I don’t often talk about how mad I am. I don’t often talk about how mad I am, because talking often about how mad I am prevents me from speaking clearly and rationally. I want to speak clearly and rationally. There is so much need for speaking clearly and rationally amid the endless streams of waste and filth polluting our public discourse.

But I can’t speak clearly and rationally at the expense of morality. Morality often begins with a feeling. The Gospels tell us of Jesus looking on the poor — he could hear and smell their misery — and he was “moved with pity.” But another way of putting it, another way of translating σπλαγχνισθεὶς, is that the rabbi felt compassion “in his guts.”

If you’re like me, your gut is telling you that so much is wrong. Your gut is telling you that so much is wrong and that so many people are ignoring, overlooking or knowingly rationalizing so much injustice in our country. I don’t mean to suggest anger with an unfair world. I don’t mean to advocate anger with the human condition. I do mean to suggest that rage is appropriate when bad people are allowed to do bad things, and when bad people create political conditions by which good people can’t satisfy justice.

Sometimes, it’s best to ignore your head.

Sometimes, it’s best to listen to your gut.

Florida saw a horrific crime Friday. A young military student started shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola. He killed three people and wounded several more before dying under police fire. The student was a Saudi national stateside for training. He bought the handgun legally. There are reports of his watching videos of mass shootings the night before. The FBI is investigating the scene as a potential act of terrorism.

Was it? The president isn’t waiting to find out. Donald Trump took to Twitter over the weekend. He said the murderer had nothing to us with the Saudi Arabian people. He said the murderer had nothing to do with the Saudi Arabian government. The FBI hasn’t begun investigating. How would he know? The Saudi king called to say so.

It’s wrong for the president to come to a conclusion about a crime before a crime has been investigated. It’s wrong for the president to tell us that something is true when he can’t yet know. It’s wrong for the president to trust uncritically the likes of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whose government not only murdered a Washington Post columnist last year, but bone-sawed Jamal Khashoggi into pieces for speaking truth to power.

More importantly, it’s wrong for the president of the United States to appear as if he were the Saudi king’s legal representation in the court of public opinion. In the absence of the king’s counsel (that is, Trump), the Republican Party and its right-wing media allies might be spewing all manner of Islamophobia, as they normally would when shooters are even the slightest bit brown. But the king and the president got ahead of the story, preempting what would normally be at least 24 hours of hysteria.

More importantly, it’s wrong for the president to deflect potential responsibility before we know whether the Saudis had anything to do with the Pensacola massacre. It was wrong for the current president to do that just as it was wrong for the George W. Bush administration to deflect attention away from Saudi Arabia and instead on to Iraq. (The majority of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi; none was Iraqi.) In both cases, money and power (oil and tyranny) appeared to prevail over the blind administration of justice.

Even more importantly, the president has opened the door to yet another government to interfere with the American way of life. Even if the FBI were to conclude that the Pensacola shooter was a terrorist, what then? Trump would defend the kingdom, as he defended the Kremlin against confirmation that it undercut Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a massive propaganda operation to move public opinion against her. In both cases, the president of the United States would appear to be in the tank for other countries, setting the stage of repeated crimes against America and our democracy.

Only next time, instead of memes and tweets, it might be bullets and bombs.

Gaslighting is what happens when bad people hurt other people, deny having hurt them and convince victims they are actually villains. Gaslighting is what happens when bad people act with impunity to the laws, rules and norms governing human behavior. Gaslighting is what happens when good people don’t listen to their guts.

Your gut is right. Listen to it.

And get mad.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 December 2019
Word Count: 780
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The House Judiciary Committee had its first impeachment hearing Wednesday. It heard testimony from four authorities on American constitutional history and law. The Democrats called three. The Republicans called one. That, for me, was the day’s news.

The numbers, I mean. Three to one.

All three witnesses for the Democrats said the case against Trump is clear. All three said the framers of the Constitution would have recognized the danger. All three said impeachment was the correct remedy. All three said Donald Trump abused his power to enlist foreign interference to deprive Americans of their right to self-determination.

Jonathan Turley, the GOP’s witness, didn’t necessarily disagree. That’s the first thing you should know. He argued instead that we can’t know yet if the president is guilty of impeachable offenses. There’s not enough evidence, Turley said, and proceedings are moving too fast. He didn’t say his colleagues were incorrect. He said hold your horses.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a constitutional law scholar. But neither are most of the Americans who watched the hearing. That’s why I’m pointing out the numbers. Three to one is something everyone can understand — three to one when even the one doesn’t really disagree; he’s just cautious, which is reasonable. Everyone gets three to one.

Think about it.

Most people most of the time have something else to do than pay close attention to politics. Nearly everyone has something else to do than take the time to read, study and make a career in constitutional law. If three scholars — from Harvard, Stanford and UNC — say the case against Trump is clear, well then, it must be clear. If one scholar says you’re going too fast, well then, maybe we should slow things down. This, I think, is a conclusion most people will draw. They don’t know law. They know three to one.

Some have wondered why the Democrats decided to schedule yesterday’s hearing. This question typically came from reporters and pundits who spend all of their waking hours talking about politics. For them, there’s little point to having scholars debate constitutional history and law on live television. To a Washington press corps desiring conflict and novelty above all else, the hearing wasn’t the spectacle they’d prefer.

But that was the point. The Democrats understand well that impeachment must be rooted in deep reverence for American history, American ideals, the rule of law and, most importantly, patriotism. It must be grounded in their sworn and solemn duty to defend and protect the US Constitution. They must give the lasting impression that they don’t want to do this, but must, because law and morality demand it. That’s the impression you get when three to one constitutional scholars give their blessing.

The Republicans understand yesterday’s impact. They have long stopped defending the president on the strength or weakness of the available evidence against him. For many of these Republicans, the authority of truth matters less than the authority of the individual speaking the truth. If they can erode or destroy that authority, they win.

This is why you saw so much effort to cast doubt on the trio’s motivations, their political preferences, their opinions past and present, their hoity-toity Harvard degrees, and their manicured hair and nails. They succeeded in getting the press to jump on some fabricated outrages and trivialities. They failed to make most stick.

The Republicans know that most Americans most of the time have something better to do than pay close attention to politics. They know that most Americans are going to say to themselves: Well, if three to one experts say Trump did it, I guess he did it. The Republicans used their best weapon, which is the very worst weapon. It didn’t work.

This is not to say the truth prevailed. The truth will never prevail on its own. The Republican Party and its media allies are right now lying to millions of Americans who mistakenly believe that one of the witnesses for the Democrats, Stanford’s Pamela Karlan, insulted the president’s youngest child, Barron Trump. She didn’t. She was making a point about the Constitution forbidding a president from acting like a king.

Contrary to what President Trump has said, Article 2 does not give him the power to do anything he wants. The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.

That this is not, in any way, an insult doesn’t detract from the utility of saying it is. By whipping up fake outrage over a fake insult, the Republicans and their media allies can move public opinion in the president’s favor. They can create a picture of a Democratic Party so hell-bent on overturning an election they’re willing to attack an innocent boy.

This is why truth alone won’t prevail. Only when truth is coupled with power can we defeat disinformation, propaganda and vicious lie after lie after lie. And lo, that’s what we saw this morning. Nancy Pelosi, in a solemn speech at the Capitol, called on the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to draw up articles of impeachment. Her bet is simple and clear. How many Americans will believe the truth more than lies?

Probably about three to one.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2019
Word Count: 878
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On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast, Carl Bernstein. It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story of how the Committee to Re-elect the President burglarized Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.  That reporting and the impeachment hearings that followed eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace in 1974. Bharara wanted to hear about what differences Bernstein sees between the Nixon impeachment proceedings and Donald Trump’s today.

That was the week when the New York Times reported that viewership of those “boring” hearings was proving to be “as big as Monday Night Football.” That was the week when the world heard from, among others, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman on Donald Trump’s July 25th “perfect” phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky; from ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland on how “everyone was in the loop” when it came to the Ukrainian quid pro quo (not to speak of his “Zelensky loves your ass” exchange with the president); and from the steely former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, on how that country promulgated the fiction that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 American election.

That should have been enough to convince anyone paying attention that the president had indeed attempted to trade a Zelensky White House visit and U.S. military aid for an announcement that Ukraine was investigating its own (fictitious) interference in that election and the (equally fictitious) corruption of Joe Biden via his son Hunter. Clearly, however, the Republicans in Congress were anything but convinced.

Bharara reminded Bernstein that, when Richard Nixon was at risk of impeachment, key Republican congressional figures, including two senators (at a moment when, as now, Republicans had a majority in that body) encouraged the president to resign rather than be impeached and be convicted in a trial there. Why, Bharara asked, is today’s Republican Party more loyal to the president than the Constitution and the rule of law?

Bernstein replied that, in his view, the divisions in the U.S. today are no longer simply a matter of ideological differences — disagreements about what constitutes a good society and how to achieve it. The whole country, he suggested, is already embroiled in a “cold civil war” that’s vividly reflected in Congress. If so, then it’s a complex war indeed, involving at least four allied but also diverging forces in today’s Republican Party:

*  Those motivated by white anxiety and resentment, some of whom also tend to be isolationists opposing U.S. military adventures abroad;

•  Those dedicated to maintaining U.S. military expansion around the world, some of whom genuinely believe in the ultimate superiority of a white, Christian United States and some of whom care only about the projection of force;

•  Right-wing evangelicals, many sharing white resentment and also ready to make common cause with the forces of imperial expansion, especially when it comes to support for Israel;

•  Those dedicated to increasing the wealth of the wealthiest elites, who are quite willing to harness white fear of losing privilege, as well as nationalist military desires, to advance their own agenda of reducing taxes and rolling back regulatory constraints on corporate power.

The roots of much of the turmoil in the current Republican Party are, however, centuries old. They go back, in fact, to the twin crimes that have helped shape this country from its very beginning: slavery and imperial expansion.

Slavery This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival in the British colonies that would become the United States of America of the first enslaved Africans. The New York Times has gathered some of the best recent scholarship on the nature and history of American slavery in an excellent series: “The 1619 Project.”

Many white people in this country think of slavery as a “problem” of the distant past. They are mistaken. African Americans live with its effects today (as do the rest of us in different ways) in legacies like mass incarceration and the existential threat of police violence. In 2015, the Guardian reported that “young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.” In that year, police killed 1,134 people. The Washington Post now keeps a running annual tally of such police-caused deaths. As of November 25th, the number for this year was 829.

The line that can be drawn from slavery to convict leasing to lynching to torture in police stations to police shootings of African Americans is all too direct. It’s impossible, in fact, to overstate the importance of slavery to the economic, legal, and social development of this country. The 1789 Constitution was in many ways a document meant to appease southern slave states and keep them in the union. This included the “three-fifths” compromise, which counted any enslaved resident as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives to each state. Similarly, the creation of an upper house, the Senate, where each state has two representatives, regardless of population, and the invention of the Electoral College were meant, in part, to enhance the power of southern states. And to this day, those two institutions continue to allow southern and, more generally, rural states to exercise an undemocratic power, disproportionate to their population size. In a very real sense, compromises made in 1789 helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

The first income-generating crop in the southern colonies was tobacco, initially planted, tended, picked, and packed by semi-free indentured servants from England who worked for a fixed period (usually seven to 10 years) and then were free to start farming on their own. Enslaved Africans, however, soon offered a number of advantages over such contract workers. As a start, their “contracts” never ran out. Indeed, their children and children’s children would also be enslaved workers. They would prove crucial to the way those planters built their wealth (and significant parts of the wealth of the colonies and that of the United States as a whole), both as profit-generating laborers and as capital-building assets against whom money could be borrowed. This history is well-described in a number of books, including Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Andres Resendez’s The Other Slavery (about the little-studied enslavement of native peoples in what would become the American Southwest), as well as in the autobiographies and collected oral testimonies of hundreds of formerly enslaved people.

In Virginia and the Carolinas, however, those tobacco farmers faced a serious problem. Unlike indentured servants who could look forward to their eventual freedom, newly enslaved Africans had no incentive to work; none, that is, except physical pain. As a result, torture — real mind- and body-destroying torture — was part of the American experience from the first moments the slave system was established, with effects that have lasted to this day.

After the revolution and the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s seed-stripping cotton gin, southern farmers turned to another, far more lucrative export crop: cotton. First in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, but soon in the lowlands that would become Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, cheap raw cotton would feed England’s fast-industrializing textile industry and so, for the next two centuries, help make that country’s economy the world’s preeminent one. It also fed the nascent textile mills in the North after Samuel Slater, an early industrial spy, crossed the Atlantic to New England, carrying in his memory plans (embargoed by Great Britain) for a water-powered textile factory.

As slavery expanded, so did the systematic use of torture. Enslavers on the new plantations organized “gangs” of laborers, their long lines easily visible to overseers who followed them with cowhide whips. From dawn to dark, through the endless workday, that whip flew at supersonic speed (the source of its “crack”), tearing flesh till the blood ran. It waited for workers in camp at night, as each day’s output was weighed, and those who failed to make their quotas were punished.

A new form of torture-enforced labor began after the Civil War and the brief interim period of Reconstruction when black people in the South found themselves, through the legal conceit of convict leasing, essentially enslaved all over again. Arrested on minor charges or none at all, prisoners — almost all of them African-American men — found themselves leased out by county and state authorities to private cotton growers and to the developing coal and steel industries of Tennessee and Alabama. Once again, the whip came along for the ride. Convict leasing lasted into the 1920s when Southern states chose to employ their convicts directly in chain gangs to build the region’s railroads and highways.  Legal segregation, also begun at the end of Reconstruction, did not end until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Nor did state-sanctioned torture of African Americans end with emancipation or the eventual diminution of those convict-leasing programs. Lynching (a label Donald Trump recently had the nerve to apply to the impeachment proceedings) continued from the end of the Civil War well into the twentieth century, peaking between 1880 and 1920. In addition to its culminating murder by hanging or burning, lynching often involved whipping and the castration of male victims prior to death. In the context of Jim Crow segregation, these institutionalized rituals of torture and murder served to secure the power of white authorities over black populations. In many places, lynchings were also treated as popular entertainment, encouraged by local officials who often participated themselves. The practice even produced a form of popular art: photographs of lynchings decorated many postcards in the early part of the twentieth century.

Every society that adopts institutionalized torture as a method of social control identifies certain groups of people as legitimate targets for it. From the very beginning of this country, one group was so identified: enslaved Africans (and their emancipated descendants). Even today, in police stations, prisons, and public schools, black Americans are at risk of socially sanctioned physical abuse, even torture.

President Trump’s open embrace of a white supremacy born of slavery and nurtured by convict-leasing, segregation, and lynching has powerfully emboldened its modern proponents, encouraging economically and socially anxious whites to focus their resentment on blacks and, of course, immigrants from anywhere but northern Europe.

Imperial expansion As much as American history is a story of slavery and its legacy, it’s also a tale of steady geographical expansion and imperial domination, often enabled by military force. That history, too, has a twenty-first-century legacy: America’s forever wars across a significant part of the planet.

It’s a tale that began early. The newly independent United States quickly acquired a lot more of itself, starting with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France. That deal effectively doubled the country’s territory, annexing lands that would eventually become parts or all of 10 new states. Of course, France didn’t actually control most of that land, apart from the port city of New Orleans and its immediate environs. What the U.S. government really bought was the “right” to take the rest of that vast area from the native peoples who lived there, using treaties, population transfers, and wars of conquest and extermination.

Such acquisitions continued with Florida in 1819 (from Spain) and the annexation of Texas (by war) from Mexico in 1845. All of this new territory contained land that was, as Sven Beckert says in Empire of Cotton, “superbly suited to cotton agriculture.”

So, conquest, slavery, and (when it came to native peoples) displacement and genocide combined as cotton growers expanded their holdings. A frequent first step in securing new territory for cotton planting was to remove the people already occupying it. That process began in Georgia in the early 1800s, as the Creek nation was driven west. Soon, as Beckert writes, “the Creeks suffered further defeats and were forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceding 23 million acres of land in what is today Alabama and Georgia.” In a process that today would likely be called ethnic cleansing, cotton’s empire continued to expand at the expense of indigenous peoples:

“In the years after 1814, the federal government signed further treaties with the Creeks, Chickasaw, and Choctaws, gaining control over millions of acres of land in the South, including Andrew Jackson’s 1818 treaty with the Chickasaw nation that opened western Tennessee to cotton cultivation and the 1819 treaty with the Choctaw nation that gave 5 million acres of land in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to the United States in exchange for vastly inferior lands in Oklahoma and Arkansas.”

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, designed to do exactly what its name implied by requiring Indian nations in the southeastern United States to “exchange” prime cotton-growing acreage for vastly inferior land in present-day Oklahoma. As the National Park Service’s website on the subject recounts, after the Choctaws, Muscogee Creeks, Seminoles, and Chickasaws had for some time “fiercely resisted” such relocation, they finally “agreed” to be moved to the newly designated Indian Territories.

Perhaps the best-known population transfer of this period was the one that took place along the Trail of Tears. Beginning in May 1838, the U.S. Army, together with various state militias, began the forcible removal of more than 16,000 Cherokee people from North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to Oklahoma. The job was completed by the following year. The journey proved a tragic one (more than 1,000 people died along the way) and the destination unsatisfactory, but the Park Service wants to assure visitors that the story has a happy ending:

“The Cherokee, in the years that followed, struggled to reassert themselves in the new, unfamiliar land. Today, they are a proud, independent tribe, and its members recognize that despite the adversity they have endured, they are resilient and invest in their future.”

U.S. expansion continued across the rest of the continent, decimating Indian nations and consigning survivors to reservations. In 1893, it reached Hawaii where U.S. Marines supported a coup against Queen Lili’uokalani. In 1898, the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the country’s first full-scale imperial conflict abroad, gave the United States Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. After World War II, the United Nations awarded the U.S. what would become the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, including the island of Saipan, which remains in U.S. “trusteeship” to this day.

The U.S. shadow also fell across Latin America, as it occupied Nicaragua from 1909 to 1933, installing the autocrats of the Somoza dynasty in power there in 1936. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the government of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz to prevent him from instituting a land reform program. Support for coups continued into the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Rather than make these Latin American countries actual colonies, a policy of global neocolonialism (backed by the unprecedented military garrisoning of the planet) allowed the United States to fuel a postwar economic boom with cheap raw materials from around the world.

Today, the United States maintains about 800 military bases in more than 80 countries and has forces stationed on every continent except Antarctica. We remain by far the world’s preeminent military force and continue to fight (unsuccessful wars) across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Uneasy bedfellows The Trump Republican Party has inherited, and continues to make use of, the legacies of this nation’s twin evils: slavery and imperial expansion. We see in its white supremacist strand a commitment to maintaining systems of white superiority that have persisted from slavery through Jim Crow segregation to ever-present threats of violence today. Many white evangelical Christians maintain an enthusiasm for racial separation (as the histories of their flagship universities reveal). They see in Trump a leader who will advocate for white supremacy so they don’t have to.

The power of the Republican militarist wing may appear to have diminished in the face of Trump’s vocal isolationism and threats to bring U.S. troops home from this country’s various twenty-first-century wars, but in truth, the military and intelligence sectors of the government have managed to do almost everything they’ve wanted to, even while seeming to agree with the president. (No surprise, then, that there are now more U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East than there were when Donald Trump took office.) In addition, he has certainly made sure that the Pentagon has all the money it could possibly want, even if he sometimes decries excessive military budgets.

The history of U.S. territorial and military expansion has long been accompanied by a commitment to American exceptionalism, a belief that this country is different from and better than the rest of the world’s nations. That sense of superiority is usually described as an embodiment of national values like democracy and equality, but bubbling beneath the surface there has always been the belief that the U.S. succeeded in all but eliminating the native peoples on this continent and in defeating others around the world because of a natural superiority born of a European heritage. This confidence remains strong today, despite the fact that (apart from invading the tiny nations of Grenada and Panama) the U.S. hasn’t won a war since World World II, including the never-ending conflicts it has launched over large stretches of the planet after 9/11.

And what of the economic elites, the top tenth of the top one percent? Their commitment, however they may choose to wrap it in libertarian anti-tax rhetoric, remains only to themselves and to maintaining and expanding their own vast wealth. To the extent that any of the party’s other three strands contribute to that goal, they are happy to contribute to the party.

Today’s Republicans are very different from those of the Nixon era. His was a party with an ideological commitment to anticommunism, law and order, and opposition to organized labor. In Trump, the party seems to be committed not to principles, but to a man who defies the rule of law and is disorder personified. However, like their president who shamelessly turns on his friends when it suits him, his party will likely turn on him the moment he appears to threaten, rather than enhance, their election prospects. In the meantime, they are in every sense a historic crime in the making.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2019 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 December 2019
Word Count: 3,061
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The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Washington Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That won Giuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 December 2019
Word Count: 825
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It bears repeating: Donald Trump was not only press-ganging Volodymyr Zelensky in an illegal scheme for partisan gain. He was rewriting the history of 2016 in order to wound enemies (Democrats) and help friends (Vladimir Putin) — as well as to give Kremlin operatives room to strike again.

It is in no way overstating the case to say the president of the United States is the head of an international conspiracy to defraud the American people.

It has remained to be seen how far the Republican Party is willing to go in defense of Trump’s conspiracy. Senate Republicans quickly conceded that Russia sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but stopped short of saying the president benefited (because admitting that would be admitting Trump is an illegitimate president.)

But now, as the impeachment process enters a new and dangerous phase, we are seeing new GOP behavior (though we have witnessed plenty of hints). David Drucker, a superlative reporter, wrote today that Republicans decided the best way to defend the president is to embrace “the claim of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.”

Let’s be clear. There was no Ukrainian interference. That’s according to the special counsel’s report, which cited one and a half dozen national security agencies. That’s according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. That’s according to every career official in the State Department who testified under oath last month.

The idea that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the US originated in the Kremlin. The idea that the Democrats, not Trump’s campaign staffers, conspired with foreign operatives is more than “conspiracy theory.” It is a fascist ploy to turn lies into truth. This is why I said recently Trump’s crime is so much worse than abuse of power. It’s treason.

And the Republicans, like lemmings, are heading for a cliff.

Now, it’s one thing to follow the party wherever it goes. Ordinary partisan activity, however vile, isn’t something I care to debate now. It’s quite another thing, however, to know what you’re doing is wrong and do it anyway. The Republicans can’t not know.

First, because intelligence officials briefed Senate Republicans, telling them explicitly the Ukraine-attacked-us story is pure Putin disinformation. Second, because Fiona Hill, a former member of the White House National Security Council, and a Russia authority, was clear about what House Republicans were already doing. She said:

In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016 (my italics).

And now we have another reason why the Republicans can’t not know they are participating in conspiracy to defraud the American people. Rudy Giuliani, who is not regarded for his discretion, confessed to knowing the Ukraine-attacked-us story was bunk. Not only that, the president’s personal attorney actually said he decided to pursue “evidence” of Ukraine’s attack in order to undercut Robert Mueller’s report.

I knew they were hot and heavy on this Russian collusion thing, even though I knew 100 percent that it was false. I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah.’ I’ve got what a defense lawyer always wants: I can go prove someone else committed this crime.”

So: to defend Trump is to defend Russia.

Is that where the Republicans want to go?

Well, yes, if Tucker Carlson is any indication. The Fox News host is on the bleeding edge of attempts by Trump partisans to expand what the American people think is acceptable behavior. On his show last night, he said: “I’m totally opposed to these [US] sanctions [on Russia] and I don’t think we should be at war with Russia and I think we should take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

He went on to say the Democrats hate America more than Vladimir Putin does.

I think it’s fair for some conservative writers, like Charlie Sykes and Matt Lewis, to characterize the Republicans as dupes and stooges or parroting the Kremlin line. But at some point, we must face what it means for Republicans to know the truth but to advance Kremlin lies anyway, even when doing so slowly burns down the republic. At some point soon, we must stop calling them dupes, and start calling them the enemy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 December 2019
Word Count: 731
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When an announcement of a “Moral Injury Symposium” turned up in my email, I was a bit startled to see that it came from the U.S. Special Operations Command. That was a surprise because many military professionals have strongly resisted the term “moral injury” and rejected the suggestion that soldiers fighting America’s wars could experience moral conflict or feel morally damaged by their service.

Moral injury is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis. It’s not on the Veterans Administration’s list of service-related disabilities. Yet in the decade since the concept began to take root among mental health specialists and others concerned with the emotional lives of active-duty soldiers and military veterans, it has come to be fairly widely regarded as “the signature wound of today’s wars,” as the editors of War and Moral Injury: A Reader, a remarkable anthology of contemporary and past writings on the subject, have noted.

For those not familiar with the tag, moral injury is related to but not the same as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which is a recognized clinical condition. Both involve some of the same symptoms, including depression, insomnia, nightmares, and self-medication via alcohol or drugs, but they arise from different circumstances. PTSD symptoms are a psychological reaction to an experience of life-threatening physical danger or harm. Moral injury is the lasting mental and emotional result of an assault on the conscience — a memory, as one early formulation put it, of “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

The idea remains controversial in the military world, but the wars that Americans have fought since 2001 — involving a very different experience of war fighting from that of past generations — have made it increasingly difficult for military culture to cling to its old manhood and warrior myths. Many in that military have had to recognize the invisible wounds of moral conflict that soldiers have brought home with them from those battlefields.

That shift was evident at the moral injury symposium, held in early August in a Washington, D.C., hotel. The feelings and experiences I heard about there were not necessarily representative of the climate in the wider military community. The special operations forces, which put on the event, have their own distinctive character, culture, and experiences, and a disproportionate number of the 130 or so attendees were mental-health specialists or chaplains, the two groups that have been most open and attuned to the very idea of moral injury. (A military chaplain in the Special Operations Command, in fact, first had the idea for the symposium.)

Still, the symposium emerged from the same history the rest of the military has lived through: 18 years of uninterrupted violence, of war without end in distant lands, that has killed or wounded some 60,000 Americans and a far greater number of foreign civilians, while displacing millions more and helping drive the worldwide refugee population to successive record-setting levels. Against that backdrop, those two days in Washington proved gripping and thought provoking in their own right. What follows are some of the thoughts they provoked in my mind as I listened or when I later reflected on what I heard.

Something said, something unsaid In the sessions I attended, virtually every speaker mentioned one relevant fact about our present wars and the soldiers who fight them. But a different relevant fact on the same subject was almost completely missing.

Again and again, participants spoke about the great change in how soldiers experience war. In past generations, for the great majority of service members, war was a one-time event. In the 18 years since 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, war has become a permanent part of soldiers’ lives in a continuing cycle of repeated deployments to battle zones. (And that’s not to mention the even more startling change for those who see combat remotely, sitting in front of screens and firing missiles or dropping bombs from unmanned aircraft flying over targets thousands of miles away.) As nearly all the symposium speakers pointed out, that change in the war-fighting experience has also changed the nature of combat trauma and the military culture’s understanding of and attitudes toward it.

Here’s the reality that almost nobody mentioned, though it’s closely related: the reason these wars have lasted this long and have become a permanent part of soldiers’ lives is that they have not been successful. My notes record only one presentation where that connection was even touched upon, and then only implicitly, not directly.

That single indirect mention came in a discussion group conducted by Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, the commanding officer of a Florida-based remotely piloted aircraft squadron. He mentioned that his MQ-9 Reaper drone crews increasingly have come to prefer missions in theaters other than Afghanistan. Specifically, he said, they were most positive about strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria where they “could see the front lines moving.” (That suggests he was referring mainly to the 2016-2017 period when those Reapers were supporting American and Iraqi ground forces recapturing territory that had been under ISIS occupation.) Those missions led to “less trauma” for his operators, he said. At another point, he added that “if it [an engagement] ends well, they look back on their lives differently.”

Other than that single remark about his crews preferring missions in other theaters, Blair never made any explicit comparison between Afghanistan and any other conflict zone. However, what he did say sounds like plain common sense. It’s logical that when a military operation is relatively successful, it’s easier for soldiers to explain to themselves and live with their own actions. It must help mitigate moral injury symptoms, at the very least, if they can tell themselves that a greater good was accomplished.

Conversely, if you did something that leaves you with doubt or regret but achieved no positive results, that would lead to more painful feelings and less defense against them. So, in one way, it seems odd that, except in those few moments, I didn’t hear anyone make the connection between the lack of victory in America’s wars and the incidence of trauma.

On the other hand, it’s not so surprising that such connections were not made more often or more clearly. They would only have reminded the participants of an uncomfortable reality: that America’s wars in the present era have, on the whole, fallen far short of producing any greater good that would help justify the moral injury so many soldiers are struggling with, not to mention all the other human damage those wars have caused.

I can’t know their inner feelings, but I can guess that it would have been painful for many symposium participants to admit that fact out loud or to let themselves think it at all. Probably it wasn’t something the organizers would have liked to hear either or remember when they face troubled soldiers in the months and years to come.

Moral clarity versus moral injury Another moment in that same session suggested a different but related link between the nature and circumstances of a military operation and the likelihood of trauma. This one had to do with the moral perception of the operation itself.

Since his crews are not physically at risk when carrying out their missions, Lieutenant Colonel Blair pointed out, the traditional “kill or be killed” formula of the battlefield can’t help them explain their war to themselves. Instead, the drone fighter’s explanation has to be “kill or someone else will be killed.” In turn, that determines not just what they do, but who they feel they are. “Being a protector of others,” Blair said, becomes their “core identity.”

A couple of quotes in a December 2017 article on an Air Force website show how the missions against ISIS strongly validated that identity — and, indirectly, suggest why operations in other theaters have not.

The article, which I found after the symposium ended, was a feature about a remotely piloted aircraft unit (not Blair’s) that supported the ground operation to recapture Raqqa, the Syrian provincial city that ISIS designated as the capital of its so-called caliphate. One quote is from a squadron commander: “It wasn’t our aircrew just striking ISIS targets. We also were safeguarding and watching over [friendly Syrian troops] as they cleared civilians moving out of the city to safe locations.” The article also quoted a sensor operator: “My favorite part of this job is that I’m able to help civilians be safe and I’m able to help liberate whatever city we need to. There’s no better feeling than knowing you can directly impact the battlefield and other people’s lives.”

Obviously, when their screens showed them the civilians they were helping, and not just the enemies they were killing, those crewmen found moral clarity, rather than moral conflict, in their experience. From Blair’s comments, one can surmise that was true for his crews as well, presumably for similar reasons.

Sadly, it is also pretty obvious that such a sense of clarity has been the exception, not the rule, in the wars Americans have been fighting for nearly two decades. That doesn’t automatically mean those wars were not moral, but whatever their moral nature, it would only rarely have shown up on the drone operators’ screens — or in the sightlines of soldiers looking at actual battlegrounds in real space — as clearly as it did for those airmen remembering their Raqqa missions. (Not that Raqqa raised no moral questions at all. Yes, the fighting there liberated its inhabitants from an exceptionally brutal occupation. But it also destroyed most of their homes, largely in air strikes by U.S. and allied planes that, by one estimate, dropped 20,000 bombs on the city. By the time the campaign was over, Raqqa, like a number of other Syrian and Iraqi cities, was in almost complete ruins.)

A question, maybe farfetched… I didn’t frame it this way when I was at the symposium, but this question later came to mind: Has the U.S. military as an institution, not just its individual service members, morally injured itself over the last 18 years?

This is a military force that never stops declaring it’s the best and strongest in the world, but has not successfully concluded a significant war for nearly 30 years or maybe longer. (The first Gulf War of 1990-1991 looked like a great win at the time, but appears like anything but an unequivocally positive accomplishment in retrospect.) It may sound farfetched, but is it unreasonable to wonder if that dissonance, that wide gap between goals and actual accomplishments, might leave a collective sense of sorrow, grief, regret, shame, and alienation? That’s the list of feelings that Glenn Orris, a Navy chaplain, displayed on a chart in his symposium presentation and specified as the ones that keep morally injured service members awake at night.

I’m posing this as a question, not offering it as an answer. Certainly, at various moments during the symposium, I had a sense not just of individual but of collective trauma. As an outsider in that world, I can’t and won’t venture to evaluate the emotional state of the military as a whole. Still, the question doesn’t seem ridiculous.

A new idea of what moral injury really is The final event of the second day — an unusual closer for a professional or academic conference — was a reading of Sophocles’ play Ajax, as rewritten by Bryan Doerries. After the reading, Doerries, artistic director for Theater of War, the company that put on the performance, moderated a discussion with a panel of four recent veterans and members of the audience.

Essentially, he attempted to draw out the panelists and the audience on what the play was trying to say and how that 2,500-year-old story of a warrior’s depression, madness, and suicide might connect to their own experience. Listening to various responses, I found myself thinking that perhaps the main purpose of his, if not Sophocles’s, version was to make the audience think about what war is. What it really is, not the heroic myth humans have made of it from ancient times on. And then I thought, maybe that’s what we’d been talking about for the previous two days. Maybe that’s what moral injury is: realizing the true nature of war.

Along with that thought came another, one that first occured to me nearly 45 years ago when, as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, I personally witnessed the disastrous end of the Vietnam War. I’ve believed ever since that covering war from the losing side gave me a truer knowledge of its nature than I’d have gotten from that or any other war’s winning side. Maybe I should say darker, not truer, since I suppose the winners’ war is real, too. But whichever word you choose, my experience, I felt, gave me a more unobstructed view of war. I could see it more clearly for what it was precisely because there was no good result to balance against the death and loss and terror and despair. There was no excuse to explain away the human disaster I’d seen and written about for several years, no way to tell myself that the war was necessary or had served any purpose.

That bit of personal history makes me think it’s not accidental that our present consciousness of moral injury has come out of wars we didn’t win. They haven’t been lost in the same clear-cut way that the war in Vietnam was. They haven’t (yet) ended in the kind of catastrophically decisive final act I witnessed there in the spring of 1975 in the weeks that led to Saigon’s surrender. But these recent wars haven’t accomplished their goals either, or given our soldiers a worthwhile reason for what they’ve gone through, which is surely a key piece of the moral injury story.

I was a civilian journalist, not a soldier. I went to Vietnam to report, not to fight. I didn’t come home with any trauma symptoms. But I have all the feelings that Chaplain Orris listed as identifying markers for moral injury: sorrow, grief, regret, shame, and alienation. Those emotions come from what I learned about war, not from anything I did, and that makes me believe it may not be wrong to think that what we call moral injury might not be just one person’s response to particularly troubling events, but a symptom of something larger, of seeing war individually and collectively for what it truly is.

A last thought In closing, I will turn back to the editors of War and Moral Injury. In their introduction, Douglas Pryer, a retired army intelligence officer and Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, and Robert Emmett Meagher, a classicist and professor of humanities at Hampshire College, pointed to an aspect of war that is missing in their anthology, the symposium, and in American culture more broadly:

“We must acknowledge a great gap in this text as in nearly every other on the subject of America’s wars and veterans: the deaths and wounds, physical and spiritual, inflicted on the ‘others,’ our enemies, especially our ‘civilian enemies.'”

Pryer and Meagher are right. Such an acknowledgement is almost entirely absent from the national discourse about our wars and their legacy. But without it, no moral wound, whether an individual’s or a society’s, can truly be healed.

Arnold R. Isaacs, a journalist based in Maryland and writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He covered the final years of the Vietnam War for the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy, and an online report, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net

Copyright ©2019 Arnold R. Isaacs — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 December 2019
Word Count: 2,554
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Circumventing every possible obstacle, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan keeps moving ahead on the path he set, cementing his rule in Turkey, as he takes every opportunity, big or small, to consolidate his legitimacy on the basis of “stability in Turkey.”

Having survived political defeat in the local elections some seven months ago, Erdogan is back in the game, using the same fundamental tools that have kept him in power: use of religion in a rhetoric similar to the one applied by the Muslim Brotherhood; conducting divisive policies at home, fiercely exercised to keep the opposition as polarised as ever before; constantly driving a wedge between bodies such as NATO and the European Union and, as the Syrian incursion exemplified, raising the stakes for Turkish nationalism; and irredentism, which causes growing concern in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

In all these efforts Erdogan seems unstoppable. Regarding religion as a political tool, he knows he has the powerful backing of the overwhelming Muslim majority at home, which he hopes will see him as the unchallenged leader of the country.

Addressing the sixth Religious Council meeting of the Presidency of Religious Affairs November 28 in Ankara, his gambling became obvious once more: “Even if it may burden ourselves, we shall place the decretals, and not the rules of the present, at the centre of our lives,” Erdogan said. “Islam is an acquis of rules and prohibitions which encircle all the sections of our lives. We believe in a religion that encompasses its every phase. We are ordered to live as Muslims until the very end.”

Even if Erdogan took his time to underline the traps of “fault lines among Muslims in the world,” it was these words that echoed in Turkey’s increasingly oppressed secular circles, more than his unanswered ambitions to emerge as the leader of the Islamic world.

He also knows that such statements are without a doubt breaches of the constitution, which emphasises that the president remains an impartial and unifying figure. But his challenging in-your-face gestures have always remained his game. He knows that dropping the rhetoric of religion altogether may spell a lethal weakening of his power. Nevertheless, the result of such statements is a continuous Islamisation of the education system, undermining Turkey as a modern nation.

His use of nationalism has pushed the centrist opposition into a corner but, for Erdogan, it is not sufficient, unless coupled with bold divisions within it.

The chain of events placing the secular main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), have recently presented a taste of what is bound to come in the near future. It all began with an obvious piece of disinformation spread by a couple of murky reporters in the press. The “rumour,” these reports said, was that a prominent figure of the main opposition had secretly met Erdogan at his palace to hear from him that “it would be a fine idea if he had replaced the current leader of the CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.”

The media jumped on the bandwagon, dragged by the unconfirmed piece aimed at manipulation. It took several days to deny it, as the opposition party was delivered blow after blow, and internal rifts surfaced. The damage was done, proving, as it were, the oppressed Kurdish politicians who had warned the CHP figures that “you remain silent before the cruelties to us, but you will be next in line.” Erdogan was visibly content and in waves of joyful attacks, as was expected of him. He felt assured that he has his opponents in control.

In foreign policy, Erdogan is benefiting enormously from the overall turbulence and international folly developing day by day. Volatile conjuncture in the Middle East and Europe leaves his daredevil policies room to develop and enlarge, so far so that Ankara feels a growing appetite for irredentism for redrawing the map of the eastern Mediterranean, testing the reaction capacities of the EU.

The more the EU appeases, the more it encourages an escalation of the crisis with Turkey at one side and Greece, Cyprus and Egypt on the other. Amnesia reigns: It was the reactions to the Treaty of Versailles that shaped the Nazi regime in Germany and, in some sense perhaps, the discontent with the Lausanne Treaty will have a similar effect in Turkey’s path to totalitarian rule.

Erdogan, while challenging the European Union, places his bet on the EU trauma. The violent fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya is the main source of the refugee crisis that has been reshaping the European political landscape to far-right populism and overall disorder. Erdogan knows very well that the EU at the end of the day would prefer to have him as the leader of Turkey, who will maintain its stability, as opposed to any alternative that would amount to deeper chaos.

The same fear — a prospective instability bigger than in Libya — applies among NATO’s European allies. Thus, Erdogan and his team feel free to block NATO’s plans for its Baltic members, as the bloc turns into a witness as Ankara develops into a Trojan horse.

All these factors explain the success of Erdogan’s survival. He reads the new global reality better than all the others — except perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 December 2019
Word Count: 870
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I’ve said before that I take after George Orwell. Disinformation scares me more than bombs. As bad as they are, bombs don’t lie. They don’t make it impossible to tell truth from falsehood. They are trying to kill you. They don’t try to make you feel insane.

But there’s one thing that scares me even more than that. It’s indifference. As bad as things are right now, as unpopular as this president is, I don’t think enough Americans are scared enough, or enraged enough. As bad as things are, I fear that most people, but especially middle-class white liberals, are not inspired nearly enough to care.

White and relatively affluent people, even when they think of themselves as liberals, have the power to turn the whole thing off, as if it were just another tasteless reality-TV show. They can go to work with other white and affluent people, maybe even a majority of whom think of themselves as liberal, and pick their kids up from school, where white and relatively affluent kids also go to school, and not think much about it. They can go the whole week without having given Donald Trump a second thought.

This is possible even here in New Haven, where the Elm City is split more or less into thirds, demographically: a third white, a third African American, a third everybody else. Like other cities in which white people do not prevail numerically, white people here, on average, live in mostly white neighborhoods, send their kids to mostly white private schools. Nonwhite people are visible, of course, but they are not, generally, friends or colleagues of white people. This is not a judgment. This is the world as it is.

A major consequence of this being the world as it is: caring is a choice. Fascism is about punching down, but it’s not punching down on white people (not yet). To be sure, many white people do care about the damage Trump is doing to our communities and institutions, our discourse and democracy. That, however, is still a choice. White people are not yet compelled to care in the way a black woman is compelled to on seeing white men strolling down her street wearing what appears to be “Nazi garb.”

Another major consequence of this being the world as it is: even if white people care, do they care enough? I’m dubious. It’s natural to focus on the 2020 presidential election. My fear is most white liberals will celebrate if Donald Trump is defeated and then … stop. They won’t go farther. They will pat themselves on the back, just as they did after Barack Obama’s victory, while ignoring, as they did after 2008, the fascist politics that would quickly take over the Republican Party within a mere two years.

The Republican Party no longer recognizes the validity and hence the legitimacy of Democratic control of any branch of state and federal government. Republican allies, especially white evangelical leaders, are whipping their followers into a frenzy, warning that impeaching the president is tantamount to defying God. Trump has already called rivals “enemies of the people” and “human scum.” How do you treat enemy human scum? Not with respect. Political violence is the one and only answer.

White liberals, I suspect, don’t care enough. But it’s not only because their skin color shields them from the worst of fascist politics (so far). It’s also because they are liberal. Liberals, but especially white liberals, don’t truly understand why anyone would vote for a troglodyte like Trump. And they don’t understand, I suspect, because they have not experienced the depth of authoritarianism that animates everything about him. People who have, however, are Cassandras warning it’s all going to get much worse.

Liberals, but especially white liberals, are deeply convinced that there is a right side and a wrong side to history. Racists are on the wrong side. Sexists are on the wrong side. All shades of bigotry are on the wrong side. And because they are on the wrong side of history, it’s just a matter of time before things work themselves out. Eventually, the white liberal thinking goes, all will return to normal. The right side will prevail.

The right side of history might prevail, but not without struggle, pain and sacrifice. But even then, there’s no guarantee. It’s just as plausible that the reverse will happen. Imagine, for instance, the president’s reaction to losing in 2020. Will he concede to the will of the people? Will be respect the peaceable transfer of power? Um, no. He will no doubt blame defeat on an international conspiracy to bring him down, thus fueling and justifying any reaction, including political violence, to a new Democratic president.

As a white liberal, I know lots of people who say they tune Trump out. As a white liberal who has experienced the depth of authoritarianism that animates everything about Trump, I come close to freaking out when I hear that. A cyclone is coming for us, but too many act like it can’t touch them or the people they care about. It will.

Indeed, it already has.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 December 2019
Word Count: 856
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I’d rather not talk about Rick Perry, but, alas, he has forced me to. The US Energy Department secretary made headlines this week, saying God chose the president:

“God uses imperfect people through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect. And I actually gave the president a one-pager on those Old Testament kings … And I shared it with him and I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people who say that you say you were the chosen one.’ And I said, ‘You were.’ I said, ‘If you are a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.’ ”

So once again, we are faced with an apparent paradox: why would white evangelical Christians stand cheek-to-jowl with such an un-Christian president? Perry has his way of explaining things, a “biblical” explanation. But another way of looking at it is so obvious as to be quite invisible: Donald Trump is as Christian as evangelicals are.

That we ask the question at all may be part of the problem. We keep asking why white evangelical Christians support such an un-Christian president because we believed what they said about Barack Obama, but especially about Bill Clinton. We believed their outrage over Clinton’s diddling an intern in the White House, thus sparking a process that led to his impeachment. We believed it was all in good faith. We believed it was based on genuine religious sentiment. We believed they meant what they said.

Well, what if they didn’t mean it? If we imagine for a moment that they meant none of that, what we are seeing now makes a lot more sense. All of this talk about a biblical understanding of Donald Trump as the chosen one makes more sense. This “biblical understanding” is a rationalization for a conclusion they’d already come to, which is a conclusion with little grounding in religion. It has more to do with power politics.

Put another way, more accurately: power politics is their religion.

So it doesn’t matter that Trump paid off at least two women to keep quiet about having extra-marital sex with him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a proud self-proclaimed “pussy grabber.” It doesn’t matter that he abandoned Syrian Christians. It doesn’t matter that his administration confiscated infants from immigrant mothers at the border. All of his actions are irrelevant because evangelical Christians have already made up their minds, a process totally in keeping with the history of the cult of American tradition.

“The cult of tradition” is something I’m borrowing from Umberto Eco. He was talking about European tradition. I’m substituting “American.” In the current context, that tradition has held that the United States is a Christian nation given by God. We must ask: who was it given to? You already know. They didn’t look like Barack Obama.

The cult of tradition was necessarily syncretistic, a combination of different forms of belief that tolerates contradiction, Eco said. “Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth” (my italics).

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. […] No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.

For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. (“Ur-Fascism” is the title of Eco’s article.)

The president’s critics are familiar with the idea that his followers constitute a cult of Trump. What his critics fail to understand, mostly, is that this cult was always already functioning under different names in different places for different reasons. But once the leaders of this cult of American tradition understood in 2016 what Trump was about, the melding of interests was easy and natural. There was no contradiction.

The president’s critics are also familiar with the argument that Trump is a fascist leader who will not tolerate constitutional limits on his power. That he’s a fascist and that his followers are evangelical Christians is also not a contradiction in terms. To the contrary, it is syncretistic. Everything alludes, allegorically, to the same primeval truth

There is no such thing as abuse of power when one has been chosen by God to rule. There is no such thing as obstruction of justice when God alone decides who is worthy of justice. Since God chose Trump, only God can end his presidency, and any attempt to impeach and remove him is, by consequence, a sinful attempt to obstruct God’s will.

That white evangelicals genuinely believe this to be true should not in any way be mistaken for religious sentiment that other Americans are bound to respect. We should not give this authoritarian strain of Christianity any more benefit of the doubt politically than we would to a man who yells “fire” in crowded theater. Yes, he has the right to free speech, but not at the expense of everyone else’s rights and freedoms. Evangelical Christians have religious freedom, but no right to impose it on others.

That white evangelical Christians believe they are an oppressed minority should not in any way deter other Americans from fighting like hell. Their worldview is categorically incompatible with a just and equitable democratic republic. Their politics is their religion, and their opponents should act accordingly.

Is Trump as Christian as evangelicals are? Yes, it’s obvious.

Once you see them for what they are, that is.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 November 2019
Word Count: 952
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The Trump administration removed another major obstacle to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank by reversing Washington’s long-held view that Israel’s creation of settlements in the occupied territories was a violation of international law.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the new policy on November 18, 102 years after publication of the historic Balfour Declaration signalled British support for a Jewish state in Palestine.

In his announcement, Pompeo employed the same logic underlying the Trump administration’s decisions on Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He explained that “what we’ve done today is we have recognised the reality on the ground. We’ve now declared that settlements are not per se illegal under international law,” he said.

“We think, in fact, we’ve increased the likelihood that the vision for peace that this administration has, we think we’ve created space for that to be successful. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to move forward on that before too terribly long.”

A US policy based upon a recognition of “facts on the ground” signifies a ringing endorsement of an Israeli strategy pursued since the first settlement was established in areas conquered in June 1967 and, indeed, since the Balfour era a century ago.

Trump’s decision signifies “a huge achievement” in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for whom the Trump presidency has been a gift that keeps on giving. Like its previous departures from the international consensus on the Golan and Jerusalem, US recognition of the legality of settlements marks a complete and irreversible victory for Israeli efforts aimed at undermining the ability of Palestinians to establish a sovereign presence anywhere in the Palestinian territories.

The centrepiece of the move by Washington is a long quiescent legal opinion provided by the US State Department two generations ago.

In the spring of 1978, the Carter administration was deep in discussions before the historic Camp David summit between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that would lead to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and efforts — realised with the Oslo Accords in 1993 — to establish Palestinian “autonomy” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In anticipation of the negotiations, the State Department addressed the US view of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to Israel’s occupation of areas conquered in the June 1967 war. Were Israeli civilian settlements in East Jerusalem, Sinai, the Golan Heights and West Bank and Gaza violations of international legal restrictions governing the transfer of civilians into areas under hostile military occupation?

The State Department legal adviser obliged in April 1978 with a three-page analysis of “the legality of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.”

Herbert Hansell wrote that “the civilian settlements in the territories occupied by Israel do not appear to be consistent with these limits on Israel’s authority as belligerent occupant in that they do not seem intended to be of limited duration or established to provide orderly government of the territories and though some may serve incidental security purposes they do not appear to be required to meet military needs during the occupation.”

“The establishment of civilian settlements in those territories,” Hansell concluded, “is inconsistent with international law.”

The Hansell opinion did not excite much interest when it was issued. This was the era of what the New York Times described at the time as Israel’s “benevolent occupation.” Although more than 50,000 Israelis had settled in East Jerusalem, when Begin travelled to Camp David in September 1978 there were only 10,000 settlers in what were then isolated and primitive West Bank outposts.

Even before Hansell’s analysis, Washington had left little doubt about the view that settlements were both temporary and illegal. A succession of Israeli prime ministers — Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin — well understood US policy.

It was also clear that US opposition had no discernible effect on limiting Israel’s strategy of creating conditions on the ground through settlement and other means that would anchor Israel permanently in the areas conquered in June 1967 and preclude any Palestinian effort to establish sovereign control there.

Carter would unsuccessfully try to oblige Begin at Camp David to agree to a permanent freeze in settlement expansion. Begin was prepared only to keep the bulldozers quiet for three months.

With or without the Hansell opinion, over the next four decades, Washington, under Republican and Democrat leadership, proved unequal to the task of enforcing its view that international law prohibited the settlement effort — establishing a consistent record of failure to cajole, oblige or force Israel to stop the policy of creating facts. Today more than 600,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Pompeo has cited this failure as justification for the change in policy. He recalled that the Reagan administration had turned US policy on its head when US President Ronald Reagan declared that settlements were not illegal. Unlike Trump, however, Reagan never formally repudiated the Hansell opinion and policy under Reagan continued the ritual opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion.

Israel, which ignored with impunity previous warnings from Washington, welcomed Reagan’s change in US policy. On the ground, however, Washington policy gyrations were all but ignored. No matter the declarations from Washington, Israel continued to follow its own settlement blueprint and its insatiable desire to create facts on the ground.

The Obama administration made no secret of its view that settlements were at the heart of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and the principal obstacle to the US national security interest in realising the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously declared: “[The president] wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly.”

Netanyahu was stunned by Obama’s demand but, like his predecessors, he rebuffed Washington without suffering any real consequence. Indeed, he defied the wishes of the US president and lived not only to tell the tale but to prosper.

The intensity of Clinton’s demand for a settlement freeze only made Obama’s failure to bring Israel to heel that much more significant.

Trump is right to decry this failure. However, his remedy, which is intended to encourage outright annexation, is worse than the disease.

Geoffrey Aronson is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Monthly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 November 2019
Word Count: 1,044
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