A Heatwave Solstice

Diesel the Donkey, Tectonic Shifts among Global Powers, and Reflections for the Solidarity Movement

Spring is ending with another record-breaking heatwave, as the heat dome moves from the Gulf of Mexico to encompass much of North America. In Catalunya, my home for 16 years, one of the worst droughts on record has eased up a little with some recent rains, but it hasn’t been enough to restore the water table, all the crops and the trees and the animals lost… Everywhere you look, any place on the planet that might be meaningful and important to you, the signs are clear.

Capitalism and the State are already failed systems, but they won’t disappear overnight. The apocalypse has already started, and it will last for generations. We have some power to determine how bad it gets, how many of us survive, whether those responsible remain in charge. But we only have that power if we choose it, if we build it up ourselves. The instruments of change and reform that they offer us are not the tools we need.

The news briefs this week are focused on the contest between great powers and how this is affecting the situation in Palestine, as well as reflections on the movement for solidarity with Palestine. But I thought we could start with some comforting reading, a little reminder that this world is beautiful, it’s meaningful, and it’s worth fighting for.

The priests of capitalism will often spout off about how competition—fucking others over to promote our own self-interest—is natural, but this is sheer ignorance. They can cherrypick partial examples to back their claim, but they’re speaking from a place of antagonism, detachment, and distance from their ecosystems and their own species. They haven’t humbly listened and watched and paid attention to the operative patterns of life on this planet. They haven’t done their research into the available data. They actively erase the cultures and experiences of the majority of human societies. And they don’t really understand what they mean by “individual” or “self-interest” and how it’s a culturally and historically constructed concept that differs widely from one society to the next.

Anyways, I was supposed to be sharing some beautiful stories that contradict the dominant narrative about what life is supposed to be like. So here we go:

Diesel the donkey went missing 5 years ago after getting scared and bolting into the woods. The humans who took care of him searched and searched but never found a trace. It turns out, he was healthy, happy, and sound… living with the herd of elk who adopted him. Since he appeared to be “living his best life,” the humans he had previously lived with have no plans to recapture him.

Can you spot the mutual aid in this picture?

According to a strictly Darwinian analysis, it makes little to no sense for one species to adopt a member of another species. But in fact, it happens all the time. The priests of capitalism love talking about cuckoos laying their eggs in the nests of other birds to do the raising for them (maximal genetic profit vs. minimal cost of care), but in fact animals will frequently raise the offspring of another member of their own species, or even raise young from completely different species. Gorillas and bonobos routinely raise orphans, including even the children of other groups, different species of dolphins and whales have been documented numerous times raising the young of other aquatic mammal species, when given the opportunity cats will nurse dog pups or squirrel pups, animals in captivity will frequently develop cross-species friendships (like the case of an orphaned hippo and a 130 year old giant tortoise), and there are dozens of documented cases of human children being raised by monkeys or primates, wolves, bears, dogs, and domesticated animals like sheep and goats.

The very concept of competitive self-interest obscures one of the principal dynamics at work in nature (and nature includes human societies). That principal is called mutual aid.

Other assumptions around human uniqueness or human supremacy are crumbling as well. Just a couple examples for some relaxing reading: An orangutan in the wild was documented treating an injury with plant medicine.

Also, while it’s been known that many species of birds and monkeys call or refer to other members of their social group by imitating that individual’s song or voice, it has now been documented that elephants name one another. Comparing hundreds of audio recordings of elephants addressing other members of their herd, biologists noticed that in their low frequency rumblings elephants make unique combinations of sounds to name a particular family member. Elephant names don’t appear to be any kind of imitation of what the named elephant sounds like, anymore than human names are imitations. (The NPR article also has an audio option, if you prefer listening, as well as links to the original scientific article in Nature and other similar research.)

It’s a beautiful world! Let’s fight for it. And fighting effectively means… better understanding those who are destroying it.

Baked fields, dying earth, earth that can be loved and restored. Central Catalunya.

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Newsbriefs: Geopolitics and the Solidarity Movement

A few months ago I offered this prognosis on the current juncture of geopolitics:

Geopolitics for 2024

I want to offer some updates.

After 1989, NATO seemed like the undisputed world leader, but that is no longer the case. In 2018, in Diagnostic of the Future, I wrote that in the future we would be able to look back and identify 2018 as the year the US lost its global hegemony. Current events continue to bear out how that moment was a historical turning point. We are moving into a definitively multipolar world, with powers hostile or at the very least disloyal to NATO, willing to play multiple sides, becoming bolder and better positioned.

China continues to grow stronger and more effective as a capitalist counterpower. Xi Jinping, the Chinese head of state, has accomplished an improbable task by centralizing power under his direct control without undermining the economic, political, and military basis of his power. Starting in 2012, he cracked down on corruption in the local, regional, and national leadership of the Party, prosecuting over two million officials. Between 2012 and 2017, he amped up the government’s censorship and control of the internet, creating one of the most thorough regimes of information and discourse control in the world, while still developing an internet and social media landscape that is highly profitable. Next, Xi went after China’s billionaires and brought the banks and real estate developers to heel, slowing growth but avoiding the sort of bubbles that were beginning to pop in other major economies. Last year he purged several military leaders, and this year created a new branch of the Chinese military in a major reorganization designed to both modernize and centralize its war-fighting capabilities. From experts cited by CNN: “the reorganization enhances Xi’s direct control over the PLA’s strategic capabilities and underscores China’s ambitions in better mastering AI and other new technologies to prepare for what it calls the “intelligentized warfare” of the future.”

China’s increasing aggressiveness has certainly provoked a response, with India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries moving much closer to the US. However, considering that China also continues to strengthen its own alliances and isn’t backing down on flash points like Taiwan and the South China Sea, all this means is that the stakes are higher, aggressive pressure tactics will be rewarded, so conflict becomes more likely.

With Russia in the midst of a redoubled offensive at multiple points across its 1,000km frontline against Ukraine, Russia and North Korea have signed a mutual defense agreement. Both are nuclear powers, each in a state of conflict with multiple US allies, and both are allied with China, which essentially boxes the US in, a couple moves away from checkmate. In a limited proxy war (e.g. NATO arming Ukraine, Turkey arming Azerbaijan), Russia is likely to end up outmaneuvered, eroded, even humiliated. But given that Russia is facing an existential threat, at risk of losing its status as a powerful nation-state, the only sensible strategy from Moscow’s perspective is to get more aggressive, widen the conflicts, and destabilize the global order that has disproportionately favored NATO countries for so long.

If more forceful measures against Russia or Belarus might provoke North Korean attacks against South Korea or Japan, the conflict could quickly expand beyond the ability of NATO and the US’s Indo-Pacific alliances to contain it, especially since China would either take advantage of a widening conflict to improve its position against regional rivals, or throw its considerable weight behind Russia and North Korea to limit NATO’s possible responses. China’s position in these brewing conflicts is especially important since many US capitalists and the political and economic leadership of the EU (i.e. the rest of NATO) favor a working business relationship with China. They don’t want to isolate China, the way they’re willing to isolate Russia or North Korea.

The US has its hands tied when engaging in any brinksmanship or aggressive negotiations, whereas the situation favors aggressiveness from the Russian bloc, from China, and from non-aligned countries (of which there are a growing number, like Saudi Arabia, arguably Turkey, or key countries like the Philippines that are always just an election away from allying with China or Russia).

Another destabilizing factor is a key US ally that has proven incapable of recognizing its own limits or acting in a strategically prudent manner. Even more destabilizing is the fact the US has proven incapable of disciplining that ally: Israel.

In past newsletters I’ve written about the geopolitics of support for Israel; how in the past the immense military and economic support from the US and UK for Israel made geopolitical sense whereas now it contradicts their interests and destabilizes their position as world leaders; nonetheless they are unlikely to change course because they are too wrapped up in their own propaganda machines and prejudices to have a clear view of their interests, their capabilities, and their limits.

The greatest threat to the geopolitical status of all three countries—the US, UK, and Israel—is currently presented by their own governments.

The more Israel pushes forward its genocidal war on multiple fronts, the more the US pretends to care about human rights while failing to do anything meaningful to oppose the genocide, the more hegemonic power NATO loses and the more Israel backs itself into a corner that could easily result in its total destruction, or at least a reversion to its 1948 borders.

Any Polish friends out there? Help spread this Polish translation of the newsletter “Israel is pioneering new methods of genocide”

Signs of this can be found in many places: Saudi Arabia negotiating a bilateral security deal with the US at the exclusion of Israel; Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia recognizing Palestinian statehood, with others like the UK and Australia voicing support for the idea; increasing talk of energy and arms embargoes against Israel; essential Israel ally Egypt “furious” after the IDF killed several Egyptian soldiers and unilaterally broke numerous agreements when they seized the shared border with Gaza; the Houthis sinking another ship in the Red Sea as a show of support for Gaza; and Hizbollah promising to attack Israeli ally Cyprus if Israel expands its war against Lebanon

(Background for those unfamiliar with all these names: the Houthis and Hizbollah are allies of Iran. The former hold power in most of Yemen and the latter are a militia and political organization that holds significant power in Lebanon. Israel has a long history of invading and bombarding Lebanon, and the IDF has carried out numerous massacres and acts of terrorism there. Since the beginning of the war against Gaza, Hizbollah and the IDF have been exchanging fire on a daily basis. As for Cyprus, it’s a nearby Mediterranean island where Israel has been staging some of its military operations.)

Given their overwhelming firepower, the US and Israel can pretend they don’t need to care too much about their reputations. For example, on April 13, Iran fired over 300 missiles and drones against Israel in retaliation for lethal attacks made by the IDF against the Iranian consulate in Damascus. US and Israeli media cheered breathlessly when Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system shot down 99% of those projectiles. However, the sophomoric writers at The Washington Post and Bloomberg missed the most relevant facts of the battle.

• Iran, in an act of discretion, announced their missile barrage days in advance.

• It cost Israel half a billion dollars to shoot them down. This is not a sustainable expense for them.

• It wasn’t exactly Israel that shot all these missiles down: they did it with the assistance of the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE, who collectively were responsible for downing half or even a majority of the pre-announced missiles and drones.

In other words, the US and its allies were sending a double-edged message: to Iran, that the borders of Israel and all the stolen territories it occupies are a Manginot Line that they will steadfastly defend. And to Israel, that they can’t defend themselves from Iran alone so they should probably stop acting unilaterally. Israel understood the message, given how uncharacteristically restrained and symbolic their retaliation was. By seeking deescalation, Israel strengthened Iran’s regional position and also exposed themselves to pressure or hardball negotiations in the future from the likes of more critical allies such as the UK, or semi-independent players like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

US credibility and Israeli credibility were damaged when the US and allies drew a line in the sand against an invasion of Rafah, and then did nothing when Israel invaded. Meanwhile, most reasonable observers had to admit that Israel was only engaging in negotiations for a ceasefire not in good faith but as a delaying tactic. Netanyahu wants to keep the war going to buy time before an election he is likely to lose (exposing him to criminal prosecution, not for war crimes but for corruption), and—the quiet part that no official commentators are saying out loud, but that Israeli military and political leaders openly proclaim—their end game is to kill or expel all the Palestinians. They don’t want a ceasefire because a longer and more brutal war means more steps towards total genocide.

Far more important than the words of politicians is their inability to complete their plans on the ground. Israel lost any last shred of its reputation when it invaded Rafah, plunging a million Palestinians into immediate danger of death by starvation or bombardment. Israel’s only rationale was its campaign to destroy Hamas, but even as they invaded Hamas’ “last stronghold” in Rafah, Hamas made a resurgence in northern Gaza, which the IDF claimed to have pacified months ago. Netanyahu is now losing support on the Right, where Israelis who celebrate the murder of Palestinians are upset because Netanyahu isn’t doing his genocide effectively enough.

Meanwhile, the US looked like a dinosaur when it promised to solve the humanitarian crisis by building a $320 million floating pier that could deliver aid to Gaza by boat. Aside from the fact that Israel used the aid project as a political and military lever, the US public relations stunt was a disaster. The US military unloaded cargo trucks over the pier for 5 days starting May 17, then paused and withheld the supplies for supposed security reasons. On May 25 and again on May 28, the pier was knocked out of commission by “choppy waters”. That’s right. A third of a billion dollars and this megaproject was broken by some rough waves. It’s expected to be dismantled in July.

Still pretending to be an international arbiter of justice, the US passed sanctions on June 14 against a white supremacist organization of Israeli settlers who had been blocking and attacking aid shipments heading for Gaza. However, the attempt is pretty transparent: weak sanctions against a single group of settlers, coming weeks after pretty much everyone paying attention to the war was already made aware that it was the Israeli military coordinating attacks on aid, just as they were complicit in deadly settler attacks on the West Bank. Israeli settlers, on the whole, constitute a heavily armed, highly organized white supremacist movement responsible for the murder of Palestinian children and elders on a weekly basis. Far from being “extremists” or a few bad apples, they represent the majority on at least a few key points. With Gaza facing mass starvation, two-thirds of Israelis opposed sending any humanitarian aid to the strip. They favor collective punishment, they favor famine as an instrument of warfare, they are explicitly and knowingly pro-genocide.

The truth is, Israeli society on the whole, from Right to Left, is psychologically guarded against critical reflection of their actions the same way Americans are. Most USians and Canadians (and Argentinians and Australians and white citizens of all the other settler states) believe their countries have “a right to exist,” no matter that their existence is predicated on historical and ongoing genocide. From Tel Aviv to Washington to Canberra, the mainstream institutions build historical narratives that sanitize their actual history (in the case of Israel, its founders were not the ones who fought the Nazis, they were the ones who negotiated with Nazis and continue to negotiate with neo-Nazis today). And just like all the moderate Israelis who think that the killing of a thousand soldiers, paramilitaries, and unarmed settlers justifies the deaths of 100,000 Palestinians (a realistic possible death toll for the current war, if it’s still continuing at the end of this year), the average USian or Australian also believes their lives are worth more than the lives of a hundred or a thousand racialized and colonized people.

In October 2001, 88% of people in the US and 65% of people in the UK supported an invasion of Afghanistan. It wasn’t until 2009 that the scales tipped in the US and the majority opposed the war, although evidence suggests that the more important factor was that the ongoing military operation was not effective enough at rooting out “terrorism.” The pollsters never asked this question directly, but as far as I can piece together, only a small minority believed it was wrong for the US to invade another country and slaughter large numbers of people.

For the record, on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda (non-state actors who got as much support from US-ally Saudi Arabia as from US-enemy Afghanistan) killed 2,977 people, including many janitors and secretarial workers, but also plenty of investors and military bureaucrats whose chosen daily labor was pulling in huge paychecks by managing murder and impoverishment around the world.

(I point this out because, while those who justify mass murder will never be able to help build a better world, it is worth pointing out that the attack against the Pentagon and World Trade Center was hardly “unprovoked,” similar to how the current war in Palestine precedes Hamas and precedes last October.)

The US government used those couple thousand deaths to justify starting a war that killed 220,000 people in Afghanistan and 80,000 people in Pakistan, mostly by the US and allies. Whereas the Taliban and aligned forces were responsible for roughly two-thirds of the civilian deaths caused by direct fire, the US and allies were responsible for the larger share of civilian deaths: those caused by conditions of famine and disease brought on by the invasion. US forces also engaged in systematic torture, long term poisoning through the mass use of depleted uranium munitions, and the deployment of death squads that killed children and suspected opponents of the US-backed government.

The US also used the 2,977 deaths of September 11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, even though the Iraqi government under Hussein had been a much more consistent enemy of al-Qaeda than the US was. After all, the CIA and Pentagon financed, armed, and supported the group in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and gave intentional support to the spread of similar groups in West Asia, from Iraq to Israel, in the ‘00s). The US already caused an estimated million deaths in Iraq in the ‘90s through its massive bombing and embargo, a figure acknowledged and deemed “worth it” by Secretary of State Madeline Albright. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, deemed “justified” by a narrow majority of the US population, led to a death toll “much higher” than 300,000 people. An accurate estimate may never be available, since occupation forces did their best to keep deaths from being reported.

To counter a common misconception: the US public cannot be portrayed as innocent sheep who were misled by the mainstream media and government peddling lies about Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction. Politicians and all the major media were in fact spreading those lies, they’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and I hope to live to see the day in which they get treated like the mass-murdering nazis they are. But, the truth about the falsified WMD claims was already being reported before the US invaded. It wasn’t getting as much air time, but it was out there. And if people are willing to support a major war without taking ten minutes to research and inform themselves, then the blood is on their hands too.

So, given the current genocide in Palestine, it’s necessary to name that nearly the entirety of Israeli society is complicit. But let’s not single them out. The US (and to a large extent the UK) used the killing of fewer than 3,000 people (many of whom were themselves professional killers) to justify killing approximately one million people.

Remembering the invasion of Iraq is useful for another reason as well, because the US/UK invasion was preceded by the largest protests in world history, which were exclusively nonviolent in most cities. And they did absolutely nothing to stop or slow down the war machine: in fact, in many places, people got their hopes up believing the size of the protests mattered, because the falsified histories of past movements taught them that nonviolence worked. But when they saw the futility of their actions, the antiwar movement collapsed, except in places where people could engage in meaningful, effective resistance, like the port blockade movement on the West Coast.

The anti-war movement did almost nothing that helped stop or ease the death and suffering being inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s important for the current solidarity movement to grow stronger and wiser as the genocide continues unabated in Palestine.

First off, that means not granting any credibility to the forms of protest that blew up and fizzled out in 2003. The most salient features of that kind of movement are:

• self-policing and an insistence on strict, exclusive nonviolence

• Left unity “coalitions” controlled by an opaque mix of vanguardist cults like the PSL, Stalinist front groups like ANSWER, and NGOs linked to the Democratic Party (or Labor Party, or Socialist Party, depending on the country) or big donors like George Soros, Rob McKay, David Rockefeller Jr., and Bill Gates

• focusing our protests at the media and at government—as though they were run by people with hearts and a capacity for empathy, care, and reflection—instead of physically stopping or destroying the infrastructure and machinery needed to wage war

It is no coincidence that as people give up on peaceful protests, as encampments increasingly embrace self-defense against the police, and with encampments, building takeovers, and acts of sabotage spreading, the mainstream media freeze out any mention of the Palestinian solidarity movement. When people rely on the media, the media can make anything or anyone disappear. The crux of the matter is, we need to do an end run around both mainstream media and social media by strengthening our infrastructures of counterinformation and by becoming so disruptive that people stop staring at their screens and come back to the world. Until we have that capacity for disruption, you can help overcome the wall of silence by getting the word out. Read more here, or if you prefer listening, a podcast on the same topic. And then share!

(And don’t forget, international solidarity is infinitely more effective when we have comrades on the ground who can tell us what they’re experiencing and what their needs are! Here’s an account from a medical volunteer in Palestine.)

In the campus encampments, there was a rapid process of collective learning as many students quickly shifted from engaging in negotiations with campus administrations in good faith, to rejecting such negotiations as a bad faith tactic for pacifying movements. (I love how candid this CNN article is in acknowledging that there is an actual playbook that universities use for student protests, developed from the accumulated institutional knowledge of decades of protest management, and that the playbook recommends negotiating with protesters as a delaying tactic: just wait them out because the semester will end and soon enough they’ll go home. What a coincidence that the Israeli government is also engaging in ceasefire negotiations that never seem to get anywhere...)

Nonetheless, on the whole I don’t think the movement did enough to learn from and connect with past struggles, or to make sure that non-students, older people, people with disabilities, Palestinians not connected to any NGO or party, and people breaking out of the failed framework of media-driven civil disobedience could participate actively and meaningfully in many encampments and protests.

Here in northeast Ohio, those tensions gave rise to an Open Letter to the Encampments and Protests in Support of Palestine, written by two anarchists, one Palestinian and the other white. The PSL and other vanguardists attempted to discredit the Open Letter by claiming it was written by outside agitators, and grossly misrepresenting what it said (which was effective, as many people on social media who never read the letter began circulating the PSL’s claims). Among other people, there was a certain amount of fear or discomfort around airing criticisms openly, which leads to a useful conversation. Does criticism violate solidarity? Obviously, I think the ability to communicate informed and respectful criticism is a vital component of solidarity. This second open letter explores how our movements view conflict, communication, solidarity, and unity. Maybe these will be useful for similar debates that broke out where you live?

As always, the conversation continues. And in honor of that conversation, I want to share some worries that a Jewish comrade shared with me: how in addition to the horror of the ongoing genocide, there has also been an increase in antisemitism in the Left, and even amongst anarchists (who, as anarchists, shouldn’t engage in binary thinking, and who historically have been particularly strong in the Jewish labor movement and have also frequently shared the role of scapegoats and exiles, as in the case of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and so many others, cursed by the mainstream as anarchists and as Jews when they were deported from the US in 1919).

I wish it weren’t necessary to say this, but Israel can define itself as a Jewish state without its opponents defining Jewish people as pro-Israel (remember, the vast majority of Zionists worldwide are antisemitic Christian evangelists). We can criticize Zionism and the ongoing genocide without circulating any antisemitic tropes (remember, the good Christians and secular atheists of the US were far more bloodthirsty and unrestrained in Afghanistan and Iraq). And we can validate the Palestinian people’s need for armed struggle, self-defense, and counterattack without justifying the death of children or placing Hamas beyond critique (remember, the IDF and Mossad helped create and empower Hamas, while also buying off the PLO, because they preferred fighting against right wing fundamentalists instead of human rights-respecting secular internationalists who were adjacent to anticapitalism).

In conclusion, a few words from a Jewish activist participating in the Passover Seder protest in NYC this April: “Judaism is a beautiful, thousands-year-old tradition, and Israel is a 76-year-old colonial apartheid state.”

Catalunya photo courtesy of John