillary was going to be the nominee. Not that Obama was in her camp. But by the gratuitously insulting and imperious way in which Obama, on behalf of Hillary, shut Bernie down.

Bernie was not going to win the superdelegates. Obama could have worked with Hillary quietly, behind the scenes, to ensure that, and to make sure the convention went smoothly enough, while maintaining his public neutrality.

By endorsing Hillary at this time, in this way—within minutes of his meeting with Sanders where Bernie had praised Obama for not “putting his thumb on the scale,” before Bernie had even started his next meeting of the day, before the final primary, before the vote at the convention that formally decides the nominee, and with an ad that Obama had filmed for Hillary in advance, posted on Facebook by the Clinton campaign—Obama was making a deliberately excessive gesture.

He was effectively telling Bernie, in a publicly brutal way, who’s the boss: “You’ve had your fun. Now get with the program. Oh, and, by the way, as you leave, make sure that those little ‘uns you got all riled up vote for Hillary.”

Forget thumb, Obama put his fist on the scale, effectively telling the superdelegates how he wants them to vote.  Obama is now campaigning for Hillary while Bernie is still officially in the race, and daring Bernie or anybody to complain about it. “Hey Bernie: Not the superdelegates, not anybody in this party, is going to defy me. Are you?”

“Good al-Qaeda’s” Air Force: The United States Is At War With Syria

 Fighters of al-Nusra front driving through Aleppo 26 May (AFP)

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation”
— candidate Barack Obama, December, 2007

The United States has decided to allow airstrikes to defend Syrian rebels trained by the U.S. military from any attackers, even if the enemies hail from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. officials said on Sunday.
—  "U.S.to defend Syrian rebels with airpower, including from Assad," Reuters, August 3, 2015

The United States just went to war with Syria. With the confirmation today that American planes will shoot down Syrian planes attacking USDA-approved "rebels," the United States is now overtly engaged in another criminal attack on a sovereign country that poses no conceivable, let alone actual or imminent, threat to the nation. This is an act of war. 

Please don’t try any not-really-war “no-fly zone” or “safe zone” bullshit. As the Commander of NATO says, a no-fly zone is “quite frankly an act of war and it is not a trivial matter….[I]t’s basically to start a war with that country because you are going to have to go in and kinetically take out their air defense capability.” Or as Shamus Cooke puts it: “In a war zone an area is made ‘safe’ by destroying anything in it or around that appears threatening.”  Inevitably, “U.S. and Turkish fighter jets will engage with Syrian aircraft, broadening and deepening the war until the intended aim of regime change has been accomplished."¹ 

Does anybody doubt that this is exactly what’s intended? Perhaps Obama will soothe the discomfort of his purportedly peace-loving progressive fans with some assurance like: “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” He’ll be lying, as he was four years ago when he said that about Libya.

As an aggressive, unprovoked war, this is totally illegal under international law, and all the political and military authorities undertaking it are war criminals, who would be prosecuted as such, if there were an international legal regime that had not already been undermined by the United States.

Good for the Gander:Ukraine's Demise Accelerates

A further look at the Ukraine debacle, in seven pieces.

Montagueski and Capuletovitch

(Cool Photo. Remember what happened to Romeo and Juliet.)

Ukraine, Interrupted

“Ukraine” means “borderland,” and if there were ever a country suffering a borderline personality disorder—barely “keeping itself together,” as we say—it is Ukraine. Suddenly, it’s been deprived of its meds (discounted gas and other Russian-provided subsidies), and goaded into a schizophrenogenic family crisis (the American-sponsored overthrow of its elected government, resented by half the country).  After the maidan mania, came the Crimea depression, and now, it seems, rapid and radical decompensation.

Before the maidan winter games, if some in the country (Kiev “liberals”) were looking for the cure from Dr. America and Nurse NATO, standing by to treat the flailing patient with their straitjacket of austerity and electroshock-and-awe therapy, perhaps some are now realizing that these practitioners’ cures only increase the crazy.

Since my last detailed post, the Ukraine situation has indeed been devolving rapidly, both within the country and on the level of international geopolitics.  It’s hard to see where Ukraine is going—whether it will survive as a unified state at all (even sans Crimea), and it is hard to see how seriously the world will be riven by a “new Cold (or even hot) War.” American political and media discourse is now completely dominated by the “aggressive Russia/nasty Putin” meme, but it would be wise to look carefully at the different axes of major, and lesser-included subsidiary, contradictions to see the real web of tensions which the “new Cold War” narrative is designed to occlude.

Syria: No Better Angels

In my last post on Syria, I commented that “Short of widespread popular unrest, on issues like this, the will of the people counts for nothing against the exigencies of imperialism and Zionism, as understood by the American political elite,” that “there would be no challenging debate in the US Congress like that in the British Parliament,” and that “a combination of domestic political pressure that, along with international reluctance, [which would] create an effective pushback against Obama’s momentum towards war” was “not likely.” I was 100% certain of, and would have bet heavily on, a strike on Syria within a few days.

I am surprised and happy to see that I would have lost that bet. Indeed, there is substantially more than a glimmer of pushback on a number of fronts.  The British parliament’s rejection of a military attack on Syria turned out to be a wedge blow that opened crucial cracks in the hitherto seemingly-impervious American imperial edifice. It pushed Obama into going to Congress for a vote, which bought time in which the American people could think about the case and not just follow the leader, and in which the media would have to open the window of information and analysis at least a bit more than usual.

At the Syrian Threshold:“al-Qaeda’s Air Force” Prepares for Battle

Here's a report from July, "FSA chemical lab uncovered near Damascus":

Chemical weapons materials and facilities have been found multiple times in "rebel" areas. The "rebels" are the *only ones* who have any motive for using chemical weapons.

Yeah, it's from RT (Russia’s English-language TV channel). Do you really think you have any more reason to believe the US government and its media -- proven liars, multiple times, on the subject -- than RT?  It’s those who reflexively dismiss anything reported by RT or Press TV (Iran’s English-language TV channel), while reflexively taking for granted the truth of everything Obama and the New York Times and MSNBC say, who demonstrate their gullibility. Do you really believe that the foot-stomping insistence of Obama and Biden and Kerry that they absolutely, positively know the Syrian government is to blame is any more credible than was the sooo convincing “proof” that George Bush and Dick Cheney produced on Iraq? Remember how the media and the humanitarian interventionists liberal imperialists creamed over Colin Powell’s irrefutable presentation?  Here we go again. Fool me how often?

Guess what, Obamicans: It’s the same imperialist state. If anything, at this point, Obama has less credibility than Bush, and you have less excuse for going along with him.

Leprechaun Hats Decorated with a Bit of Stars and Stripes: Ireland Greets the Emperor

During the G8 Summit in June, held in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, just across the border of the Republic, local councils."painted fake shop fronts and covered derelict buildings with huge billboards to hide the economic hardship being felt in towns and villages near the golf resort" where all the mucky-mucks met. Besides this Potemkin-village festival of capitalism, there was the obligatory effusiveness -- in the North and the Republic -- about the American Emperor and his wardrobe, woven from the glittering fabric of peace. Speaking for the less wishfully astigmatic, Irish Teachta Dála (Member of Parliament) Clare Daly excoriated the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) for his "unprecedented slobbering," and demanded the recognition of some naked truth.

Full video and transcript

The Reluctant Imperialist

Obama: "I may assume the right to attack any country, and kill anyone, anywhere in the world, whenever I want, but at least I'm all thoughtful and conflicted about it.  Just as I know you are in supporting me."

This hurts me more than it hurts you?  He's the victim, the focus of our sympathy, here?

He is fast winning the prize for the most manipulative and deceptive president I've ever seen.

Another fine analysis by Glenn Greenwald (see also, this at FireDogLake, and this at Miami Herald)..

Excerpts:

The hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. ... I've personally never seen a politician even in the same league as Barack Obama when it comes to that ability...

what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do.
What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war,.. However bad things might be, we at least have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.

The clear purpose of Obama's speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like.  No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him...

the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric, mostly designed to signal that unlike the mean and simplistic George Bush - who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and simplistically - Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep moral and intellectual conflict as he embraces them. ..
Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is about it all. ..

Benjamin Wittes similarly observed that Obama's speech seemed written to align the president "as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration's operational flexibility in actual fact." In other words,... "the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to make sure that it could continue to do so." ...

That's what makes it such a classic Obama speech. And that's the point: his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions. ... Until one sees actual changes in behavior and substance on those issues, cheering for those changes as though they already occurred or are guaranteed is the height of self-delusion.

Carry On Margaret: Still Playing in Theaters Near You

The Carry On films were a series of 31 very popular low-budget British comedies (more films than any other British series), made between 1958 and 1992, which spoofed various typical social characters and cultural icons -- Carry On Sergeant, Carry On Nurse, Carry On Teacher, etc.  By 1978, after 20 years and 30 movies, the series wore quite thin. After that year, when the penultimate Carry On Emmanuelle (thin, indeed) was made. there was a break of fourteen years. Then, in 1992, thinking there were still tickets to be sold, producers tried to resurrect the series with Carry On Columbus (nodding to the Columbus cinquecentennial), which turned out to be the last unfortunate gasp. It was one of those franchises that just did not want to admit its own demise.

"By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them" is the way the Gospel of Mark (7:16) puts it.  "By their friends ye shall know them" is a similar aphorism, which derives from Aesop's fable of "The Ass and His Purchaser."  Both are apt in considering who still buys into, and carries on, the shopworn legacy of the departed Baroness Thatcher.

A selection of symptomatic remarks on her passing:

“Thatcher on feminism: "I hate feminism. It is a poison."
Thatcher on Mandela: "He is a terrorist."
Thatcher on Pinochet: "Welcome."”
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/swanstonmuir/status/321292318701391873

Apology Excepted: Obama’s Turkish Twist

Following up on yesterday’s post about how the American media disappeared a Palestinian dissident and an American victim of Israeli aggression in one fell swoop of ideological misrecognition.

No apology

Furkan Dorgan in Turkey before he was killed by the IDF 

(from www.thiscantbehappening.net)

As this story in the New York Times (NYT) describes, in a dramatic last-minute, on-the-tarmac-before-takeoff telephone negotiation, Obama went out of his way to “broker” a deal whereby Israel would give an apology (one of those sorry for “any mistakes” non-apology apologies, to be sure) to Turkey for the killing of nine people during the 2010 Israeli raid the on the Turkish-flagged vessel Mavi Marmara in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, in exchange for Turkey’s restoration of full diplomatic ties with Israel. 

Restoring what historically has been a friendly relationship between Israel and Turkey is, you see, good for Israel. As both the NYT and the Jerusalem Post (JP) report, it means that Turkey will drop its criminal indictments against Israeli military officials, and it will open the door for Israel “to upgrade its ties with NATO, something that Turkey, as a NATO member, had continuously vetoed.“ It will also help the American-Israeli effort to, as the NYT so delicately puts it, “confront Syria’s civil war.”  Indeed, the JP reports that Syria was the decisive factor for Netanyahu, who posted that: “The fact that the crisis in Syria is getting worse by the minute was the central consideration in my eyes.”  As Netanyahu’s National Security Adviser, Yaakov Amidror, puts it: “What we wanted is to get to a situation where the relationship will be upgraded so that we can cooperate more regarding Syria, and will give Israel more freedom of action in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

More (?!) “freedom of action” for Israel. (N.B. NATO, “and elsewhere”?!!)  Just the formula for peace that the world needs.

So, in order to restore Israel’s beneficial relation to Turkey, open the door for Israel’s de facto integration into NATO, bring everyone on the same page for destroying the Syrian State, and, generally, everywhere, ”give Israel more freedom of action,” Obama used his newly-lauded “talent for arm-twisting” to get the Israeli Prime Minister to apologize to Turkey for an incident in which an American citizen was also killed – but nary a twist, tweak, word or suggestion about an apology to the United States, Israel’s uniquely generous patron. Love is never having to say you’re sorry. Or, the American Israel lobby would never allow that.

As Dave Lindorff points out in this cogent post, the American media “are full of glowing reports and praise” for Obama’s display of tough-minded diplomatic prowess.  Of course, neither would the American president “bother to demand that Netanyahu include an apology, weak or otherwise, to the American people for the killing of an American national,” nor would the American media bother to notice that he hadn’t.  Not allowed.

Some might find “the idea that this president cannot demand even a mild apology from an Israeli prime minister for the brutal slaughter of an unarmed US citizen, even as he is brokering such an apology for the killing of nine Turkish citizens … beyond appalling.”  “Some,” who will not be found – will not be allowed – in the Democratic or Republican parties, or in the mainstream media.

So after being killed by the IDF with “two shots to the face fired at close range …as he lay already gravely wounded … having been already shot in the back, leg and foot,” Furkan Dorgan, along with Rachel Corrie and the sailors of the USS Liberty, officially joins the ranks of Americans with whom, when it comes to Israel’s “freedom of action,” the President of the United States and the American media cannot be bothered.