Wednesday, October 9, 2024

THE INCREASED ROLE OF RELIGION IN US POLITICAL LIFE

Harry Targ

 


https://godandcountrythemovie.com/

I live in North Central Indiana, a state that has moved to the right over the last twenty years, largely because of the efforts of leading Republicans to crush the prominence of the labor movement and the shift of the Indiana Democratic party to neoliberalism in the Clinton era.

However, in Tippecanoe County there have emerged a variety of organizations which are concerned about the twenty-first century attack on women, the rise of racism, rightwing legislative attacks on education, and the erosion of the environment, and, undergirding all of this, democratic institutions. In addition, peace and justice groups have blossomed on the campus of Purdue University, so much so that the Purdue Administration has reversed a tradition initiated in 2007 to have polling booths on the university campus.

To their credit a number of churches and civic organizations have been showing periodically a powerful new documentary co-produced by Rob Reiner called God and Country. This is a powerful documentary that demonstrates how the radical right has appropriated Christianity to serve political purposes. The film shows that beginning in the 1970s many well-funded groups and leading political operatives associated with the presidential campaign  of Ronald Reagan, such as Paul Weyrich, began to challenge the 200-year constitutional commitment to the separation of Church and State.

The documentary points out, as Nancy MacLean did  in Democracy in Chains, that the resuscitation of the radical right was stimulated by the historic decision ending racial segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education. And while the key stimulus for the right-wing resurgence was racism, the film suggests, the issue that ignited the political and religious right as a mass movement was abortion. It is the latter issue that generated the movement of sectors of Christian evangelicalism to the rightwing, thus connecting Brown with Roe v. Wade.

In sum, politics becomes central to sectors of Christian evangelicalism when  some religious leaders realize  that challenging the separation of church and state can be financially profitable and can lead to enhanced political power. And to connect the dots between religion and politics, the film suggests, selected politicians gained critical support, particularly Ronald Reagan, and in our own day, Donald Trump. The Christian right and the unconstitutional claims about the connections between religion and the state have been promoted by multi-million-dollar support for corrosive media: radio, television, the internet, music, films, and organized efforts to restructure political institutions.

From the film’s point of view, and most of us, there was never in the US constitution any envisioned connections between religion and politics. God and Country, the ‘founding fathers’ declared must remain separate. And most voters learned from their childhood that the separation of church and state was the very essence of US democracy. And this, religious ideologues of the right challenge today.

The film presents a variety of experts who have studied the religious right, including current and former Christian evangelical ministers, who clearly document the “counter revolution” that has occurred in the religious community. The film shows charismatic ministers, beginning with Jerry Falwell, who cross the line between religion and politics for their own gain, financial and political power. The documentary brings the narrative to January 6, 2021 and beyond to show that rightwing evangelicals are willing to “pick up the gun” to insure that God and Country are merged. This the film suggests represents a fundamental threat to democracy and the Trump/Vance campaign is its current instrumentality.

This is a powerful film that deserves to be shown regularly before the election (and beyond) as it is being shown in my Indiana community.


Having said that I want to note two caveats in reference to the film. First, while it powerfully addresses racism and patriarchy, it does not address adequately the class character of the radical right, both its membership and why its devotees have drifted to the right. The only references to economic issues are two powerful, but undeveloped, comments by Reverend William Barber, who through his New Poor People’s Campaign, and his new book, points out that one third of eligible American voters are poor. (One participant in the film showing I attended correctly pointed out the important role of the politics of fear and resentment drawing voters to the far right).

In addition, the film speaks to Christians, albeit in a powerful way, but does not address those who have moved to the radical right who are not Christians. Communities committed to uncovering the roots of the radical right and its constituencies might show a documentary about Jewish fundamentalism as well, such as the new film Israelism.

Again, despite its shortcomings, I applaud those in my community who have organized the showings of God and Country and I regard multiple showings of films like it as a kind of political movement bringing concerned citizens together for education, discussion, and organizing to defend democracy.

 


Tuesday, October 1, 2024

THE HISTORIC US/IRANIAN CONFLICT MAKES MIDDLE EAST WAR LIKELY: Some Essays

Harry Targ

(“Biden: ‘All-out war is possible’ in the Middle East”President Joe Biden warned Wednesday that “all-out war is possible” in the Middle East, acknowledging the limits of his own persistent diplomatic efforts at achieving a cease-fire deal. (Politico, September 25, 2024)



Monday, April 15, 2024

The danger of war with Iran



Given the troubled history of U.S./Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising. As the influential Council of Foreign Relations put it in January:

A drone attack on a U.S. military outpost in Jordan killed three U.S. troops (Reuters) and wounded at least thirty-four, U.S. President Joe Biden said yesterday. He said that Iran-backed militant groups carried out the attack in northeast Jordan near the Syrian border.…CFR expert Steven A. Cook writes for the Wall Street Journal. “No one is going to lend a hand to the U.S. unless Washington takes decisive action to reform the [Palestinian Authority], confront Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ and isolate the region’s arsonists, notably Qatar and Turkey.”

Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah of Iran’s dictatorship starting at the end of World War II, the U.S. militarization of the country , the overthrow of the progressive Prime  Minister  Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, the embarrassment of the hostage taking in 1979, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations. During the Obama administration in 2015 a nuclear treaty was negotiated between Iran, the US, and other countries, but it was abrogated by President Trump. U.S./Iranian hostilities have increased ever since, particularly since October 7, 2023.

U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large (and justifiable) internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement, more or less, for growing Israeli threats against Iran.

Given this troubled history of U.S./Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.

And now, (April, 2024) the threat of escalating war in the region, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, has increased dramatically.



Saturday, March 24, 2012

MEASURING TARGETS OF US IMPERIALISM: HISTORY, ECONOMICS, GEOPOLITICS, CULTURE AND IRAN

Harry Targ

U.S. Imperialism in the Beginning

Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority. The rise of the United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel, textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge concentrations of cash.

Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines. The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day.


While U.S. expansion occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.

Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism

To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that relate to the relative importance policy-makers give to some countries compared to others.

First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural resources.

Second, geopolitics and military hegemony matter. Empires require ready access to regions and trouble spots all around the world. When Teddy Roosevelt, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice President, and President of the United States, articulated the first warning of the need for global power he spoke of the development of a “two-ocean” navy. The U.S., he said, must become an Atlantic and a Pacific power; thus prioritizing the projection of military power in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. If the achievement of global power was dependent upon resources drawn from everywhere, military and political hegemony in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and parts of Africa also required attention.

Third, as the imperial project grows, certain political regimes and cultures take on particular importance for policy-makers and the American people. Foreign policy elites claim that the U.S. has a special responsibility for them. If these roles are rejected by the targeted country, the experience burns itself into the consciousness of the people. For example, Cuba was seen by U.S. rulers as far back as Thomas Jefferson as soon to be part of the United States. Cuba’s rejection of this presumption of U.S. tutelage has been a scar on the U.S. sense of itself ever since the spread of revolutionary ferment on the island.

The Danger of War With Iran Today

Reflecting on the SSUSI adds to the discussion about current United States foreign policy toward Iran. The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In 1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil.

After World War II, with a young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh became Prime Minister and asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The British government enlisted the United States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40 percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent, and the rest would be given to rich Iranians.

Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the bulwark of US power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the 1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world.

To the great surprise of left critics of the Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil workers against the regime. In January, 1979 secretly organized massive street protests led by the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected by Carter.

After jockeying for power in the post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980 Carter authorized a military rescue effort
that failed. The bungled military operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny.

In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the end of the Iraq/Iran war U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing 290 people aboard.

Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations. U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large and justifiable internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement, more or less, for growing Israeli threats against Iran. Given this troubled history of US/Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.

Returning to SSUSI and Iranian Relations

As an emerging global power, United States needs for natural resources, customers for consumer and military products, investment opportunities, and outlets for energy companies grew throughout the twentieth century. One of the significant historical junctures in the transfer of economic and geopolitical power in the world from the declining British empire and the rising U.S. empire was the agreement to redistribute control of Iranian oil in 1954. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was obliged to share Iranian oil with the then five U.S. oil giants.

As U.S. oil needs and those of its friends in Europe increased, control of the Persian Gulf region and access to its oil became more vital. Furthermore, since a hostile Iran could control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian revolution of 1979 posed an increasing geopolitical problem for American dominance.

The impulse in 1979 to send U.S. troops to save the Shah’s regime was driven by both economics and geopolitics. It was only because other Carter advisers disagreed with the National Security Advisor on the possibility of saving the Shah that a U.S. intervention stalled in 1979. But in 1980 an Iraq/Iran war provided an opportunity, it was hoped, to weaken Iran’s potential control of the region.

Finally, the U.S. decision-makers since 1953 saw a special relationship between this country and Iran. The U.S. put the Shah in power, plied him with enormous military power, encouraged and facilitated significant cultural exchanges, and defined his regime as a junior partner in policing the region.

The rapidity of the Shah’s overthrow and the anger expressed by the Iranian people about its historic relationship to the American people communicated to the world declining U.S. power. Consequently, U.S. hostility to Iran in subsequent decades using a variety of issues including processing uranium is not surprising.


Tuesday, August 20, 2013

SIXTY YEARS OF BLOWBACK: IRAN

Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2001 about “blowback” that it “is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded.…. This misguided ‘covert operation’ of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.” (The Nation, October 15, 2001).

The CIA initiated overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh sixty years ago on August 19, 1953 was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East and the fourth largest in the world and it was geographically close to the former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the CIA covert war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.

The immediate background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian government received only ten percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil. Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.

Ironically, Mossadegh assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy. But, in Washington, the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”

After the nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a military intervention but the Truman Administration feared such an action would work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party. 

The boycott led to economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition, Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

As a result of the plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department official put it:

“When the crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis….The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program…. Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be in power.” (Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, 1972).

The Shah, who had fled Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free” world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).

In August, 1954, a new oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of forty percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million, which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was accorded fifty percent of profits from future oil sales. President Eisenhower declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of “economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an independent country in “the family of free nations.”

In brief, the United States overthrew a popularly elected and overwhelmingly endorsed regime in Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s, 70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary overthrow of his military state.

As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United States role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.

 

 

HYBRID WARS AGAINST IRAN

Saturday, January 25, 2020

from https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2020/01/hybrid-warswhat-is-new-and-what-is-not.html

Iran has been a country of particular concern of the United States at least since the end of World War II. The US propped up the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) at the outset of the war to protect US bases which were used to transfer war materials to the former Soviet Union. After Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, elected in 1951, nationalized Iran’s valuable oil resource, Great Britain, whose Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had “owned “ the oil, began to urge the US to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister, instill full power in the monarch, the Shah, and reprivatize Iranian oil. In 1953 the US Central Intelligence Agency launched a coup to overthrow the Prime Minister and to establish the Shah as Iran’s all-powerful dictator. His brutality and repression lasted for years until a mass-based worker and religious-led movement ousted him from power in 1979. In the aftermath of the ouster of the Shah, religious leaders consolidated their control of the state, the Shah fled to the United States for medical treatment, the new regime demanded his return to stand trial for his crimes, and Iranian students took 52 US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days.

The United States responses to the transformation of the Iranian regime included President Carter’s declaration of his “doctrine,” which proclaimed that instabilities in the Persian Gulf region were vital to US national security. The US began to fund Iraq in its eight-year bloody war against Iran, which led to 500,000 Iranians killed. The United States urged Israel to invade Lebanon, escalate attacks on Palestine, and in general tilted in opposition to Iran and its allies in the region. The US also increased the sale of technologically sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia. Therefore in the 1980s, US policy in the Persian Gulf and Middle East regions was driven by the growing hostility of Iran to the United States (once a pillar of US support in the Persian Gulf), the continued need of Europe and Japan for Iranian oil, and Iran’s vital geographic location, particularly in terms of its potential control of the  flow of oil to Europe and Japan.  But, in addition, the Iranian people had violated a cardinal rule of US global hegemony. They had risen up against rule by an American puppet. Much like Cuba in the Western Hemisphere, Iranians declared that they no longer would abide by a leader chosen by the United States and not them. (In fact, in the Nixon Administration, the Shah’s regime was identified as the key “gendarme” state in the Persian Gulf, the local US police enforcer).

Ever since the hostage crisis of 1979, the United States has imposed economic sanctions of one sort or another on Iran. After the long years of damage to the Iranian economy and the people at large, the  Nuclear Treaty of 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was negotiated by Iran, the United States, member countries of the European Union, and Security Council members, Russia and China.  Along with Iran’s promise to stop the production of potential nuclear material, signatories agreed to end the freezing of Iranian assets deposited in US and European banks, to eliminate various prohibitions on Western investment in the Iranian economy, and to remove trade restrictions.

Almost immediately after the sanctions were lifted in the aftermath of the Nuclear Treaty, the Iranian economy grew: a 12 percent growth in GDP in 2016 and an additional but modest 3.7 percent in 2017. However, in 2018 President Trump withdrew from the Nuclear Treaty and re-imposed crippling sanctions. As a result, the Iranian economy contracted by 4.8 percent in 2018 and in a BBC report projected a further decline of 9.5 percent in 2019.

Iran’s oil exports and hence production was hit particularly hard. The value of Iranian currency declined dramatically and inflation in the country rose, particularly for the price of food. (BBC News. “Six Charts That Show How Hard US Sanctions Have Hit Iran,” December 2, 2019). Sanctions reduced purchasing power, increased the cost of living for food and transportation, reduced access of Iranian students studying abroad to financial resources, and led to the reduction of public services. 

This is the story of hybrid war against Iran: along with military threats and attempts to isolate Iran diplomatically, make the people suffer and cause increased outrage at the material conditions of life. The hope is that the people will rise up and overthrow the regime in power (and, of course, instances of corruption and repression will magnify protest responses). The scenario has been repeated over and over: Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950s, Cuba since 1960, and  now Venezuela and Iran again. And make no mistake about it: economic sanctions are targeted against civilian populations and constitute a strategy of war against the people, motivating them to rise up against their governments.

Meanings of the Hybrid War Concept for the Peace Movement

We can deduce a variety of conclusions from the Law of Hybrid Wars.

First, twenty-first century imperialism is not solely or primarily about direct military confrontation such as wars and/or covert acts of terrorism against targeted nations.

Second, hegemonic powers, such as the United States, see coalitions of states as a threat to global dominance. This is true in Eurasia, the countries along the Silk Road, and in Latin America where a crippled Bolivarian Revolution survives.

Third, policymakers do not primarily act impulsively. They see a threat, which includes transnational cooperation and resistance. Strategists then identify weak links in threatened coalitions. They formulate multi-dimensional, stage-by-stage responses. And these responses involve economics, culture, sowing seeds of division, promoting demonic narratives about target states, and at the same time they leave “all options on the table,” which means traditional military action.

Finally, it behooves the peace movement to be cognizant of twenty-first century methods of imperialism. It must fashion strategies that clearly and compellingly identify and combat economic sanctions recognizing that they, indeed, are acts of war.

                                              Tricontinental



 

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

US SUPPORTS ISRAEL’S BRUTAL WAR TO CREATE A ‘GREATER MIDDLE EAST’

Noam Chomsky, Current Affairs, Amnesty International, Al Jazeera, Harry Targ

 

                                           https://currentaffairs.adda247.com/greater-israel-map/

US Supports Israel with $3 billion in Military Aid Per Year Since 1979: this year $18 billion more

“… the crises will be serious in what President Eisenhower called “the most strategically important area in the world.” In the early post-War years, the United States in effect extended the Monroe Doctrine to the Middle East, barring any interference apart from Britain, assumed to be a loyal dependency and quickly punished when it occasionally got out of hand (as in 1956). The strategic importance of the region lies primarily in its immense petroleum reserves and the global power accorded by control over them; and, crucially, from the huge profits that flow to the Anglo-American rulers, which have been of critical importance for their economies. It has been necessary to ensure that this enormous wealth flows primarily to the West, not to the people of the region.”(Noam Chomsky, Excerpted from Fateful Triangle, 1999).

https://youtu.be/Mtcj9oTxgzA?si=e0ApT_t-mTJ-LWd4

The Current Campaign of Israeli/US Genocide in the Middle East

The news coming out of the occupied Gaza Strip continues to be stark. The suffering is relentless.

As Amnesty International recently reported:

“Over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, with 70% being women and children. Children have been starved to death. Families have been forced from their homes and their land rendered uninhabitable. For a second year, at least 45,000 first-graders in Gaza are unable to start the school year, according to the United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF”. (alerts@takeaction.amnestyusa.org)

And Now Lebanon

   https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/24/israel-attacks-lebanon-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker                                         

 And the Second Nakba from The Progressive International.

https://progressive.international/wire/2024-10-13-pi-briefing-no-39-a-year-of-genocide/en?link_id=0&can_id=ec64d0b91f753344eb4a9810fb771d23&source=email-pi-briefing-no-39-a-year-of-genocide&email_referrer=email_2489557&email_subject=pi-briefing-no-39-a-year-of-genocide\

The Middle East and the Peace Movement

Most American politicians express their belief that the US must maintain a special relationship with the state of Israel. One of the few active mobilizations for peace today is the worldwide campaign to demand governments, corporations, and other institutions boycott, and divest holdings in what is regarded as an apartheid state, Israel, which oppresses its  Palestinian population and those living in the Occupied Territories. The campaign is so effective that along with national politicians, governors and state legislatures have taken stands against the BDS campaign.

Next to the historic US ties to Israel, most analysts see the deconstruction of the Middle East  as a direct result of the Iraq war initiated in 2003. Since then, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries have been torn apart by civil war fueled by western, primarily US, intervention,

The Middle East policies of the United States, and its proxy Israel, have created a growing resistance, directed at western targets and an ideological campaign against all the traditional imperial powers who dominated the region for hundreds of years.

With this as a backdrop, Israeli responses with United States complicity is stepped up high-tech killing justified by a public campaign that demonizes Muslims everywhere in the world including in the United States.

It is the obligation of the US peace movement to work even more vigorously to oppose US imperialism in the region and the transfer of military aid to Israel, and to demand autonomy for the Palestinian people. And for now the peace movement must continue to demand that the US pressure Israel to stop the bombing and killing of people in the entire region. The Greater Middle East vision of the United States and Israel has been a brutal vision.

 

Thursday, September 19, 2024

REMODELING LIBERAL ARTS IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: A Conservative Agenda

Harry Targ

(The story below appeared in the Purdue University periodical electronic newsletter “Purdue Today” on September 19,  2024. It celebrates the new Liberal Arts program, Cornerstone,  established during the administration of former Purdue President Mitch Daniels. It describes ACTA’s recognition of the Liberal Arts program as a “hidden gem.” Also hidden was the political background of ACTA and its affiliates, ALEC and the State Policy Network.

ACTADesignates Purdue University’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program as aHidden Gem for its Robust Liberal Arts Curriculum - College of Liberal Arts -Purdue University)


In the recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the intellectual development of the libertarian right and its connection with the Koch Brothers and state programs to promote an ideologically-driven policy agenda.  She argues that many of the libertarian right’s policy proposals would be opposed if public discourse and majoritarian democracy prevailed. Consequently, she suggests, efforts are made to limit transparency, public discussion, and legislative and electoral participation in major public policies.

Public universities are among the institutions in which the lack of transparency is becoming the norm. The tradition of shared governance is being trampled on. Educational decisions are being made by politicians, administrators and boards of trustees without any advice and consent from educators and taxpayers. Under the guise of a “business model” driven by metrics and profit-making, many years of educational practices are being overturned by administrators with little educational experience. Great state universities such as those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana are being reconstructed. Programs of teaching and research are being uprooted. Sometimes ongoing programs are abolished. And new liberal arts curricula measure success by creating narrowly trained job seekers. Research is increasingly channeled to meet the needs of corporations or the military.

The Vision of the 21st Century University

The President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, on October 12, 2018 received the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education presented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Daniels reported with enthusiasm that Purdue University is the third “most STEM-centric school in the country,” with over 60 percent of its undergraduate students matriculating in engineering, chemistry, physics, and agricultural and biological sciences. And he implied that there is a struggle going on in great universities everywhere about what should constitute liberal arts (Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. “Re-liberalizing the Liberal Arts,” Washington, October 12, 2018, goacta.org.) From Daniels’ point of view, administrators cannot wait for liberal arts programs in the twenty-first century to transform themselves. This is so because liberal arts education today consists of “conformity of thought, intolerance of dissent and sometimes an authoritarian tendency to quash it, a rejection of the finest of the Western and Enlightenment traditions in favor of unscholarly revisionism and pseudo-disciplines.”

Daniels then railed against the “one-sided view of the world” being presented in liberal arts classrooms in opposition to critical thinking. He appropriately celebrated the “clash of competing ideas,” but characterized liberal arts curricula and research as dogmatic and authoritarian. (Many liberal arts educators would argue that old ideas are always revisited bringing new, diverse, perspectives to bear on traditional disciplinary formulations in the social sciences and humanities). In other words, while most scholars and students appreciate the openness and creativity of education and scholarship that has resulted from the last fifty years of ferment, debate, and thought characteristic of the intellectual life of higher education, Daniels advocates to the contrary that the newer scholarship and education should be challenged and expunged (Daniels referred in his lecture to some of his intellectual mentors including Charles Murray and Jeb Bush).

Daniels added that the tenure system protects dogmatists rather than what he would regard as free thinkers. He characterized modern liberal arts education as “the celebration of mediocrity;” the liberal arts as the home of “illiberal viewpoints;” and as the transmitter of “conformity of thought.” He condemned what he called “shoddy scholarship” as well. “Hopelessly abstruse, jargon-laden papers from so-called ‘studies’ programs read like self-parodies.” He claimed, with no evidence, that “…fewer than half the published studies across the social sciences can be replicated.”

And the final and most damaging claim Daniels made was that practitioners of liberal arts make their subject matter boring. He asserted that histories are written without heroes, excitement, “…glory, the human elements…”

All this, Daniels suggested, requires reform of liberal arts from outside the clutches of the educators in the various fields he condemned. At Purdue University change is occurring because of a program called Cornerstone which brings STEM students to specially crafted liberal arts courses. “Enrollees will read Locke, Hobbes, and Jefferson as well as other works in the Great Books tradition.” Reading the great books, which according to Daniels are not already being taught in existing courses, and offering various dual degree and fast track three-year degrees, he said, are responses to the needs of the business community for liberal arts graduates.

And as to free speech on campus, Daniels castigated students who, he asserted were coached by faculty, made unwarranted demands on him to denounce fascist and racist flyers on campus. And without any sense of irony, Daniels quoted 1960s Chancellor of the University of California system of higher education Clark Kerr who said that a proper university “is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” He apparently did not recall that students at the University of California launched the Free Speech Movement on their campus in 1964 because Kerr’s administration banned literature tables on campus.

Discussions of Higher Education Are Held in Secret

Lastly, Daniels praised the work of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA, formed in 1995, says it works “…to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” Henry Giroux has characterized ACTA as “…not a friend of academic freedom, nor is it comfortable with John Dewey’s notion that education should be responsive to the deepest conflicts of our time…” (Henry Giroux, The University in Chains, Paragon Publishers, 2007, p. 161).

ACTA, while claiming to be independent, is an associate member of the State Policy Network. SPN is a “think tank” with affiliates in 49 states. SPN groups are affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which was a creation of the billionaire Koch brothers and rightwing organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, to promote a radical libertarian policy agenda in virtually every state. Jane Mayer, Nancy MacLean and others have shown that ALEC, SPN, and ACTA leaders realized that public discourse and transparency in political and other institutions might lead publics, often majorities, to reject their anti-government, “free-market” agendas.

Universities historically have had public discussions about curricula and most universities, including Purdue University, have institutionalized mechanisms for decision-making on educational policy matters. Faculty Senates, curricula committees, and promotion and tenure committees, have been the lifeblood of higher education. And, appropriately enough, as a result of student movements on college campuses, students have been included in conversations about educational matters as well. And, some state universities value the input of citizens and a broad representative array of alumni from their universities, not just the wealthy who become the core of boards of trustees or the small number who can afford to donate millions of dollars.

What the Daniels speech represents is a capsule summary of the Daniels vision of what liberal arts should be. It is largely a series of claims about modern liberal arts programs, diametrically opposed to the reality. It is a policy brief for his campus that Daniels presented to the non-transparent ACTA, an affiliate of a larger covert institutional network with a presence in every state. The network is committed to a radical transformation of economic, political, and educational institutions, a radical libertarian America. Since the liberal arts tradition includes a rigorous conversation about this and other visions, questions of the direction of higher education at Purdue University deserve a rich diverse public conversation among educators, students, and citizens. Private conversations within and between organizations that restrict this conversation violate the spirit of higher education.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_of_Trustees_and_Alumni


 

Monday, September 16, 2024

CONVERSATIONS ABOUT NEW INTERNATIONAL REALITIES

 Harry Targ and Stephen David

                                                         


 

Behind the turmoil of the Ukraine and Israeli wars, tensions between the United States and China, African contestation over neo-colonial political, economic, and military influence, and US meddling in the politics of Latin America, there are fundamental forces in play that seek to rearrange and change the architectures of global social relations. Simply put: the world, especially the Global South has had enough of Western oppressive systems and its imperial thrust.

New institutions and solidarities, beyond the control and wishes of the West, are emerging in the Global South. These involve changing patterns of trade, finance, uses of national currencies in place of the dollar and Euro, and new expansive trade corridors and routes. Perhaps most importantly, in the Global South, the voices of criticism of the unjust and dictatorial conduct of the United States and its allies is on a sharp rise. There is a renewed belief in sovereignty and a new form of political economy that supports more just international social relations then were institutionalized in the Bretton Woods system after World War Two.  In short, the hundreds of years of forms of  “linking” of North and South are increasingly being challenged.

And now candidate Trump on the campaign trail is warning his supporters of the “dedollarization” movement that is advancing around the world and promises to crush it if he is elected. The link below is to a recent Trump campaign speech and a useful discussion of dedolarization and the rising of the BRICS movement.

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/09/13/trump-threat-punish-dedollarization-dollar/

In short, there is much happening in what might be called “the new international realities” which must concern progressives around the world. These changes require us to include them in our analyses and long run  struggle against the “rules based” capitalist empire.

 

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.