Eighty years ago today the most feared name in the in the 20th Century took his life as the totalitarian state he built failed to rule until all of eternity. He-who-must-not-be-named, Adolf Hitler, died in a bunker in Berlin, as Soviet troops surrounded the city. Hitler’s power and fear under the Third Reich, which lasted from 1933-1945 – and which he expected to last a thousand years – ruled based on racism and divisiveness and drew inspiration from U.S. Jim Crow laws.
An article in the Indian Times today, titled “A Lesson In Absolute Power and Fear” says that while the Western media says Hitler shot himself, the narrative of the Soviets was quite different. Although this is somewhat irrelevant to Power and Fear, it’s a good reminder of the propaganda we’re given.
Thirty years later, fifty years ago today, Vietnam – South and North Vietnam – reunified as the Communist-run North Vietnam seized Saigon, which was the capital of the U.S.-backed South Vietnam. The current leader of Vietnam called this a ‘victory of faith’ and ‘justice over tyranny’. The 1975 “fall of Saigon, as Reuters called it, happened about two years after Washington withdrew its last combat troops from the country which “marked the end of a 20-year conflict that killed some 3 million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans, many of them young soldiers conscripted into the military.”
Today in history, then – frighteningly recent history that many of us and/or our parents and grandparents lived through – we think about Victory and Defeat.
In 1945 Hitler was defeated, and in theory fascism and its end-result of totalitarianism was defeated. Fascism was never entirely defeated in 1945, because fascism results from the capitalist quest for more profits. At the same in 1945 there was victory for both the West – now dominated by the United States – and for the Soviet Russia.
Thirty years later The United States and the Soviet bloc were engaged in a proxy war, and Vietnam was part of that proxy war to determine who could control which regions on the global map. Facing public pressure because of the deaths overseas and at home caused by the war in Vietnam the United States left the country, although it would never admit defeat. From a perspective looking at the human cost of war, including lingering effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals, it’s hard to say that anyone one the war. But the Vietnam war was also a war on colonization, and a quest for self-determination, and in that sense Vietnam can claim victory.
When I get in bed at night I look at my phone. I watch as many reels -that’s what the tech companies call them – as I can.
When I get in bed my brain is on overdrive remembering all the interactions I had, or I didn’t have.
When I get in bed all the thoughts about the day come crashing through my mind. Sometimes I think about other days. Sometimes I think about tomorrow.
When I get in bed I think of all the writing there is to do. Should I get back out of bed and write?
When I’m in bed sometimes the thought are so overwhelming that I want to get up and be somewhere else. Do I go sit in my car? Do I go for a drive? Is there a park bench outside I could go sit on while my thoughts consume me? Should I take a long walk?
When I’m in bed I don’t want to sleep.
The richest billionaires in the United States were front-and-center guests at the presidential inauguration in January. We have a presidential administration that immediately declared war on its own citizens. It would be a falsehood to that no one expected us to end up where we are.
The Corporatist State
Published in 2007, Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine an “accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big business is not liberal, conservative, capitalist, but corporatist.”
It’s main characteristics, she continues,
are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalization that justified bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population outside the bubble , other feature of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.
The modern doctrine of privatizing state services en-mass, Naomi Klein, says, came from Milton Friedman. Often referred to as the Chicago school of economics, where he taught and where his proteges studied under him, his proposals of mass privatization have used natural and human-made disasters as catalysts to maximize private profit and minimize the need for state services. This has applied to Chile, Haiti, Syria, China, and numerous other places. It “came home,” Klein says, after September 11, 2001, and after Hurricane Katrina in 2003. There was a huge effort to get rid of public schools in Louisiana. Of course, the security state increased dramatically after September 11.
Milton Friedman had long-standing affiliations with some think-tanks calling for a neoliberal, or corporatist approach to government since the mid-1990s. Among those thinks thanks are the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The same Heritage Foundation that wrote Project 2025 – the playbook to privatize the government and attack civil liberties.
Twenty years later these policies are here to stay until we do something about it. The corporatist state has increased in strength, and has reached the point the rich live in a bubble and everyone else is disposable and a nuisance. That’s exactly why the current administration quickly revamped the US Digital Service to become the US Department of Efficiency, headed by the billion Elon Musk, and tasked it with “efficiently” overhauling the government and removing federal employees in an effort to quickly privatize essential services provided by the government.
It would be easy to blame the current administration, which as made the corporatist state obvious. Unfortunately but importantly, scholars, historians, and people continuing to pay attention, have pointed out that previous administrations have laid the groundwork for what’s happening.
Previous administrations, including the Democratic presidencies of Obama and Biden, also targeted non-white immigrants. A lot of attention has been given to ICE’s terrible policies of targeting non-white migrants for deportation. The detention of a Mahmoud Khalil, picked up for ICE because his political views has heightened that attention. The corporatist state is reaching the part where incarceration increases and civil liberties decrease.
How we respond will determine if we are governed by corporations or by people. We can’t have both.
If your like me you don’t care about the Oscars. I just happened to turn it on – after some peer pressure – just in time to see the only part I cared about. No Other Land won an Oscar for best documentary.
It gave Palestinians recognition, bringing attention to the never-ending oppression and land theft happening the the occupied land that’s supposed to be part of a future Palestinian state.
No one ever stops to ask exactly how Palestinians will have a state when they don’t have land.
No Other Land‘s win also gave the co-director Yuval Avbraham a voice on international prime time. He used that time, Mondoweiss and others report, to condemn ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta, where the movie takes place. But he failed to condemn Zionism and praised “both-side’ism”.
It’s not that Israelis and Palestinians can’t live together, but that they can’t live as equals in the current system.
Yuval’s speech, Nada Elia correctly writes in Mondoweiss, condemns Zionism’s current actions without condemning Zionism. It was a speech of perfect hasbara (propaganda), calling for change without changing the system.
In the time and place of political opportunists Tulsi Gabbard has found her place.
The former Representative, and former Democratic candidate for president, has put her name forward to be head of the Department of National Intelligence under President Trump’s unsurprisingly far right-wing government.
In this role, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies with a budget of about $100 billion and serve as the principal adviser to the president on intelligence matters.
To Gabbard’s credit, in an McCarthy-like hearing in a Senate committee to out find if she was the right person, she failed to call former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States.
Later, according to NBC, Gabbard, who “had previously called for Snowden to be pardoned” reversed herself at the hearing, saying she would not seek a pardon or clemency for the former National Security Agency contractor accused of espionage.
Edward Snowden made the same mistake that Reality Winner, and other intelligence analysts have made. He released government information that the government was lying to, and spying on, its own citizens.
In the hearing in which Gabbard refused, correctly, to call Snowden a traitor she said about Snowden that “he broke the law”.
As Snowden himself has said, When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.
Time will tell how wishy-washy Gabbard will be, either in this role or in any other.
Watching to fire in the Los Angeles area brings back memories.
The five fires that are burning around LA have burned 35,000 acres in the last week. It’s doubtless most destructive fire every in January in the United States, and is happening months after the end of California’s fire season, and well before the fire season is supposed to begin.
This isn’t the most destructive or most deadly fire California has seen, but it might be the most costly fire ever seen in the United States, at least a cost of $135,000,000,000 (135 billion), with property damage, lost wages and income, and disruption to the economy.
This fire brings back a lot of memories. When I was in high school in California in 2003 (did I just tell you my age?!?), California had the largest fire it had ever seen. Like the current fire, they were actually a collection of fires (fifteen) that happened at the same time in the same area. About 400,00,00 acres burned in the last week of October, and early November, covering areas from San Diego to the desert north of the San Bernardino Mountains.
The current fires, like the one in 2003 have been intensified by the Santa Ana winds, strong gusts of dry wind. The speed of the wind, intensified by climate change, makes fire spread quickly. Fire can sixty miles away, and with little time it’s at your doorstep. It’s unheard of to have huge fire in January, but California has been in a drought that makes it easy to burn once the fire has started.
In 2003 I watched from the Webb School of California, as fire came up from the hills to the east, slowly spreading toward the Inland Empire between San Bernardine and Los Angeles. The school evacuated 200 teenagers, asking us to take just a sleeping bag and other essentials, to a school a few miles south. I feel like recalling this was late in the evening. We slept – if there was much sleep by several hundred teenagers in the same room – in a large auditorium, and then spent the next week scattered to whatever evacuated places we could find. I stayed in a friend’s house, a few miles away….
During the same fire, around the same time, my parents had to evacuate. The fire, which started in the canyon between San Bernardino. and the San Bernardine mountains to its north (Crestline, Big Bear), blocked the main road to San Bernardino; my mom had a friend who alerted her and she got out just before the road closed. What do you grab except the two dogs, and some clothes? … My dad wasn’t home, he was further north toward Santa Barbara. He got a call – no cell phone at this time – and he came up the back (north) side of the mountain. Instead of evacuating, he stood on the roof with a fire hose.
The wind pushed the fire right up the the rim of the mountain, where some houses burned. We were a hundred yards from the rim, a couple roads down. Houses burned above us, and further down into the valley. Houses in San Bernardino, at the base of the mountains burned. It was a hit and miss with no rhythm to it, and any house could have burned.
Fire is mesmerizing. It’s addictive to watch the news on the weather station and see what’s burning. This is very familiar. It’s entirely surprising and unpredictable.
My most recent letter to Congress was prompted by the destruction of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, and the subsequent abduction of Dr. Safiya, head of the hospital. Israel has “transferred” Safiya to the infamous and abusive Sde Teiman military base and detention center.
The fact that neither my Congresswoman nor my Senators has issued a press release or commented on this tragedy of intentional destruction of a hospital, and the abduction of the head doctor (and many others, who weren’t immediately and intentionally burned alive) is troubling.
I sent this to my Representative in Congress, and both Senators.
Dear _______,
I’m writing to you as a constituent and as a Jewish American troubled about current actions by Israel. As you know, the last functioning hospital in north Gaza was destroyed last week by Israeli forces, after weeks of besieging and attacking the hospital.
The director of the hospital, Dr. Safiya, has been captured by Israelis and has been taken to one of the most abusive and troubling “detention centers” run by Israel.
I want to remind you that it’s never okay to destroy a hospital, even in wartime or for any military need. “Detainees,” who are really political prisoners, are expected under international law to be treated humanly. It doesn’t matter whether they are expected of terrorism. This applies to all 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and many other political prisoners. (See the the information from B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization: https://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners)
I ask that you immediately issue a press release calling for Dr. Safiya’s release, and that you work with your colleagues and the executive branch to free political prisoners now.
Israel’s actions are very troubling to me as a Jew, and as your constituent.
I encourage you to read NBC’s article, which reminds us that “Hospitals and medical workers are considered protected under international law, which states that they must never become targets in warfare.”
Thanks again for your representation,
Long before Hamas and other resistance movements penetrated Israel’s defense around Gaza last October Gaza was relegated to economic peace. Almost all commentary suggested that by failing to address the undermining political and economic realities that Palestinians face in Gaza and beyond Israel is entrenching the status quo of cycles of latent and physical violence.
WHAT IS ECONOMIC PEACE
Economic peace is the notion that if you give people economic opportunities other issues that might lead to conflict would be mitigated. Capitalistic to the core, and based on modern economics, economic peace suggests that if every one is well off – or has the opportunity to be well off – other issues, like land theft – will be bygones and two different cultures with two different histories and narratives won’t have further disputes. Economic peace is at best a fig-leaf designed to reject that other issues need to be addressed.
Professor of economics, Ibrahim Shikaki wrote about how economic peace only entrenches Palestinian reliance on Israel. He was writing just after another large scale attack on Gaza, in 2021. The international community responded, as usual, “by organizing a humanitarian mission for aid and reconstruction in the besieged Palestinian enclave” after the noticeable violence ended.
“Although a humanitarian response is sorely needed in Gaza,” Shikaki wrote, “failing to also address the political and economic realities Palestinians face will only entrench the untenable status quo of Israeli occupation and likely lead to further violence.”
Economic peace plans for Israel and Palestine are everywhere, Shikaki continued. Under Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry pushed his plan, and under the first Trump presidency the Kushner Plan promoted economic peace. (Links found in the Shikaki article in Foreign Affairs, but this information can be found elsewhere). Explaining how economic peace entrenches Palestinian reliance on international donors, Shikaki says that reports from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund “calling for unhindered economic ties between the Palestinian and Israeli private sectors” are also economic peace plans. Economic peace, he says, is “a flawed theory that assumes there is an economic solution to a political problem” that suggests economic incentives will keep Palestinians from demanding their right to self-determination.
Shikaki is not alone in suggesting that economic peace is a flawed theory. Yossi Alpher, an Israeli security analyst, wrote in October 2024 that “Prior to October 7, 2023, Netanyahu thought he had a working strategy of buying off Hamas (“economic peace”) and deterring Hezbollah. He made no secret of this. It failed completely.” A year earlier, writing in December, 2023, Alpher summarized the still-fresh events of October saying that among Netanyahu’s “failed strategies for managing relations with the surrounding Arab world” was ‘economic peace’ – “it magically assumed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was economic in nature rather than territorial, ideological, historical and religious. We saw how economic peace worked on October 7.”
Alpher added that economic peace, specifically related to Hamas in Gaza, has been around for a long time. In 2009, a couple months of taking office yet again, Netanyahu called “on the Arab countries to co-operate with the Palestinians and with us to advance an economic peace.” More recently, following the Trump-era (Biden-supported) Abraham Accords, Netanyahu has collaborated with Qatar in hopes of advancing advancing economic peace in relation to Hamas.
HOW DOES ECONOMIC PEACE WORK
Shikaki, in his Foreign Affairs article, reminds us that “between 15 and 40 percent of the total Palestinian labor force worked in Israel at some point in the last 50 years and even more worked for the Israeli economy via subcontracting in the occupied Palestinian territories.” More than 1200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza were working in Israel in 2022.
Shikaki continues, “the Israeli economy has made use of Palestinian labor to ensure low costs of production while opening Palestinian markets to its goods”. Shikaki says, “little has changed since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994 through the Oslo peace process.” More workers, until October 2023, were working in Israel, but it provided an economic fig-leaf, not a durable solution to a political problem.
The whole process made Palestinians dependent on foreign investors and private debt, and Israelis somewhat reliable on cheap labor from Palestinians. NPR‘s “Israel’s war with Hamas disrupts Palestinian workers and Israeli employers alike,” said in November 2023 that “left without those [Palestinian] workers — and without alternative sources of labor, as Israeli reservists have been called to war and many foreign workers have fled the conflict — the construction industry in Israel is operating at 15% of its prewar capacity, according to the Israel Builders Association, an industry group.” Meanwhile the Palestinians in the West Bank, “the sudden shutoff of income has rippled through the economy, as workers struggle to pay their rent, car payments and children’s tuition.”
Somehow this doesn’t sound like it leads to peace.
King Wenceslas and the Feast of Steven have been immortalized by Love Actually. Good King Wenceslas, who was a duke, and not a king, was born in 907 according to Wikipedia.
Wenceslas’s father was named Vratislaus and his mother Drahomíra. Vratislaus’ father Bořivoj, also a duke, and his grandmother Ludmila converted to Byzantine Christianity. It was Ludmila who ensured Wenceslas received a Christian upbringing. In today’s world perhaps this wasn’t shocking, but eleven-hundred years ago Christianity was relatively new.
In 921, when Wenceslas was about 14, his father died and he became duke. Considered too young to rule – ask Edward III of England (king at 14, began rule at 17), or Louix XIV of France (king at 4, began rule at 17) – Ludmila declared herself regent. Jealous over her mother-in-laws control over her son assassins, on the order of Drahomíra, murdered Ludmila on 15 September 921. Drahomíra, Wikipedia says, took over the regency and initiated measures against Christians.
When Wenceslas was eighteen, remaining Christians nobles led an uprising, and Drahomíra was exiled. Wenceslas was remembered as a good king. All kings are good until proven otherwise, of course. Lots of things happened – military victories and defeats, and importantly the expansion of Christianity. I’ll skip the details, which can be found on Wikipedia because there’s not a lot of original sources about Wenceslas. In September 935, Wikipedia says, “a group of nobles allied with Wenceslaus’s younger brother Boleslav plotted to kill him”. Using the oldest trick in the Game of Thrones book, Boleslav invited Wenceslaus to a celebration of the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian, at which point three of Boleslav’s companions stabbed Wenceslas to death. Apparently, Boleslav then ran Wenceslas through with a lance.
Wenceslas was assassinated. His grandmother, Ludmila, was assassinated by Wenceslas’s mom.
He was almost immediately made a saint and a martyr, and stories and biographies of Wenceslas appeared very quickly. Considering this was the Dark Ages and very few people theoretically knew how to write, this is fairly impress.
Good King Wenceslas, a song with lyrics appeared in 1853. (Not long after his death, Wenceslas was given the title “king” by the Church). The song refers to “on the day of Steven,” or Saint Steven’s Day, (December 26), and is partly made famous by Hugh Grant in Love Actually.
A relatively minor rule in history, who was just one of thousands of chiefs, barons, dukes, and kings, Wennceslas might best remember for being dead. His death, which made him a martyr – because the people said so – and a saint – because the Church said so – made him famous. The myths of what he accomplished has led to poets, songs, and more. He was given, several hundred years later, the aura of a noble and just leader which provided him Saint Stevens Day – the second day of Christmas.
His life of twenty-two years, full of intrigue and assassins has been forgotten. Now he’s Good King Wenceslas.
A few months after Prime Minister Netanyahu assembled the most right-wing government in Israeli history at the end of 2022, Alison Speri wrote an article in April of 2023 for The Intercept that begins with the story of Masafer Yatta.
Speri’s “Lab of Oppression” is behind a partial paywall for The Intercept. You can access a particular number articles a month, and after that you can join The Intercept for free by adding your email address. You might or might not be able to access this article.
The story begins in Masafer Yatta. A collection of halmets in the Hebron hills surrounding Yatta, Masafer Yatta is one of many areas across the occupied West Bank where the Israeli state has for decades forced out Palestinians and replaced them with Israeli settler. The goal, as Netanyahu “stated plainly” after returning to power, “is to give the state absolute control over what he called ‘all areas of the land of Israel’ – including land widely expected to one day form the territory of a Palestinian state.”
Lab of Oppression is a story of people, structural oppression, and the laws designed to oppress people. It’s a reminder that Palestinians have long faced oppression, as both whether they’re citizens or refugees under international law. Israel has done everything it has can to not implement peace agreements, and to maintain and increase modes of oppression against occupied Palestinians. The increased violence over the last fourteen months, which can’t be called a war, was precipitated by this oppression, and has allowed settlers, with state backing, to increase (undefined) all areas of the land of Israel.
The Dole Blog 