#and undermine our own blockades

[beastieclub]

it’s not that protests and demonstrations “dont work”, they very much so do as most any disruptive action will, it’s that americans don’t fucking know how to protest

[hassibah]

https://commons.com.ua/en/ukrayinskij-list-solidarnosti/

Ukrainian Letter of Solidarity with Palestinian people

"Our solidarity comes from a place of anger at the injustice, and a place of deep pain of knowing the devastating impacts of occupation, shelling of civil infrastructure, and humanitarian blockade from experiences in our homeland. Parts of Ukraine have been occupied since 2014, and the international community failed to stop Russian aggression then, ignoring the imperial and colonial nature of the armed violence, which consequently escalated on the 24th of February 2022. Civilians in Ukraine are shelled daily, in their homes, in hospitals, on bus stops, in queues for bread. As a result of the Russian occupation, thousands of people in Ukraine live without access to water, electricity or heating, and it is the most vulnerable groups that are mostly affected by the destruction of critical infrastructure. In the months of the siege and heavy bombardment of Mariupol there was no humanitarian corridor. Watching the Israeli targeting the civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the Israeli humanitarian blockade and occupation of land resonates especially painfully with us. From this place of pain of experience and solidarity, we call on our fellow Ukrainians globally and all the people to raise their voices in support of the Palestinian people and condemn the ongoing  Israeli mass ethnic cleansing.

We reject the Ukrainian government statements that express unconditional support for Israel's military actions, and we consider the calls to avoid civilian casualties by Ukraine's MFA belated and insufficient. This position is a retreat from the support of Palestinian rights and condemnation of the Israeli occupation, which Ukraine has followed for decades, including voting in the UN.  Aware of the pragmatic geopolitical reasoning behind Ukraine’s decision to echo Western allies, on whom we are dependent for our survival, we see the current support of Israel and dismissing Palestinian right to self-determination as contradictory to Ukraine’s own commitment to human rights and fight for our land and freedom. We as Ukrainians should stand in solidarity not with the oppressors, but with those who experience and resist the oppression.

We strongly object to equating of Western military aid to Ukraine and Israel by some politicians. Ukraine doesn't occupy the territories of other people, instead, it fights against the Russian occupation, and therefore international assistance serves a just cause and the protection of international law. Israel has occupied and annexed Palestinian and Syrian territories, and Western aid to it confirms an unjust order and demonstrates double standards in relation to international law.

We oppose the new wave of Islamophobia, such as the brutal murder of a Palestinian American 6-year old and assault on his family in Illinois, USA, and the equating of any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. At the same time, we also oppose holding all Jewish people all over the world accountable for the politics of the state of Israel and we condemn anti-Semitic violence, such as the mob attack on the airplane in Daghestan, Russia. We also reject the revival of the “war on terror” rhetoric used by the US and EU to justify war crimes and violations of international law that have undermined the international security system, caused countless deaths, and has been borrowed by other states, including Russia for the war in Chechnya and China for the Uyghur genocide. Now Israel is using it to carry out ethnic cleansing."

[hussyknee]

Queer historical romance among the ton but make the rage of oppression and injustice howling across the centuries.

Sir Gareth tries to convince himself that his father's mysterious profits could not have come from smuggling and attempts to tell his erstwhile lover Joss Doomsday, grandson of a escaped American slave and the Crown Prince of Romney Marsh's Smugglers, why trading with the French during the Napoleonic war is Wrong™.

“Yes, but—Look, it can’t be that. He was in his fifties, a gentleman, a baronet. He can’t have been a smuggler.”

“Course not.”

“He can’t! He wasn’t making trips to France.”

“Not on his own legs, maybe,” Joss said. “Do you know how the trade works?”

“I have no idea.”

“Sometimes it’s barter—we bring over wool to France and exchange it direct-like. Sometimes an innkeeper needs his cellar filled, or a London merchant wants to stock his shop with French gloves, or pepper, or fine soap, so they place the order with us. And sometimes it’s speculation. Which is to say, a rich man invests his money with a free trader, who buys and sells as he thinks fit. A while later our gentleman gets his money back and more, and never gets his hands dirty touching the goods.”

That last was so exactly what Gareth had feared that he couldn’t face it, couldn’t hear it. The sheer, shameless crime of it all. “You are aware we’re at war with France?” he said furiously. “I mean, you do know you’re trading with the enemy?”

“Free trading’s what we do. I’m not one for politics.”

“Politics? This is more than politics. It’s more than crime, even. The Continent is supposed to be blockaded, and you’re helping the enemy by buying their goods! It’s all but treason, and you don’t appear to give a damn!”

“Hold on there,” Joss said. “Yes, there’s a blockade. The government set it up, and everyone who lives by the wool trade found themselves sitting on a lot of fleeces they couldn’t sell while the French spinners and weavers had empty looms. We’ve got a dunnamany sheep here and not a lot else, you’ll have noticed. How are people meant to live if you cut off their living?”

“It’s a war! People have to make sacrifices.”

“That right? What sacrifices have you made? The lordships and gentlemen in London, are they running short of food? You think the King’s husbanding his coals? Why’s all the sacrifice on us?”

“That’s entirely specious.”

“Talk English,” Joss suggested sardonically.

Gareth discovered he couldn’t instantly define specious. “The argument doesn’t hold up. If the nation is at war, trading with the enemy undermines us all. And it’s all very well to talk about livelihoods, but whose livelihoods are supported when you import brandy and tobacco and silk? How are those things necessary?”

“They are for the French who make them,” Joss said. “People over there are trying to feed their families, just like people over here. And as for whether they’re needful here, well, you tell me.”

“Me?”

“You’re gentry, and it’s the gentry who wants those things, need or not. I sell to London clubs and London drapers and who do you think they sell to? The men who make the laws and set the taxes still want their brandy and tobacco, the silks and lace for their ladies, and they buy it knowing where it came from.”

“Well…they shouldn’t,” Gareth said, uncomfortably aware of the lavender soap at home. “And you’re still ignoring the fact that we’re at war!”

“I don’t care.”

He sounded like he meant it. Gareth stared at him. “What? How can you not?”

“Lords and kings and emperors fighting about crowns? They aren’t my people. George means no more to me than Boney. German or Frenchman on the throne, who cares? We had a dunnamany French kings before.”

“When did we—You can’t be talking about the Norman Conquest,” Gareth protested.

“Got invaded by the French and the world didn’t end. What’s it to me which rich man runs the country? What difference does it make to Romney Marsh who wears the crown? Or no, I’ll tell you what difference: there’s no laws against sharing your bed with another fellow in France now. If you gave me a vote, I’d vote for that.”

So would Gareth. He struck out for safer waters. “This is all very well, but we’re talking about being defeated and invaded! Have you not considered what an enemy army entering this country might mean?”

Joss laughed, but not in a way that suggested humour. “Couldn’t miss it, with Martello towers up and down the coast. The invasion will come through here just like last time. That’s why they built the Royal Military Canal, to slow down Boney’s men.”

Gareth knew the Canal, an ugly, wide, straight gash that ran all the way from north of Rye and across the top of the Romney Marsh, just before the land began to rise. “Yes, so—”

“So when these terrible Frog monsters come over here breathing fire and seeking blood, they’ll be kept on the Marsh for as long as possible,” Joss said. “That’s what they built the Canal for: so the Marsh takes the brunt of an invasion. Am I supposed to be pleased about that?”

“Well, no, but… You must see they’ve got to defend the country.”

“Oh, they’re going to. You know the other plan? They’re going to breach the Wall.”

“To what?” Gareth felt a spasm of shock. He might be outmarsh, but he knew the Wall was sacred.

“When the French ships land, the soldiers are to set charges, blow up the Wall, and drown the Marsh.” Joss’s voice was harsh now, almost frightening. “Our land, our home, all gone just to slow the French down for a day or two. Oh, but there’s a plan to get the sheep off. Lot of important men own fine sheep here, so they aim to drive them out first. Got to save the sheep.” He spat that out.

Gareth stared at him. “Um. I don’t… Why is it so bad they want to save the sheep?” Joss didn’t say anything. He just waited. Gareth looked at his face, turned over his words. “There’s a plan to get the people out as well, yes?”

“Course not. The old, the crippled, the children, everyone with their worldly goods on their backs, we’ll all have to fend for ourselves when our own soldiers flood the Marsh, but sheep are valuable. Look, nobody gives a damn for the Marsh except Marshmen. The government and the King don’t care if we starve. They put on the blockade but charge their rents and taxes same as ever, and they’ll let the sea or the French take us if that preserves their skins for another day. So we look after ourselves. And that means trading, and selling wool—some of it wool off the sheep that are going to be saved when old women and children will be left behind, acause if you think those landowners have given up their income for the sake of the war, you’re joking. They want their wool sold, just like the Quality in London want to wear silk and drink brandy, and the merchants want their shelves stocked. We run goods for them, and when they catch us doing it, they hang us for the look of the thing.”

Gareth had no idea what to say. He wasn’t a political philosopher. He had a vague sort of idea that country, king, and law were the foundations on which the nation was built, while nevertheless acknowledging that he had no intention of taking up arms for the country, the king was a mad German, and he’d spent much of his adult life happily breaking the law. Still, they were principles, even if they weren’t his principles. He’d thought this would be an easy fight to pick.

He’d met plenty of radicals in London—men who wanted wealth redistributed, laws changed, the government made representative. Joss Doomsday, fervent patriot of a hundred square miles of marshland, was perhaps the most radical man he’d ever met.

[tzifron]

Vision & Mission

Vision: A just peace in Israel-Palestine based on principles of equality and human rights.

Mission: To amplify the voices of Canadian Jews in support of justice in Israel-Palestine and at home.

Thematic areas

Palestine Solidarity: IJV was the first national Jewish organization to endorse the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. We continue to support and defend BDS as well as to hold Canadian organizations accountable when complicit in Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Anti-racism and Indigenous solidarity: IJV stands in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and with all marginalized peoples in Canada against racism, settler colonialism and white supremacy. IJV also works to combat antisemitism and distinguish it clearly from critiques of Zionism and Israeli policies.

Justice-Oriented Jewish Communities: IJV believes that no one should have to choose between embracing Judaism or Jewishness and supporting Palestinian rights. IJV chapters and campus clubs organize meaningful ritual gatherings that centre justice and critical reflection.

IJV Basis of Unity

We are a group of Jews in Canada from diverse backgrounds, occupations and affiliations who share a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights. We come together in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions that claim to represent Jewish communities as a whole. We further believe that individuals and groups within all communities should feel free to express their views on any issue of public concern without incurring accusations of disloyalty. We have therefore resolved to promote the expression of alternative Jewish voices, particularly in respect of the grave situation in the Middle East, which threatens the future of Palestinians and Israelis as well as the stability of the whole region.

IJV Principles

We are guided by the following principles:

We affirm that human rights are universal and indivisible and should be upheld without exception.

We believe that all people living within Israel-Palestine have the right to freedom, equality, and to peaceful and secure lives.

We believe that the fight against antisemitism is undermined when principled opposition to unjust Israeli government policies and practices–including those that contravene international law–are branded as antisemitic.

We oppose all forms of racism, including antisemitism, anti-Arab racism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and intra-Jewish racism, which marginalizes Jews of colour, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.

We stand in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America) in their efforts to overcome the impacts of European colonization both past and present.

We seek direction from the communities with whom we stand in solidarity and follow their leadership at every opportunity.

We strive to be inclusive, justice-seeking, democratic, and open to diverse ideas and practices.

We believe that true security requires justice and solidarity.

We hereby reclaim the tradition of Jewish support for universal freedoms, human rights and social justice. The lessons we have learned from our own history compel us to speak out.

These principles are violated when we allow an occupying power to trample the human rights of an occupied people. Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, living under Israeli occupation and military blockade, face appalling living conditions, with desperately little hope for the future. At the same time, Palestinian Israelis are subjected to a range of discriminatory laws and regulations and are consequently unable to enjoy the same rights and freedoms that are enjoyed by Israeli Jews. This institutionalized discrimination has led increasing numbers of people around the world to identify Israel an apartheid state. We therefore declare our support for a properly negotiated peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people and oppose any attempt by the Israeli government to impose its own solutions on the Palestinians. Furthermore, we support full equality for Palestinian Israelis. To these ends, IJV supports the 2005 call issued by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee for an international campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to compel the State of Israel to comply with international law and support Palestinian Israelis’ human rights by

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

[theadventuresofamuslimrevert]

CONTENTMENT.

Assalamu Alaikum!

So I’m really excited to do this blog today with this topic – contentment.

Google defines contentment as “a state of happiness and fulfilment”. So how exactly can we achieve this state? How can we be content with our family and friends, with what we have, with what we’ve been given, with what we’ve not been given, with our blessings and our trials?

It certainly is easier said than done believe i know first hand believe me.

So much is expected of us women. Somehow in this rat race of dunya that we live in we have to be super. “Super mums”, “superwomen” super everything. We need to excel in every aspect of life or else we are somehow not significant enough.

Before we point fingers at others or society I really do feel that the main cause for this is our very own self esteem. If we are happy, if we are content, if we are satisfied then – what anyone says or does SHOULD NOT matter.

It is all in us.

It all begins with us.

What we let in, what we let influence and affect us, our moods and our thoughts.

Not one of us have it all regardless of what people might say or how they act. It is never what it looks like from the outside believe me. The grass always look greener on the other side but its not true. Looking on – at our sisters we somehow feel oh wow. But each of us fail to realize that to each our own competencies, our own strengths and our own weaknesses. All of us – have difficulties, trials, hurdles, blockades that we need to work around.

“Be kind. For each fights a battle none knows naught about”

It never is what it seems. So instead of sitting and wishing about what others have been blessed with. We need to get going.

Supplicate!!

So our beautiful deen is not simply a religion it is a way of life. I say this because we have been taught everything that we need to survive and excel in this world. We have been taught the best of mannerisms. Our Sunnah encompasses all facts of our life. Our internal interactions and our external interactions.

We’ve been taught how to eat, drink, dress and even relieve ourselves! How to purify ourselves with water and even in its absence! The How to’s encompass all aspects of our life. – Glory be to Him. We’ve even been taught such beautiful supplications and one of these which include seeking contentment – my topic for today.

‘Abdullah bin Mas’ud (May Allah be pleased with him) reported:

The Prophet (ﷺ) used to supplicate:

“‏اللهم إني أسألك الهدى  والتقى، والعفاف، والغنى‏”‏ ‏

“Allahumma inni as’alukal-huda, wat-tuqa, wal-‘afafa, wal-ghina

(O Allah! I beseech You for guidance, piety, chastity and contentment).”

So we need to supplicate to Allah, to make us content, to make us happy with what we have. To guide us to the right path, the right friends, the right priorities. Supplication is after all worship.

Goal!!

“Life is like soccer. We need goals”

We need to have goals to achieve. Having a destination in mind helps us pause and redirect every so often. It’s so easy to get carried away and go with the flow. Having that goal in mind or written somewhere is like a flashlight, a torch. It guides us, makes us see reality and focus and prioritize.

Without working towards a target or knowing where our ultimate destination is we can never really get there.  Without a goal – we don’t know what it is we are striving for. It will be what takes us through the daily grind.  It need not be all laid out in concrete. Sometimes it simply does to begin. Often times we undermine our selves, but we should have lofty goals. It is the first step towards getting there.

Having a goal make us see the big picture. With faith and hard work we can get there! After all we are supposed to “tie the camel and trust the Lord!”

Pack it in!!

So none of us have it all, or know it all. Every day is a learning curve and I believe we have two choices to deal with whatever life hands us. Either we sit and moan, grumble and complain and end up discontent, dissatisfied and disheartened or we pack it in and do what we can with what we have. The latter attitude is I believe what is needed to be content.

Contentment cannot be monetized. I believe contentment goes hand in hand with Baraka. It is not in our pay check or in the storied house that we live in or the vehicle that we drive. Being content with what we’ve been given starts with our attitude.

Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with him) narrated

The Prophet (ﷺ) said:

“Look at those who are lower than you (financially) but do not look at those who are higher than you, lest you belittle the favors Allah conferred upon you.”

So sometimes yes, we will feel if only we got less money troubles, that most sought after promotion at work and then we’ll be content thats normal we are human for goodness sake if we didn't I dont think we would be human. But we do not know what tomorrow will bring so be patient. We have to change our attitude. We have to learn to accept what we have, to make the maximum of what we have, to do what we can with what we have.

We need to bring Alhamdulillah back into our lives, childrens lives, our families lives and also our friends live. We need to remember that we’ve been taught everything that we need for survival and to get content we need to begin with Alhamdulillah. Reading about the vast meanings of Alhamdulillah and what it means is a great way to start!

Educate ourselves!!

In this materialistic world where brands and possessions dominate and surround us and society and social media has us wanting more. It is easy enough to be discontent. The latest phone, the latest fashions. We are bombarded with new and innovative every turn we take. It’s like keep up or be left out. But the more ilm we have, the more awareness we have of our goal, the more content we can be.

True ilm, will bring us humility.

True ilm will make us more receptive.

True ilm will be our savior.

True ilm will aid us prioritize and see the big picture.

Friends!!

Birds of a feather, flock together.

As the saying goes we are – who we surround ourselves with. So striving to mingle with the kind of people who have our same priorities, same values, same ideas go along away in achieving contentment. The company we keep, the kind of activities that occupy our past times all work towards either giving us the contentment that we so need or making us discontent. 

What do you think I have i missed anything out??

[buffshipper8490]

Rated Mature

A Star Wars Episode IX story using elements of "The Rise of Skywalker" & "Duel of the Fates."

As the Resistance mounts a last ditch mission to break through the transmission blockade on the First Order Capitol of Coruscant, the last Jedi Rey races towards the hidden planet of Exegol to stop the return of the Sith...

*There Shall be Two Halves of a Whole One to Embody Power and also to Crave it*

Chapter 1: Title Crawl

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

STAR WARS: PROPHECY OF THE DYAD

The iron grip of the FIRST ORDER has spread to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Only a few scattered planets remain unoccupied. Traitorous acts are punishable by death.

Determined to suffocate a growing unrest and a continued insurrection led by GENERAL LEIA ORGANA and her RESISTANCE, Supreme Leader KYLO REN has silenced all communication between neighboring systems and travels to MUSTAFAR in search of a SITH artifact that promises the power to destroy any challenge to his reign...

Chapter 2: The Hidden World of the Sith Supreme Leader Kylo Ren travels to the red planet of Mustafar to find a Sith artifact belonging to his grandfather, Darth Vader...

Chapter 3: The Orbital Ring of Kuat The Resistance attempts to sabotage the Kuat Drive Yards to undermine the First Order...

Chapter 4: Empire of the First Order The Knights of Ren visit the Kuat Drive Yards; young Dade navigates the decrepit streets of Coruscant under the First Order’s oppressive rule; Chancellor Hux and the Supreme Council meet with the Warlord Cabal...

Chapter 5: The Beacon of Hope Rey struggles with her role as the last Jedi and Kylo Ren comes to terms with Emperor Palpatine’s role in his life and the origins of the First Order as he plans his next move...

Chapter 6: The Plan of Attack Kylo Ren rendezvous with his Knights on Coruscant; Poe lays out the plan to activate the Jedi beacon and offers to help Rey on her quest to find Exegol...

Chapter 7: Flight of the Resistance Rey must say her goodbyes to her friends in the Resistance as she evacuates Korilev on the Millennium Falcon with Poe, Chewbacca, and BB-8 before the First Order arrives...

[nicklloydnow]

Lovely morning, World War III

“Citizens of Donetsk and Luhansk, the People's republics of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and other people free from the Nazi regime.

We will be talking about the steps of protecting our sovereignty, the will and desire of our citizens to determine their own future, and about the aggressive bloc of Western countries that are trying to keep their supremacy at all costs - that are trying to block and suppress any independent centers of development in order to force their will in brutal ways on other people.

The aim of the West is to weaken, and destroy. They are openly saying that in '91 they managed to split the Soviet Union and now is the time for Russia itself. Russia will be split into many regions and areas which are fighting each-other to the death.

They had these plans for a long time. They supported bands of international terrorists in the Caucasus. They are encouraging NATO to come to our borders. There is total Russophobia and many years of total hate for Russia.

First and foremost this is in Urkaine. They made the Ukrainian people cannon fodder and pushed Ukraine into a war with our country.

They started the war already in 2014, using the army against the civilian population, and organising genocide, a blockade and terror against people who refused to acknowledge Ukrainian power as a result of a military coup.

As usual, they refused a peaceful solution of the Donbas issue and started claiming the right to use nuclear weapons. It became clear as before, a second large offensive in Donbas is inevitable and the decision of a pre-emptive military operation was the only decision and absolutely necessary.

The main aim of freeing the whole of the Donbas remains without change.

The Luhansk People's Republic is fully cleared of the Nazis. The fight in the Donetsk People's Republic continues.

The occupation regime has made deep line of defence and therefore the part of our army and Donbas military units are using technology and people, and are freeing the Donetsk People's Republic step but step, village by village, and helping people turned into hostages by the criminal regime.

As you know, the professional army is taking part in the special military operation, however volunteer units are fighting alongside them.

They have different nationalities, professions and ages. They are true patriots, protecting Russia and Donbas through the call of their hearts.

The Ministry of Defence was instructed by me to determine as soon as possible the legal status of these areas and also the status of the units of the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics.

They have to be the same as the professional military of the Russian army, including social guarantees, medical and financial supplies.

We need to pay special attention to the procurement of the units of the Donbas using technology and munitions.

Our army, based on the decisions of the Ministry of Defence and the general command, have freed from the neo-Nazis the considerable territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. As a result, there is a long line of military contact - over 1,000km.

At the Istanbul [peace negotiations with Ukraine] there was a very positive reaction to our proposals concerning ensuring the security of Russia.

But it was obvious the West was not happy with a peaceful decision, so after reaching certain compromises Ukraine was effectively given the direct order to undermine the negotiations.

The Kyiv regime started using new bands of foreign mercenaries and nationalists, and the army was trained by NATO standards and actually commanded by western commanders.

The repression regime intensified across the whole of Ukraine by its military who, in 2014, used the politics of terror and intimidation. It becomes more and more barbaric and terrible.

The territories freed from the neo-Nazis and freed from the war, they are the Novorossiya lands we are talking about - Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporzhizhia regions - you have seen the barbarities of the neo-Nazis in the regions captured by them.

The Banderas [supporters of a far-right Ukrainian leader] and the Nazi mercenaries are torturing the peaceful citizens.

In the Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson over 7.5million people lived before the start of the operation.

Many were forced to become refugees, those who remained are constantly bombarded by rockets and artillery on the part of the neo-Nazis who attack hospitals, schools and create acts of terror against peaceful citizens.

We have a moral right to give people that are dear to us, who are being tortured, we need to give them a chance to determine their own fate.

The parliament of the LPR, and the DPR, and the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions have decided to hold referendums on joining Russia and have asked Russia to support such a step.

I stress that we will do all that we can to create safe conditions to hold the referendums, so people can express their will and decision about the future. They will be supported by us.

Dear friends, today our army is directing at the frontline exceeding 1000km, and they are facing not just the neo-Nazis but the collective military machine of the whole of the West.

In this situation, I deem it is necessary to make the following decision which is appropriate to the threat we are facing.

In defence of our motherland, to ensure its safety, territorial integrity, security of our people and in the free territories I deem it necessary to support the decision of the Ministry of Defence and the general command for a partial mobilisation held in the Russian Federation.

I stress that it is partial mobilisation. Only those who are currently in reserve will be conscripted, and also those who served in the army and have certain military skills. They will be given additional military training, taking into account the special military operation.

The decree has been signed, officially the chambers of the federal assembly and Duma will be informed.

The mobilisation will start today on 21st September, I task the heads of regions to provide all necessary assistance to military commissioners. I stress that Russian citizens called up as part of mobilisation will be given all the guarantees, all the benefits of those serving under contract.

The decree of partial mobilisation includes additional measures to safeguard the state procurement for the defence concerning military technology, and additional capacities for its production.

All the financial matters for supplying defence factories shall be resolved without delay.

In its aggressive anti-Russian policies, the West has crossed all lines.

We constantly hear threats against our people and some irresponsible politicians in the West are talking about not just providing Ukraine with long-range military systems that will be able to hit Russia - that is already happening, we're talking about the border regions, in Belgorod and systems using strategic drones, planes, doing reconnaissance across the south.

There are plans in Washington and Brussels to move the military action on to Russian territory.

There are not just talking about Russia being destroyed on the battlefield, they are talking about political, cultural, and all other types of sovereignty with complete pillage. Now they're talking about nuclear blackmail.

The Zaporzhzhia nuclear power plant was shelled. Also the high representative of leading NATO states were saying that it might be permissible to use nuclear weapons against Russia.

Those who make such statements will be reminded that our country also has various weapons of destruction and with regard to certain components they are even more modern than the NATO ones.

If there is any threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to protect our people we will certainly use all means available to us. I'm not bluffing.

Russia citizens can be certain that the territorial integrity of our motherland, our independence and security will be assured. I shall stress - by all means available to us

And those trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the tables can turn on them.

In our historic tradition our people had it in their destiny to stop those how are trying to subjugate our motherland and it will happen now.

I believe in your support.”

[ill-will-editions]

QUARANTINE LETTER #1

This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing epistolary exchange between comrades living through conditions of quarantine. Responses and other reflections on the present moment can be sent to: illwill@riseup.net

***

Destitution, interrupted

1. The theorists have agreed: the current interruption is the outcome of well-established logics of capital, crisis governance, and alienation. Giorgio Agamben writes, “humans have become so accustomed to living under conditions of perennial crisis and emergency that they do not seem to realize that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition stripped not only of all social and political dimensions, but likewise of its human and affective dimensions.” An article in Lundimatin on March 19 insisted that “the economy is the devastation”, but whereas this was “a theory before last month…now it is a fact.” Another article from the same issue reminded us that “the catastrophe is always already here”—from the floods and fires of California, to the atmospheric asphyxiation of non-human life, to the warming oceans and melting icecaps—and, if there is a difference today, it is only that “we are now obliged to open our eyes.” Finally, as if to carry this logic to its outer limits, a recent letter from Jacques Camatte proposed that “what we are now witnessing is the outcome of [a] vast phenomenon that has developed over thousands of years, stretched between the two great moments during which the threat of extinction asserted itself.” [1] The Coronavirus, it would seem, is nothing other than the protracted outcome of civilization itself.  

While it is certainly right to insist that conditions of the present are an extension of the conditions of the past, this chorus of continuity misses something essential. Our world is certainly decomposing, but the song is not exactly the same.

Two years ago, a friend stated that, “the constitutive heterogeneity of the real is given to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. To superficial perception, the mask is the real itself. To allow the mask to falter, is therefore to risk vertigo.” [2] In January, this mask still resembled the form it had assumed in recent years: a tumultuous but for the most part intelligible field of global political polarizations. The world, and our place within it, still felt within reach.

By March, the ruling institutions had been forced into a roundly reactive posture. It is by no means clear that the Coronavirus can be compared to a typical economic crisis or natural disaster, nor has the response been limited to an ordinary state of exception. After all, at least for a moment, rulers and ruled alike were pushed on to the back foot, their certainties shaken, as the virus usurped the position of global antagonist. Institutions on which the reproduction of this world depends have been perfunctorily suspended: employment, imprisonment for misdemeanors, evictions; even the DOW Jones seems up for grabs.

The dislocation of the social fabric has been far deeper than anything we have known. The veneer of normalcy fell away at a shocking speed. Actions that were once the very substance of normalcy now feel like experiments. And if we are honest, the ethical and political lines are not exactly what they used to be.

2. Three months ago, what concerned us and much of the world was the tally of forty-seven countries: the newspapers announced “a new global wave of revolt.” From France to Hong Kong, riots, occupations and blockades erupted with a ferocity and longevity unknown in living memory.

Successful revolts do not only undermine existing powers— they also allow their participants a capacity to participate more fully in the world. If we have come to think of revolt as a destituent force, this is not only because revolt splinters and fragments the social fabric into asymmetrical camps, but also because it returns us to earth, placing us in contact with reality. Destitution is rightly thought of either as a double movement or as a single process with two sides. On the one hand, it refers to the emptying-out of the fictions of government (its claim to universality, impartiality, legality, consensus); on the other hand, a restoration of the positivity and fullness of experience. The two processes are linked like the alternating sides of a Möbius strip: wherever those usually consigned to existing as spectators upon the world (the excluded, the powerless) instead suddenly become party to their situation, active participants in an ethical polarization, the ruling class is invariably drawn into the polarization and cannot avoid exhibiting its partisan character. The police become one more gang among gangs.

Needless to say, our situation today is different. We are living through a halfway destitution, a destitution interrupted. Every party has returned to earth-- yet without entering a world. The advent of COVID-19 has drained standard narratives and roles of their force. The logics holding this world together have been revealed as the arbitrary and mechanical operations that they are. Yet because it was neither “we” nor “they” who pulled the e-brake, but a perfectly inhuman virus, the standstill of historical time lacks the festival that usually accompanies it— the collective intelligence and confidence that comes with being the agent plunging normal time into disorder. In the absence of an agent, the truth of this moment remains stubbornly negative: our lives materially prostrate to supply chains as far flung as they are brittle, our world a conduit of reciprocally perilous immunity and disease.

3. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, participants in political events are never solely agents, but always also patients at the same time—we affect and are affected, we are changed by what we do and what is done to us, whether by police or one another. To have an active hand in our own deposition, to become anyone by participating in a common power with no name, is the mark of those movements and moments of eruption we’ve felt close to over recent years.

By contrast, our one-sided passivity in the face of this global event generates a vertiginous sense of being outpaced by the change around us. To be patients but not agents has meant that the dislocation of social life has occurred at a speed that makes it all but impossible to metabolize.

In their 1956 text, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman observe that the subversive power of a détournement is “directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” This dependency of subversion on the memory of the subverted is not limited to the case of art but is, they argue, merely “a particular case of a general law” applicable to all action upon the world.

If the radical interruption of normal life we are undergoing has been so disorienting, this is because it is unfolding like a botched détournement, one whose force or potential is neutralized by its very radicality. We are swept into the new with such disarming speed that we cannot recall what preceded it. The tissue of normal life has been punctured, yet the cancellation was so rapid that we have been unable to register the distance traveled between the “original contents” of normal life and the world we now inhabit: a violence too sudden, too terrible even to be liberating, numbs us to the subversive effects it nevertheless carries out. The upending of the world becomes a strangely pacified process, reduced to a disorienting and disempowering experience: an inhuman velocity, less an event than a jump-cut, an excision of memory, a vertical severing of time itself.

In the long run, the vertigo will settle into more acute polarization. When it does, our inability to recalibrate will play to the benefit of the ruling powers. It insulates them against the subversive shock of what the virus has compelled them to do—less by the so-called “Corona socialism” than by the radical demobilization of the labor force that has accompanied it. Meanwhile, we float in an empty time; unable to seize upon and decide it, we wait for the suspension of history to reach its conclusion.

However, as Furio Jesi understood well, suspended time often requires a “cruel sacrifice” before it can conclude itself. [3] If our only experience of this event is as a “blip” of confusion and panic amidst an unbroken chain of administered life, when the time finally comes for an imperial reboot, the reversion to normalcy (or worse) will find no argument or exteriority to oppose it. That we remain dazed and out of step with the world gives our enemies free reign to reintroduce historical time on terms amenable uniquely to them, as the recent murders of activists during the quarantine lockdown in Columbia have already begun to attest. [4]   

For now— at least for a moment—we are all here on earth, in the desert solitude of collective uncertainty:

To have been on earth just once —that’s irrevocable. / And so we keep on going and try to realize it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart. (Rilke)

However paradoxical, perhaps our task over the coming weeks is to slow down the pace of change, to impose a rhythm allowing us to participate once again in the subversion and reinvention of the world on our own terms.

-August and Kora

Chicago, March 24, 2020

*******************

[1] Giorgio Agamben, “Clarification,” published on the column Una voce, on Quodlibet.it website; (Anonymous), “Coronavirus: Apocalypse and Redemption,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Anonymous), “What the Virus Said,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Jacques Camatte, “Letter from Camatte to a Friend in the North,” 3.20.2020. English translations available here: ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

[2] Moses Debruska, “Preface,” in Josep Raffanel i Ora, Fragmenter le monde (Paris: Divergences, 2018), 19. Our translation.

[3]   “Every true change in the experience of time is a ritual that demands…a determinate cruel sacrifice.” Furio Jesi, Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Trans. Alberto Toscano (Seagull, 2014), 61-63. 

[4]  “Colombian death squads exploiting coronavirus lockdown to kill activists,” The Guardian, 3.23.2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/colombian-groups-exploiting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-kill-activists

[thelawyerthatwaspromised]

Sansa Stark is in love with Jon - Where does Jon stand?

It’s probably been long enough not to tag spoilers, but I’ll put this under the cut.

[under the cut]

Let’s get this outta the way - holy crap is Sansa Stark in love with Jon.

They also make this BEFORE Sansa even finds out about R+L=J.

The biggest hurdle for “Jonsa”, at least when it comes to the GA accepting the idea, has always been “but they see each other as siblings!” and as a close second “Sansa doesn’t want to be with anyone after what she’s been through”...and this episode emphatically put that to rest.

Perhaps just as importantly, we need to have an idea of what’s in Jon’s head - as his POV has remained frustratingly obscured by the show. All we’re left to do is interpret his actions. Words are wind, as they say, so seeing past his words and focusing on his behavior is the best way to get to the core of Jon’s current struggles. 

First, the framing, again, told a very specific story.

Jon as the public head of the house. Speaking for them all.

You have Jon burning the body of Lyanna Mormont...the girl who died very much having lost respect for Jon because he gave up his crown. Then Jon shoots a look right at Dany. It’s...very negative as far as Jon having any type of love for Dany. She was the first one to pledge for him to fight the Boltons. She was the first one to proclaim that he should be king. Do you think he forgets that? No. What was Lyanna’s (LYANNA) favorite saying? The North Remembers. 

The feast scene continued this Jon-Sansa-Dany framing as it opened with a clear image of Jon stuck in the middle between Sansa and Dany. Are Jon’s feelings also “torn” between these two women?

What can we tell about Jon’s POV?

Meanwhile, Gendry is observing Jon awkwardly looking over to Dany...he clearly senses something is amiss. Then his attention shifts to wondering where Arya might be. It’s subtle but it’s later confirmed by Tyrion and Davos that all is not well between Jon and Dany. 

We also get a really subtle confirmation that Jon and Davos have NOT told Dany about who Gendry is...as evidenced by the momentary panic they both display when Dany announces that she knows who Gendry is and she’s going to reward him with Storm’s End. We find out later she wanted Jon to remain “Ned’s bastard” and I 100% believe she intended to legitimize him and name him the Lord of WF to usurp Sansa’s authority.

So Dany is specifically wedging herself between Jon and Sansa. She doesn’t do this unless she views Sansa as a threat when it comes to Jon. She doesn’t view Sansa as a threat if she can’t tell that Jon has a different vibe with Sansa. It’s a heavy clue, already, that Jon IS clearly having trouble keeping himself reserved.

Sansa’s look after Gendry is legitimized also tells the story that she knows what Dany just did and what she may be planning to do next.

Then we have the rather adorable little moment when Tormund is encouraging Jon to drink and they just HAD to slip in the subtle little, “go on, I believe in you” from Sansa. Again, on its own, it doesn’t really mean anything. But taken in the context of the rest of the interactions we see - Jon is ONLY at ease when Dany is not in the frame. Sansa being mildly flirtatious. Then giving Jon GIGANTIC heart eyes. Followed by her noticing that Jon is looking at Dany and Sansa stands up to leave. I mean...

These aren’t the behaviors of siblings. They removed Arya from the scene and it makes it even more obviously non-sibling in it’s framing. Sansa is very clearly pining for Jon and still very much bothered by Dany’s presence. The fact Jon turns around immediately after Sansa leaves to look for her is even more indication that, yeah, he has to keep up appearances with Dany, but his heart and attention lie completely elsewhere.

We’re then shown Jon having the love of the people in the Hall. Dany is shown having her Viserys-esque realization that she will never have the love of the people that Jon possesses. Varys takes keen interest in Dany’s internal meltdown, too.

Then, humorously but intentionally, we see Tormund lamenting that Brienne was taken from him by Jaime...and it’s a funny juxtaposition but it’s framed in crazy similar manner but infused with humor.

Sansa politely shuts Sansan down forever next, which was pretty great.

Also, she shuts down the notion from the Hound AND from some people in the GA that she made some mistake by leaving with Hound at Blackwater after the asshole talks about Sansa being raped by Ramsay. Beautiful. Also, fuck you, Hound.

I’ll skip ahead to what’s likely the most talked about scene: Jon and Dany in chambers. Jon is pretty clearly depressed when Dany walks in. He’s also drunk. Dany very clearly is not. Jon opens up talking about Jorah, and Dany talks about loving him and not being able to love him back like the way she loves Jon. Does Jon say “I love you?” when it’s teed up? No. He kisses her. Then - he freezes up and stops undressing her. 

So...why did they stop? Are they uncomfortable about being related? No...Dany says what makes her unhappy IS HOW BELOVED JON IS BY HIS PEOPLE. (well, SHOULD be his people). Dany realizes that Jon will ALWAYS be more loved on “this side of the sea” than she will. And THAT’S what she can’t stomach. It’s her articulating that she cannot allow his claim to the Throne to become public BECAUSE SHE KNOWS THEY PREFER JON. That’s not love. That’s not even like. That’s pure pure envy and resentment. 

Breakdown how she says things, “what happens when they press YOUR claim and take what’s MINE.” Damn. Talk about twisted entitlement. This isn’t about being kept from Jon for her. It’s about Jon exceeding her. She absolutely will not have that. 

Jon knows this fear of hers. And so he goes absolutely desperation mode by bending a knee and saying he’ll refuse the crown. And then Dany does something that Jon finally...FINALLY...cannot accept. She tries to put rules on how he can behave with his family. She wants him (IMO) to stay Ned’s bastard and then be legitimized and take WF from Sansa. She puts an ultimatum on Jon - and Jon defies her. 

I’ve seen it posited that Jon won’t want the Throne so much that he would keep it a secret forever. Aaaaaaaaaaaand that got exploded. Telling Sansa (and Arya but Dany very clearly emphasizes that Sansa is the one she fears) is more important to Jon than maintaining his relationship with Dany. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.

I strongly feel that Jon sees no way out of his relationship with Dany and that he’s resigned to living out his days with her in the south...being miserable. But it’s the price to pay to keep his people protected. He still believes he can’t defeat her. It’s all about safety. This is why he tries to make Sansa and Arya promise not to tell anyone. It’s explosive information. It’s dangerous. But - he prioritizes telling them over keeping it within. He makes the choice that Ned never could. This, I believe, shows that his family is the only

Dany’s monologue is pretty amazing: she’s talking about Jon’s claim and what it WILL DO TO PEOPLE (herself). No matter how many times he bends the knee. No matter how many times he swears he doesn’t want it, he will always be a threat to her if his claim is known. 

Dany then INCREDIBLY says Sansa is not the girl Jon grew up with...not after the things that have happened to her. Ugh.

1) How fucking dare her?

2) How fucking dare her?

3) She doesn’t know who Sansa is or was in any capacity.

4) Jon hardly knew her when they were growing up.

5) She’s implying that Sansa’s traumas have made her a terrible person; meanwhile just last season Dany told Jon that her own traumas are exactly what gave her the resolve to rule Westeros.

6) Maybe she’s right - Sansa has also far exceeded Dany. That’s why Dany can’t have Sansa knowing about Jon’s identity.

7) Still, how fucking dare her.

And NOW I’m seeing why Dany is so obsessed with taking the Iron Throne immediately.

She needs the Iron Throne very very badly. It’s highlighted in her next war council scene. [talking about Cersei] “No matter how many lords are lined up against her, as long as she sits on the Iron Throne, she can call herself the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Why might this not be just about Cersei? Because Dany just told Jon how he will always be more loved than Dany. She’s seen the loyalty shown to both Sansa AND Jon over herself. She knows Sansa is intelligent and worthy as a politician and schemer. She starts a race to the Throne because she has to get there before Jon or Sansa do. 

This shows that Dany does NOT trust Jon anymore. She sees him primarily as a threat - but she understands she has leverage over him in the form of the threat of dragonfire. 

So Jon is a subdued threat, in her mind. Sansa is the one she can’t rein in. This is why, IMO, she legitimized Gendry and very likely had the same plans for Jon and WF to undermine Sansa’s authority. She’s trying to play the Game of Thrones with Jon. That’s not love either, that’s greed and that’s fear. 

Jon has ALWAYS tried to preserve lives. He endorses a blockade. He’s trying not to anger Dany. He’s JUST heard how much Dany fears Sansa’s political influence. Jon is afraid for Sansa - which is why he goes hard in the war council to try to defuse Dany’s anger. 

Then a HUGE fucking line from Dany’s mouth:

“The longer I leave my enemies alone; the stronger they become.”

She doesn’t want to press the attack because of Cersei. She wants to press the attack because she’s sensing she’s losing power to Jon and Sansa. Look at how the damn camera focuses in on Sansa’s face as she says this. It’s not even about Cersei. It’s about keeping the Starks from gaining too much influence before she can take the Throne. She’s a runaway train and Jon is trying to delay her as much as he can because he KNOWS what she can do if the dragons are focused on Winterfell. 

Jon’s desperately trying to get Sansa to see what he’s saying: “we’re gonna honor our promises to the queen of the seven kingdoms”. He’s not saying this because he believes it. Right after this he tells them he has the better claim to the Throne!!!! He’s saying this out of fear. Jon is still afraid. Because now there isn’t even a NK to distract Dany. 

Jon’s behavior shows fear but it’s very very very plain that when push comes to shove, he chooses Sansa and Arya. He defies Dany’s demand by telling them about his identity. And he knows Dany is scared that Sansa will maneuver to make Jon the king. I completely believe he knows this himself. And he tells them anyway. It’s obviously already happening - with Sansa telling Tyrion - but I think the larger point is that Jon knows that it’s basically inevitable. Dany said if he tells anyone, it will tear them apart. He tells them anyway. 

That’s where Jon’s mind is at. He pushed this along with Dany as long as he could. Now it’s reached a breaking point. And it totally involves Sansa. He chose his duty to Sansa over Dany’s begging. 

It’s frustrating not to hear Jon say these things. But remember that words are wind. Actions define who people are. And Jon chose Sansa. 

[feitanswife]

Things from my life I think would make very good concepts (or at least funny ones) for anime:

-Snowmobiling. Please someone make or find an anime about like.... long dramatic snowmobile racing, with tricked out rides and all sorts of racing anime nonsense cause normal snowmobiling is already wild as fuck and I can’t imagine how they’d they’d make it weirder than it already is unless they strap cannons to them. My family only rides casually and I’ve seen my dad ride vertical walls and do jumps. Snow is literally so dangerous and this is such a weird “sport” and tbh I think it would be the most fun racing anime ever and I want it so bad please someone reply to this saying it already exists!

-in a similar vein; the concept of a jeep club. Less dramatic, more slice-of-life with gorgeous scenery, long stories about the main character’s grandfather who started the club before she was born, the main character getting over her fear of driving to eventually take up the mantle of Hroup Leader from her father... and cars that tend to break down in spectacular ways while doing very basic tasks. Would mesh very well in a post-apocalypse setting, I could see a group of traveling merchants who take long forgotten dirt roads through the hills to avoid blockades on the main roads, smuggling supplies from the cities out to the countryside via the scenic mountains and seemingly impassable terrain that their specially built vehicles can traverse easily, until of course they break down at a critical moment and the group needs to stop and camp in the depths of the woods while the mechanics of the group fix it...

-the game Sequence. It’s both a card game and a board game and it’s really simple in a way that could become incredibly complicated and convoluted and BS if some thought was put into it. It’s basically connect four but on a board game board and you have cards that dictate where you can place your chips to get a five in a row, but each card appears twice on the board and Jack’s have special effects and corners have free spaces and there’s like so many ways the ante could be upped here. Bigger boards, team rules (you aren’t allowed to talk to your teammates which is wild) and I read somewhere once that there used to be 5 card suits in a deck which, can you even imagine? My family is OBSESSED with this game to the point where we bought wooden chips online and decorated our own custom sets cause sometimes our games go so long we run out of chips. I want tournament arcs, I want season 5 introducing Tarot cards with special effects, I want 3D game boards where you can have vertical sequences!!!

- SAO except they’re all streamers and the events are being live-streamed to their twitch channels 24 hours a day. Every moment of their lives are being broadcasted to a loyal audience. No such thing as privacy. The streams only stop if they die. Bonus points if you don’t get to know the streamers outside the game, and it’s presented as if you’re a first time viewer who has no prior knowledge of group drama or past events, leaving you to scrape together a web of events from clues in the character’s actions. (I might be working on an rpg maker game with this concept, and I like how it’s coming along!!)

- witch war. Not like, magical girl stuff. Actual witchcraft. Takes place as a community college, next to a forest that’s just infested with fae, a group of friends who are all witches end up having to like, defend the school from evil or something and turns out the guy who’se been trying to undermine the Club President’s power is also a witch and then it turns into a dual of Magics. Totally not based on something that happened to me a couple years ago.I’m not part of a Witch Mafia. The community college’s lgbt+ club is not run by a bunch of Witches, and there is no mysterious temple in the woods.

[yuzuruspoohsan]

This is perhaps one of the largest protests ever captured in the modern age:

Right now, Hong Kong’s people are rallying together to protest against the Extradition Laws set forth by Chinese government. If passed, it would grant China the power to overlook Hong Kong’s authority to hold individuals that have been deemed “criminals/felons” by the Chinese government. Hong Kong will have no say in the matter and be forced to hand over such individuals to Chinese authorities.

This will undermine and cripple Hong Kong’s ability to self-govern and prevent China’s government (led by a communist party) from politically invading Hong Kong. China will be able to take out and punish any Hong Kong politicians, protesters, activists that speak against the Communist Party and the Chinese Government. Edit: Foreigners speaking against the Communist Party are also not safe if they are in Hong Kong because of the Extradition Law.

For a while Hong Kong has been a democracy and a civil rights safe haven, but that is quickly corroding away. Yet, these protesters form a blockade to prevent legislators from entering the Legislative building in order to prevent the possibility of the laws passing. Know that it is not a mere hundreds of thousands of people, no -- it is growing by the hundreds of thousands and reaching 2 million. Hong Kong’s total population is 7.4 million, which means nearly 30% of Hong Kong’s entire population is out there defending the democracy they have. 

As one of the lucky ones, you must bear witness and know the cost of living in a democracy. 

Most of us will never have to march and stand against a nation that wishes to squash a voice of opposition, but it does not mean you have the leisure of ignoring the issue all together. No. 

You must fortify yourself with knowledge. You must acknowledge them, for what they defend for is akin to your life and why you can sit and scroll through posts so comfortably. 

This is a moment for you to reflect on the things you have forsaken for. The liberties you and I simply have from just being born, they have to form a human barricade to demonstrate and voice their will because their own democratic government already has no say in the matter against China.

Here is Hong Kong:

One of the most metropolitan cities and largest economic hubs in the world, and its about to lose its spark by succumbing under a communist regime once and for all.

You owe it to yourself to witness their protest and this moment in history, and to never take your civil liberties, rights, and democracy for granted. 

I wrote this to give you a moment to reflect...to learn...and to come face to face with a facet of your mortality. I wrote this in hopes that people will begin to see that these issues aren’t as isolated as they seem. 

This is not just about Hong Kong, its about how we, the citizens of this planet, are watching this happen. We’re letting it happen because we feel so inclined to be separate from one another and barricade ourselves within borders. And as this mentality proliferates, atrocities around the world will go on at the same rate...like the Sudan Massacres.

Hong Kong is an example that this can happen anywhere in the world when we allow it to. When one democracy falls, which will be next?

So, always educate yourself whenever a crisis happens (but always remain skeptical of what you’re being fed) because together, we’ll become a force to push the world in the right direction. And it’s not impossible, but it’ll need everyone to work together and time to make it an absolute standard. The more pressure we exert on our governments to act and get foreign nations to adhere and abide to human rights -- the more our governments will feel accountable.

[sprmint-bkgsoda]

THE 1619 PROJECT - NEW YORK TIMES

America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.

By Jamelle Bouie

AUG. 14, 2019

If you want to understand American politics in 2019 and the strain of reactionary extremism that has taken over the Republican Party, a good place to start is 2011: the year after a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency swept Tea Party insurgents into Congress, flipping control of the House.

It was clear, at the start of that year, that Congress would have to lift the debt ceiling — the limit on bonds and other debt instruments the government issues when it doesn’t have the revenues to fulfill spending obligations. These votes were often opportunities for grandstanding and occasionally brinkmanship by politicians from both parties. But it was understood that, when push came to shove, Congress would lift the limit and the government would pay its obligations.

2011 was different. Congressional Republicans, led by the new Tea Party conservatives, wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make other sharp cuts to the social safety net. But Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. So House Republicans decided to take a hostage. “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said the incoming majority leader, Eric Cantor, at a closed-door retreat days before the session began, according to The Washington Post. Either the White House would agree to harsh austerity measures or Republicans would force the United States to default on its debt obligations, precipitating an economic crisis just as the country, and the world, was beginning to recover from the Great Recession.

The debt-limit standoff was a case study of a fundamental change within the Republican Party after Obama took office in 2009. Republicans would either win total victory or they would wreck the system itself. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, used a variety of procedural tactics to effectively nullify the president’s ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch. In the minority, he used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree. In the majority, after Republicans won the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, stopping the Senate from even considering the president’s nominee for the bench.

Where did this destructive, sectarian style of partisan politics come from? Conventional wisdom traces its roots to the “Gingrich Revolution” of the 1990s, whose architect pioneered a hardball, insurgent style of political combat, undermining norms and dismantling congressional institutions for the sake of power. This is true enough, but the Republican Party of the Obama years didn’t just recycle its Gingrich-era excesses; it also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American. He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn’t count. It didn’t represent the “real” America.

John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most prominent political theorist of the slaveholding South and an influence on modern right-wing thinking. From the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Obama’s election reignited a fight about democratic legitimacy — about who can claim the country as their own, and who has the right to act as a citizen — that is as old as American democracy itself. And the reactionary position in this conflict, which seeks to narrow the scope of participation and arrest the power of majorities beyond the limits of the Constitution, has its own peculiar history: not just in the ideological battles of the founding but also in the institution that defined the early American republic as much as any other.

The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth. Enslaved people working in glorified labor camps picked cotton, grew indigo, harvested resin from trees for turpentine and generated additional capital in the form of their children, bought, sold and securitized on the open market. But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.

South Carolina was a paradigmatic slave state. Although the majority of enslavers resided in the “low country,” with its large rice and cotton plantations, nearly the entire state participated in plantation agriculture and the slave economy. By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in “The Counterrevolution of Slavery,” it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held slaves.

Not surprisingly, enslavers dominated the state’s political class. “Carolinian rice aristocrats and the cotton planters from the hinterland,” Sinha writes, “formed an intersectional ruling class, bound together by kinship, economic, political and cultural ties.” The government they built was the most undemocratic in the Union. The slave-rich districts of the coasts enjoyed nearly as much representation in the Legislature as more populous regions in the interior of the state. Statewide office was restricted to wealthy property owners. To even qualify for the governorship, you needed a large, debt-free estate. Rich enslavers were essentially the only people who could participate in the highest levels of government. To the extent that there were popular elections, they were for the lowest levels of government, because the State Legislature tended to decide most high-level offices.

But immense power at home could not compensate for declining power in national politics. The growth of the free Northwest threatened Southern dominance in Congress. And the slaveholding planter class would witness the rise of an organized movement to stop the expansion of slavery and curb the power enslavers held over key institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court.

Out of this atmosphere of fear and insecurity came a number of thinkers and politicians who set their minds to protecting South Carolina and the rest of the slaveholding South from a hostile North. Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John C. Calhoun. Vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, secretary of state under John Tyler and eventually a United States senator representing the state, Calhoun was a deep believer in the system of slavery — which he called a “positive good” that “forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable institutions”— and a committed advocate for the slave-owning planter class. He was an astute politician, but he made his most important mark as a theoretician of reaction: a man who, realizing that democracy could not protect slavery in perpetuity, set out to limit democracy.

Calhoun popularized the concept of “nullification”: the theory that any state subject to federal law was entitled to invalidate it. He first advanced the idea in an anonymous letter, written when he was vice president, protesting the Tariff of 1828, which sought to protect Northern industry and agriculture from foreign competitors. Calhoun condemned it as an unconstitutional piece of regional favoritism.

The South may have been part of the pro-Andrew Jackson majorities in Congress, but that wasn’t enough for Calhoun, who wanted absolute security for the region and its economic interests. Demographic and political change doomed it to be a “permanent minority”: “Our geographical position, our industry, pursuits and institutions are all peculiar.” Against a domineering North, he argued, “representation affords not the slightest protection.”

“It is, indeed, high time for the people of the South to be roused to a sense of impending calamities — on an early and full knowledge of which their safety depends,” Calhoun wrote in an 1831 report to the South Carolina Legislature. “It is time that they should see and feel that ... they are in a permanent and hopeless minority on the great and vital connected questions.”

His solution lay in the states. To Calhoun, there was no “union” per se. Instead, the United States was simply a compact among sovereigns with distinct, and often competing, sectional interests. This compact could only survive if all sides had equal say on the meaning of the Constitution and the shape and structure of the law. Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they thought the federal government was favoring one state or section over another. The union could only act with the assent of the entire whole — what Calhoun called “the concurrent majority” — as opposed to the Madisonian idea of rule by numerical majority, albeit mediated by compromise and consensus.

Southern college students at the Southern Democratic Convention in 1948, the year that segregationists began to break with the national Democratic Party over civil rights. From Bettmann/Getty Images

Calhoun initially lost the tariff fight, which pitted him against an obstinate Andrew Jackson, but he did not give up on nullification. He expanded on the theory at the end of his life, proposing an alternative system of government that gave political minorities a final say over majority action. In this “concurrent government,” each “interest or portion of the community” has an equal say in approving the actions of the state. Full agreement would be necessary to “put the government in motion.” Only through this, Calhoun argued, would the “different interests, orders, classes, or portions, into which the community may be divided, can be protected.”

The government Calhoun envisioned would protect “liberty”: not the liberty of the citizen but the liberty of the master, the liberty of those who claimed a right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty, Calhoun stated, was “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike — a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving — and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.” It is striking how much this echoes contemporary arguments against the expansion of democracy. In 2012, for example, a Tea Party congressional candidate from Florida said that voting is a “privilege” and seemed to endorse property requirements for participation.

Calhoun died in 1850. Ten years later, following the idea of nullification to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single Southern state. War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun fought to protect. But parts of his legacy survived. His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy — his view that government must protect interests, defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics, more than people — would inform the sectional politics of the South in the 20th century, where solid blocs of Southern lawmakers worked collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region.

Despite insurgencies at home — the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s — reactionary white leaders were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the last generation of segregationist senators held on through the 1960s into the early 2000s. United, like their predecessors, by geography and their stake in Jim Crow segregation, they were a powerful force in national politics, a bloc that vetoed anything that touched their regional prerogatives.

Anti-lynching laws and some pro-labor legislation died at the hands of lawmakers from the “Solid South” who took advantage of Senate rules like the filibuster to effectively enact Calhoun’s idea of a concurrent majority against legislation that threatened the Southern racial status quo; the spirit of nullification lived on. When Northern liberal Democrats added a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 presidential convention, in an effort to break the Southern conservatives’ hold on the party, 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest: the prologue to the “Dixiecrat Revolt” that began the conservative migration into the eventual embrace of the Republican Party.

Calhoun’s idea that states could veto the federal government would return as well following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as segregationists announced “massive resistance” to federal desegregation mandates and sympathizers defended white Southern actions with ideas and arguments that cribbed from Calhoun and recapitulated enslaver ideology for modern American politics. “The central question that emerges,” the National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights Act, “is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes — the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” He continued: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

It is a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Conservatives drove the groundswell that made Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Republican Party nominee for president. He lost in a landslide but won the Deep South (except for Florida), where the white people of the region — among the most conservative in the country, a direct legacy of slavery and the society it built — flocked to the candidate who stood against the constitutional demands of the black-freedom movement. Goldwater may have insisted that there are “some rights that are clearly protected by valid laws and are therefore ‘civil rights,’ ” but he also declared that “states’ rights” were “disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism” and called Brown v. Board an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence, of course,” Goldwater wrote in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” “to preserve their rightful powers over education.”

Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse — to give political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself — reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy. Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis — a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism — identified this dynamic in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana:

“Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.”

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who was then the House majority leader, speaks to reporters in April 2011 during the lead-up to a standoff with President Obama over raising the debt ceiling. Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images

The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic. The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans and liberal white people. In their survey-based study of the movement, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

The scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson came to a similar conclusion in their contemporaneous study of the movement, based on an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists across the country. “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” they write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.”

To stop this change and its political consequences, right-wing conservatives have embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy. Mitch McConnell’s hyper-obstructionist rule in the Senate is the most high-profile example of this strategy, but it’s far from the most egregious.

In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won legislative and executive power for the first time in more than a century. They used it to gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting, specifically aimed at the state’s African-American voters. One such restriction, a strict voter-identification law, was designed to target black North Carolinians with “almost surgical precision,” according to the federal judges who struck the law down. When, in 2016, Democrats overcame these obstacles to take back the governor’s mansion, the Republican-controlled Legislature tried to strip power from the office, to prevent Democrats from reversing their efforts to rig the game.

A similar thing happened in Wisconsin. Under Scott Walker, the governor at the time, Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves a structural advantage in the State Legislature through aggressive gerrymandering. After the Democratic candidate toppled Walker in the 2018 governor’s race, the Republican majority in the Legislature rapidly moved to limit the new governor’s power and weaken other statewide offices won by Democrats. They restricted the governor’s ability to run public-benefit programs and set rules on the implementation of state laws. And they robbed the governor and the attorney general of the power to continue, or end, legal action against the Affordable Care Act.

Michigan Republicans took an almost identical course of action after Democrats in that state managed to win executive office, using their gerrymandered legislative majority to weaken the new Democratic governor and attorney general. One proposed bill, for example, would have shifted oversight of campaign-finance law from the secretary of state to a six-person commission with members nominated by the state Republican and Democratic parties, a move designed to produce deadlock and keep elected Democrats from reversing previous decisions.

The Republican rationale for tilting the field in their permanent favor or, failing that, nullifying the results and limiting Democrats’ power as much as possible, has a familiar ring to it. “Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison,” one Wisconsin Republican said following the party’s lame-duck power grab. The speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos, made his point more explicit. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority — we would have all five constitutional officers, and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.” The argument is straightforward: Some voters, their voters, count. Others — the liberals, black people and other people of color who live in cities — don’t.

Senate Republicans played with similar ideas just before the 2016 election, openly announcing their plans to block Hillary Clinton from nominating anyone to the Supreme Court, should she become president. “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” declared Senator John McCain of Arizona just weeks before voting. And President Trump, of course, has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the product of fraud and illegal voting. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he declared on Twitter weeks after the election, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The larger implication is clear enough: A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn’t a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics. The recent attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort. By asking for this information, the administration would suppress the number of immigrant respondents, worsening their representation in the House and the Electoral College, reweighting power to the white, rural areas that back the president and the Republican Party.

You could make the case that none of this has anything to do with slavery and slaveholder ideology. You could argue that it has nothing to do with race at all, that it’s simply an aggressive effort to secure conservative victories. But the tenor of an argument, the shape and nature of an opposition movement — these things matter. The goals may be colorblind, but the methods of action — the attacks on the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors, the casting of rival political majorities as unrepresentative, the drive to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions — are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Stop all “Blood Phosphate” imports! Saharawi resistance figure kicks off speaking tour of Aotearoa

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa blog on 07/10/19. Tecber’s tour has already ended but I’m saving all blog posts for posterity. Saharawi resistance figure, Tecber Ahmed Saleh, has begun a tour across New Zealand to talk about life under Moroccan occupation and the role New Zealand’s fertiliser companies have had in prolonging this occupation through importing phosphates from the region.

Morocco invaded Western Sahara in the “Green March” of 1975. Before then, the territory was ruled by Generalissimo Franco’s fascist Spain, but as the despot lay on his deathbed, he signed a secret agreement to split Western Sahara between Morocco in the North and Mauritania in the South. Franco knew that Spain’s colonies wouldn’t be held after his death, and he feared that an independent Western Sahara would join his enemies in the growing decolonial and communist movements in Africa. Rather than allow this, he signed over the territory, and 74,000 Saharawi with it, to nations whom he knew would suppress any communist or decolonial sentiment.

Many Saharawi fled the region at this time, travelling across the desert into Algeria. Others fought a war against Morocco and Mauritania, forcing the latter to withdraw in 1979. Those who remained were bombed repeatedly by Moroccan aircraft carrying napalm, a flammable gasoline jelly which causes horrific burns. The ruling Islamic-nationalist government of Algeria was just as anti-socialist as the Moroccans, but made an exception to the Saharawi resistance fighters due to their own hostility towards Morocco. They granted a swathe of southern Algeria to the refugees, who administer the harsh desert region autonomously.

The exiled population in the camps has now reached 173,600. This was the place where Ahmed Saleh was born. The Saharawi have been waiting for a referendum for self-determination, agreed to by Morocco in a United Nations peace plan, since 1991, but it has not yet been put on the table by the Moroccan government.

Phosphate, used as a high-grade fertiliser, has historically been the only significant resource in the region. The Spanish ran large mining colonies in the territory, and these were later taken over by the Moroccans, who now have a near-monopoly on the world’s supply. The state-owned OCP corporation accounts for a significant portion of Morocco’s economy, and funds the lifestyle of the “progressive” monarch, Mohammed VI, whose 12 palaces cost $1 million per-day to operate.

New Zealand is the only country in which private companies still import the “blood phosphate” from the conflict zone, where human rights abuses are common. Western Sahara accounts for around a sixth of the Maghrebi phosphate industry, and even though open warfare has been over for nearly 3 decades, the situation in the territory is one of brutal occupation. The Saharawi people still see no benefit from the exploitation of their only natural resource.

Human rights violations include widely corroborated reports of torture, police brutality, and the repeated arrest and sentencing of members of human rights NGOs. Journalists are also frequently targeted with “assaults, arrests and harassment.”

“New Zealand fertiliser companies, Ravensdown and Ballance Agri-Nutrients, have been buying phosphate from The OCP Group, controlled by the Moroccan Royal Family,” says spokesperson for the Western Sahara Solidarity campaign, Mike Barton. “There’s profit to be made by extracting phosphate from Western Sahara, and our trade is undermining Saharawi human rights.”

“New Zealand needs to stop importing blood phosphate from Western Sahara.”

Ravensdown maintains that it is confident the practice is still legal under international law, despite the mounting weight of international resolutions and even legal blockades of ships carrying phosphate to NZ. The ship Cherry Blossom was detained in South Africa in 2017 with a 54,000 tonne cargo of phosphate worth $5 million destined for Ballance in Tauranga. South African legal teams took a stand against New Zealand and determined that the rock belonged to the Saharawi people.

However Morocco has applied its own campaign on international pressure, using its diplomatic staff and lobbyists to silence discussion of Saharawi self-determination wherever possible. Ahmed Saleh’s sold-out tour of Australia was cut short when she was prevented from speaking at the University of Sydney due to pressure from the Morroccan embassy.

Ahmed Saleh kicked off her New Zealand tour with a visit to the land occupation site at Ihumātao, and spoke in Auckland the following night. She has a speaking appointment in Hamilton tonight, before moving on to Christchurch, Dunedin Wellington, and Lower Hutt.

Hamilton: October 7, 6:30pm at the Meteor.

Christchurch: October 9, 7pm at WEA Canterbury Workers’ Educational Association.

Dunedin: October 10, 6pm at University of Otago Castle 1 Theatre.

Wellington: October 14, 7pm at Thistle Hall.

Lower Hutt: October 15, 7:30pm at Waiwhetu Uniting Church.

[dailyaudiobible]

10/21/2019 DAB Transcript

Jeremiah 37:1-38:28, 1 Timothy 6:1-21, Psalms 89:38-52, Proverbs 25:28

Today is the 21st day of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s good to be here with you today as we move ourselves into our workweek and start living into this shiny, sparkly, new week that we have before us as we begin to make our decisions and choices and think about things. And we have come here to allow God's word to inform us on that and to transform our thoughts, that we might have the mind of Christ on things. And, so, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week and we’re continuing our journey through the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Today we’ll read chapters 37 and 38.

Commentary:

Okay. So, in the book of Jeremiah things…things are pretty dire in Jerusalem and life-threatening for Jeremiah. Like, there are people that want him dead now because he keeps prophesying surrender, right? And you understand that. It would be like a person prophesying in front of the White House in the United States of impending doom and that we should surrender to this country that is threatening. And that is actually what God was telling Jeremiah to say. That is actually what His will was. He was going to wipe the slate clean and a lot could have been spared, including the king's life and including the city of Jerusalem, but they would have to walk out and surrender to the Chaldeans. So, just putting ourselves in that position, especially from like a national perspective, we’re talking about the king here. We understand the complications involved in all of that. And, so, as the factions were developing inside the city and the starvation that was ensuing in the mayhem of the city being strangled to death by this blockade, we see how things are disintegrating. So, even when people were after Jeremiah's life, what did the king do? He said, “like, how am I going to be able to stand against you? He's in your hands”, right? Because at this point it's all falling apart. The only thing between the Babylonian army and the people inside Jerusalem was a wall. Like, that's the only thing. But inside those walls, as was the plan, like this is…this is the strategy of taking this city, society is falling apart, right? So, there's anarchy happening. So, there isn't any unity to fight and there’s a lack of food. So, they’re growing weaker and weaker and weaker to fight. And we remember back when we began this book and all of the events that were happening at that time from the beginning of the book, there were prophets, in fact all the prophets were saying, “the Babylonians will never get in the city. The Babylonians are going to go back. All the stuff that was taken from us is going to be returned. The Babylonians, the Babylonians will never defeat us.” And they were obviously wrong and we’re not hearing much from their voices anymore. And Jeremiah’s telling king Zedekiah, “like, look, this is this is going to happen because this is God's will and this is what he intends to do. There's no turning it back. Even if you were to destroy the whole army of Babylon, and there were just like some wounded soldiers left in tents, they would stagger out of their tents and burn this city to the ground.” So…so as things continued to deteriorate, fear and panic and an overwhelming sense of gloom and doom were like disintegrating, undermining the power structures. And for lots of people the message that Jeremiah was prophesying of surrender made him look like a traitor. And, so, he buys this field in Benjamin and it just looks like he's gonna defect. Everybody is paranoid and as Jeremiah's trying to leave the city he gets arrested and he ends up in a dungeon and then king Zedekiah frees him and then he's held under house arrest and then he's later thrown into an empty well where he’s supposed to die, but he was rescued from the pit. And then after that, the king comes to him again, secretly. And, so, we can see how much things have fallen apart inside the city. The Kings meeting secretly asking Jeremiah to give him like the straight truth, what God is actually saying about the predicament. And it’s not like Jeremiah hasn't said that. So, Jeremiah's freshly out of a well where he was thrown in to die. Now he’s out of the well standing before the king. The kings asking him to give him the straight truth and you can see Jeremiah's response, “if I told you the truth, you’d kill me and if I give you advice like every other time you won't listen to me anyway”, which is pretty much reflective of the prophetic journey, the life of a prophet as we see it in the Scriptures. So, you can read the stories, they're intriguing to be sure, they’re…they’re part of history and we can study the history or we can study the tragedy of exile and find it appalling, but we don't necessarily remember that none of this had to happen. Like, Jeremiah had been warning about this for two decades, but no one listened. So, it wasn't like they hadn't been told. And indeed, the Babylonians did break through the wall and the wall fell, and when the wall fell you can imagine the rush of metal and the soldiers and leather and sword and spear rushing into the city and the chaos of people trying to flee and the chaos of people trying to hide and the chaos as the city is being taken and devastated. And we can shake our heads and go, “wow, what an awful…what an awful time that would've been. It could've been avoided”, but we disassociate as if it might not really have anything to do with us. But it starts becoming very, personally, when you think about what we read in Proverbs today, “a man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” So, that snaps some things into place all of the sudden, doesn't it? The voice of wisdom is telling us that we have no defenses, we have no protection when we lose control of ourselves. So, if we needed a picture then we've got the picture from what we read in the book of Jeremiah, but we probably already know. Like, we’ve probably already experienced this in our lives. It just hasn't been put in these terms before - chaos and fear and panic and loss and all of the enemies that come rushing through a defenseless person with deadly intent when there is no self-control. So, it obviously looks different than the taking of Jerusalem, but it's not any less real. And, so, once again, the Scriptures are right here facing us honestly holding up a mirror and asking us to look into our own eyes because it's showing us the outcomes of the paths that we choose as…as we've seen in today's reading. And a lack of self-control is usually the choice between chaos and order. So, what path will you walk today?

Prayer:

Father, we invite You into that. We've seen and are seeing the destruction of Jerusalem and it's certainly overwhelming and it’s certainly a sad part of the story, but when it becomes applied to our own lives as the Proverbs tells us that a person without self-control is…is like a city with the walls torn down, well then we realize the chaos that was happening inside that city when it was being taken is the kind of stuff that happens to us when we lose control of ourselves. And the reality is, we can't…I mean…we like to think that we’re in control way more than we actually are, and what we need to do is give up and let go and surrender to You and Your will and Your ways, because we will never find self-control in any other way. So, come Holy Spirit into all of this we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link on the homepage, and I thank you for pressing that link over the years. We wouldn't be here if we didn't do this together and I’m glad that we’re doing this together. What a remarkable time we live in. To even be able to conceive of doing something like this together is…is profound. So, I'm thankful each and every day that we’re here for each other around the Global Campfire. So, yeah, you can press the link on the homepage, you can press the link in the app or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, you can press the Hotline button that’s at the top of the app screen. You can't miss it, the little Red button or you can dial these numbers on my sheet. 877-942-4253 is the number to dial if you are in the Americas. I mean, you can dial any of these numbers from anywhere that you are, that’s up to you but if you're in the UK or Europe, you can dial 44-20-3608-8078 or if you are in Australia you can dial 61-3-8820-5459.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.

By Jamelle Bouie | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

If you want to understand American politics in 2019 and the strain of reactionary extremism that has taken over the Republican Party, a good place to start is 2011: the year after a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency swept Tea Party insurgents into Congress, flipping control of the House.

It was clear, at the start of that year, that Congress would have to lift the debt ceiling — the limit on bonds and other debt instruments the government issues when it doesn’t have the revenues to fulfill spending obligations. These votes were often opportunities for grandstanding and occasionally brinkmanship by politicians from both parties. But it was understood that, when push came to shove, Congress would lift the limit and the government would pay its obligations.

2011 was different. Congressional Republicans, led by the new Tea Party conservatives, wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make other sharp cuts to the social safety net. But Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. So House Republicans decided to take a hostage. “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said the incoming majority leader, Eric Cantor, at a closed-door retreat days before the session began, according to The Washington Post. Either the White House would agree to harsh austerity measures or Republicans would force the United States to default on its debt obligations, precipitating an economic crisis just as the country, and the world, was beginning to recover from the Great Recession.

The debt-limit standoff was a case study of a fundamental change within the Republican Party after Obama took office in 2009. Republicans would either win total victory or they would wreck the system itself. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, used a variety of procedural tactics to effectively nullify the president’s ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch. In the minority, he used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree. In the majority, after Republicans won the Senate in the 2010 midterm elections, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, stopping the Senate from even considering the president’s nominee for the bench.

Where did this destructive, sectarian style of partisan politics come from? Conventional wisdom traces its roots to the “Gingrich Revolution” of the 1990s, whose architect pioneered a hardball, insurgent style of political combat, undermining norms and dismantling congressional institutions for the sake of power. This is true enough, but the Republican Party of the Obama years didn’t just recycle its Gingrich-era excesses; it also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American. He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn’t count. It didn’t represent the “real” America.

Obama’s election reignited a fight about democratic legitimacy — about who can claim the country as their own, and who has the right to act as a citizen — that is as old as American democracy itself. And the reactionary position in this conflict, which seeks to narrow the scope of participation and arrest the power of majorities beyond the limits of the Constitution, has its own peculiar history: not just in the ideological battles of the founding but also in the institution that defined the early American republic as much as any other.

The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth. Enslaved people working in glorified labor camps picked cotton, grew indigo, harvested resin from trees for turpentine and generated additional capital in the form of their children, bought, sold and securitized on the open market. But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.

South Carolina was a paradigmatic slave state. Although the majority of enslavers resided in the “low country,” with its large rice and cotton plantations, nearly the entire state participated in plantation agriculture and the slave economy. By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in “The Counterrevolution of Slavery,” it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held slaves.

Not surprisingly, enslavers dominated the state’s political class. “Carolinian rice aristocrats and the cotton planters from the hinterland,” Sinha writes, “formed an intersectional ruling class, bound together by kinship, economic, political and cultural ties.” The government they built was the most undemocratic in the Union. The slave-rich districts of the coasts enjoyed nearly as much representation in the Legislature as more populous regions in the interior of the state. Statewide office was restricted to wealthy property owners. To even qualify for the governorship, you needed a large, debt-free estate. Rich enslavers were essentially the only people who could participate in the highest levels of government. To the extent that there were popular elections, they were for the lowest levels of government, because the State Legislature tended to decide most high-level offices.

But immense power at home could not compensate for declining power in national politics. The growth of the free Northwest threatened Southern dominance in Congress. And the slaveholding planter class would witness the rise of an organized movement to stop the expansion of slavery and curb the power enslavers held over key institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court.

Out of this atmosphere of fear and insecurity came a number of thinkers and politicians who set their minds to protecting South Carolina and the rest of the slaveholding South from a hostile North. Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John C. Calhoun. Vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, secretary of state under John Tyler and eventually a United States senator representing the state, Calhoun was a deep believer in the system of slavery — which he called a “positive good” that “forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable institutions”— and a committed advocate for the slave-owning planter class. He was an astute politician, but he made his most important mark as a theoretician of reaction: a man who, realizing that democracy could not protect slavery in perpetuity, set out to limit democracy.

Calhoun popularized the concept of “nullification”: the theory that any state subject to federal law was entitled to invalidate it. He first advanced the idea in an anonymous letter, written when he was vice president, protesting the Tariff of 1828, which sought to protect Northern industry and agriculture from foreign competitors. Calhoun condemned it as an unconstitutional piece of regional favoritism.

The South may have been part of the pro-Andrew Jackson majorities in Congress, but that wasn’t enough for Calhoun, who wanted absolute security for the region and its economic interests. Demographic and political change doomed it to be a “permanent minority”: “Our geographical position, our industry, pursuits and institutions are all peculiar.” Against a domineering North, he argued, “representation affords not the slightest protection.”

“It is, indeed, high time for the people of the South to be roused to a sense of impending calamities — on an early and full knowledge of which their safety depends,” Calhoun wrote in an 1831 report to the South Carolina Legislature. “It is time that they should see and feel that ... they are in a permanent and hopeless minority on the great and vital connected questions.”

His solution lay in the states. To Calhoun, there was no “union” per se. Instead, the United States was simply a compact among sovereigns with distinct, and often competing, sectional interests. This compact could only survive if all sides had equal say on the meaning of the Constitution and the shape and structure of the law. Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they thought the federal government was favoring one state or section over another. The union could only act with the assent of the entire whole — what Calhoun called “the concurrent majority” — as opposed to the Madisonian idea of rule by numerical majority, albeit mediated by compromise and consensus.

Calhoun initially lost the tariff fight, which pitted him against an obstinate Andrew Jackson, but he did not give up on nullification. He expanded on the theory at the end of his life, proposing an alternative system of government that gave political minorities a final say over majority action. In this “concurrent government,” each “interest or portion of the community” has an equal say in approving the actions of the state. Full agreement would be necessary to “put the government in motion.” Only through this, Calhoun argued, would the “different interests, orders, classes, or portions, into which the community may be divided, can be protected.”

The government Calhoun envisioned would protect “liberty”: not the liberty of the citizen but the liberty of the master, the liberty of those who claimed a right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty, Calhoun stated, was “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike — a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving — and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.” It is striking how much this echoes contemporary arguments against the expansion of democracy. In 2012, for example, a Tea Party congressional candidate from Florida said that voting is a “privilege” and seemed to endorse property requirements for participation.

Calhoun died in 1850. Ten years later, following the idea of nullification to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single Southern state. War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun fought to protect. But parts of his legacy survived. His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy — his view that government must protect interests, defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics, more than people — would inform the sectional politics of the South in the 20th century, where solid blocs of Southern lawmakers worked collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region.

Despite insurgencies at home — the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s — reactionary white leaders were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the last generation of segregationist senators held on through the 1960s into the early 2000s. United, like their predecessors, by geography and their stake in Jim Crow segregation, they were a powerful force in national politics, a bloc that vetoed anything that touched their regional prerogatives.

Anti-lynching laws and some pro-labor legislation died at the hands of lawmakers from the “Solid South” who took advantage of Senate rules like the filibuster to effectively enact Calhoun’s idea of a concurrent majority against legislation that threatened the Southern racial status quo; the spirit of nullification lived on. When Northern liberal Democrats added a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 presidential convention, in an effort to break the Southern conservatives’ hold on the party, 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest: the prologue to the “Dixiecrat Revolt” that began the conservative migration into the eventual embrace of the Republican Party.

Calhoun’s idea that states could veto the federal government would return as well following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as segregationists announced “massive resistance” to federal desegregation mandates and sympathizers defended white Southern actions with ideas and arguments that cribbed from Calhoun and recapitulated enslaver ideology for modern American politics. “The central question that emerges,” the National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights Act, “is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes — the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” He continued: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

It is a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Conservatives drove the groundswell that made Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Republican Party nominee for president. He lost in a landslide but won the Deep South (except for Florida), where the white people of the region — among the most conservative in the country, a direct legacy of slavery and the society it built — flocked to the candidate who stood against the constitutional demands of the black-freedom movement. Goldwater may have insisted that there are “some rights that are clearly protected by valid laws and are therefore ‘civil rights,’ ” but he also declared that “states’ rights” were “disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism” and called Brown v. Board an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence, of course,” Goldwater wrote in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” “to preserve their rightful powers over education.”

Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse — to give political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself — reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy. Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis — a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism — identified this dynamic in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana:

“Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.”

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic. The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans and liberal white people. In their survey-based study of the movement, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

The scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson came to a similar conclusion in their contemporaneous study of the movement, based on an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists across the country. “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” they write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.”

To stop this change and its political consequences, right-wing conservatives have embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy. Mitch McConnell’s hyper-obstructionist rule in the Senate is the most high-profile example of this strategy, but it’s far from the most egregious.

In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won legislative and executive power for the first time in more than a century. They used it to gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting, specifically aimed at the state’s African-American voters. One such restriction, a strict voter-identification law, was designed to target black North Carolinians with “almost surgical precision,” according to the federal judges who struck the law down. When, in 2016, Democrats overcame these obstacles to take back the governor’s mansion, the Republican-controlled Legislature tried to strip power from the office, to prevent Democrats from reversing their efforts to rig the game.

A similar thing happened in Wisconsin. Under Scott Walker, the governor at the time, Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves a structural advantage in the State Legislature through aggressive gerrymandering. After the Democratic candidate toppled Walker in the 2018 governor’s race, the Republican majority in the Legislature rapidly moved to limit the new governor’s power and weaken other statewide offices won by Democrats. They restricted the governor’s ability to run public-benefit programs and set rules on the implementation of state laws. And they robbed the governor and the attorney general of the power to continue, or end, legal action against the Affordable Care Act.

Michigan Republicans took an almost identical course of action after Democrats in that state managed to win executive office, using their gerrymandered legislative majority to weaken the new Democratic governor and attorney general. One proposed bill, for example, would have shifted oversight of campaign-finance law from the secretary of state to a six-person commission with members nominated by the state Republican and Democratic parties, a move designed to produce deadlock and keep elected Democrats from reversing previous decisions.

The Republican rationale for tilting the field in their permanent favor or, failing that, nullifying the results and limiting Democrats’ power as much as possible, has a familiar ring to it. “Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison,” one Wisconsin Republican said following the party’s lame-duck power grab. The speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos, made his point more explicit. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority — we would have all five constitutional officers, and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.” The argument is straightforward: Some voters, their voters, count. Others — the liberals, black people and other people of color who live in cities — don’t.

Senate Republicans played with similar ideas just before the 2016 election, openly announcing their plans to block Hillary Clinton from nominating anyone to the Supreme Court, should she become president. “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” declared Senator John McCain of Arizona just weeks before voting. And President Trump, of course, has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the product of fraud and illegal voting. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he declared on Twitter weeks after the election, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The larger implication is clear enough: A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn’t a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics. The recent attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort. By asking for this information, the administration would suppress the number of immigrant respondents, worsening their representation in the House and the Electoral College, reweighting power to the white, rural areas that back the president and the Republican Party.

You could make the case that none of this has anything to do with slavery and slaveholder ideology. You could argue that it has nothing to do with race at all, that it’s simply an aggressive effort to secure conservative victories. But the tenor of an argument, the shape and nature of an opposition movement — these things matter. The goals may be colorblind, but the methods of action — the attacks on the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors, the casting of rival political majorities as unrepresentative, the drive to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions — are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage.

Jamelle Bouie is a Washington-based New York Times opinion columnist and a political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs and culture.

HOW SLAVERY MADE ITS WAY WEST

By Tiya Miles | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times |

Published August 16, 2019 |

Slavery leapt out of the East and into the interior lands of the Old Southwest in the 1820s and 1830s. Cotton began to soar as the most lucrative product in the global marketplace just as the slaveholding societies of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic were reaching limits in soil fertility. To land speculators, planters, ambitious settlers and Northern investors, the fertile lands to the west now looked irresistible.

The Native American nations that possessed the bulk of those lands stood in the way of this imagined progress. President Andrew Jackson, an enslaver from Tennessee famous for brutal “Indian” fighting in Georgia and Florida, swooped in on the side of fellow enslavers, championing the Indian Removal Act of 1830. When Congress passed the bill by a breathtakingly slim margin, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles in the South as well as Potawatomis, Wyandots, Odawas, Delawares, Shawnees and Senecas in the Midwest were relocated to an uncharted space designated as Indian Territory (including present-day Oklahoma and Kansas). “Removal,” as the historian Claudio Saunt argues in a forthcoming book on the topic, was far too quiet a word to capture the violation of this mass “expulsion” of 80,000 people.

As new lands in the Old Southwest were pried open, white enslavers back east realized that their most profitable export was no longer tobacco or rice. A complex interstate slave trade became an industry of its own. This extractive system, together with enslavers moving west with human property, resulted in the relocation of approximately one million enslaved black people to a new region. The entrenched practice of buying, selling, owning, renting and mortgaging humans stretched into the American West along with the white settler-colonial population that now occupied former indigenous lands.

Slaveholding settlers who had pushed into Texas from the American South wanted to extend cotton agriculture and increase the numbers of white arrivals. “It was slavery that seemed to represent the soft underbelly of the Texas unrest,” the historian Steven Hahn asserts in “A Nation Without Borders.” Armed conflict between American-identified enslavers and a Mexican state that outlawed slavery in 1829 was among the causes of the Mexican-American War, which won for the United States much of the Southwest and California.

Texas became the West’s cotton slavery stronghold, with enslaved black people making up 30 percent of the state’s population in 1860. “Indian Territory” also held a large population of enslaved black people. Mormons, too, kept scores of enslaved laborers in Utah. The small number of black people who arrived in California, New Mexico and Oregon before midcentury usually came as property. Even as most Western states banned slavery in their new constitutions, individual enslavers held onto their property-in-people until the Civil War.

Enslaved men who had served in the Union Army were among the first wave of African-Americans to move west of their own free will. They served as soldiers, and together with wives and children they formed pocket communities in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. It is a painful paradox that the work of black soldiers centered on what the historian Quintard Taylor has called “settler protection” in his classic 1998 study of African-Americans in the West, “In Search of the Racial Frontier.” Even while bearing slavery’s scars, black men found themselves carrying out orders to secure white residents of Western towns, track down “outlaws” (many of whom were people of color), police the federally imposed boundaries of Indian reservations and quell labor strikes. “This small group of black men,” Taylor observes, “paid a dear price in their bid to earn the respect of the nation.”

[xhxhxhx]

Do you have an opinion on The Lost Mandate of Heaven? Should the Ho Chi Minh Trail be renamed the Averell Harriman Memorial Highway?

I haven’t read The Lost Mandate of Heaven, but I have read Edward Miller’s Misalliance and Pierre Asselin’s Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, which have helped me understand the story of Vietnam from 1955 to 1965.

I believe, among other things, that South Vietnam was socially, culturally and linguistically distinct from the North; that genuine non-communist nationalism was viable and active in South Vietnam; that South Vietnam was a better and more open society than the North; that the Geneva Accords were not binding on either South Vietnam or the United States; that Ngo Dinh Diem was a capable and independent leader; and that the assassination of Diem was a terrible mistake.

I believe that North Vietnam waged an immoral and unlawful war of aggression against South Vietnam; that North Vietnam was backed by China and the Soviet Union; that the National Liberation Front was backed and directed by North Vietnam; and that the National Liberation Front was a terrorist force that preyed on the peasants and workers of South Vietnam.

This is not a necessary corollary, but it is important to point out: Ho Chi Minh was not the true leader of North Vietnam after 1960, but a figurehead sidelined by Le Duan, the Communist Party General Secretary. Ho had wanted reconstruction and peace, but Le Duan wanted war, and until South Vietnam was liberated by force, he never wavered from that mission, no matter the cost in blood and treasure.

I believe that American defense of South Vietnam against North Vietnam was a moral cause; that its defense of an independent, non-communist South Vietnam against communist subversion was a moral cause; and that its containment of Chinese and Soviet imperialism was a moral cause.

But moral causes do not always make for moral missions. 

The National Liberation Front was a terrorist force, but it was a terrorist force that controlled substantial territory within South Vietnam. It was backed and directed by North Vietnam, but the extent of its territorial control in South Vietnam made isolating and eliminating its forces slow and costly. The Americans assumed much of that burden.

South Vietnamese nationalism was real, but it was an urban movement. Its roots in the countryside were thin. South Vietnam could have had more political success by adopting a more traditionalist nationalism, but Ngo Dinh Diem was as much a Catholic as a Confucian. 

It is true that the Buddhist rebels were witting or unwitting allies of National Liberation Front. It is true that the American press overstated their popular support. But the Buddhist rebellion was real, and, like the earlier Cao Dai rebellion, it showed the limits of Catholic traditionalism in a non-Catholic country.

Because South Vietnam was an open society, it was open to subversion in ways that North Vietnam was not. South Vietnam could not subvert the North, but the North could subvert the South. Communism is a force multiplier: North Vietnam could starve and incarcerate its people, as it did in the South after Liberation, because even though it was poorer, its social control was more complete. 

If the question is whether the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem was a mistake, the only possible answer is that it was. If the question is whether Diem could have handled North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front on his own, without the escalating American commitments of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, I confess that I do not know. 

If the question is whether an independent, non-communist South Vietnam was viable, the answer is that it was. If the question is whether it was viable at a politically acceptable cost to the United States, my honest answer is that I do not believe that it could have been, or not with Le Duan in Hanoi and without Diem in Saigon.

The United States did not pursue the least politically costly or most militarily effective means of intervening in Vietnam. Its ground combat missions alienated the peasants and workers they needed to protect. Its liberal use of artillery and air support was counterproductive. Although American war crimes were no more common than they had been in past wars, they were unacceptable, and undermined its cause. 

However, its naval blockade and mining operations, its air campaign against North Vietnam, its air campaign against the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s counterintelligence operations, its armed intervention in Cambodia and Laos, and its training and counterinsurgency operations in South Vietnam all helped reverse National Liberation Front’s advances, contain communist aggression, and preserve the viability of an independent, non-communist South Vietnam.

Still, before the Nixon administration’s opening to China, the risk of Chinese intervention was real and substantial. China had always been an aggressive revisionist player in its near abroad, and China had given North Vietnam with arms and materiel. China had invaded Tibet and threatened Korea, Taiwan, and India. On the eve of American intervention, they exploded their first nuclear bomb. 

Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese gave the North Vietnamese guarantees. Chen Jian’s Mao’s China and the Cold War, one of the best and most revealing books on the Cold War I have ever read, puts some of those guarantees to paper.

In May 1963, Liu Shaoqi told North Vietnamese leaders that they could “definitely count on China as the strategic rear.” In June 1964, Mao told them that “[i]f the United States risks taking the war to North Vietnam, Chinese troops should cross the border [to enter the war]. It is better for our troops to be [called] volunteers. We may claim that they are organized by the people, and that the [PRC] government has no control over them. You may also organize your own volunteers and dispatch them to the South, and you may claim that they have been organized by the people without the knowledge of President Ho.” 

Mao told the North Vietnamese rally their spirits:  ‘‘[T]he more you fear the Americans, the more they will bully you. … You should not fear, you should fight. … In my opinion, the less you fear [the Americans], the less they will dare to bully you.’’ After Mao’s bright little speech, Liu underlined his message: “The less you fear them, the more they respect you. If China does not fear them, and if the Vietnamese people do not fear them, they will have to consider again and again before taking any action. … When they do something about Vietnam, they will have to think of China.”

Then, in July 1964, Mao said the same thing to the North Vietnamese ambassador: “We must be prepared. Both North Vietnam and China must be prepared. If they [the Americans] start bombing or landing operations [against North Vietnam], we will fight them. … If the United States attacks North Vietnam, that is not just your problem. They will have to remember that we Chinese also have legs. The Americans can dispatch their troops. Cannot we Chinese also dispatch our troops? From our country to your country, we take one step and we are already there.”

It is possible that by the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, China would be unprepared to give effect to Mao’s military romanticism in North Vietnam. It is also possible that the United States could have tolerated a limited Chinese intervention, but South Vietnam was not worth the risk. It is probably not overstating things to say that the Chinese might have extinguished South Vietnam all on their own, to say nothing of what the Soviets might do while the Americans were preoccupied with Asia.

That meant that for much of the armed conflict, the United States only had a choice between costly and ineffective means, and escalatory ones, which risked much more than the survival of South Vietnam. It meant that the American mission was painful and seemed nearly hopeless. And until Nixon went to China, perhaps it was. 

After China, everything was possible, but the hopelessness of the American mission in Vietnam to that point had left Nixon with limited means. He used them well: South Vietnam was safer and more secure under Nixon than it had been under Kennedy or Johnson, and with fewer American casualties. South Vietnam was not viable on its own, but Nixon had shored up the American position, and North Vietnam came to terms.

The story of the later war is told in Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, Mark Clodfelter’s The Limits of Air Power, which highlights the power of Nixon’s Linebacker as much as the limits of Johnson’s Rolling Thunder, and Pierre Asselin’s A Bitter Peace.

The Paris Accords were far from perfect, but they would have made for a workable peace, if the United States had cared to defend it. But America, at least as indifferent and callous in peace as they are in war, decided that it would be better to let South Vietnam fall. 

And I suppose that is my ultimate reservation: The defense of South Vietnam exacted a price that the United States was not, in the end, willing to pay. It was a moral cause, but good causes are not enough. There is no good in a war that cannot be won, and I am yet unpersuaded that Vietnam was a war America could win, with or without Ngo Dinh Diem.