Worse pandemics are on the way if we do nothing to protect the environment, scientists say. Now giant Asian hornets that destroy beehives have arrived in the United States, and they’re here to stay. There are wildfires that are more destructive every year in California.
The list goes on. These are not flukes. They are a result of behavior like usual, and politics like usual. It’s time to act to save our environment.
In Bill Clinton’s fist presidential run he won with the catch-line “its the economy, stupid!”. This is the last time the a Democratic candidate has run on any argument other than that “we’re not the other Party”.
In the current millennium – which is politically in the post 9/11 era – John Kerry ran on the argument that he wasn’t Bush. Obama and Hillary Clinton ran on the argument that they were a change from the other party; Obama promised hopes and dreams. After eight years of Obama’s hopes and dreams Hillary ran again, arguing that she’s different than the other party.
After losing the election to a Republican – who had often donated to Democratic candidates – that ran on a lark, Hillary disappeared for four years.
Her policies and her position that she’s not the other party have been replaced, through backroom wrangling and democracy at its worst, by Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden.
After vanquishing twenty-five contenders this year – although he had and has no ground-game, and little financial backing – every one his opponents has mysteriously backed Biden. His most notable opponent, and one of the few that had an argument other than “we’re not the other guys,” Bernie Sanders was the last to suspend his campaign.
In general political speak Bernie Sanders is a progressive who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, advocating for tax dollars to be used to benefit people rather than corporations, and that corporations should be regulated by the government. Joe Biden is a liberal who advocates social causes but believes corporations have final say in things like wages, healthcare, prisons, and war – in other terminology, then Biden is a neoliberal, a person who advocates for social causes but thinks people, not corporations need regulation.
Joe Biden’s campaign is a continuation of the argument “we’re not the other guys”. With Trump as president that should be an easy argument to make, but beyond failing to propose concrete economic solutions to fix an economy – he could argue “it’s the economy, stupid!” – Biden has been accused of sexual assault – some would say rape – and the Democrats have lost both the economic and moral high ground.
For several years there’s been a rift in the Democratic Party between Sanders supports who argue drastic political reform is needed and supporters of neoliberal polices. – Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. There was not, until recently, a drastic notable rift between the two factions in their moral stands.
A couple years ago during the confirmation of conservative judge Kavanaugh – who how has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court – he was accused of sexual assault (or rape) and there was widespread condemnation of his moral capabilities by the Democrats, who used the #MeToo movement by survivors of sexual assault as a moral standing point. The Democrats had already forced the resignation of Senator Al Franken for the minor offense of making a joke about assault during his life in comedy.
I’m not here to tell you whether Joe Biden did or did not commit sexual assault. The Democrats claimed the moral high ground and emphatically said no to sexual assault, until Joe Biden was accused of it.
To say that there’s a war on the political left – if by left we mean both progressives advocating for change an neoliberal Democrats advocating for more of the same. Not only have most Biden supporters have contradicted their views from just a couple years ago, some are saying they’ll vote for Biden even if he raped their daughter, and others who have platforms in the media are calling for arrest of the journalists who cover the story (the story is whether he did or did not do it).
It has been said that the genius of Bill Clinton was to drive the Republican party mad and drive the Democratic party to the right. The Democratic party has actually gone so far right that it too has gone mad. The Democrats have actually reached a point where they can’t be differentiated from the Republicans.
It would be easy to say that this isn’t true, until you consider that Democrats are now condoning rape and joining the security-state attitude of arresting people that cover stories they don’t agree with. Do Democrats really want to not only lose the moral high ground and the economic high ground, but also their sanity and the sense of reason?
March 16 is always a good time to remember Rachel Corrie. This year she would be approaching 41, undoubtedly in the prime of a meaningful career. In fact, any day would be good to remember Rachel – Land Day, UN Children Day, Nakba Day, Human Rights Day, or her April birthday.
It’s worth remembering the Palestinian activists – health, unhealthy, dead, and alive – who have, and who are, fighting for Palestinian rights and for human rights.
It is also worth remembering, now and at other times, Tom Hurdal, and Jo Cox, as well as Heather Heyer. These are just some of the familiar white activist deaths that make it in to Western media. So many of these stories are forgotten as another event occurs.
Rachel’s story has never been forgotten and it has inspired communities across the globe in the past, in the present, and it surely will in the future.
On this day let’s look back and look forward. Look back at the work we’ve been inspired to do, and forward at the fact that we’ve been inspired to continue this work.
…
As a full disclosure, I am on the policy committee for the Rachel Corrie Foundation to Peace and Justice. I wrote this for myself, to share with the Foundation, to be shared at the annual March 16 pot luck in celebration of Rachel’s life. The event isn’t happening this year.
In an effort to avoid the path of least resistance I have returned to school, ideally taking five classes this year that focus on human rights. The first class, which has recently commenced, is on Forced Migration and Human Rights.
I feel that it’s a good idea to share one paragraph quote with you, during which I hope we remember that the current U.S. administration an a lot of people that support it do not like the United Nations and international cooperation in general.
This comes from the 2018 Global compact on refugees (pdf), in a Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees:
against this background, the global compact complements ongoing United Nations endeavours in the areas of prevention, peace, security, sustainable development, migration and peacebuilding. All States and relevant stakeholders are called on to tackle the root causes of large refugee situations, including through heightened international efforts to prevent and resolve conflict; to uphold the Charter of the United Nations, international law, including international humanitarian law, as well as the rule of law at the national and international levels; to promote, respect, protect and fulfil human rights and fundamental freedoms for all; and to end exploitation and abuse, as well as discrimination of any kind on the basis of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, disability, age, or other status. The international community as a whole is also called on to support efforts to alleviate poverty, reduce disaster risks, and provide development assistance to countries of origin, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and other relevant frameworks.
Despite the unsuccessful endevours of the U.N. consider just how the current administration views refugees and any attempt – all good ideas listed by the U.N – to mitigate any refugee crisis.
There are always choices in politics, as there is in life. You can vote for things stay the same (status quo), to get regress (conservative), or to make an effort to change for the better (progressive).
Now really, if things stay the same they never improve and therefore they eventually become regressive.
Conservative politics regresses farther than status quo politics. Not only is it not content with the current state of affairs, but conservatism try to revert the politics body to some antiquated – and fictional – past in which everyone fights for themselves and everyone -mainly the rich – are content.
Then the questions arises: do we regress back forty years, or one hundred? Which golden age of inequality do we which to emulate? Is it inequality of wealthy, or inequality of wealth and of civil rights?
Choices.
If we choose progress, is it incremental, or deep structural change? Who, besides people who promote inequality of wealth and of civil rights, benefits from incremental change. Incremental progress merely creates a new regressive status quo.
Progress – real progress – ensures that everyone has rights, and that everyone’s well-being is accounted for.
Choices.
I recently went on vacation, and my reading choice was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (a natural choice for reading while on vacation). I haven’t finished, and although it is true that the United States – even three years after this article Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt – we are not totalitarian it is also true the totalitarianism can appear in any country.
Here’s a brief quote from the paperback edition of copyright1968:
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements , their most conspicuous eternal characteristic is their demand from total, unrestricted , unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member.
Knowing that we are not a totalitarian country, try to not join a movement that demands unconditional loyalty, and we might never be totalitarian.
I intended to send this message by email, although I may still have posted it here for the world to see. However, a search for how to contact Erica Green produces only places like LinkedIn. The article to which I want to respond, “Wider Definition of Judaism Is Likely to Aid Crackdown on Colleges” lists no way to contact you and is behind paywall.
In this syndicated article you suggested that most Jewish organizations are in favor of defining Judaism as more than a religion. The administration’s most recently executive order would, as you pointed out, would define Judaism as a race or a group of national origin. You did not mention that the Nazis of the Third Reich used this same definition to describe Jews. Nor did you include any viewpoint of any Jewish organization not vested in maintaining the brutal status quo in Israel.
The goal of the executive order, the administration tells us, is to combat anti-semitism. Especially anti-semitism on college campuses; thank you for providing a brief overview there and pointing out that this would cause ‘enormous confusion’ on college campuses. Although you failed to question any Jewish organization other than the conservative Zionist Organization of America, which you pointed out that Kenneth L. Marcus (the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, who has been pushing for this kind of legislation or order for years), as an investigator reporter you also failed to say where the definition of anti-semitism originates from.
Your bio on the New York Times article – which again, contains no contact information – mentions that you’re an investigative journalist. You can easily find out that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) promoted the definition of anti-semitism that the administration has instructed the Department of Education to now implement, and also find out that the IHRA has used the same definition against human rights activists in Britain.
Essentially, you took no time to investigate what you’re writing about . As a person that concerns me. As an American that concerns me. As a Jew who reads your writing about anti-semitism, that concerns me.
For those of you keeping score at home, more weapons do not make us safer. Our insecurity increases when we add in nuclear weapons, or submarines powered by nuclear reaction.
How we’re going to pay for this is a great question. Why we’re paying for this is just as an important a question. And who’s making money off this?
On a day that should have ended the war to end all wars “early on November 11th [1918], the Germans met the Allies near Paris to sign an Armistice ending the fighting. The agreement set 11:00am Paris time as the moment the truce would begin – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.”
But, as the World War I Centennial Commission adds:
The fighting continued until the last possible moment. As a result, there were 10,944 casualties, including 2,738 deaths, on the war’s last day. Most occurred within a period of three hours. The last soldier to be killed in World War I was Henry Gunther, an American of German descent, who was killed just sixty seconds before the guns fell silent.
The agreement between the armies to stop fighting – the armistice – lasted long enough to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
It sounds like a great excuse to have a three day weekend, but in reality what happened was A Peace to End All Peace.
November 9-10 is the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The Atlantic, in “The Echoes of Kristallnacht,” writes that the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, just before midnight on 1938 sent a telegram to every police unit in Nazi Germany: “In shortest order actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Firefighters stood by as synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, schools, and businesses burned to the ground. Within a day, 91 Jews had been murdered, and between 20,000 and 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps,” writes The Atlantic.
And interviewee in the film by Leo Baeck Institute, about which “The Echoes of Kristallnacht” is based, said about those who ‘made it to America’: “America did not exactly make it easy. That’s a myth—the open arms of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now.”
Now in the United States we have an increasingly tough immigration system that includes concentration camps where more than 10,000 children separated from their family are waiting to ‘come to America’ or to be turned away – sent back to where they wanted to escape from.
It’s sadly possible that Americans (the kind from the United States) don’t know this. It’s even more possible, sadly that Americans (the kind from the United States) don’t know about Kristallnacht or the Holocaust that followed it. This year Oregon became the 12 State to mandate teaching the Holocaust, writes Elaine Povich for PewTrusts. The map the PewTrusts provides of which states do require Holocaust education shows a huge gap through the middle of our country. (A few months later Washington also passed a bill requiring Holocaust education). For instance, Povich writes that “A survey last year showed that two-thirds of U.S. millennials were not familiar with Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp complex, located near Krakow, Poland. More than 1.1 million people were gassed, shot or starved at Auschwitz, including nearly a million Jews.”
Thirteen States out of fifty means 26% of States require Holocaust education. That’s a failing grade.
Next, we might want to know what kind of education about the Holocaust is taught. Do we learn, for instance, that
the Holocaust was the largest genocide in history, but not the last one. More recent examples include the Khmer Rouge’s killing of about 2 million Cambodian dissidents between 1975 and 1979; the Hutu slaughter of about 800,000 mostly Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994; and the Sudanese government’s killing of 300,000 civilians in the Darfur region, beginning in 2003
Elaine Povich knows that. It was beyond the time-frame and scope of her article to acknowledge that Washington State also passed legislation mandating Holocaust education.
The bill Washington State passed was promoted by the Holocaust Center for Remembrance. Among the studies supporting the bill, as listed by the Holocaust Center for Remembrance website, is IHRA Research in Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust 2017.
I had previously come across this article from 2016, by Jonathan Ofr in Mondoweiss, about Britain’s equating criticism of Israel with anti-Antisemitism, and the organization that pushed it. The organization is the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). I believe that Teresa’s May accepting of their argument made it British law, in a way.
I don’t know the relation between the Center for Holocaust Remembrance is International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. I know that the IHRA has a vague definition of anti-Semitism and conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
What happens when Holocaust education turns to the creation of Israel as a state? Does the legislation mandating Holocaust education require discussing the indigenous Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing they face, and the broken promises that led to this ethnic cleansing?
What is a Holocaust and what isn’t? Why do we learn about so few Holocausts? And why are we trying to create another one?
The Dole Blog 