redFlags

Someone said boo?

The Revolutionary Communist Party has decreed on a "matter of basic orientation." The unsigned author(s) don't mention the object of their scorn by name, but they call the Nine Letters to Our Comrades nothing but "completely dishonest and unprincipled attacks, including crude distortions of our views, aims, and methods." The distortions and purported lies are not discussed, noted in particular or corrected. Off limits and not up for consideration. Decided. Think about that. Read the Nine Letters, then the RCP's initial public response and hear the elastic snap.

Nor is any shadow of a doubt left up to wonder about the motives of Mike Ely or the other comrades involved, myself included:

...there are some people who have sunk to the point where they can do nothing more than act as “parasitic critics” in relation to our revolutionary role and work—having themselves nothing positive to offer in terms of achieving a radical alternative to the monstrous system we live under, having no defining or unifying mission other than seeking to sabotage our efforts to bring such a radical alternative into being.

Peculiar, considering the sharp use of weasel words, is the total refusal to even say what this is all about. As if saying the words gave them power, which is dialectically speaking, exactly what silence does. It imparts fear and wonder when you can regulate what can and can't be said. Which you can't, by the way, beyond those who will put up with it in demonstration of their fealty to the mantle of revolution, rhetorically claimed.

Anyway, Bob, I'll see your reality and raise you a check. Lyrics on the link.

Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis

Mike Ely, a life-long communist and former editor of the RCP's press, has released a major polemic on Avakian's supposed "New Synthesis" and the failures of the RCP to become a leading party of revolution in the USA. I'll hold off on my own commentary by way of introduction... but discussion has already taken off on Ely's new Kasama website. For anyone working to build a revolutionary movement in the United States, this is among the most thoughtful, engaged analyses you will find on such efforts over the last few decades. It is no "so long to all that" – rather, it is a call to begin the "audacious task". 

Download – Nine Letters to Our Comrades: Getting Beyond Avakian's New Synthesis (PDF)

The Shock Doctrine

Imperialism, local reaction and the duty of communists

The following polemic was passed on to me recently by a sometimes contributor to this blog and veteran of the North American anti-imperialist and communist movements. Included are an abridged version of a recent report  from the Communist Party of Iran (MLM) and a critical response. They raise the important question of what are the tasks of Iranian communists in the event of a US invasion and occupation of Iran. The CPI(MLM) argues that the "primary contradiction" and focus of struggle must be with the reactionary Islamic Republic, the critical response argues that it should be with US imperialism.

The implications of the discussion are all around us.

Politics in an age of fantasy

Stephen Duncombe writes in the premier issue of Turbulence, a new theoretical journal-cum-newspaper that:

The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The left and right have switched roles – the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. The political progeny of the protestors who proclaimed, “Take your desires for reality” in May of 1968, were now counseling the reversal: take reality for your desires. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

I have to say I know what he's talking about. From defending the evaporating, fetid gains of the welfare state or the ongoing acceptance by people who should know better of the Clintonian urge to do the Bushie thing right, large sectors of the "left" have become more conservative than those they ostensibly oppose. The fault of this, if where it lies is so simple, may reside less in a lack of the urge to dream than in the inculcated, now naturalized habits of American anti-communism – those who refuse to even say the world socialism shouldn't be shocked when the movements they lead and participate in settle for a refracted politics of fear and permanent, if glorious, resistance. After all, isn't "yelling from the mountaintop" just another word for vanguardism? Or, is it only a dread vanguard when there's the expectation that people will listen, be transformed and themselves take responsibility for others?

I only ask these questions because it seems like the stalemate in the movement of movements has settled into a discomforting middle age. One quick note: Turbulence makes it's entire issues immediately available as a PDF. In other words, they write so that people read! Here's to hoping more publications see the wisdom in this. Click on the cover to get the entire issue as a PDF formatted for letter-size paper.

We must name the system

This dramatic reading of Paul Potter's rightly famous speech is part of a wonderful series of public performances called the Port Huron Project re-enacting the signal flares of the American New Left. It's striking how contemporary they sound, and why, really, 1968 neither failed nor won. It is in more ways than one would wish the terrain of the battle we are still fighting. It's easier than you think to engage in free speech. You just have to do it. Read an interview with project creator Mark Tribe.

Finkelstein case: Urgent need to right wrongs at DePaul University

The following is an open letter from Prof. Bill Martin, a tenured professor of philosophy at DePaul University, site of the recent fight over Norman Finkelstein's tenure  and the very ability of intellectuals to engage in work that runs counter to the dominant politic.

"Two things that are very simple to understand need to be said up front. First, you cannot deny tenure to a professor because she or he takes a political stand that you do not like, agree with, or that is going to incur the disapprobation and wrath of some group. Yes, frankly, I think a professor who is an outright racist or misogynist or anti-gay bigot ought to be removed from the university (though even here there have to be procedures, and judgments cannot be based on whims, innuendo, or the self-promoting agendas of powerful persons or groups), but that is not what is going on here. Second, you cannot deny tenure to a professor simply for a rhetorical style that you do not like. A person cannot be denied tenure simply because you find his or her rhetoric 'inflammatory.'”

Akil Bomani's Authoring a Culture

Okay, so I confess that as a New Yorker, the fact that "Burningman" was an over-priced participatory arts orgy in the Nevada desert didn't quite register with my hard head. Every year, around this time, I get a surge of traffic from folks looking for information or reports on the Burningman festival. Haha! Bet you didn't see this one coming! I was just a man on fire... Adopting the Burningman pen name was only a play on the translation of my family name. In any case, I thought I'd post a link for ya'll burners to a scientific essay about the art of revolution. What does that mean?

Read it!

Notes on XXIst Century Socialism

[Thus far my favorite critical piece on events in Venezuela. For a surprisingly robust, open and religious(!) exploration of the same theme, check out this speech by the outgoing Defense Minister... a long time friend of Hugo. — JB]

by Bromma
from threewayfight

Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, recently announced the arrival of XXIst Century Socialism. This declaration, although greeted with great enthusiasm, left a residue of confusion. Since Chavez didn't discuss XXIst Century Socialism during his recent Presidential campaign, and since there are virtually no public theoretical documents defining this new Socialist era, its precise features are not always clear.

Fortunately, Chavez has appointed a committee, well stocked with international supporters, to come up with appropriate explanatory documents. In the meantime, we can best understand the contours of XXIst Century Socialism by examining it as it actually functions in the real world. Practice is the true test of theory; after several years of Chavez's leadership, we can readily detect the broad outlines of this innovative Socialism.

There appear to be several critical new features of the new XXIst Century Socialist breakthrough. We will review some of the most important:

First of all, XXIst Century Socialism does not require a revolution. This comes as a great relief to Socialists around the world, and will surely encourage many new Socialists to step forward.

Declaration to Reaffirm the Significance and Relevance of the Anti-Revisionist Struggle and the GPCR

This international declaration, signed by several significant international communist parties including the Communist Party of India (Maoist), was originally issued on May 1, 2007. I am here including it to give communists in the USA a sense of how some of these discussions are playing out... Unfortunately, there is no organized national grouping in the USA that currently sees the need to keep these in circulation.

We, the undersigned Marxist-Leninist, Mao Zedong Thought and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations, hereby issue this declaration to reaffirm the significance and relevance of the struggle against modern revisionism starting in 1956 in opposition to the revisionist content of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956 leading to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and continuing after the bourgeoisie seized power in China in 1976. We do so after one year of activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the anti-revisionist struggle and renewing our commitment to pursue this struggle.

A hundred-year argument in 5 minutes

My buddy LeftSpot found this gem from Reds on YouTube. It highlights an argument between two old friends, Jack Reed and Emma Goldman during the hard times of War Communism in the early Soviet Union.

"It's just the beginning, EG. It's not happening the way we thought it would. It's not happening the way we wanted it to. But it's happening..."

"I do not recognize myself anymore"

Found poem.

"Actually, everything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax.  Ostensibly, the elected Assembly is the one which reflects public opinion most faithfully.  But there is only one sort of public opinion, and it is serial. 

"The imbecility of the mass media, the government pronouncements, the biased or incomplete reporting in the newspapers -- all this comes to seek us out in our serial solitude and load us down with wooden ideas, formed out of what we think others will think.  Deep within us there are undoubtedly demands and protests, but because they are not echoed by others, they wither away and leave us with a 'bruised spirit' and a feeling of frustration.  So when we are called to vote, I, the Other, have my head stuffed with petrified ideas which the press or television has piled up there.  They are serial ideas which are expressed through my vote, but they are not my ideas. 

"The institutions of bourgeois democracy have split me apart:  there is me and there are all the Others they tell me I am (a Frenchman, a soldier, a worker, a taxpayer, a citizen, and so on).  This splitting-up forces us to live with what psychiatrists call a perpetual identity crisis.  Who am I, in the end?  An Other identical with all the others, inhabited by these impotent thoughts which come into being everywhere and are not actually thought anywhere?  Or am I myself?  And who is voting?  I do not recognize myself any more."

• —Jean-Paul Sartre's Elections, A Trap for Fools

Nazim Hikmet: On Living

Living is no laughing matter :
you must live with great seriousness
                           like a squirrel, for example -
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                           I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter :
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                     your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory,
    in your white coat and safety glasses,
    you can die for people -
     even for people whose faces you have never seen,
     even though you know living
     is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
                     because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

More poetry from Nazim Hikmet

U.S. Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism… and the Need for Another Way

by Sunsara Taylor, Revolution

As the U.S.'s crimes against humanity in the Middle East mount, it is of tremendous importance for people in the U.S. to honestly confront and rise to the profound challenges and responsibilities before us in bringing this to a halt. In this spirit, I welcomed the argument made by Hadas Thier and Aaron Hess in the Socialist Worker on April 20, 2007 entitled Standing up to Islamophobia, even while I find their central arguments to not only be wrong, but harmful.

I do not doubt that Thier and Hess want to oppose U.S. wars of aggression and their accompanying assault on Muslims, Arabs and South Asians living in the U. S. But they end up arguing for an approach that will neither meet the actual challenges of opposing the U.S. “crusade,” nor bring forward new, truly liberating possibilities here and around the world. They end up in this unfortunate place through the use of bad logic, flawed methodology, and a duck-from-unpleasant-realities epistemology (method for arriving at what is true).

The Activist Top Ten for 2007

Brought to you by History Is A Weapon:

1) There is no purchasing the revolution or surfing to it online. While this might seem like a no-brainer to most, the tendency to reduce social change to individual action penetrates even the sharpest minds. So while we might be too cool for the (red) scam, we can still get caught up in the American Apparel branding. Which brings us to...

2) A lifetime of purity is worth a good ten minutes of coalition. What's it worth if you believe all the right things but can't work with anyone who doesn't? People getting shot at in Iraq don't care if you're working with democrats, nationalists, liberal reform groups, or radical communists if it stops the war. Jerry Falwell and the Chamber of Commerce may not agree on banking regulation and sermon subjects (or they might...), but they rule because united they stand, divided we fall. We don't need to drink together, but we have to let bygones be bygones and keep our eyes on the prize.

3) Even a vigil a day won't keep the system at bay. A moral argument may convince regular people to join us, but the empire isn't rhetorical. Politicians and the various institutions of war, from Exxon to the Ivy Leagues, don't give a whit about our moral arguments: they know their goal and they've made calculations to achieve it. Getting them to change their actions means getting them to change those calculations: politicians want to stay in office and corporations want to maintain profits. Threaten their primary needs and they won't just listen, they'll respond.

Carl Dix: 50 Reasons

Impeachment: What's the word?

Far-fetched? Unlikely? Liberal? Won't impeaching Bush just leave us with Cheney? Didn't Pelosi say it's "off the table?"

Planned for February 17 and 18, the Emergency Summit to Impeach Bush for War Crimes in New York,  is a must-attend event.

Sponsored by World Can't Wait, Progressive Democrats of America, Troops Out Now, DemocracyRising, Ramsey Clarke's ImpeachBush.org, After Downing Street and the Green Party of the United States – it's looking to be a movement that won't be deniable. For any activists reading this, there's an open call for workshops — so if you know what the movement is missing, here's your chance to change the game.

Saving the summit talk for the gathering, I did want to bring together some of the available writing on impeachment and what people's thinking is. On the jump, I've posted the entirety of Howard Zinn's recent article Impeachment by the People.

Also worth a read, on both the urgency of the situation and the strategy of impeachment:
Voices for Impeachment | Voices Speak Out | US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) on Oct. 5 | Deborah Sweet: Presentation to WCW National Meeting 1/13/07 | Liz Holtzman: The Case for  Impeachment | Fact Sheet on the Military Commissions Act | Why Demand Impeachment Now?  | Sunsara Taylor: Why the Democrats Won't Stand and Fight (and Why YOU Must) | The New Investigation Season | Nader: Talking About Impeachment | 4 Things You Can Do to Drive Out the Bush Regime

Capitalism, Revisionism & Revolution: Avakian's "Three Alternative Worlds"

The Bob Avakian Show continues full steam. In the latest edition of Revolution, the publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, they've printed a transcript of a talk that opens up the question of agency and socialism. What is, after all the difference between a social-welfare state and socialism as the dictatorship of the proletariat?

For the generations coming up with no living memory of 20th Century socialism and reared on the (neo-Conservative) end of history narrative, it's worth digging into how revolutionary communism developed in opposition to the welfare/police state model of "socialism" that was unfortunately not just a cariacture.

It's not just the ruling class and its courtiers that want to equate revisionism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it's also every shade of opportunist you can imagine. Anything that turns the specter of the future into the ghost of the past...

"...the rights of the people cannot be reduced to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically, and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses of people."

Anyone with links to other leaders discussing this kind of vision, I'm all ears.

We — featuring the words of Arundhati Roy

       

This is a public service announcement... Some anonymous pirates took Arundhati Roy's historic Come September speech and adapted it for the web with video and music to illustrate her plea for our common humanity. We is not about Roy so much as all of us, and the place we find ourselves at the start of this century. We is the future of agit/prop. Words of genuine wisdom, song and movement — anonymous and catalytic. Undeniable. This is our one and only life.

Free for distribution as a stream or download,(100mb, wmv), a $5 DVD is also available at WeRoy.org

Celebration and concern among Maoists regarding developments in Nepal

No revolution in the twenty-first century can be propelled forward without taking proper lesson from the experiences of great revolutions and counter-revolutions of the twentieth century. From this point of view, our party has been giving plenty of importance to the questions of defense, application and development of the fundamental principles of MLM. —Prachanda

Major institutions from the international communist movement are beginning to speak on developments in Nepal.

In the interests of gathering a developed assessment of what is up and to facilitate discussion:

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist): The Worker #10
This is the most comprehensive political and strategic statement so far from the CPN-M, published in their party magazine and distributed internationally. It includes a number of articles analyzing domestic and international issues, from leaders and politically allied organizations from the region and the RIM. These articles have been posted to the web by an independent Maoist collective in the United States.

A World to Win News Service (CoRIM): Nepal Maoists and Government Sign Peace Agreement
This careful explication of the terms of the peace agreement has a notably restrained tone. It comes from the CPN-M's comrades in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, of which they are a participating member. This article is posted in full below.

People's March: Exclusive Interview with Communist Party of India (Maoist) spokesperson on Nepal Developments
Dated Aug. 6, 2006, this critical assessment of the peace accords comes from one of the CPN-M's closest companion organizations. Leading a people's war in neighboring India, the CPI (Maoist) is a co-participant with the Nepalese in the CCOMPOSSA, a political coordinating body of South Asian Maoists.

Analytical Monthly Review: People's Victory in Nepal, U.S. and Indian Reactions
Short analysis from the Indian companion magazine to Monthly Review here in the USA.

In the comments below, a comrade has posted a joint press statement from Aug. 8 by the Communist party of Nepal (Maoist) and Communist Party of India (Maoist) on the recent debates between two parties. They have also released statement condemning the brutal attack on Lebanon.

Stan Goff Follows the Logic of the "Refoundation" Logic

What is a website like this to do? For regular readers that's obviously been an issue for me. My hope has been to create a discussion board for the broader communist trend in a time of tremendous political crisis. I don't think that "crisis" is mainly in socialism: but in the whole creaking, bloody edifice of capitalism itself, a crisis that has most certainly extended to those sections of the socialist movement that do not accept, or cannot honestly conceive, of a revolutionary break with the existing social relations.

Organized, self-described communist forces have tended to do one of two things. Either they pragmatically tailor their politics to what they take as their immediate needs, or they play the lonely beacon — shining the light into the conceptual darkness of the "masses." The pragmatists lose the forest for the trees, and more often than not themselves along the way. The vanguardists confuse the Forest for its dialectical ecology. And the system has stood through this, if not impervious to resistance – still standing, still dangerous, still wasting lives by the millions.

I've never believed that the conscious, active, vanguard element is fundamentally separate from the "masses." (Self-)Consciousness itself is not an alienation. I have to work. I've been a waiter and a glorified typesetter. Sometimes I've also led and participated in social movements; felt a glow from the people in struggle, like Etienne, the hero of Emile Zola's classic novel Germinal. My old friend Nilda, who introduced me to Wu Tang, also taught me a simple, important lesson: "you're in the mix, kid."

We are in the mix.

Why say all this? ...By way of introduction to Stan Goff's renunciation of Leninism as "doctrine." Goff has been one of the more interesting Marxist-identified writers in the US for a minute. A former Special Forces soldier, he served in Haiti, Somolia and Colombia, writing a chilling memoir of the former. Like a modern Smedley Butler, he went from being a "racketeer of capitalism" to a dedicated opponent not just "imperialism," but each of the systems of oppression that feed each other. In particular, he has dedicated substantial attention to questions of patriarchy. In one line he summed up the link between militarism and the domination of women in a way that helped me understand a lot: "Perfect masculinity is sociopathic." Indeed.

Renunciations are important — even when I disagree, strongly. It's necessary to reject "doctrine" if you want to think, let alone accomplish something. For those who view Marxism as a monolith, or conflate a scientific method with a search for purity, it is this same rejection of orthodoxy and dogmatism that has led me not to reject Marxism for the "sins of revisionism," as Lenin put it, but to engage what Avakian calls an "epistemological break."

There is no doubt the Soviet Union created a "doctrine" of Marxism-Leninism. They gave PhDs in it for crissakes. Sects have come and gone, it's true,  be they Trots or Mao-Maos (or Hoxjaites or New Americans or anti-authoritarians). There is also no doubt that the Marxist-Leninist party is the single most important "movement technology" to ever be developed. Where there are revolutions, that seek socialism and not just a re-shuffling of the same deck, these are the organizations that do it.

The reason for this isn't magical, or related to any orthodoxy or doctrine. In this, Goff always failed to understand what Marxism is. [Hint: It's not a normative vocabulary binding disparate reform struggles.]

I've posted Goff's piece in full on the continuation of this post to see what other folks think about it, and to comment myself when I've thought on it a bit. I hope those who respond do so having read what he's written. 

On Your Own Terms: An open letter to activists regarding World Can't Wait

Jed Brandt writes:

This letter is a personal appeal for your active involvement with World Can't Wait, on your own terms, starting now.

Momentum is building for the Oct. 5 protests, but many activists have yet to step up -- or even investigate for themselves the scope of this effort. The lull in the protest movement since the start of the war, exactly as the population has turned against this disaster is more confusing than it should be and, I'd argue, related to a passive orientation towards the elections.

Let's stop waiting. Let's stop pretending like Bush will change his mind or the Democrats will "grow a spine." They have backbone, but they don't as a party represent us. After literally years of this same wishing game, we have to learn the lessons that are there in plain sight. That's right. I'm using the imperative "we have to." We have to act consciously, resist, and stop politically pussyfooting around.

Too many of us have been involved in day-to-day activism that isn't taking into consideration the political root of the current situation. Massive popular revulsion at the legalization of torture,  surveillance without warrant -- and Bush's recent legislation exempting himself and his cabinet from war crimes prosecution must be galvanized, mobilized, given tangible expression. This requires experienced activists, media workers, community-based organizers. It requires that we put distrust aside, and work like what we do matters.

If you are not now involved, please question why. What is holding "radical" movements from radical action? It certainly isn't that people aren't ready to move. Hardly. The problem as I see it is in the habits of the organized left and its refusal to get with the times, leave comfort zones and challenge all the orthodoxies of political passivity.

The State of the Movement Is Everything

The launch of Red Flags is still a few weeks off, but in the meantime, something must-read does come across the wire. Andy Cornell and Dan Berger have shared their assessment of the current period and what is portends for anti-authoritarian activists. (By way of Kazembe who just launched what promises to be the blog of the year.)

Ten Questions for Movement Building and Reflections on the Current Period has a "movement-centered" orientation that ontologically equates organized political parties and groupings on the revolutionary left with sectarianism, no matter their actual practice -- but lacks some of the knuckle-headed shallowness that generally passes for original thinking in these circles.

Both are dedicated anti-racists, anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists. Both reject Leninism and feel little need to even engage what it is. And in this, they are typical of activists around the USA at this point in time. I post this not because I agree much at all with what it says, but rather because it is honest, is the product of hundreds of discussions around the country, and, perhaps most importantly — because they actually want to see some motion in the movement is everything.

The traditional anti-authoritarian mix of social-democracy and anarchism is fully evident here, with serious objectives not discussed -- and the myriad obvious ways that it has limited resistance movements (from within) is not addressed.

While Dan and Andy look to Latin America as an exception to this rule -- it is the very proof in the pudding. See Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia — and, yes, Mexico. If the proletariat cannot rule, according to the orthodoxies here, then it would seem the bourgeoisie is always up for the part.

In the same way that Berger's history of the Weather Underground takes their conceits at face value, this joint statement is rigorous only within the narrow limits it sets itself: anyone who has alternate answers to these questions is categorically denounced as "sectarian," fixated on "correct line," while the very line they agree on is always implicit. Quite a trick when looked at from outside, disheartening when its implications are grasped. And, it only works so long as proletarian politics don't have an organic presence... As Avakian remembered Lenin observing, anarchism remains payment for the sins of revisionism.

I would argue that the responsibility for this lies in the failures of the communist movement to fully break with what are genuinely authoritarian and reactionary ideological habits we've inherited. That revolutionary-minded thinkers such as these two remain divorced from the exciting developments among revolutionary communists is a tragedy. They continue to treat MLM as little more than a sectarian tic, which at this point I suspect is honest ignorance, and in so doing limit both themselves and the "range of the possible" among countless radicals looking to break on through.

Battle Cry For Theocracy! Meet the Shock Troops of the Christian Right

Sunsara Taylor is sounding the cavalry bugle, and you better listen! In today's CounterPunch, the New York-based initiator of World Can't Wait lays out what is happening with BattleCry, the Christian Fascist youth movement led by the Pharisees from on high... She already debated Battle Cry leader Ron Luce on Fox, but this isn't a debate. It's war.

If you've been waiting until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army" to get alarmed, wait no longer.

In recent weeks, Battle Cry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit and this weekend they plan to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

They claim their religion and values are under attack but, amidst spectacular lightshows, hummers, Navy Seals, and military imagery on stage, it is Battle Cry that has declared war on everyone else! Their leader, Ron Luce, insists: "This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent--the 'forceful' ones--will lay hold of the kingdom."

No joke, people. Read the full piece on the link.

      

The Israel Lobby: Stepping on the "Third Rail" of American Politics

Anyone who has done international solidarity work knows that to even mention Palestine is to alert a well-funded, aggressive and unscrupulous cadre of Zionist attack dogs... and face their apparently unaccountable fury. I don't mean to use harsh rhetoric, but there is no other way to describe the Dershowitz / Horowitz / ADL  types who defend Israel by tarring any opponent of that settler-state, or even critics of its most flagrant crimes, such as occupation, ethnic cleansing, torture, official state racism, as anti-Semitic.

For those on the left, committed to internationalism, this is enough to scare off a fair amount of people from even engaging an open discussion. My Name Is Rachel Corrie couldn't even play at the New York Theatre Workshop because of the tremendous fear Zionist attacks generate. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney stood up, she saw her right-wing opponent receive massive amounts of funds from Zionists to push her out of Congress. That's real power, from a real sector. What are grassroots organizations to do when they face foundations and a political class that openly suppress principled support for Palestine?

The recent imbroglio around the (decidedly non-radical, not left) Harvard study, which alleges U.S. support for Israel is "almost entirely related to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the Israel Lobby,'" alongside the indictment of leading members of AIPAC for passing US intelligence informally to Israel, has brought the issue of why it is that the U.S. "unconditionally supports" Israel.

Read: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.pdf | The Lobby: It's Not Either/Or

Or just follow the link below for a few more ramblings...