ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Black African Concentration Camps in the Second Anglo-Boer War (11 October 1899 - 31 May 1902)

May 30^th, 1902 is the date is used to mark the deaths of at least 15,000 Black Africans in concentration camps that housed approximately 115,000 of their number during the Second Anglo-Boer War (26,370 Boer women and children died in separate ‘concentration’ camps as well, and those camps included Black—‘Kaffir’—servants). The date is significant because it comes the day before the signing of the “peace” agreement, the Treaty of Vereeniging, at Melrose House in Pretoria on May 31^st, 1902. Later estimates put the number at closer to 20,000 Black Africans, the majority of whom were children, the causes of death being primarily medical neglect, exposure, infectious diseases (e.g., measles, whooping cough, typhoid fever, diphtheria and dysentery) and malnutrition. The establishment of these camps was but one part of a “Scorched Earth Policy” adopted by British Commander Lord Kitchener during the South African War (‘once called the last gentleman’s war’) as a counter-measure to the Boers’ guerrilla strategy employed at the end of 1900.

“The South African War broke out on 11 October, 1899 between the two former Boer republics (Transvaal and the Orange Free State) and the British. But war touches the lives of all inhabitants of the affected country and it would be unacceptable to not acknowledge the many ways it destroyed the lives of the black population groups including the Khoi, San, Zulu, Xhosa, Tsonga, and Swati. Whether their role was voluntary or involuntary; combatant or non-combatant, we would be doing an injustice to our history if we removed them from this war.

Black people were conscripted and used as slaves and servants as scouts, messengers, watchmen in blockhouses, despatch runners, cattle raiders, trench diggers, drivers, labourers, agterryers and auxiliaries. The agterryers were used by the Boers for guarding ammunition, cooking, collecting firewood, mending the horses, and loading firearms for battle. It is important to note that auxiliaries were also used in fighting, evident in some of the photographs taken during the War. At least 15,000 blacks were used as combatants by the British and also by both British and Boers as wagon drivers.” (from the third link below)

Please see the following links:

• Second Boer War
• Black Concentration Camps during the Anglo-Boer War 2, 1900-1902
• Erasure of black suffering in Anglo-Boer War
• Black victims in a white man’s war
• ‘Spin’ on Boer atrocities

Related bibliography: South African Liberation Struggles

Caught in the Web: End of May (2017) Miscellany

Elizabeth Catlett, “The Lesson,” ca. 1948 (crayon on paper)

David Lazarus at the Los Angeles Times: “Die hard: Republican healthcare bill has no problem throwing you off a building”

“What kind of politician would commit such a monstrous act? That’s easy, said Elizabeth G. Taylor, executive director of the National Health Law Program: Any politician more interested in cutting taxes for the rich than providing affordable healthcare for ordinary people. The bill ‘sacrifices the healthcare of millions of vulnerable people to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest in this country,’ she said.”

*           *           *

Harold Meyerson (executive editor at American Prospect) in the Los Angeles Times: “Why do billionaires care so much about charter schools?”

“ … [W]e have to go back to the economic polarization of pre-New Deal America to find a time when the super-rich felt so compelled to better the lot of the poor, as they understood it. Andrew Carnegie, who grew mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to public libraries in the process.

What Carnegie and today’s pro-charter rich have in common is a belief in individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally established standards and services. Living in separate eras when the middle class was — and is — embattled and the gap between rich and poor was — and is — immense, billionaires have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap: raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free, funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment, reviving collective bargaining and raising progressive taxes to pay for all of that.”

*           *           *

From the Los Angeles Times, an article by Danielle Paquette of The Washington Post: “Layoffs at Carrier start soon, targeting some of the jobs Trump vowed to save”

“Carrier, the company President Trump pledged to keep on American soil, informed the state of Indiana this week that it will soon begin cutting 632 workers from an Indianapolis factory. The manufacturing jobs will move to Monterrey, Mexico, where the minimum wage is $3.90. That was not supposed to happen, according to Trump’s campaign promises. He told Indiana residents at a rally last year there was a ‘100% chance’ he would save more jobs at the heating and air conditioning manufacturer.”

*           *           *

From Vox: “45 million Americans rely on food stamps. Trump wants to gut the program.”

“The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been helping keep Americans from going hungry since the 1960s. Formerly known as food stamps, the program began as a pilot under President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as part of the war on poverty. Today, SNAP is the biggest and most important nutrition assistance program: About 45 million Americans living below the poverty line — nearly half of them children — rely on SNAP to purchase food.

If Trump had his way, though, the number of SNAP recipients would soon be drastically cut. The administration’s first comprehensive budget proposal would trim SNAP spending by $191 billion over the next decade — which is about a quarter of the program’s funding. (The program costs the federal government $80 billion a year, which is a large amount of money — but a relatively small fraction of the budget.) [….]

So is SNAP actually ineffective? It’s a well-explored question. A number of major studies have evaluated the program’s impact, and they consistently show that SNAP delivers results on a range of problems, from improving health outcomes like diabetes to reducing the number of people who go hungry. In fact, researchers who study poverty and food policy say throwing people off SNAP is a silly idea because it’s one of the government programs that really works. As the Trump Administration’s own Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said earlier this week of SNAP, ‘You don’t try to fix things that aren’t broken.’”

*           *           *

From Chad Terhune in the Los Angeles Times: “Americans waste $200 billion every year on medical tests they don’t need, experts say”

My wife and I have had numerous “dinner table” discussions about this over the years. One thing that has always puzzled and irked me is the fact that many doctors have financial stakes in medical laboratories (at least here in California), even owning them, although this is not mentioned in the article: so, more tests, more money! I’m not implying this is a problem about doctors in the first instance, as the health care “system” is  well-known for directly or indirectly creating perverse or wrong-headed incentives (at least from the perspectives of health, health justice, and health care). The high cost of medical malpractice premiums in many states is one reason, for instance, that too many doctors still practice “defensive medicine.”

*           *           *

From the irrepressible and inimitable Michael Hiltzik at the Times: “The challenges in setting up a California single-payer system are daunting — but not insurmountable”

Although I agree in principle of the need for a single-payer system, I doubt a Republican-dominated progress (along with the lobbying power of insurance companies) will allow this to happen in California. The problem here is somewhat analogous to “islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism” (or, for example, isolated cooperatives in an economy dominated by capitalist firms). Nevertheless, I think that problem is often exaggerated (were there once ‘islands of capitalism in a sea of feudalism’?) and thus perhaps the obstacles (both known and unanticipated) are “not,” as Hiltzik says, “insurmountable.” The legislative momentum in our state may accord the single-payer plan a public hearing it would not otherwise receive.

See too this, from Jacobin: “Taking Single-Payer Seriously”

“Medicare for all is a moral imperative. But the urgency of passing it doesn’t mean we can forget about the details.”

*           *           *

Neil H. Buchanan at Dorf on Law: “Trump and the Republicans Continue Their Attacks on Education”

“The release of the Trump Administration’s proposed federal budget has been met with mockery and ridicule across the political spectrum.  All budgets are ‘dead on arrival,’ but Trump’s budgets stands out for its dishonesty, incompetence, and inhumanity. [….] My initial reaction to Trump’s budget, in fact, was that it fully explains why House Speaker Paul Ryan has continued to support a man whom Ryan so clearly despises. Ryan has spent his career trying to look concerned while crafting reverse-Robin Hood policies. Trump’s budget proposal will allow Ryan to look comparatively humane while implementing a deeply inhumane series of cuts to crucial lifelines for the middle class and poor people, all in the name of shoveling money toward the rich. [….]

The larger issue is that the Republicans are systematically shutting down access to higher education. Direct financing of universities and colleges: Cut! Subsidies to student loans: Cut!  After-the-fact loan forgiveness for people who are willing to live modestly to work in the public interest: Cut? As the old line goes: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  Republicans have tried it, and they like it. Now, they want to impose it on everyone else.”

*           *           *

Finally, from Kenan Malik at Pandaemonium: “Rigged Labour Market, Skewed Public Debate” [with great art photos!]

“ … [Non-compete clauses in] contracts have long been routine among senior executives. But now they are being used by companies to restrict the job opportunities of blue collar workers …. And in restricting their job opportunities they also reduce workers’ bargaining power, and hence lower wages.

One academic study found that 37 per cent of US workers have signed such agreements some time in their life, and that 18 per cent (almost 30 million workers) were currently working under such agreements. Given that many workers who sign such agreements do not realize that they have, the real figures are likely to be much higher.”

State Secrets in the Office of the President

They told me that if I voted for Hillary Clinton that state secrets would not be safe in the office of the President. And they were right. I voted for Hillary Clinton, and state secrets are not safe in the office of the President. 

An Agribusiness Perspective on Farm Labor & Immigration

At Food Politics, Marion Nestle shares an interview with Tom Nassif, the CEO of the Western Growers. “Nassif represents this trade association for industrial agricultural producers in the West and Southwest. He discusses how immigration issues affect farm labor from the perspective of producers.”

The entire interview is worth reading, but I want to highlight the following two “questions” and answers, commenting—by way of the work of Frank Bardacke—on the second one below:

1. Some people say farmers just have to pay more for their labor.

“Anyone who is an enlightened observer of immigration reform and agriculture knows that’s not true. Wages have continually gone up. And the supply of labor keeps diminishing. … It’s not the wages, it’s the work. This is a difficult job. This is seasonal. This is migratory. This is not full time. This requires people to be away from their families. So that’s not very attractive work. And money alone isn’t going to do it, because farm workers aren’t raising their kids to be farm workers and certainly people here lawfully in the United States are not willing to do that kind of work when they have so many economic opportunities. As you know, Mexico is now importing farm workers [from other countries], because even in Mexico they are seeing better economic opportunities than being a farm worker.”

2. How in danger are produce growers of being put out of business by the current labor situation?

“I think several of the smaller to midsize operators are in danger of either having to cease farming or sell their operations to larger producers who have the wherewithal to withstand some of the things that are happening because they are able to invest in and develop more mechanical harvesting and other robotic operations. In many cases it will take the farmer a million dollars or more just to develop a harvesting machine for a particular commodity.”

*           *           *

As a prelude to the topic of increased mechanization of harvesting processes (and consequent devaluation of manual labor or Marx’s ‘cunning of the hand’), permit me to quote from Frank Bardacke’s “masterpiece,” Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso, 2011):

“Not all farm jobs require equal skill. Different techniques are required for thinning, weeding, or harvesting, for working on the ground or climbing on ladders, for working by the hour or doing piece work, and each crop has its craft secrets and know-how. It is one thing to pick lettuce, another to girdle table grapes, another yet to pick lemons. Not all the physical skill of farmwork depends on the coordination of accomplished hands and sharp, experienced eyes. The work also requires physical endurance. Farm work is hard not only in the sense of being skilled but also in the sense of requiring toil, exertion, and extended physical effort. When arriving in the early morning to begin work, Pablo Camacho would often say, ‘Ya llegamos al campo de la batalla’ – ‘Now we arrive at the field of battle.’ Although intending to provoke a smile, Camacho was not being ironic. Most people who have worked in the fields say that it is the hardest work they have ever done. It is hard to put up with the inevitable pain and physical exhaustion, to last until the end of the row, the end of the day, the week, the season. ‘To last’ is not quite the right word. The right word is a Spanish one, aguantar: to endure, to bear, to put up with.

Pablo Camacho was proud of his ability to aguantar, even arrogant about it, often claiming that he never felt pain while he was working. That is a pose that a lot of farmworkers assume, even among themselves. At work, no one complains about pain. Camacho believed that the ability to put up with pain was part of the Mexican national character, especially evident in sports. Like many farmworkers, he was an avid boxing fan. He could name all the boxing champions in the lighter divisions from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as recount the ways Mexican fighters had been denied championship opportunities. Mexicans were the best boxers in the world, he argued, especially in their ability to withstand punishment. They were also good marathon runners and long-distance bicycle racers, he said, sports in which endurance and patience are the essential virtues.

But Mexicans do not have an exclusive franchise on the ability to tolerate hard work. Endurance is a trait of slaves and the oppressed in general, and also characteristic of peasants and other agricultural people – whether free or unfree. Agriculture by its very nature requires patience. Farmworkers have to wait for nature to do her work. They must plant, water, and wait. Weed and wait. And, finally, after enduring the wait, they may harvest.

[….] Aristotle contended that ‘occupations are … the most servile in which there is greatest use of the body.’ The dynamic relationship between the brain and the hand was ripped asunder by early philosophers, leaving two separate activities: valued intellectual labor (suitable for free men) and devalued manual labor (suitable for women and slaves). This philosophical predisposition against the work of the body had its greatest worldly triumph in the development of capitalism and the factory system. As Marx so passionately chronicled, English factories destroyed English handicrafts. What he called ‘modern industry’ – machines built by other machines strung together in a continuous process of production, where laborers are ‘mere appendages’ to the machinery – replaced the earlier system of production that ‘owed its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of the hand.’

The cunning of the hand, what farmworkers call maña, remains the basis of California farm work as surely as it is the basis of a major league pitcher’s job, or a skilled craftsman’s. Many farmworker jobs are not only hard to do but hard to learn, often requiring years to master, and skills typically are passed from one generation to the next. Farmworkers use hand tools: knives, hoes, clippers, pruners. They do not tend machines or have to keep up with an assembly line.”

In brief, “Behind every fruit and vegetable for sale in the supermarket lies an unknown world of toil and skill.” The rhetoric of “factory farming” and “industrial agriculture” is thus misleading to the extent that contemporary agriculture remains highly dependent on manual labor, although it is true that “planting and harvesting of so-called field crops—grains, sugar beets, and dry beans—have been successfully mechanized and deskilled. But field crops take up a rapidly diminishing percentage of California farm acreage….” Nassif appears to suggest (or his answer may be taken to at least imply) that the only obstacle to increased “mechanical harvesting and other robotic operations” is its comparatively high capital cost to all but the largest agricultural producers, but it remains the case that not all planting and harvesting is amenable to mechanization. Again, Bardacke:

“In the early sixties, when growers realized that the bracero program, thus their cheap labor supply, was coming to an end, they and their collaborators at the University of California began to build machines and remake seeds that they predicted would mechanize farmworkers out of existence. The project has been a colossal failure. Eighteen years of research and millions of dollars were thrown away on the lettuce machine alone. [….]

Each failed attempt has its own story. The strawberry machine bruised the berries. The asparagus machine couldn’t cut the shoots without destroying the ability of the bulb to generate more shoots for a later harvest. The celery machine couldn’t cut the stalks cleanly enough to be suitable for the fresh market. The lemon tree shaker produced three to seven times as much unmarketable fruit as did hand picking. Most other tree shakers do too much damage to the tree roots, although many nut trees can withstand the shaking. The one great mechanical success is the contraption that picks canning tomatoes, which, combined with a reengineered tomato, did replace thousands of workers. Otherwise, fresh tomatoes, like most other fruits and vegetables, are harvested by proficient workers making judgments and wielding tools. As the anthropologist Juan Vincent Palerm quipped about the growers’ dream of mechanization, ‘What we have witnessed over the past years is not the mechanization, but rather the ‘Mexicanization’ of California agriculture.”

For further reading and research:

• César Chávez & the United Farm Workers… and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S. — A Basic Bibliography
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice — A Basic Bibliography

[cross-posted at the Agricultural Law blog]

Profiles in Corruption and Hypocrisy

Where to begin? Well, it is now well known that the House Health Care Bill is designed to cut health care and predominantly reward the wealthy with $880 billion dollars in tax cuts. This is accomplished by cutting Medicaid (protecting the poor and the disabled) by 25% depriving 24 million people of benefits to the tune of $880 billion. But there is more, the bill cuts $300 billion of subsidies to those who do not have insurance through employers affecting the elderly and low income citizens; it undermines protections for those with pre-existing conditions, and imperils the comprehensive character of insurance benefits received through benefits. This massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich was passed by Republican politicians who claim to be Christians.

Paul Ryan, who holds himself out as a Catholic, to my knowledge, has yet to explain how the Church or the Bible can possible be understood to privilege the rich over the poor. Nor, to my knowledge, have other members of the House.

The same day that the House passed this Bill, the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, signed an executive order purportedly calculated to advance religious freedom. Although it is the rare person who can wear a religious mantle, let us leave to the side that the hypocrisy associated with a racist, woman groping, only-I-matter, pathological narcissist supposing to care about religion is palpable.

His Executive Order instructed the Internal Revenue Service not to take tax exemptions away from religious organizations whose ministers endorse candidates. You will not be surprised to hear that this is nothing more than a craven appeal to his base. It has been many years since the IRS has brought any kind of enforcement action against a religious organization for public political endorsements despite many provocative attempts to lure the agency into doing so.  You will also not be surprised to hear that the Order like his Islamic-excluding (religion, after all in Trump’s sycophantic world means Christian) immigration orders is unconstitutional. The order basically says this: if you are a religious non-profit, feel free to endorse candidates; if you are an ordinary non-profit, beware. Violations of the Establishment Clause are not to be found under every bush. But Trump has bumbled his way into several violations already.

Of course, the subject of corruption and hypocrisy cannot be discussed without a mention of Russia and the Trump campaign. It’s fake news, eh. We all wonder then why so many connected with Trump lied about their connections and conversations with Russians. And we eagerly await the much-rumored sealed indictments to become unsealed. But before that happens, the surprise is that so few Republican have the wherewithal to criticize the firing of James Comey (except behind closed doors where they complain that Trump is unhinged). 80% of Republicans still support Donald Trump! Hilary Clinton was criticized for saying that a substantial part of the Trump base  (she never said that of the majority) was composed of deplorables. But she was right.

When the indictments start rolling out, Trump’s support among Republicans will diminish. Hopefully Republican politicians will rue the fact that they were more interested in deterring whistleblowing and obstructing justice than getting off the Trump train. These Christian politicians are obviously long on self-preservation and short on integrity. It is a sad commentary on our times that Donald Trump would be politically damaged far more seriously if the rumored sex tapes came to light than by the establishment of the charges with which he and his associates are suspected.

In fairness, however, it should be admitted that the Republicans respect some Puritan principles (leaving aside women-groping admissions by their leader). Obviously, it is more important to go after Stephen Colbert for telling an off-color joke than to take money laundering, money gained through conflicts of interest, obstruction of justice, and espionage seriously.

Nakba Day, May 15 (Arabic: يوم النكبة Yawm an-Nakba, ‘Day of the Catastrophe’)

“By the end of the wars of 1947-49, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians had either fled Palestine or been expelled from their homes by the Haganah. Palestinians … call this seminal happening the Nakba, or the Great Catastrophe. [The events of this period are commemorated by Palestinians in both the Palestinian territories and elsewhere on May 15^th, Nakba Day.] Over 90 percent of the Palestinian inhabitants of Haifa, Tiberias, Beit She’an, Jaffa, and Acre had vanished. Expulsions from towns and villages were common along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road in the eastern Galilee. Palestinians in Nazareth and the southern Galilee for the most part stayed, and today these areas form the core of the Palestinian Israeli population. Altogether, roughly 15 percent of Palestinians remained behind and became Israeli citizens, some staying where they lived, other moving to other parts of the country, all losing their property to expropriation.

In the course of the wars [and ethnic cleansing], ‘531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants.’ When the guns fell silent, the Israelis controlled 78 percent of Palestine, a far cry from the 55 percent mandated under the UN partition plan. UN Resolution 194, passed on December 11, 1948, affirmed the right of Palestinians to return to their homes once hostilities had ended. That resolution has been reaffirmed every year since then under international law. [Shelly Fried is quoted in a note by O’Malley: ‘Archival sources now available show that Israel never had any intention of implementing this proposal’ to allow the 65-70,000 refugees to return.]

[While it was once a matter of impassioned debate as to whether Palestinians fled their homelands or were expelled, the preponderance of evidence now available has come] down on the side of expulsion. [….] … Israel’s position has remained unequivocal: Under no circumstances will Palestinian refugees be allowed back to their homes or land under the rubric of the Right of Return. The number of Palestinians who remained in their homeland in the 1948 territory after the Nakba was estimated at 154,000 persons, and at 1.4 million on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Nakba in May 2014.”

The Colonial-Settler project of Zionism

“When Jews constituted less than 5 percent of the population living on that land, there is now available compelling evidence that the Zionists’ objective from the beginning, in the late nineteenth century, was the creation of a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Even David Ben-Gurion came to Palestine in 1906 not to escape persecution but to fulfill Hertzl’s dream of a national Jewish home in Eretz Israel and in the years to come he was unambiguous regarding the boundaries of that nation. On January 7, 1937, in evidence before the Peel Commission, he stated, ‘I say on behalf of the Jews, that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible which was written by us, in our language, in Hebrew, in this very country [Palestine]. This is our Mandate, it was only the recognition of this right which was expressed in the Balfour Declaration.’ The Zionists—worldly, pragmatic men—meticulously planned the new state from within Palestine and from safe havens far beyond. In the first half of the twentieth century, they deployed sophisticated diplomacy in Western capitals, adroitly courting their leaders. They understood that achieving their ultimate objective required the backing of a great power, and they successfully attached themselves to the greatest power at the time, Great Britain. When Britain turned from aid to obstacle, they turned on Britain and, following World War II, hitched themselves to the new greatest power, the United States.” — Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives (New York: Penguin Books, 2015): 170-172.

Recommended Reading:

• Beit-Hallahmi, Benny. Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel. Oliver Branch Press. Brooklyn, NY: Olive Branch Press, 1993.
• Benvenisti, Meron (Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, tr.) Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
• Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso, 2^nd, 2003.
• Fischbach, Michael R. Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab -Israeli Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
• Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
• Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
• Kattan, Victor, ed. The Palestine Question in International Law. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
• Masalha, Nur. The Expulsion of Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
• Masalha, Nur. A Land Without People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
• Masalha, Nur. Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, 1967-2000. London: Pluto Press, 2000.
• Masalha, Nur. The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem. London: Pluto, 2003.
• Masalha, Nur. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology, and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Masalha, Nur, ed. Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees. London: Zed Books, 2005.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. London: Verso, 2014.
• Quigley, John. The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Quigley, John. The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
• Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Said, Edward W. and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988.
• Sand, Shlomo. Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso, 2010.
• Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland. London: Verso, 2012.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Further Reading & Research:

• A bibliography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• A bibliography on Zionism.

For a wonderful collection of Nakba Day posters, please see The Palestine Poster Project Archives.

Message Discipline — Health Care Is a Right

The United States House of Representatives, by approving Trump Care legislation on Thursday, May 4, has initiated a major national debate over health care policy. The Democrats must be sure, in the forthcoming debate, to maintain message discipline.

And that message must be very simple: Health care is a right. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans want governmentally-supported or subsidized health care coverage. An opinion poll conducted by the Pew Foundation in January found 60-percent support for the proposition that “the government should be responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans.” Other polls have reached similar results.

There are sound philosophical, policy-based, and even religiously-grounded reasons that justify this widely-shared view. Consider first the idea of the common good. This is an ethical conception of society with deep roots in the American tradition.

When American reformers began their great experiments in public education in the 1840’s and 1850’s, the idea of the common good stood behind their efforts and shaped the goal they had in mind. They believed that all Americans would be made better off if everyone could read and write and solve simple math problems. Americans, all Americans, not merely Americans with school-aged children, contributed through their tax dollars to the building of a public school system that educated a nation. And the standard of living for everyone improved with the achievement of widespread literacy and numeracy.

Consider also the American highway system. The earliest American highways, back in the first days of the Republic, were, many of them, privately-funded tollways. Again, however, the public concluded that the nation was better served by a system of freely-accessible highways supported by tax dollars. The early twentieth century witnessed the birth of the national highway system and the years after World War II gave rise to the Interstate system. Everyone paid for it, not merely those who had drivers’ licenses or those who used the highways. Again, however, the nation as a whole was made better off. This national network of publicly-financed highways now serves as the veins and arteries of American commerce. The common good, once again, was served.

Health care is like these other great public ventures. There was a time when health care was exclusively the concern of private arrangements. That time was the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the rise of modern medical education and the growth and sophistication of treatments. Those were the days of the avuncular old country doctor. Those days now exist only in old John Ford westerns.

With complexity and sophistication came increased cost. Private insurance plans defray the expenses for many Americans, but we know that there are many people who do not receive healthcare coverage through their employment. And they are the ones most immediately threatened by the Republican Party’s rollback of healthcare protection.

And for those people, indeed, for all people, healthcare is a right. It is a right grounded on the common good, in the same way that a right to an education and a right to use the highway system have become established features of American public life. Shared civic responsibility. This was the great animating principle behind public education and the highway system, and it should similarly drive the effort to make the right to healthcare real.

To move from the philosophical to policy-based arguments, one should not want a system where bankruptcy is a real possibility whenever one gets sick. A prosperous middle class is beneficial to the nation’s well-being, and the beggaring of those who have the bad luck to get cancer or heart disease does no one any good. Furthermore, entrepreneurship may well flourish under a system of broad-based governmentally-supported medical care. Men and women will be more likely to “go it alone” and start their own businesses if they feel secure about their healthcare coverage.

Finally, there are even religious reasons to support the claim that healthcare is a right. Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, the Vatican’s head of delegation at the United Nations, declared in March that “health care is a fundamental right ‘essential for the existence of many other rights’ and ‘necessary for living a life in dignity.’” (Catholic News Agency, March 16, 2017). Pope Francis, furthermore, has declared many times, in many venues, that health care is a universal right, as have the American bishops.

The Republican Party has attacked this right. The Democrats must respond, and they must do so by keeping their message simple and clear. The right wing knows how to maintain message discipline. They have spent decades reducing complex ideas to simplistic bumper-sticker slogans and reciting those slogans endlessly until they form part of the common consciousness of the nation.

It is time for Democrats to identify slogans of their own. And a good place to start is, “health care is a right.” Democrats should not have burst into song last Thursday, when the House bill passed. Thursday truly was a tragic day for millions of Americans. More properly, Democrats should have denounced, with a single voice, a Republican Party willing to destroy the health care of millions. And the Democrats should repeat, repeat until they grow tired of the repetition: “Health care is a right.”

Cross-posted from HuffPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/message-discipline-health-care-is-a-right_us_590e71dce4b046ea176aec11

Walter Sisulu (18 May 1912 – 5 May 2003)

From his Wikipedia entry (the embedded hyperlinks are from yours truly): “Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu … was a South African anti-apartheid activist and a member of the African National Congress (ANC), serving at times as Secretary-General and Deputy President of the organization. He was jailed at Robben Island, where he served more than 25 years’ imprisonment.

[In 1943, a couple of years after becoming a member of the ANC, Sisulu], together with Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, joined the ANC Youth League, founded by Anton Lembede, of which he was initially the treasurer. [….] Sisulu was a political networker and had a prominent planning role in the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’). He was made secretary general of the ANC in 1949, displacing the more passive older leadership, and held that post until 1954. He also joined the South African Communist Party.

As a planner of the Defiance Campaign from 1952, he was arrested that year and given a suspended sentence. In 1953, he travelled to Europe, the USSR, Israel, and China as an ANC representative. He was jailed seven times in the next ten years, including five months in 1960, and was held under house arrest in 1962. At the Treason Trial (1956–1961), he was eventually sentenced to six years, but was released on bail pending his appeal. He went underground in 1963, resulting in his wife being the first woman arrested under the General Laws Amendment Act of 1963 (or ‘90-day clause’). He was caught at Rivonia on 11 July, along with 16 others. At the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial (1963–1964), he was sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964. With other senior ANC figures, he served the majority of his sentence on Robben Island.

In October 1989, he was released after 26 years in prison, and in July 1991 was elected ANC deputy president at the ANC’s first national conference after its unbanning the year before. He remained in the position until after South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.”

*           *           *

More invaluable information about his life, especially the role of his wife Albertina during his time at Robben Island, as well as his continuing education while incarcerated, his leading role in the “High Organ” at the prison, and the tutoring of his prison comrades, please see the biography at South African History Online, and the section, “The ANC on Robben Island,” in Fran Lisa Buntman’s Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Lastly, from the South African Communist Party, a tribute to Sisulu, the inspirational anti-apartheid activist who “distinguished himself as a promoter and defender of the revolutionary alliance between the national liberation movement, the communist party and the trade union movement.”

For further research and reading, please see this bibliography on South African Liberation Struggles.

Shootings at Kent State University, May 4, 1970

Kent State University photo

                “Ohio”

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.—Neil Young

From the Wikipedia entry on the “Cambodian Campaign”:

“At 21:00 on 30 April [1970] …. President Nixon appeared on all three U.S. television networks to announce that ‘It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight’ and that ‘the time has come for action.’ He announced his decision to launch American forces into Cambodia with the special objective of capturing COSVN, ‘the headquarters of the entire communist military operation in South Vietnam’ [Central Office for South Vietnam (Vietnamese: Văn phòng Trung ương Cục miền Nam), officially known as the Central Executive Committee of the People’s Revolutionary Party from 1962 … was the American term for the North Vietnamese political and military headquarters inside South Vietnam during the Vietnam War]. COSVN as a single headquarters for control of PAVN [People’s Army of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Quân Đội Nhân Dân Việt Nam)] operations in South Vietnam probably did not exist, or, at least, was never found.”

Kent State University photo

From Tom Wells’ book, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (University of California Press, 1994):

Word of the invasion reached New Mobe (New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) leaders the day before Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, prompting a quick consensus to “call for a demonstration at the White House on May 9, only ten days away. [….] Nixon stressed that the assault was ‘not an invasion of Cambodia’ but a limited and temporary operation. [….] Nixon failed to tell the public that he had also ordered heavy bombing raids on North Vietnam, an apparent violation of the United States’ private understanding with Hanoi prohibiting strikes there.” [….]

Student demonstrations took place immediately at several college campuses, including Princeton, Rutgers, and Oberlin, followed by “hundreds of protests and public meetings across the country. A national student strike began to take hold; within four days, strikes were in progress at over a hundred schools. [As Penny Lewis notes in Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks (ILR Press, 2013), ‘college protests gave way to shutdowns, with 1.5 million students closing 20 percent of campuses nationwide. Over half of all campuses reported that some protest took place in those weeks, and some colleges remained closed for the rest of the semester.’] [….] Protesters engaged in civil disobedience and political violence in many locations. Maryland students launched a ‘hit-and-run attack’ on their school’s ROTC headquarters and skirmished with state police. Students battled police for more than three hours at Kent State, inciting a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Shortly afterward, ‘a fire of undetermined origin’ roared through the schools wooden ROTC building; firemen were impeded by students slicing fire hoses and throwing rocks. Ohio’s governor called in the National Guard. Students at Stanford went on a rampage, breaking into shops and smashing windows; among the rampagers was Robert McNamara’s son Craig. The National Student Association and sixty-eight Cornell faculty [members], claiming the invasion was unconstitutional, called for President Nixon’s impeachment. Peace activists deluged Congress with telegrams. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If the antiwar movement had needed a rallying point to pull it out of its lull, the invasion of Cambodia had provided it.”

On the afternoon of May 4, “from the top of a hill, National Guardsmen opened fire on student demonstrators at Kent State. In a matter of seconds, more than fifty bullets whistled through the air, striking cars, trees, dirt, and students. Four protesters were killed, nine wounded.

Less than an hour later, an ‘agitated’ Haldeman informed Nixon of the shootings. The president was ‘stunned.’ So were other officials. ‘Grim-faced White House aides, haunted by memories of the domestic violence which erupted after Martin Luther King’s shooting two years earlier, clustered around the chattering ticker-tape machines in Ron Ziegler’s press office as the ugly story unfolded,’ Colson recounts. In the White House staff mess that evening, ‘I looked around the crowded room,’ writes Colson. ‘Like a scene from a stop-action camera nothing was moving’ as officials stared intently at a TV screen replaying scenes from the tragedy, including the sobbing father of one of the victims angrily blaming Nixon for his daughter’s death. [….] Most officials were less shaken by the deaths themselves than by the specter of mushrooming protest; indeed, more than a few blamed the students for getting shot. ‘I happened myself to be one who sympathized with the National Guard at Kent State,’ Nixon’s speechwriter Ray Price remembered. ‘The National Guard themselves are a bunch of scared kids with guns, and as a mob charged, hurling rocks, at a bunch of scared kids with guns, you shouldn’t be surprised if some of the guns go off.’ (Price’s account of the shooting is inaccurate: the students were not charging the Guardsmen, although some had thrown rocks at them). J. Edgar Hoover informed other officials that one of the female victims had been ‘sleeping around’ and ‘was nothing more than a whore’ anyway. The White House expressed its callous attitude toward the shootings in a statement released that afternoon: ‘This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.’ That evening Vice President Spiro Agnew called the killings ‘predictable’ and refused to criticize the Guardsmen; he went on to condemn ‘elites’ who encouraged the ‘paranoids’ demonstrating on campuses and who advanced the Bill of Rights as protection for ‘psychotic and criminal elements in our society.’ No wonder, said Agnew, that ‘we have traitors and thieves and perverts and irrational and illogical people in our midst.’”

John Filo/Getty Images

For further reading and research, please see my bibliography for the U.S. War in Vietnam.

“Be realistic, demand the impossible.”

May 3, 1968: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” As the Verso Radical Diary reminds us, on this date French students protest[ed] the closure of the Sorbonne, setting off the May ‘68 wave of strikes by millions of students and workers.” See, for example, the late Daniel Singer’s book, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Haymarket Books, 2013/first published by Hill & Wang in 1970).

“In May 1968 ... when a student revolt led to a general strike of nearly ten million workers in France, there were significant demonstrations of solidarity in Mexico City, Berlin, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Berkeley, and Belgrade, and students and workers in both Spain and Uruguay attempted general strikes of their own. Massive student strikes in Italy forced Prime Minister Aldo Moro and his cabinet to resign; Germany experienced its worst political crisis since World War II, and a student strike at the University of Dakar, Senegal, led to a general strike of workers. These are instances of what sociologists have called ‘contagion effects’ (and what I consider ‘eros effects’); they remain to this day understudied, a moment of neglect which stands in inverse proportion to their significance.” — George Katsiaficas

 

Related bibliographies:  The Black Panther Party and, The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s.

Resistance & Revolutionary Aspirations in the Middle East: some recent titles

  I want to draw your attention to some books that fall, loosely (e.g., perhaps they’re indirectly relevant to…), under the heading, “resistance and revolutionary aspirations in the Middle East.” The list is confined to books I’ve read or am currently reading, with the exception of Blumenthal’s title on the last war in Gaza, which I hope to read anon. I had planned on confining the list to ten works, all less than ten years old, but I’ve ended up exceeding the first constraint by two titles. Given the arbitrary nature of the constraints and the fact that I’ve not been able (of late) to keep up on the number of books that might meet our criteria for inclusion, there invariably are titles worthy of mention missing from this list. But at least it’s a start, especially for those for whom this is not an area of expertise or one of predominant interest in assembling a reading regimen.

                                                                          

• Achcar, Gilbert. The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
• Alexander, Anne and Mostafa Bassiouny. Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution. London: Zed Books, 2014.
• Allegra, Marco, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor, eds. Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017.
• Beinin, Joel. Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs/Stanford University Press, 2016.
• Blumenthal, Max. Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. New York: Nation Books, 2013.
• Blumenthal, Max. The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. New York: Nation Books, 2015.
• Chamberlin, Paul Thomas. The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Gana, Nouri, ed. The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
• Honwana, Alcinda. Youth and Revolution in Tunisia. New York: Zed Books, in association with International African Institute, Royal African Society, and World Peace Foundation, 2013.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Viking Penguin, 2015.
• Pappe, Ilan. The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. London: Verso, 2014.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.

Happy May Day! (International Workers’ Day)

The following, albeit lightly edited, is from the Bread and Roses Centennial Committee’s (1912-2012) Facebook post yesterday accounting for the distinction between May Day and Labor Day in this country:

“Ever wonder why the U.S. celebrates Labor Day, the first Monday in Sept, while May 1 is a day recognized around the world as a workers’ holiday, a day of solidarity between workers of all nationalities? It was bound up with the struggle for the shorter workday – a demand of major political significance for the working class. ‘Eight hours for work —eight for rest—and eight for what we will.’

Already at the opening of the 19th century workers in the United States made known their grievances against working from ‘sunrise to sunset,’ the then prevailing workday. Fourteen, sixteen and even eighteen hours a day were not uncommon. The 1820s and 1830s are full of strikes for reduction of hours of work and demands for a 10-hour day were put forward in many industrial centers —the Mechanics’ Union of Philadelphia, led a strike of building trade workers in Philadelphia in 1827 for the 10-hour day — Lowell’s ‘mill girls’ Mill did the same.

The 8-hour day movement, which directly gave birth to May Day, is connected to the general movement initiated in the U.S. On August 20, 1866, delegates from over 50 craft unions formed the National Labor Union. At its founding convention the following resolution dealt with the shorter workday: ‘The first and great necessity of the present, to free labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which 8 hours shall be the normal working day in all states in the American union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.’

The First International adopted the Eight-Hour Day in Sept. 1866 at [its] Geneva Congress … :  ‘The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive .... The Congress proposes 8 hours as the legal limit of the working day.’

The Second International, held at Paris in 1889, designated May 1^st be set aside as a day upon which the workers of the world, organized in their political parties and trade unions, were to fight for the 8-hour day. The Paris decision had been influenced by events in the U.S. in 1886 where there had been a call for a general strike on May 1^st, 1886, for the 8-hour day.

Strikes and lockouts in 1885 increased to about 700 and the number of workers involved jumped to 250,000. In 1886 the number of strikes more than doubled. On May Day, 90,000 marched in Chicago, in New York, 10,000 marched to Union Square. Eleven thousand marched in Detroit. May Day rallies in Louisville and Baltimore were remarkable for their black-white unity. In NYC, labor leader Samuel Gompers, told the crowd, ‘May 1^st would be remembered as a second declaration of independence.’

But the event that guaranteed May Day a place in the history of the working class took place three days later at Haymarket Square in Chicago. There, an 8-hour Association was formed long in advance of the May 1, 1886 strike. Events of May 3 and 4, which led to what is known as the Haymarket Affair, were an outgrowth of the May 1^st strike. A demonstration on May 4 at Haymarket Square was called to protest a deadly attack of the police upon a meeting of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works on May 3, where six workers were killed and many wounded. The meeting was peaceful and ended when the police marched into the Square. A bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing a sergeant; a battle ensued and seven policemen and four workers were dead.

A witch hunt against militant workers, especially the anarchist leaders followed and eight men were arrested. The trial produced no evidence that any of them threw the bomb, nor that any of them had conspired to throw it. Prosecuting Attorney Julius Grinnel said in his closing remarks, ‘Law is upon trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands that follow them…. Convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and save our institutions, our society.’

Seven men were sentenced to death; two petitioned for clemency and had their sentences commuted to life in prison; and 21-year-old Louis Lingg exploded a dynamite tube in his mouth while in jail. The four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One year after the hanging of the Chicago labor leaders, the American Federation of Labor voted to rejuvenate the movement for the 8-hour day.

May 1^st, which was already a tradition, was chosen as the day to re-inaugurate the struggle for the 8-hour day. Yet leaders of the A. F. of L. limited the strike movement. While May Day picked up momentum across the world, it lost steam in its country of origin. In 1905 the AFL disavowed May Day altogether, choosing instead to celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September, the national holiday sanctioned by the federal government in 1894. May Day in the U.S. was nevertheless still celebrated. In 1910 the Socialist Party brought 60,000 into the streets of New York City for May Day, including 10,000 women of the Shirt Waist Makers’ Union.”

Sundry Reflections & Proposals in Honor of May Day (International Workers’ Day)

“Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”—Eric Hobsbawm

“In the Marxist tradition, self-realisation is the full and free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual. [….] Under suitable conditions, both [political democracy and economic democracy] can be arenas for joint self-realisation.”—Jon Elster

“We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can only be a hothouse and unreal culture where itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make we are not cultured. [….] Industry without art is brutality.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy