Trump's Lost Sons

By Sean Posey

Accused mail bomber Cesar Sayoc reportedly spent much of the past 10 years living in a van in southern Florida. According to those who knew him, he drifted through life - working odd jobs at a pizza shop and a strip club. He seemed to have made little impression on the world.

On the day of his arrest, cable news and social media lit up with images taken of his van. Festooned with the stickers depicting images of President Trump - and his political opponents, who appeared with gun sights superimposed on their faces - the vehicle served as a seemingly made-to-order meme. But who is Sayoc?

During an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Sayoc's family lawyer, Ron Lowy, provided some revealing insight into the man. Sayoc had apparently never been political before Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in June 2015. After that seminal moment, Sayoc gave himself over to the Trump movement.

Trump has been "reaching out," in Lowy's words, to "outsiders" just like Sayoc, "people who don't fit in, people who are angry at America." Trump is telling these people they "have a place at the table," Lowy explained. "This was someone lost," he said of Sayoc. "He was looking for anything, and he found a father in Trump."

Sayoc is not alone. Most famously, Kanye West adopted Trump as a kind of father figure. In October, West travelled to the Oval Office to meet the President. During a rambling speech to the press, he explained his attraction to Trump and the "Make America Great Again" slogan that so memorably defined the President's campaign.

"I love Hillary," West said. "I love everyone. Right. But the campaign, 'I'm with Her' just didn't make me feel, as a guy, that didn't get to see my dad all the time. Like a guy that could play catch with his son. It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman," he told Trump.

Many depicted West as a lost soul for having to find a father figure in someone like Trump. But America today is filled with lost boys and men. Most of them, however, are not multi-millionaire rappers.

In previous decades, these are men who would have been working in factories, serving in voluntary associations, starting families or going off to college. Many are, like Sayoc, (described as "a 14-year old in man's body" by Lowy) only marginally attached to the work world.

Since the early 2000s, the labor force participation rate of you men without a bachelor's degree has declined more than any other group . Other disturbing statistics about the plight of American males are a regular feature of articles with headlines like "We're Losing a Whole Generation of Men to Video Games."

These are males who are moving from what should have been a place in mainstream America to the very margins. The decline in church attendance, the disappearance of civic life and the splintering of the family has left many men seeking something beyond even the material. The number of children living with two parents, for example, has declined over 20 percent since 1960. Yet in the past two years stand-in father figures have emerged.

Jordan Peterson, previously an obscure Canadian psychologist, recently rose to fame as a kind of guru for struggling men. He estimates that 90 percent of his 1.5 million YouTube subscribers are male. Part of Peterson's appeal is his broadside against what he terms "cultural Marxism" and politically-correct, postmodern society, which he says ignores the needs of young men. Yet he also mixes the kind of critical guidance that one would expect from a father or a mentor, but it's directed at an audience that perhaps has never heard anyone who they felt really spoke to them. This is also something you can hear from those who identify with Trump and feel he speaks to them.

It's not just Kanye West who has adopted the MAGA hat as a kind of warrior's helmet or mark of American traditionalism. A group known as the Proud Boys, which formed as Trump's campaign took off in 2016, has adopted the MAGA cause. They're causing growing consternation among many on the left as their members engage in street brawls across the country with liberal protesters and members of antifa, a loosely organized group of leftist militants.

The Proud Boys bill themselves as a modern day version of the kinds of clubs and fraternal organizations whose decline Robert Putnam documented in his book Bowling Alone. The Proud Boys are a "men's club," according to founder Gavin McInnes. They have two hard and fast rules for membership: you have to be biologically male and you have to declare yourself a "Western chauvinist."

"I think the Proud Boys, and I think Donald Trump, for the most part, drives people who have been disenfranchised by the public because they don't fit in," said Proud Boy Andrew Bell Ramos during an NBC Left Field story on the group in 2017.

"Most guys my age are basically just interested in sitting at home, masturbating, eating Cheerios and playing video games, smoking weed and trying to avoid responsibility," Ramos explained in another segment on SBS Dateline. The NBC segment shows the Proud Boys bonding over a bonfire, getting tattoos, venerating the role of the housewife, and expounding upon the superiority of the Western world. It isn't your average Knights of Columbus meeting.

"What's it like to be a male chauvinist in 2017? Probably a lot less lonely thanks to these guys," NBC journalist Aurora Almendral somewhat naively explained. They almost assuredly do provide a sense of belonging for some alienated men, but at what cost?

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the Proud Boys a "hate group." Founder Gavin McInnes has been involved with alt-right websites such as Vdare.com, and a skinhead group called the 211 Bootboys joined the Proud Boys in assaulting protesters after McInnes spoke at the Metropolitan Republican Club in October. "I cannot recommend violence enough," he has said . "It is a really effective way to solve problems."

The Proud Boys are an outgrowth of the alt-right and the land of the "red-pilled." The expression "red-pilled" is borrowed from the imagery of the 1999 film The Matrix. In the film, Neo, the putative hero, is offered the choice of taking either a blue pill or a red pill by the mysterious figure, Morpheus. Though he isn't aware of it, Neo is trapped in a simulation called the matrix.

"You're here because you know something," Morpheus explains. "What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." If Neo takes the blue pill, he returns to his virtual reality life. If he takes the red pill, as Morpheus explains, he'll discover "how deep the rabbit hole goes."

In the film, the matrix is "the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Not long after the onslaught the Great Recession, the term "red-pilled" began to be adopted by a very loosely organized group of white nationalists, "men's rights" activists, reactionary conservatives, antifeminists and a host of other groups coalescing in far-right circles on the internet who became collectively known as the alt-right.

To them, the liberal order is the world that has been pulled over their eyes. And for many, it's Trump who is red-pilling more and more of the "normies" among the general public.

A recent analysis of 30,000 Twitter accounts of users who "self-identified as alt-right, or who followed someone who did," found that Trump is "the glue that binds the far right together." And young men (including the Proud Boys) are now an increasing presence at Trump rallies.

"Identity has become the coin of the realm in American culture," writes Angela Nagle , "but one that's not accessible to the heirs of white male hegemony." Although it isn't only white males , as Sayoc, West and others confirm. This is something Trump seems to recognize. His word and deeds are attracting the lost, the damaged and the economically disenfranchised men in America.

These men are searching for meaning and belonging in a country that has long been "Bowling Alone." Some might stop at Jordan Peterson; others will take the red pill. And it's likely that Trump, not Morpheus, will be the one who guides them down the rabbit hole.

The Lonely American

By Sean Posey

In 2015, psychotherapist Traci Ruble started a "community listening project" in San Francisco dubbed "Sidewalk Talk." The project sends trained volunteers to meet strangers on the street and listen to them discuss their problems and concerns. In a promotional video, Ruble is shown with her fellow volunteers, asking people if they'd like to sit for a talk. "You want to be listened to? It feels good!" Sidewalk Talk has apparently caught on and is now in 29 cities across the country.

Are there large numbers of Americans so bereft of friends and confidants that they have only strangers in the street to confide in? There apparently are. New studies are showing that Americans are increasingly lonely, isolated, and unhappy. Unmoored from one another and from a (fading) sense of community. More and more of our fellow citizens are going through life alone. This has devastating consequences for individual health and portends a troubled future for the American experiment.

According to a recent Cigna study involving 20,000 adults, loneliness in America has reached "epidemic proportions." "Most Americans," the report states, "are now considered lonely." When asked how often they feel like no one knows them well, 54 percent responded that they sometimes or always feel that way. Nearly half of respondents report feeling sometimes or always alone. The numbers are even more disturbing when broken down:

"We also see that roughly one in four respondents rarely/never feel as though there are people who really understand them (27%), that they belong to a group of friends (27%), can find companionship when they want it (24%), or again feel as though they have a lot in common with others (25%)." Only 53 percent of American have daily "meaningful in-person social interactions," according to Cigna.

Loneliness and social isolation, both "actual and perceived," have direct consequences on one's health, according to a 2015 study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The effects of loneliness on mortality are the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which makes prolonged loneliness a bigger individual health risk than obesity.

Loneliness is also connected, perhaps not surprisingly, to mental disorders. According to the National Institute of Mental Health , nearly one in five adults have a mental health condition. Mental health issues are now one of the fastest growing causes of long-term absences from work. More disturbing still is the connection between loneliness and suicide, which recently hit a 30-year high in America. Even the opioid crisis, a main contributor to the country's declining life expectancy, has been connected to the loneliness epidemic. These deaths are increasingly classified by researchers and the media as "deaths of despair."

The World Happiness Report 2017, compiled by a group of independent experts for the United Nations, recently delivered even more bad news for Americans. The introduction to the report (written by John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs) states "Happiness is increasingly considered the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy."

The top countries on the list rank highly on six key factors, the report explains: "healthy years of life expectancy, social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble), trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business), perceived freedom to make life decisions, and generosity (as measured by recent donations)." Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland are the happiest nations. The US, on the other hand, finished in 19th place. Rising levels of corruption and "declining social support" are listed among the primary reasons for America's dismal placing.

While the phenomena of decreasing happiness and increasing loneliness are finally getting notice, much of the blame is often placed on recent developments in the country's history, including the rise of neoliberalism (understandable) and the election of Donald Trump as president (equally understandable). However, historical roots and recent developments alike seem to constitute important elements of the country's failure to develop a meaningful sense of community and attachment among its citizenry.

American culture is often described - rightly - as highly individualistic. Despite the Puritans and their quest for " a city upon a hill," as John Winthrop so memorably put it, the first immigrants to the New World often arrived seeking material, not spiritual, prosperity. "Even in the sixteenth century," writes historian Leo Marx, "the American countryside was the object of something like a calculated real estate promotion." This was a "business civilization," as historian Morris Berman refers to it (something Calvin Coolidge echoed during the 1920s when he said, "The business of America is business").

The peerless observer Alexis de Tocqueville saw this during his travels through the country in 1831. While de Tocqueville admired much of the American character, he understood the downside of the relentless individualism that permeated every aspect of social and cultural life: "They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habits of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands."

Americans proved to be relentless seekers; first moving beyond the Royal Proclamation line that the British issued to separate their colonies from Indian lands; and then, finally, fulfilling "Manifest Destiny" and closing the frontier in the 19th century. The existence of the frontier in American life nurtured a "dominant individualism," according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner - one that failed to disappear with the frontier itself.

War, however, proved to be a force for increasing civic mindedness, and it provided a boon for voluntary associations - trends that no doubt helped combat the social isolation which certainly accompanied the settling of the country. According to historian Theda Skocpol, the five largest civic associations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries formed between 1864 and 1868.

Robert Putnam found similar evidence for an increase in civic mindedness among the generation shaped by World War II. In the seminal book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam calls the generation that fought the war the "long civic generation," also known as the "Greatest Generation." According to the Cigna study, they're the generation least affected by the epidemic of loneliness. On the other hand, Generation Z (those born between 1995 and 2010) reported the highest levels of loneliness. The civic connectedness and civic mindedness of the Greatest Generation simply did not last. "The [generational] changes are probably part of a larger societal shift toward individual and material values and away from communal values," Putnam writes in Bowling Alone.

There's evidence to support his assertion. In Bowling Alone, Putnam cites a Roper study from 1972 that asked adults to identify essential elements of "the good life." Approximately 38 percent chose "a lot of money," but an equal percentage chose "a job that contributes to the welfare of society." By 1996, the percentage of people who chose making a lot of money had risen to 63 percent. According to current research, 71 percent of millennials place a similar emphasis on making money.

But much like other Americans, outcomes for the wealthy compare poorly to those of their peers in other countries. For example, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of the American Psychological Association, the "richest, healthiest Americans" are as a sick as the poorest citizens in Britain. What's the reason? The study's author, Sir Michael Marmot of University College London Medical School, gives two reasons: Americans worker longer hours, are more stressed than their counterparts in other wealthy democracies, and Americans are apparently more likely to feel "friendless and isolated."

This pervading sense of loneliness and disconnection, while felt particularly by the young, cuts across class, gender and race, according to Cigna. The rise of social media is sometimes blamed for an increase in feelings of loneliness and isolation, but its use did not figure as a major cause of loneliness in the study.

For much of the past century, some American artists and intellectuals have pointed fingers at the country's culture - or what passes for culture - as being at the root of societal anomie. In 1950, playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder stated that a lack of a codification of ideals was making American life difficult to process. Americans, he said, were always on the move - a "very un-European" manner of life.

Famed sociologist Philip Slater delivered perhaps one of the most pointed critiques of American life in his 1970 book, The Pursuit of Loneliness. He declared the human desire for engagement, community, and yes, dependence, were frustrated at every turn by American life. "Americans have created a society in which they are automatic nobodies," he writes, "since no one has any stable place or enduring connection."

And it hasn't only been liberals who have echoed such criticisms. Michael Hendrix writes in the National Review, "Americans conceive of themselves as individuals isolated from others in such a way that it becomes an imperative for them to form their own meaning for their own lives." Clearly, many Americans aren't forming a meaning for their own lives, at least not alone. The dismal statistics tell us as much. But as we have seen - with some exceptions - this is a problem as old as America itself. A country where individuals are adrift and leading lives without meaningful, connective and nourishing attachments is a country with a grim future indeed. And the problem is now accelerating, as levels of loneliness and disconnection rise among the millennials and Generation Z.

How will the country solve its most vexing problems when Americans are no longer capable of holding onto even the most elementary attachments to one another and their surrounding communities? We might find out, too late, that a society of atomized individuals is no society at all.

In Defense of Tenants: An Interview with Omaha Tenants United

By Devon Bowers

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with the organization Omaha Tenants United about their beginnings and the activism the group engages in. Catch them this month in Heartland News, which is running a front page story on OTU and allowing them to write monthly updates from then on out.

Talk about how the organization formed and the work that you all do.

A group of us were aware of housing issues like tenant mistreatment and gentrification, and were inspired by other socialist organizations that help tenants, like those in Seattle or Philadelphia. From initial meetings where we discussed housing issues and read the state tenant-landlord statute, we came up with potential items to organize around. We began to focus particularly around the issue of "slumlords," or low-rent, low-maintenance landlords who skirt legality and mistreat tenants, largely getting away with it due to non-existent local enforcement and a tenant population of marginalized and low-income people, like refugees or immigrants.

We met our first tenant through Feed the People, an organization devoted to food distribution some of us were members of at the time. Since he had moved in to his apartment six months earlier, he did not have hot water despite repeated maintenance requests, with the landlord saying it would cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. We met with the tenant, and after we went over portions of the state tenant statute and discussed the tenant's options, he made the decision to take a more direct approach to resolving his dispute with the support of our organization. We drafted a demand letter citing the various parts of the statute that the landlord was infringing upon, and demanding that steps be taken to resolve the issues or face escalation. The tenant then signed the letter, and we went together to his landlord's office to deliver it. The landlord wasn't home, but after hearing about the large group who delivered the letter, he contacted the tenant, angrily demanding to know what was going on. The tenant sent him a picture of the letter and explained our involvement. Less than 24 hours later, a maintenance crew repaired what turned out to be only a broken gasket, and the tenant had hot water.

We built our approach on this experience. We try to establish contacts among the working-class people in our neighborhoods, and learn from them about the situation of tenants in the city, particularly tenants of slumlords. Through this process we identify situations we can help resolve through forming demands of landlords, and stepping in to back the tenant up in a confrontation or meeting. It's important to our mission that we serve to empower the tenant themselves rather than be seen as performing a charitable service. Our first tenant, mentioned above, was shocked when we proposed delivering the demand letter as a group with him. He had assumed that we would deliver the letter ourselves, and was delighted to take for himself the action of delivering his demands to his landlord with our support. Typically, non-profit organizations who work in working-class communities are seen as doing things for working-class people or on their behalf.(just to clarify, we're not a "non-profit" in the 501c3 sense, nor do we have any desire to be. We merely use that phrase to draw a line of demarcation between how we operate and how many other organizations do (especially 501c3 nonprofits) and the perceptions surrounding them) We want to work with tenants to support them in doing what they are already capable of doing, and through this process, we hope that the tenants will learn more about their own power and the power of an organized working-class community.

Recently, we helped a tenant win a big fight against one of Omaha's most notorious slumlords in which we occupied the slumlord's office with about 20 people and were able to get over $1,000 in made up move out fees waived and $500 of the tenant's deposit back. (Do you want us to go into greater detail about that here? We recently did a long write up on that story at our Medium which I highly recommend reading. Not sure if you want to just link that or if you'd like us to make additional comments on it here. Definitely the biggest victory we've been a part of so far.

What problems do many of the tenants deal with? Would you say that the legal system is biased in favor of landlords?

A recurring problem is a lack of proper maintenance in a tenant's home. A landlord will only put in to a building what they can get out in profit, and a slumlord, already working with crumbling buildings and tenants paying low rent, lacks motivation to make any repairs at all. Living in such a building often comes with the mentality that "well, at least the rent is cheap," and slumlords take advantage of the expectation that better maintenance is just something that one has to pay more for, rather than a housing right. As a result, many tenants are living in conditions that are not merely uncomfortable, but actively dangerous to their health.

The legal system is definitely biased in favor of landlords. While there is a state statute that outlines a tenant's rights and what a landlord owes them, the only enforcement to be found is in the courts, which tenants with low income and little time cannot afford. In addition, city housing laws were drafted essentially directly by the landlords themselves, and even the ensuing weak laws are not enforced. The statutes are also written in an obtuse, self-referential way that is not easy for a busy person to understand, much less take action based upon. As a result, after reaching some familiarity with the statute, our strategy has been to outline areas in which an offending landlord is in infringement of the statute, because while a tenant can't necessarily afford to go to court, the landlord knows that it is better for them to concede a small maintenance request than to go to court for a case they most likely know they will lose.

How do landlords utilize pricing for their own financial benefit (ie increasing prices in Silicon Valley to kick out current tenants and price gouge techies?)

Gentrification is a continual problem in the city. Landlords will redevelop housing, and/or demolish and build new housing, raising the prices, which cause working-class people to be kicked out of their own neighborhoods. Occasionally a slumlord will allow a property to deteriorate to the point that it is considered "blighted," attracting public funding for redevelopment. Slumlords have used the money they've drained from working-class tenants in dilapidated buildings to redevelop or bulldoze those buildings to make way for a higher-paying demographic.

How do you help people understand that landlord-tenant relationships are not alright and are predatory?

People we talk to already understand that they are being mistreated by their landlord, and that their friends and neighbors are too. But this is seen as the way things are. We don't need to show them that landlords are exploitative, but we can help them to fight back, showing them that it doesn't have to be that way.

It's a matter of class consciousness. The relationship between landlords, particularly slumlords, and tenants, is one of the most obvious examples of class struggle we have. These landlords are profiting by charging working-class people to live in places that they would never sleep in themselves, a property that they rarely maintain, for the most part receiving passive profit for owning a place where others take shelter. It brings up the question of private property. Anyone can see this is unfair, and we try to systematize it when we have conversations with tenants. We don't want to get caught up in individualizing the systemic injustices to a given landlord, focusing on how they are evil individually; rather, we try to have conversations in terms of landlords as a class, and us, the working people, as a class that can fight back through organizing together.

First and foremost, we are an anti-capitalist organization that believes the renter-landlord system, and more generally private property as a whole, should be abolished. In the meantime however, we recognize the need to help tenants get what they can under the current system. We hope these experiences empower our fellow tenants and other working class people to begin to fight back and get organized so that the way can be paved for more fundamental revolutionary change.

Explain the day in the life of someone who is battling their landlord.

For a tenant working with us, a large part of it is about just getting to know us. When we're essentially doing cold calls (knocking on doors of places we know have problems, there's a natural hesitancy from people when random strangers walk up to your door asking about your living conditions, let alone trying when they're trying to convince you to take a big step in actually confronting your landlord about them. So we make sure to take a lot of time attempting to build a relationship with the people we interact with. This helps us build trust in each other, and feel more confident working with each other. Ultimately, we of course want to get them confident enough that they're willing to take the steps needed to get their problems resolved.

Since OTU has kind of blown up, however, we've received a big influx of people reaching out to us with issues they're already having via our Facebook page, so this eliminates some of the initial awkwardness and need for agitation, since they're obviously already agitated enough to feel the need to reach out. At this point, we set up a time to meet in a semi-public place, and learn about their situation in greater detail. Here you sometimes sort of face the opposite issue that we do when cold calling. The people who reach out are typically already pissed off and wanting to do something fast. We really have to be careful to not over promise anything, or lead them to believe that we can just magically help them fix things.

We like to be sober and honest about what our odds are, and if it's something that we might not have the capacity to deal with, we have to be honest about that and be willing to say no to certain cases. In either situation - whether it be a cold call or someone who has reached out to us - we try to be sure to walk people through exactly step by step what all of their options are, so they aren't blindsided by anything later on. We try to explain some possible outcomes, and how we would respond from each one. Based on where the tenant is at in terms of willingness to act, and based on what the situation is, we try to formulate a plan and proceed from there. While many people would maybe like to go straight to the big confrontation method like we did in our story about notorious local slumlord Dave Paladino, we generally try to escalate as necessary.

This means first setting up a meeting with the landlord, the tenant, and maybe two OTU representatives max to read off the tenant's demands in a more low-key setting and seeing how the landlord responds. There's of course always pushback, but we give the landlord a deadline by which we expect these changes to be made. If they're not made in the amount of time given, we escalate things from there. The important part is that at all steps in the process, the tenant is taking the lead.

We don't want to get out ahead of the tenant and get them into a situation they don't feel comfortable with, and on the other hand, we don't want to hold back the tenant or discourage their own initiative, even when we may have to be frank about a situation or explain how being too rash might jeopardize the entire process. We take a lot of influence from Mao Zedong and movements inspired by him that apply what is known as "the mass line", which essentially means everything we do is informed and enacted in a way that is "from the masses, to the masses."

In what ways can people learn more about your organization?

You can find us on Facebook at Omaha Tenants United. We also have Medium, where we'll be publishing our longer-form material summarizing our work and stating our positions on things. We will have our Points of Unity out soon which explain our beliefs that we expect people to uphold in order to join. While we are a multi-tendency organization, we do ask that anti-capitalism be at the forefront of one's politics (amongst other things), and that people are willing to regularly commit time to disciplined work.

A Travesty of Scholarship: A Review of Samuel Farber's "The Politics of Che Guevara"

By Renzo Llorente

As is well known, many works on the Cuban Revolution that promise serious scholarship deliver little more than anti-Revolutionary polemics, and often extremely ill-informed polemics at that. This is true whether the topic is some political or social aspect of the Revolution or one of the Revolution's outstanding figures. One recent example of this phenomenon is Samuel Farber's book on Che Guevara. [1] Published in 2016, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice purports to be, in Farber's words, a work that "analyzes the substantive political ideas" of Che Guevara and "a political portrait focused on Guevara's thought." [2]

In reality, Farber's book contains many claims that are demonstrably false, coupled with a great deal of careless scholarship and numerous dubious interpretations. The cause of these problems is twofold. First, and most importantly, Farber chose to neglect a large amount of what Che actually said and wrote. Secondly, Farber's disdain for the Cuban Revolution, which prevents him from achieving a modicum of fairness, colors his book from beginning to end. Thus, instead of an accurate exposition of Che's political thought, Farber has produced a work that thoroughly distorts or misrepresents many of Che's ideas, and some of his actions (including, as we shall see, Che's role in the possible execution of innocent people).

I have already drawn attention to some of the most glaring inaccuracies in Farber's account of Che's thought in a brief book review published last year, [3] but the space limitations of that review prevented me from discussing more than a small number of the countless problems with The Politics of Che Guevara. The present essay offers a more comprehensive examination of the inaccuracies, errors, distortions and falsehoods in Samuel Farber's study of Che Guevara.

The errors in Farber's study of Che begin on practically the first page: in the "Selected Chronology" preceding the "Introduction," Farber has Che "graduating as a doctor" the month before he took his final exam, and also lists the wrong date in stating when Che was granted Cuban citizenship (he is off by a month). [4] Such inaccuracies are, in themselves, relatively insignificant, and certainly of much less importance than the errors that I discuss below.

Moreover, to this day there remains some uncertainty as regards the exact dates of some episodes in Che's life. Still, the errors that I have mentioned are significant insofar as they testify to the carelessness of Farber's scholarship, while also heralding those errors which are significant and which make The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice wholly unreliable as an account of Che's political thought.

Let me begin by restating four fundamental errors that I noted when I first wrote about Farber's book. Contrary to Farber, Che did indeed accept Marx's view that "the principle of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his work' was the one appropriate to 'socialism'." [5] Contrary to Farber, it is not true that Che's conception of socialism "ignored the hierarchical division of labor." [6] Contrary to Farber, it is not true that Che had no interest in increasing the quantity of consumer goods available to Cubans. [7]

Contrary to Farber, it is not true that giving "economic and political power" to "the working class and its allies" was not "a defining element of Marxism." [8] With regard to each of these questions, it is easy to demonstrate that Farber ascribes positions to Che that he did not in fact hold, and in the review to which I have referred I provided numerous references that plainly give the lie to Farber's claims. [9] (I cited three different passages from Che's works for each claim that I challenged; I could easily have cited several more.) The references were all taken from the seven-volume El Che en la Revolución cubana. [10] This work constitutes the single most comprehensive collection of Che's speeches, articles, interviews, talks, etc.-and runs to more than 3,500 pages-but, as far as one can tell, Farber never bothered to consult it (he never mentions it and the collection is not listed in his bibliography).

Nor, it seems, did Farber make much use of Escritos y discursos, [11] the standard, nine-volume edition of Che's works (which is, however, less complete than El Che en la Revolución cubana). To be sure, Farber includes Escritos y discursos in his bibliography and he does cite some of the texts from that collection that have been translated into English, but virtually all of his (limited) references to untranslated texts from Escritos y discursos are references to passages cited in another author's book. [12]

In any case, it turns out that it is not even necessary to have read more of what Che said and wrote to realize that it is a mistake to ascribe to him some of the views that I have noted, for there are passages at odds with such views in texts that Farber didconsult-i.e., works that he includes in his bibliography, such as theApuntes críticos a la economía política ( Critical Notes on Political Economy). In this work, Che states, in the course of one of his bimonthly meetings with colleagues from the Ministry of Industries, that the purpose of socialism "is to satisfy people's needs, and their ever growing needs; if not, it is not worth being a socialist." [13]

Needless to say, this statement is hard to square with the claim that Che had no interest in increasing the quantity of consumer goods available to Cuban people. In the same meeting (which had been recorded and subsequently transcribed), Che remarks that "retribution in accordance with work starts with [viene del] socialism [and lasts] until communism, and in communism retribution in accordance with need is established." [14] This remark is hardly consistent with Farber's claim, cited above, that Che rejected the idea that "the principle of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his work' was the one appropriate to 'socialism'."

So, had Farber only read the Apuntes-which, he tells us in the Introduction, was one of his two "most fruitful sources" [15] -more carefully, he would have had good reason to refrain from saying some of these things. Indeed, if Farber had only paid closer attention to passages from Che that he himself cites, he would surely have hesitated to make some of the claims that I have cited.

In Chapter Two, for example, Farber cites a speech in which Che states that "one of the premises of the construction of socialism-[is] creating a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population." [16] Is it really possible to reconcile this statement from Che with Farber's contention that "Guevara's ascetic attitude toward consumer goods aimed to suppress rather than satisfy the material needs of the Cuban people" [17] and that "consumer goods were at best unimportant" [18] for Che?

The extreme carelessness that leads Farber to misattribute many views to Che is, alas, characteristic of the book as a whole. For example, Farber repeats the familiar mistranslation of Fidel's famous dictum on cultural policy, despite the fact that Farber is perfectly fluent in Spanish. Fidel did notsay, "Inside the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing." [19] Rather, he said, "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing" (" dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada " [20] ).

Needless to say, the correct translation has very different implications and, incidentally, implications that Farber himself would presumably accept, insofar as he holds that a "new revolutionary government will need to suppress violent and subversive acts against the new socialist system" and "will also be forced, in specific instances, to curtail the civil liberties of those actively supporting the violent opponents of the revolution." [21] Another example: Farber identifies Spain's POUM, a prominent political force during the Spanish Civil War, as "an anarchist alliance," when, as is well known, it was a Marxist party, as Farber's own English-language rendering of the Party's title makes clear: "Unified Marxist Workers' Party." [22]

Such instances of carelessness are, to be sure, of less importance in assessing Che's life and work than the errors noted above. There is, however, a similar instance of carelessness that is important, as it involves a particularly scurrilous claim. In Chapter Three, Farber notes that Che "was the head of La Cabaña military fortress, where several hundred executions were carried out in the early months of 1959." [23] He goes on to add:

…it cannot be ruled out that there were some innocent people whose executions were carried out at least in part because of Che Guevara's political views. … The historian Lillian Guerra has presented evidence suggesting that Che Guevara repressed and executed some people not because they had killed anybody or committed atrocities but because of their anti-Communist activities, whether inside or outside Batista's government. [24]

Is it really true that there were "several hundred executions" on Che's watch, and is there really evidence that he may have "executed some people… because of their anti-Communist activities"?

According to the lawyer to whom Che entrusted the organization of the revolutionary tribunals, the tribunals' verdicts led to slightly more than 50 executions. [25] It is hard to understand how Farber could have made such a colossal mistake in this connection: his bibliography includes Helen Yaffe's authoritative Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, which cites the lawyer in question. But his reference to "several hundred executions" means that he not only overlooked the information cited in Yaffe's book, but he even ignored the figure included in one of the two sources that he himself cites in the endnote to the paragraph containing the two passages just cited.

This source says that there were 55 documented executions from January to May 1959 while Che was present, a far cry from "several hundred"; and it lists the total number of executions carried out while Che oversaw La Cabaña at 62. [26] In turns out, then, that an article published in contemporary Cuba (which I cite in endnote 25), an anti-Revolutionary US publication cited by Farber, and Yaffee's book (which, again, Farber lists in his bibliography) all offer very similar figures for the number of executions at La Cabaña, which are a fraction of the number given by Farber.

What about the evidence that Che may have "executed some people… because of their anti-Communist activities"? In support of this claim, Farber cites pages 78-79 of Lillian Guerra's Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 . [27] If we consult this source, we find one sentence relevant to Farber's claim: "Within days of first entering the capital after Batista's departure, Che or­dered the execution of BRAC'S [Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities'] FBI-trained director, Lieutenant José Castaño Quevedo, over a chorus of objections from multiple quarters including Andrew St. George." [28]

Guerra's source for this statement is Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish Is Red. If we consult the one page of this work cited by Guerra, we find that what Hinckle and Turner actually say is that Che simply denied the CIA's request to grant Castaño Quevedo-who, the authors tell us on the previous page, "had been promptly sentenced to death by a revolutionary night court" [29] -clemency. (Andrew St. George, Hinckle and Turner add, was a journalist who had approached Che at the behest of the CIA, and had "suggested to Che that it would be 'diplomatic' to grant the CIA its wish about this man Quevedo." [30] )

In short, "some people" turns out to be one man, and "executed" turns out to mean Che refused to overturn a tribunal's sentence. What we find in Farber's account, then, is a misrepresentation of a misrepresentation: he misrepresents a source, which is itself a misrepresentation of another source. Indeed, Guerra not only mispresents what actually happened in saying that Che "ordered the execution," but also provides a highly misleading narrative: Since Che arrived in Havana in the first week of January 1959 and Castaño Quevedo was executed in March, as Guerra herself notes, [31] it is more than a little misleading to state that "within days of first entering the capital…Che or­dered the execution." *

As should be obvious, the errors, inaccuracies and distortions that I have already enumerated-and my list is hardly exhaustive [32] -thoroughly undermine the reliability of The Politics of Che Guevara. But what about Farber's overall interpretation of Che's thought? As it turns out, many aspects of Farber's interpretation of Che's thought prove untenable, for they are based on an extremely selective reading of Che's works (which is, as we have seen, also the reason that Farber wrongly attributes numerous views to Che).

Consider, first of all, Farber's assertion that Che's thought is uncongenial to "individual identity, interest, and self-determination," [33] which is basically a corollary of Farber's thesis-repeated in one form or another on several occasions-that Che espouses a "monolithic conception of socialism." [34] There are two problems with this claim. First of all, one finds many passages in Che's works that suggest just the opposite. [35] The second problem is that Farber's arguments for this claim prove quite unpersuasive. Take, for example, the passages that Farber cites on page 18, passages in which Che refers, among other things, to a situation in which an individual "becomes happy to feel himself a cog in the wheel, a cog that has its own characteristics…a conscious cog." [36] For Farber, this passage-which he cites not from Che's works but from J. L. Anderson's biography-shows that "Guevara's egalitarianism left little room for individual differences or individual rights." [37]

What Farber fails to tell readers is that Che makes the "cog" remark in the course of explaining that "what enslaves man is not work but rather his failure to possess the means of production," and after referring to "the happiness of fulfilling a duty [in working], of feeling [one]self important within the social mechanism." [38] Farber's interpretation, which echoes Anderson's own analysis of the passage cited, ignores Che's central points: it is a certain social arrangement that makes work alienating (Che explicitly refers to "capitalist alienation" in the passage cited by Anderson [39] ), but work can constitute a source of satisfaction if the worker has a sense of fulfilling his or her duty.

The passage thus offers little warrant for the claim that "Guevara's egalitarianism left little room for individual differences or individual rights," and nor does the other passage that Farber cites (another quotation borrowed from Anderson's biography) in the paragraph in which he makes this statement. Incidentally, had Farber bothered to consult Che's original speech instead of citing from Anderson's biography, he would have had to explain why, in a sentence that Anderson omits, Che states that "we are…zealous defenders of our individuality." [40]

As a matter of fact, Che's views on individuality, which I cannot discuss at length here, are similar to those of Marx and Engels. It is important to underscore this affinity with Marx and Engels's ideas because one of the central theses of The Politics of Che Guevara is that Che "was very selective of the aspects of Marxism he adopted as his own." [41]

Farber's interest in Che's relationship to Marxism appears to derive in part from the fact that Farber himself embraces "classical Marxism" ("my political roots are in the classical Marxist tradition that preceded Stalinism in the Soviet Union" [42] ). Farber's self-characterization will surely baffle any Marxists who read his book, for his judgments and overall approach to Che reflect the kind of perspective that one normally associates with Cold War liberalism, or perhaps right-wing social democracy. But Farber's own politics aside, how much truth is there to his thesis that Che's thought represents a significant departure from the ideas of the "classical Marxist" tradition?

One way to assess the plausibility of Farber's effort to pit "classical Marxism" against Che is to consider the positions that Farber correctly attributes to Che. For example, Farber notes Che's defense of "centralized economic planning and the rejection of competition and the law of value," [43] and also observes that Che was opposed to the market and favored "the nationalization of private property." [44] When we combine such positions with positions noted at the outset (Che's concern with the division of labor, his commitment to the empowerment of the working class, etc.),

Farber's attempt to drive a wedge between Che's thought and classical Marxism appears quite misguided. Other positions that Che holds, such as his defense of voluntary labor [45] or his adherence to democratic centralism, [46] were positions which, while not held by Marx and Engels, were of course advocated by Lenin, another "classical Marxist." Since Farber effectively ignores these similarities, it would seem to be the case that it is he, and not Che, who is "very selective of the aspects of Marxism [that] he adopted as his own."

Farber complements his efforts to counterpose Che's political orientation and "classical Marxism" with a strategy that seeks to convince us that Che was in fact a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist. So, for example, Farber not only points out, correctly, that the young Che admired Stalin, but also suggests that "Guevara's 'new man' is remarkably similar to the 'new Soviet person'…that Stalin tried to create in the Soviet Union." [47]

In reality, the qualities that Farber identifies as constitutive of Che's notion of the "new man"-this person is "a selfless and idealistic man, infused with the values and practices of heroism, dedicated to the good of society" [48] -sound a lot like the qualities found in the ideals of human transformation championed by both Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. [49] One could likewise find parallels in classical Marxism to Che's commitment to "unity," which, contrary to Farber's assumptions, hardly qualifies as a "Stalinist" idea. [50] In short, either Che is not the unreconstructed Stalinist that Farber makes him out to be, or Farber must believe that such figures as Lenin and Luxemburg were themselves Stalinists avant la lettre.

Given Farber's interest in encouraging the association of Che with Stalinism (and, we may note in passing, with many of the things that Farber dislikes about the Cuban Revolution, [51] which amount to more or less everything), it will hardly come as a surprise that he also holds that Che's overall political outlook was hopelessly undemocratic. [52] Farber's treatment of the topic of democracy is noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, he fails-yet again-to discuss many texts in which Che does express, either implicitly or explicitly, a commitment to democracy.

Secondly, Farber also fails to take seriously the enormous obstacles to the institutionalization of democracy during the early years of the Cuban Revolution; these obstacles included the United States government's efforts to strangle the Revolution economically-his book barely mentions the absolutely devastating economic embargo-and promote political destabilization, and its support for both counterrevolutionary terrorism and an insurgency in the Escambray Mountains that lasted until the mid-1960s. (Incredibly, Farber claims that "there was no major external or internal threat to the stability of the revolutionary government…in mid-1960." [53]

This would certainly come as news to Cubans, for it was at this was very moment that the US imposed the economic embargo, the Escambray insurgency was beginning to crystallize, and the preparations for the following year's invasion at the Bay of Pigs were starting to get underway.) Thirdly, although he takes Che to task for having "revolutionary perspectives [that] were irremediably undemocratic," [54] Farber offers few details as regards his own conception of "democratic socialism," and the little he does say in this connection is quite unenlightening.

Consider Farber's remarks on repression in defense of the "workplace- and class-centered socialist democracy" [55] that he advocates. ("Class-centered socialist democracy" is, incidentally, an odd formulation, since Marxist socialists-and recall that Farber considers himself a Marxist-view socialism as a phase of social development tending to the abolition of classes; and if by "class-centered" Farber merely means that the working class has power, the phrase is superfluous, at least from a Marxist perspective). Farber appears to believe that certain coercive and repressive measures are consistent with socialist democracy when hedefends them, but not consistent with socialist democracy when they constitute a part of Che's political practice.

For example, Farber grants that a "new revolutionary government will need to suppress violent and subversive acts against the new socialist system in order to defend itself"; in other words, "revolutionary violence is unfortunate, but necessary and inevitable in light of what oppressive ruling groups will do in order to preserve their power." [56] Indeed, he even acknowledges that "the revolutionary government cannot wait until…violent acts take place, but must try to prevent their occurrence whenever possible" [57] and, as we have seen, that "the government will also be forced, in specific instances, to curtail the civil liberties of those actively supporting the violent opponents of the revolution." But why, we may ask, would the restrictions on civil liberties that Farber defends here be more "democratic" than restrictions on the same grounds enacted in Cuba with Che's support?

To be sure, Farber insists that "the repression that the revolutionary government will be forced to carry out, particularly right after the overthrow of the old ruling classes, can be justified and controlled by democratic aims and purposes," [58] but a statement as vague as this hardly helps us to understand why the repression that he endorses is more consistent with socialist democracy than the repression accepted by Che. Moreover, the vagueness found in the passage just cited is characteristic of most of Farber's statements regarding his own vision of social transformation.

For example, Farber's alternative to "Che's revolutionary voluntarism" and "Latin American Communist parties' electoralism" is, as he tells us in his Introduction, "a perspective that posits revolutionary politics as requiring strategic and tactical thinking and action in order to advance the revolutionary process." [59] In light of statements such as these, one wonders why it is that Farber expects us to believe that his own commitments are more likely than Che's to meet "the need for a political process that brings together the politics of revolution, socialism, and democracy," [60] which is, of course, a very real need.

It should be clear at this point that The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice has little to recommend it to anyone interested in a dispassionate assessment of Che, let alone someone who seeks such an assessment from a Marxist perspective. As noted at the outset, Farber has neglected to read much of what Che said and wrote, and this lack of interest in reading Che vitiates one argument after another. Farber's analysis of the essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba" is a case in point. It is fine to undertake a "detailed critique" [61] of Che's famous essay, as Farber does in Chapter Three, but to devote such attention to this one short text, as significant as it is, while at the same time ignoring hundreds and hundreds of important pages of Che's output, makes little sense in a book that promises "a political portrait focused on Guevara's thought."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Farber's narrowly selective reading of Che leads him to criticize Che for neglecting certain topics in "Socialism and Man in Cuba" ("increasing consumer goods," "raising the standard of living of the Cuban population" and "working people controlling their fate by making democratic decisions about social, economic, and political matters" [62] ) even though Che addresses these very topics at length elsewhere. [63] This is not the only way in which Farber's limited interest in Che's writings weakens his "detailed critique" of Che's celebrated essay.

According to Farber, "it is impossible to tell what Che Guevara had in mind" when he referred, in "Socialism and Man in Cuba," to the "first period in the transition to communism or in the construction of socialism." [64] In fact, everyone who has taken the time to study Che's works in some detail knows that Che had in mind a transitional stage from capitalism to socialism in an underdeveloped country, a topic he often explores in other texts and one that he at least mentions in a book that was, Farber tells us in his Introduction, one of his two "most fruitful sources" in writing about Che, namely theApuntes críticos a la economía política. [65]

Despite the fact that The Politics of Che Guevara proves utterly unreliable as an exposition of Che's "substantive political ideas," the book is adorned with several blurbs from prominent left-of-center academics and intellectuals. According to one blurb, Farber is "a scrupulous historian," while another assures us that Farber's polemic "scrupulously reconstructs" Che's thought. Like the blurb that describes Farber's work as "a complex and serious analysis of Guevara," these comments will seem preposterous to any reader already acquainted with Che's writings, but they do serve, unintentionally, a very useful purpose: they remind us that there remains a great deal of work to be done in explaining what Che Guevara truly believed.

This review was originally posted at Marxism-Leninism Today .

Endnotes

[1] Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

[2] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xvii; xxv.

[3] Review of Sam Farber,The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 155-57.

[4] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, viii; x.

[5] Farber, 78.

[6] Farber, 67-8.

[7] Farber, 77-8.

[8] Farber, 107. Significantly, when Farber writes, "Even when he occasionally referred to the working class as playing a role in the seizure of power, he did so in deference to the putative working-class ideology of the Communist Party, treating the working class only as an ideological abstraction" (117), he provides no references.

[9] For the references mentioned, see Review of Sam Farber, 156.

[10] Ernesto Che Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana. 7 volumes. (Havana: Editorial Ministerio del Azúcar, 1966).

[11] Ernesto Che Guevara, Escritos y discursos. 9 volumes. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977).

[12] See, for example, Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 144, notes 38, 39 and 40.

[13] Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la Economía Política, ed. María del Carmen Ariet García (Melbourne: Ocean Sur, 2006), 363; my translation. In the original Spanish: "el socialismo es para satisfacer las necesidades y necesidades siempre crecientes de la gente, si no, no vale la pena ser socialista."

[14] Guevara, Apuntes, 339; my translation.

[15] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xxvi.

[16] Farber, 18.

[17] Farber, 77.

[18] Farber, 78.

[19] Farber, 57.

[20] Fidel Castro,"Discurso pronunciado como conclusión de las reuniones con los intelectuales cubanos, Biblioteca Nacional 'José Martí'," in Habla Fidel: 25 discursos en la Revolución, ed. Pedro Álvarez Tabío (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2008), 205. One could translate the first word as "inside," as Farber chooses to do, but the word that Farber renders as "outside" is invariably translated as "against" in English.

[21] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 74; 75.

[22] Farber, 87.

[23] Farber, 72-73.

[24] Farber, 73.

[25] Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution(Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 292-93, note 5 and Felipa de las Mercedes Suárez Ramos , "Tribunales revolucionarios: Monumento a la justicia," Trabajadores, January 19, 2014: http://www.trabajadores.cu/20140119/tribunales-revolucionarios-monumento-la-justicia/ . While both sources cite the lawyer to whom I refer, Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada Ramos, they provide slightly different figures for the total number of executions.

[26] María Werlau, "Las víctimas olvidadas del Che Guevara: ¿Cuántos fusilamientos están documentados? CaféFuerteDecember 2, 2014: http://cafefuerte.com/msociedad/19698-las-victimas-olvidadas-del-che-guevara-cuantos-fusilamientos-estan-documentados/ (Farber's endnote lists December 1 as the publication date.)

[27] 145, note 50.

[28] Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 79.

[29] Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War against Castro (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 59. The names of the members of the tribunal that judged Quevedo are included in the article "Capitán José J. Castaño Quevedo, Martír": http://www.autentico.org/oa09253.php .

[30] Hinckle and Turner, The Fish is Red, 60.

[31] Guerra, Visions of Power, 79.

[32] One might also mention in this connection Farber's peculiar-and questionable-treatment of Ernest Mandel's, very lengthy definition of "the law of value," which Farber cites almost verbatim but without quotation marks (107). The definition, taken from the glossary to Mandel's Late Capitalism, contains more than 80 words. Farber's changes are limited to the insertion of two commas, an Americanization of the spelling of one word ("labor"), the removal of a hyphen and a dash, and the conversion of "i.e." into "that is." Nonetheless, he presents his formulation as, in effect, a paraphrase.

[33] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xix.

[34] Farber, 67; see also xix, 19, 93, and 117.

[35] See, for example, El Che en la Revolución cubana, Vol. I, 164; Vol. III, 433; and Vol. IV, 373.

[36] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 18

[37] Farber, 18.

[38] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life(London: Bantam Books, 1997), 605.

[39] Anderson, Che Guevara, 604.

[40] El Che en la Revolución cubana , Vol. II, 200; my translation. In the original Spanish: "nosotros somos…celosos defensores de nuestra individualidad."

[41] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xix

[42] Farber, xvii.

[43] Farber, 90.

[44] Farber, 77; 152, n. 66.

[45] Farber, 78-79.

[46] Farber, 85.

[47] Farber, 146, n. 63.

[48] Farber, 76.

[49] According to Luxemburg, "One cannot realize socialism with lazy, frivolous, egoistic, thoughtless and indifferent human beings. A socialist society needs human beings who, whatever their place, are full of passion and enthusiasm for the general well-being, full of self-sacrifice and sympathy for their fellow human beings, full of courage and tenacity in order to dare to attempt the most difficult" ("The Socialization of Society," in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004], 348). As for Lenin, see, for example, "A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear; 'Communist Subbotniks'," in Collected Works, Vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 423 and 427, and "From the Destruction of the Old Social System to the Creation of the New," in Collected Works, Vol. 30 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 517.

[50] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 84.

[51] For example, Farber assures us that "Che Guevara helped to establish in the mid-1960s" a "mass media system" that "was totally monolithic" (71), but never bothers to tell us what, exactly, Che's role was in this connection.

[52] See Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 117 and the passage cited below.

[53] Farber, 71.

[54] Farber, xviii.

[55] Farber, xxiii.

[56] Farber, 74; xx.

[57] Farber, 74.

[58] Farber, 75.

[59] Farber, xxiv.

[60] Farber, xxvi. Farber restates this conviction on page 120.

[61] Farber, xxvi.

[62] Farber, 78; 81.

[63] Again, I provide references in the review cited above.

[64] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 78.

[65]

For some passages in which Che refers to this stage, see my

The Political Theory of Che Guevara

(London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), 154, note 13.

The Question of War with North Korea: A Geopolitical Breakdown

By Devon Bowers

The summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un while photo worthy, was a disaster. Yet, it wasn't due to Trump 'getting played' as so many in the media would have one think, but rather was due to the US wanting to make demands without offering any concessions.

North Korea released a statement early July 2018 in which they "accused the Trump administration on Saturday of pushing a "unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization' and called [the meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo] 'deeply regrettable." [1] More importantly, after the summit, President Trump went and said that North Korea was still an "extraordinary threat,"[2] despite the whole intention of the summit being to lower tensions between the two nations. Given the fact that war between the two (and allied nations) may still break out, it would be pertinent to discuss what such a war would look like, starting with interested parties.

The United States

The US has been deeply involved in the Korean peninsula for the past nearly seven decades and currently has around 28,000 personnel deployed there. [3] While times have changed, the US still retains major interests with regards to the peninsula.

Generally, US concerns with NK include "verifiable elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons program," the halting of "nuclear or ballistic missile proliferation,"[4] and reduction of tensions with Japan.

The US is especially concerned with North Korea's nuclear program, as can be seen in their training exercises. In December 2017, US troops trained in exercise Warrior Strike IX which "[putting] them on North Korean soil, with the objective of 'infiltrating' and 'removing weapons of mass destruction." [5] Such exercises are nothing new, as in March 2013, the US began its Winter Wargame in which they simulated "how many American troops would be needed to go in and secure North Korea's nuclear arsenal if Kim's regime collapsed." [6]

Collapse is also a concern as it "would have severe implications for trade and the regional-if not global-economy" and "the potential for major strategic consequences (including control of the North's nuclear arsenal) and a massive humanitarian crisis, not to mention long-term economic and social repercussions, loom large." [7] Such drills are of major concern for the North Korean leadership which has always condemned such exercises and sees them as dangerous and provocative.

Nuclear weapons are extremely important for the North Korean government as not only are the drills seen as a threat, but, looking around the world, they have right to be concerned. In private meetings, North Korean officials "have often stated that they do not intend to become 'another Iraq' or 'another Libya'- countries that, in the North Korean view, succumbed to the United States because they did not have a 'nuclear deterrent."[8] This is further supported by that fact that Donald Greg, US ambassador to Seoul under President Obama, was told by the North Koreans, "we noticed you never attack anyone with nuclear weapons so that's why we developed them" and issued a statement after the attack on Libya, which read, in part:

The situation in Libya is a lesson for the international community. It has been shown to the corners of the earth that Libya's giving up its nuclear arms, which the U.S. liked to chatter on about, was used as an invasion tactic to disarm the country by sugarcoating it with words like 'the guaranteeing of security' and 'the bettering of relations. [9] (emphasis added)

Despite the government being labeled such things as 'insane' and 'crazy' they are acting quite rationally using their nuclear program as a deterrent from unwanted US interference and invasion.

The reliance on nuclear weapons makes sense, given past incidents involving the US, such as the Chenonan incident in 2010, where the South Korean ship, the Cheonan, sunk and blame was immediately laid at the feet of North Korea.[10] This is despite some people questioning the evidence being presented to the public [11] and questions being raised even in South Korea's own official reports. [12]

There was also the Sony hack in December 2014. North Korea was accused of hacking the corporation when they released The Interview, a comedy film that was critical of the North Korean government. As soon as the hack occurred, NK was already being blamed, with the FBI saying that "it determined North Korea was responsible based on an analysis of the malware involved and its similarities to previous attacks the U.S. government [attributed] to North Korean-allied hackers, including an assault on South Korean banks and media outlets in 2013." [13] In response to the hack, the US placed sanctions on NK. [14] However, what is interesting in regards to all of this is that it is quite questionable if North Korea was in fact the source of the hacking.

If you are a victim of hacking, especially on a national level, it can be quite difficult to determine who is responsible. Bruce Schneier, a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted in an Atlantic article:

Ordinarily, you could determine who the attacker was by the weaponry. When you saw a tank driving down your street, you knew the military was involved because only the military could afford tanks. Cyberspace is different. In cyberspace, technology is broadly spreading its capability, and everyone is using the same weaponry: hackers, criminals, politically motivated hacktivists, national spies, militaries, even the potential cyberterrorist. They are all exploiting the same vulnerabilities, using the same sort of hacking tools, engaging in the same attack tactics, and leaving the same traces behind. They all eavesdrop or steal data. They all engage in denial-of-service attacks. They all probe cyberdefences and do their best to cover their tracks.[15] (emphasis added)

Due to many different actors utilizing similar tactics and techniques to obtain information, quickly pointing fingers seems to do a disservice.

While the military realm of North Korea has been aggressive, the diplomatic realm has been something of a mixed bag.

President Obama's main goals with regards to NK were to 1) keep Six Party Talks open, however, with the caveat that NK take 'irreversible' steps to denuclearize first, 2) insist that the Talks be preceded by an improvement in relations between the two Koreas, and 3) respond "to Pyongyang's provocations by tightening sanctions against North Korean entities, conducting a series of military exercises, and expanding U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral cooperation." [16] This was a policy of 'strategic patience' which was essentially a carrot-and-stick approach of handling North Korea, where talks and deals could be made in times of peace, but when problems mounted, sanctions would come into play. There were some major problems with this, as rather than focusing on denuclearization of North Korea, the Obama administration seemed more concerned about non-proliferation of WMDs. This is supported by statements from US officials such as "Jeff Bader, former Senior Director on the East Asian Affairs in the National Security Council, [who] stated in an interview that while pursing bilateral talks with North Korea, the United States would focus on reducing, delaying and freezing the North Korean nuclear program, leaving complete denuclearization in the hands of history."[17]

Obama's strategy didn't work from the get-go as North Korea left the six party talks after "Pyongyang test-fired a modified Taepo Dong-2 three-stage rocket, ostensibly as part of its civilian space program" to which the UN Security Council "issued a presidential statement April 13 [2009] calling the test a violation of Resolution 1718, and expanded sanctions on North Korean firms shortly afterwards." [18] Furthermore, this focus on proliferation rather than denuclearization allowed North Korea to make gains in its program, most notably, by conducting "two underground nuclear explosions and several banned missile tests" [19] in April 2013.

Relations deteriorated further in April 2016 with President Obama stating that "we [the US] could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our [nuclear] arsenals."[20] This was in the context of increased tensions as just a month earlier (March 2016) the US and South Korea launched two military drills, one of which was Operation Key Resolve which tested "the new U.S.-South Korean military strategy operation plan, Operations Plan 5015, which aims to deter North Korea's possible use of weapons of mass destruction by preemptive attack." [21] From NK's perspective, the exercise was "offensive rather than defensive and is aimed at occupying [North Korea] by preemptive strike." It was further noted:

The aggressive nature of the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises is also apparent in setting their targets, like examination of feasibility of operations like "removal of the leadership," "occupying Pyongyang," "regime change," "preemptive nuclear strike" and "decapitation raids," which can never be found in other countries' joint military drills. [22]

While idea of war was in the background, the US 2016 presidential elections brought someone who, at least at first, seemed to strike a different tone on the matter.

The 2016 elections saw the explosion of unlikely presidential candidate Donald Trump, who brought some unconventional thinking to the political arena. In May 2016, Trump said that he would be "willing to talk to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to try to stop Pyongyang's nuclear program, proposing a major shift in U.S. policy toward the isolated nation." [23] The following month, he said that he would be willing to have Kim Jong-Un come to the White House, arguing "What the hell is wrong with speaking?" [24] This was not just a "major shift" from US policy, it was utterly unheard of.

Unfortunately, these ideas weren't to last as when Trump became President he began to condemn North Korea, saying that "the 'greatest immediate threat' to the US is North Korea and its nuclear program" [25] In August 2017, in a war of words between the two leaders, President Trump said to reporters that "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States" and that "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." [26] Such comments only aided in further straining already tense relations between the two nations, but the even larger problem seems to be the people who are surrounding him, namely John Bolton.

John Bolton isn't just known for his role in promoting the 2003 Iraq War, but is generally known as a major foreign policy hawk with neoconservative credentials. Not too soon before becoming National Security Adviser to President Trump, he penned an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First," where he says, in part:

The threat [from North Korea] is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation. (emphasis added)

Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different than in the age of steam. What was once remote is now, as a practical matter, near; what was previously time-consuming to deliver can now arrive in minutes; and the level of destructiveness of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is infinitely greater than that of the steamship Caroline's weapons cargo. [27]

It is interesting to note that despite the title, no actual legal argument is made in the article. Still, Bolton argues that due to the idea that at some point in the future North Korea is going to engage in a military, possibly nuclear, attack on the United States, that the US thus has the right to attack North Korea.

Thinking such as this should worry everyone as this is the kind of person who is giving President Trump advice and there is no one to seriously push back on it for the most part. While Steve Bannon and his cohorts aren't good people by any means, at least they represented something of an anti-interventionist front, especially when one looks at Bannon's comments regarding the North Korea situation and how it could only be solved politically.[28]

Relations between the two countries seemed as if they might improve slightly with the summit in June 2018 between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. However, as aforementioned, this went awry due to US demands without concessions. What should be noted, however, is the media's response to the summit, with articles such as Kim Jong Un has played Trump like a Stradivarius by Max Boot in the Washington Post and How Donald Trump Got Played By a Ruthless Dictator by Andy Kroll of the Rolling Stone. Many in the media, in print and television, were incessantly talking about how President Trump was going to 'get played' by Kim. Effectively, the arguments revolved around 1) by even meeting with Kim, Trump was putting North Korea on the same level as the US, 2) that diplomacy with North Korea won't work due to them having reneged on such efforts in the past 3) that Trump 'got nothing' from the summit, and 4) it was a mistake to stop the war games. Each of these arguments should be examined in more detail.

Addressing the first point, that talking to North Korea legitimizes them, such an argument doesn't make sense. The United States and rest of the world already recognizes NK as a sovereign nation, thus giving them legitimacy. However, this argument is more about how the US shouldn't legitimize the North Korean government and the horrid things it has done. To rebut that, one only has to look at who the US allies itself with, such as Saudi Arabia. People are hand wringing about acknowledging NK, when they are silent about how the US is buddy-buddy with Saudi Arabia, a nation that is currently bombing the ever-loving hell out of Yemen to the point where the Yemeni people are starving [29] and Saudi Arabia is said to have committed war crimes [30] and, some speculate, is possibly engaging in genocide. [31] On top of that, the US has a history of and continues to provide aid to dictators. [32] Thus, the argument that due to Kim Jong-Un's government oppressing the North Korean people means the US shouldn't talk to him doesn't hold water as the US is fine talking to and even aiding oppressive governments around the world.

The idea that diplomacy won't work with North Korea reneging on deals in the past is quite plausible, however, ignores certain details. The only time the US made major gains with North Korea was when engaging in serious diplomacy, as President Bill Clinton did. In 1994, the US and North Korea settled upon the Agreed Framework.

Just four pages long, the agreement said that North Korea would shut down its main nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, abandon two others, and seal fuel that could potentially be used to create a nuclear weapon. In exchange, the U.S. would provide oil to make up for the fuel lost from the dismantled plants and would build two new "light fuel" plants from which it would be harder to extract nuclear materials. If North Korea did try to get fuel out of the new plants, it would be easy for nuclear watchdogs to identify-and hard to hide. In addition, the agreement promised that the U.S. would lift economic sanctions and its diplomatic freeze on North Korea and agree that it would not use nuclear weapons of its own on North Korea. [33]

This represented a major milestone of progress in US-North Korean relations and proved that diplomacy with North Korea actually worked. Unfortunately, the US Congress refused to provide funding for the project and thus the light fuel plants were never built. Some may bring up the fact that North Korea continued its uranium enrichment program and thus broke the deal, however, that's not entirely accurate. "The Agreed Framework covered only North Korea's plutonium program; it said nothing about uranium enrichment. North Korea maneuvered around the agreement but didn't violate it"[34] and they did this only after four years of the US not holding up its end of the bargain.

The position that President Trump got nothing from the deal is true, but not for the reasons people are arguing, such as him 'getting played' by Kim Jong-Un. From the get-go, the US wasn't making concessions. Specifically, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said before the summit that "the United States [had] not made any concessions to the regime and will continue to hold firm until Pyongyang takes 'credible steps' toward denuclearization." [35] The US retained this stand even after the summit as Pompeo said that the US wouldn't ease sanctions on North Korea until they denuclearized. [36] During the entire situation, as Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen notes:

Trump made no real concessions in Singapore. He did not lift sanctions, unfreeze North Korean assets or send secret planes loaded with hard currency to Pyongyang. He did not sign an agreement ending the Korean War or offer Pyongyang diplomatic recognition. All the president did was, as a goodwill gesture, suspend military exercises with South Korea - a decision he can easily reverse. [37] (emphasis added)

Demands without concessions, diplomacy does not make.

With regards to the war games, as was just noted, it is something that can be reversed without much hassle. It is important as the North Korean government sees these war games as provocative and that the US and South Korea are preparing to invade it. By not having them, it helps to create an environment where the two parties can begin to discuss and talk out the situation, without the ever-present specter of war behind them.

While far away, there are much closer nations that are quite interested in the peninsula, namely, China, Russia, and Japan.

China

China not only borders North Korea, but has a long history with the nation, going back to their intervention in the Korean War on the side of the North. While the times have changed, China still remains heavily invested in North Korea.

Generally, the Chinese main priority is stability on the peninsula, especially with regards to the North Korean leadership and the country as a whole as they see North Korea as a buffer between them and the American-backed South Korean government. North Korea's stability is vital to Chinese interests as there would be major political, economic, and humanitarian ramifications were to North Korean government to be destabilized or collapse altogether. "However unpredictable and annoying the North Korean government may be to Beijing, any conceivable scenario other than maintaining the status quo could seriously damage PRC interests."[38] To this end, "China's food and energy assistance can be seen as an insurance premium that Beijing remits regularly to avoid paying the higher economic, political, and national security costs" [39] of a collapse or war.

On the question of nuclear weapons, China is rather wary of North Korea's nuclear program as they are worried that it could potentially create a nuclear arms race of sorts, inspiring nations such as Japan and Taiwan to pursue their own nuclear weapons/deterrents in doing so put the entire region on edge. Additionally, the Chinese government wants to avoid such proliferation as it could result in nations being more able to defend their national interests when engaged in conflicts with China, such as debates over the South China Sea. [40]

China supports the reunification of the Korean peninsula, however, they favor a peaceful environment to first be fostered without the interference of outside nations such as the United States. They support this via " direct dialogue, reconciliation and cooperation between the two [Koreas] and [encourage] economic cooperation and prosperity as key factors in achieving unification,"[41] furthermore, to these ends, they don't favor increased sanctions on North Korea as the view is that doing so creates a more hostile environment. On top of all this, reunification allows for a war to be avoided, which, if initiated by the US or South Korea, would force China's hand as China is bound to aid North Korea under the "1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance which states that China is obliged to defend North Korea against unprovoked aggression." [42] Furthermore, a war would harm Chinese investments and put their buffer zone at risk.

Russia

Russia, while seemingly far away, actually holds an eleven mile border with North Korea and thus is paying close attention to and attempting to influence the situation.

They too, see North Korea as an important buffer. The Russian National Committee of the Council of Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific noted that "the most relevant objective is not attaining a predominate position in Korea, but rather the prevention of the entire peninsula falling under the influence of another state, especially one that is not on truly friendly terms with Russia" [43] and thus it is to their advantage that North Korea act as a buffer state to US interests.

Russia is concerned about NK's nuclear program, however it doesn't have the primary prominence that it does for the United States or South Korea. Rather that lies with increasing Russian influence in North Korea and their military concerns.

Specifically, Russia wants to maintain and grow its relationship with North Korea, primarily in the economic and cultural exchange areas. Such views affect their support for sanctions as promoting them could negatively affect Russia's long-term interests. [44] Russia's economic interests prevent it from honoring its United Nations commitment to economically sanction Pyongyang as it would interfere with their access to North Korean markets and diminish their influence on North Korea. [45] With regards to economics, Russia wants to woo North Korea away from their intense dependence on China, utilizing their special economic zones, such as Rason, which is a home for foreign investment. Like the Chinese, they also want stability in North Korea as it would " open up opportunities to tap into the energy market on the peninsula itself, and further establish regional economic partnerships,"[46] possibly allowing Russia to slightly blunt some of the sanctions put on it after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Militarily, they are worried about the US's National Missile Defense plan, which " if fully implemented, would enhance US nuclear superiority over Russia's smaller, less sophisticated nuclear arsenal" [47] and so the Russians want to reign in North Korea's nuclear program as it gives the US justification for continuing to develop and deploy missile defenses which could potentially give the US an upperhand and even dominance with regards to nuclear superiority vis-à-vis Russia.

There are also concerns about a collapse of the North Korean government which could potentially "increase the likelihood that its nuclear weapons-grade material would end up on the black market, available to transnational criminal organizations as well as terrorist networks." [48] This is of major concern for the Russians given their bloody history with Chechen terrorists which engaged in an act of radiological terrorism in the 1990s [49], in addition to their terrorist acts more generally. [50] Therefore, it is in Russian interests to work to limit North Korea's access to nuclear material and ensure that access is in line with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Japan

The Japanese have had long-standing problems with North Korea, specifically with regards to North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens, an issue that remains unresolved.

"From 1977 to 1983, several Japanese citizens living in coastal regions disappeared under strange circumstances," [51] with the truth being revealed in 2002. That year, then-Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, met with then-leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il to address outstanding problems between the two countries, which resulted in the Pyongyang Declaration which dealt with several problems, everything from the historical, such as Japan apologizing for the harm done during its colonial rule of Korea to the status of Korean nationals living in Japan. Plans were made to continue talks in October 2002. Unfortunately, things went south when "Pyongyang revealed that 13 Japanese nationals had been taken from Japan and eight of them had died in North Korea" [52] and, post-summit, announced that the five survivors would be temporarily allowed to return to Japan.

The survivors returned to Japan on October 15, 2002 and were greeted with massive enthusiasm from the Japanese public. Initially, it was reported that they would stay for only two weeks, but then the Japanese government allowed them to permanently stay in Japan, after advocacy from the families of the survivors and politicians. Pyongyang was furious at this announcement, as they viewed it as Japan backing out of sending the survivors back to North Korea.

Despite this, the October 2002 talks continued as scheduled, yet focused purely on the abduction issue. When Japan pressed North Korea for information regarding the deaths of the eight other abductees, they were rebuffed. In response, Japan suspended negotiations for nearly two years, resuming them in May 2004, when Koizumi visited Pyongyang again to restart talks, yet nothing of value was gained.

This entire issue launched political careers, such as with Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, of the Liberal Democratic Party, who assumed position in 2006 and, along with his allies, made the abduction issue front and center. [53] He has pushed for major changes to Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which doesn't allow the nation to have a military that can engage in offensive operations. In order for it to go through, the measure would have to pass by a two-thirds majority in the Parliament and be subject to a referendum. Currently, there are problems as "it's unclear if Mr. Abe's coalition partners would back the proposal, and [Liberal Democratic Party] leaders acknowledge they don't expect to win support from major opposition parties" and much of the public is "wedded to the country's pacifist ways, and polls suggest a majority aren't ready for Article 9 to change." [54] If Japan's constitutional change were to go through, it would allow Japan's military to acquire cruise missiles and long-ranged air launched missiles which would let Japan attack military bases in North Korea from a distance. [55]

The military threat of North Korea is quite real to the Japanese, who have already had to deal with North Korea missiles being fired near them. Conventionally, there is "the threat posed by North Korea's guerilla incursions, incursions into Japanese territorial waters as well as attacks on Japanese nuclear power facilities along the coast of the Sea of Japan." [56] In terms of missiles, while Japan "continues to invest funds and other resources for the development of a regional missile defense system in order to protect the Japanese territory from North Korean rogue missiles," [57] there are still problems as "the 22 ballistic missiles [North Korea] has tested since February [2017] have all been fired toward Japan, whose capital Tokyo lies just 800 miles from Pyongyang." [58] Such a situation leaves the public and government seriously concerned about both North Korea's missile and nuclear programs.

In order to confront concerns about North Korea, not only is Japan increasing its military[59] , but it is also changing its military organization.

Specifically, the Ground Self-Defense Force is going to be put under a single, unified command and the establishment of an amphibious brigade. Michael Green, the senior vice president for Asia and the Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that this is in response to a reinterpretation of Article 9 in which Japan's military can be used for 'collective self-defense' which "will allow Japanese forces to plan for and potentially participate in joint military operations with the U.S. beyond Japan's home island" and let Japan "engage in anti-submarine warfare, missile defense or other missions in close support of the United States."[60] This is all being done in response to the North Korean missile threat, but also China's probing of Japanese waters.

Given all this, the question must be asked: What would a war with North Korea look like on some level?

As to why a war would start, it would most likely be accidental, with either North Korea or South Korea/the US misinterpreting the moves of the other party[61] and while therefore unlikely, is still a possibility and thus should be examined.

In terms of numbers, North Korea's military is as follows:

- 1,190,000 active, 6,300,000 reserve and 189,000 paramilitary personnel[62]

- "[A]bout 820 combat aircraft, 30 reconnaissance aircraft, and 330 transport aircraft"[63]

- 4,300 tanks and 2,000 special forces soldiers [64]

- 4,000 armored fighting vehicles, 13,000 artillery pieces, 4,500 self-propelled guns, and 5,000 rocket artillery pieces [65]

- 967 naval assets, mainly based in submarines (86) and patrol craft (438)[66]

While some may lambaste the North Korean military as not being a serious threat due to the US and South Korean militaries being better trained and equipped, it doesn't mean that they still can't do damage. As has been noted in the past, NK's artillery could do massive damage to Seoul [67], the South Korean capital, especially if they utilize chemical weapons that North Korea is thought to possess.[68] There are also the special forces soldiers, which are trained to "cover infiltration into the forward and rear areas to strike major units and facilities, assassinations of key personnel, disruption of rear areas and hybrid operations."[69] Thus, in case of a war, major havoc could be wrought in terms of physical destruction and the targeting of political, economic, and military sites.

Furthermore, the actual conditions of war for North Korea would be different. The likelihood of North Korea initiating a war is extremely slim, given the fact that they wouldn't want to have to go up against both the US and South Korea without aid from Russia or China, as China noted in 2017 that engaging in aggressive acts would forfeit Chinese support. [70] Therefore, any war would be initiated by the US and its allies, thus turning it into a defensive war. North Korea's goals would be simply to survive and push back the invasion, with nuclear weapons being used as a last resort, where as the invading nations would have to either do an incursion into North Korea or more likely a toppling of the North Korean government and post war occupation, something that would be much more difficult and costly in terms of money, lives, and material.

In terms of logistics, a North Korean-started war is questionable as well as it isn't even particularly known if they have the capabilities to maintain supply lines far into South Korea. The United States, on the other hand, would have serious logistical problems supporting a war on the peninsula as they already "[don't] have the ability to evacuate [their] own anticipated wounded quickly," with the New York Times noting in February 2018 that the US has "limited ability to evacuate injured troops from the Korean Peninsula daily - a problem more acute if the North retaliated with chemical weapons." [71] Thus, there could be serious problems with resupply, which would hamper fighting effectiveness. This doesn't take into account that current war plans have the US mobilizing "nearly 700,000 US soldiers [that] would be mobilized alongside 160 ships, 1,600 aircraft," [72] all of which would take time to prepare and actually put into theater.

There is also the question of outside nations. In case of a war, China would activate anti-missile systems near their border with North Korea and provide humanitarian aid, however Song Zhongping, a military expert and a TV commentator, noted that "defensive action could lead to engagement if US action on the Korean Peninsula threatens China's core interests." [73] Russia, too, is prepared militarily. In 2017, Russia's Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, stated that "Russia was getting ready for a military standoff between its unruly neighbor and other states around the world" and "We are assessing this and preparing ourselves. We will not be taken by surprise." [74] Thus, it seems everyone is getting prepared for a possible battle.

While the situation with North Korea seems to have stabilized for now, as we know, the situation can change at a moment's notice. The question of war still lingers in the air.

This was originally published on AHTribune.com.

Notes

[1] Gardiner Harris, Choe Sang-Hun, "North Korea Criticizes 'Gangster-Like' U.S. Attitude After Talks With Mike Pompeo," New York Times, July 7, 2018 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/world/asia/mike-pompeo-north-korea-pyongyang.html )

[2] BBC, Trump says North Korea still 'extraordinary threat', https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44584957 (June 23, 2018)

[3] Tom Vanden Brook, "Pentagon bases about 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea," USA Today, June 5, 2018 ( https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/05/u-s-bases-28-000-troops-south-korea-summit-june-12/671126002/ )

[4] Emma Chanlett-Avery, Dick K. Nanto, North Korea: Economic Leverage and Policy Analysis, Congressional Research Service, (January 22, 2010), pg 13

[5] Alex Diaz, "US commandos train to capture North Korean nukes," Fox News, December 20, 2017 ( http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/12/20/us-commandos-train-to-capture-north-korean-nukes.html )

[6] Colleen Curry, "U.S. Wargames North Korean Regime Collapse, Invasion to Secure Nukes," ABC News, March 29, 2013 ( http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-wargames-north-korean-regime-collapse-invasion-secure/story?id=18822930 )

[7] Emma Chanlett-Avery, Mi Ae Taylor, North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation , Congressional Research Service, (May 6, 2010), pg 2

[8] Evan J. R. Revere, Facing the Facts: Towards a New U.S. North Korea Policy, The Brookings Institute, https://www.brookings.edu/research/facing-the-facts-towards-a-new-u-s-north-korea-policy/ (October 16, 2013), pg 12

[9] Geoffery Ingersoll, The Iraq Invasion Convinced North Korea That It Needed Nukes," Business Insider, April 3, 2013 ( https://www.businessinsider.com/the-iraq-war-spurred-dprk-nuke-research-2013-4 )

[10] Jack Kim, "North Korea torpedoed South's navy ship: report," Reuters, April 21, 2010 ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-korea-ship/north-korea-torpedoed-souths-navy-ship-report-idUSTRE63L08W20100422 )

[11] David Cyranoski, Did a North Korean torpedo really sink the Cheonan?, Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/questions-korean-torpedo/

[12] Barbara Demick, John M. Glionna, "Doubts surface on North Korea's role in ship sinking," LA Times, July 23, 2010 ( http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/23/world/la-fg-korea-torpedo-20100724 )

[13] Alex Altman, Zeke J. Miller, "FBI Accuses North Korea in Sony Hack," Time, December 19, 2014 ( http://time.com/3642161/sony-hack-north-korea-the-interview-fbi/ )

[14] Zeke J. Miller, "U.S. Sanctions North Korea Over Sony Hack," Time, January 2, 2015 ( http://time.com/3652479/sony-hack-north-korea-the-interview-obama-sanctions/ )

[15] Bruce Schneier, "We Still Don't Know Who Hacked Sony," The Atlantic, January 5, 2015 ( https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/we-still-dont-know-who-hacked-sony-north-korea/384198/ )

[16] Emma Chanlett-Avery, William H. Cooper, Mark E. Manyin, Mary Beth Nitikin, Ian E. Reinhart, U.S.-South Korea Relations, Congressional Research Service, (February 5, 2013), pg 9

[17] Dongsoo Kim, "The Obama administration's policy toward North Korea: the causes and consequences of strategic patience," Journal of Asian Public Policy 9:1 (December 2015), pg 40

[18] Arms Control Association, The Six Party Talks At A Glance, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/6partytalks

[19] Matt Spetalnick, Anna Yukhananov, "Analysis: North Korea tests Obama's 'strategic patience," Reuters, April 19, 2013 ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-korea-north-obama/analysis-north-korea-tests-obamas-strategic-patience-idUSBRE9380YR20130409 )

[20] David Blair, "'We could destroy you,' Obama warns 'erratic' North Korean leader." The Telegraph, April 26, 2016 ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/26/us-developing-missile-shield-to-guard-against-nuclear-attack-fro/ )

[21] Kent Miller, Jeff Schogol, "315,000 U.S. and South Korean troops begin massive exercise as North threatens war," Marine Corps Times, March 5, 2016 ( https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2016/03/05/315000-u-s-and-south-korean-troops-begin-massive-exercise-as-north-threatens-war/ )

[22] Jon Min Dok, Suspend the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises for peace , NK News, https://www.nknews.org/2016/03/suspend-the-u-s-south-korea-joint-military-exercises-for-peace/ (March 15, 2016)

[23] Emily Flitter, Steve Holland, "Exclusive: Trump would talk to North Korea's Kim, wants to renegotiate climate accord," Reuters , May 17, 2016 ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-exclusive/exclusive-trump-would-talk-to-north-koreas-kim-wants-to-renegotiate-climate-accord-idUSKCN0Y82JO )

[24] Jeremy Diamond, "Trump says he would host Kim Jong Un in U.S.." CNN, June 15, 2016 ( https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/donald-trump-north-korea-kim-jong-un/index.html )

[25] Wolf Blitzer, Jeremy Diamond, Jake Tapper, "Top source: Trump believes North Korea is greatest threat," CNN, February 28, 2017 ( https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/politics/north-korea-obama-trump-threat/index.html )

[26] Peter Baker, Choe Sang-Hun, "Trump Threatens 'Fire and Fury' Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S.," New York Times, August 8, 2017 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-korea-un-sanctions-nuclear-missile-united-nations.html )

[27] John R. Bolton, The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First, Gatestone Institute, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11978/north-korea-first-strike (March 2, 2018)

[28] Robert Kuttner, "Steve Bannon, Unrepentant," The American Prospect, August 16, 2017 ( http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant )

[29] Zeeshan Aleem, "Saudi Arabia's new blockade is starving Yemen," Vox, November 22, 2017 ( https://www.vox.com/world/2017/11/22/16680392/saudi-arabia-yemen-blockade-famine-casualties )

[30] Rasha Mohammed, Rawan Shaif, "Saudi Arabia Is Committing War Crimes in Yemen." Foreign Policy, March 25, 2016 ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/25/civilian-casualties-war-crimes-saudi-arabia-yemen-war/ )

[31] Randi Nord, "Is What's Happening in Yemen Really Genocide?" Mint Press News, June 4, 2018 ( https://www.mintpressnews.com/yemen-genocide/243247/ )

[32] Rich Whitney, "US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World's Dictatorships," Truthout, September 23, 2017 ( https://truthout.org/articles/us-provides-military-assistance-to-73-percent-of-world-s-dictatorships/ )

[33] Erin Blakemore, Bill Clinton Once Struck a Nuclear Deal With North Korea, History.com, https://www.history.com/news/north-korea-nuclear-deal-bill-clinton-agreed-framework (April 17, 2018)

[34] Fred Kaplan, "Sorry, Trump, but Talking to North Korea Has Worked," Slate, October 10, 2017 ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/10/it_is_possible_to_negotiate_with_north_korea_bill_clinton_did_it.html )

[35] Karoun Demirjian, John Hudson, "Pompeo promises 'zero concessions' to North Korea until 'credible steps' are made," Washington Post, May 23, 2018 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pompeo-promises-zero-concessions-to-north-korea-until-credible-steps-are-made/2018/05/23/3ad505e4-5e90-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?utm_term=.153314b69298 )

[36] The Mainichi,US: No sanctions relief before North Korea denuclearizes , https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180615/p2g/00m/0fp/012000c (June 15, 2018)

[37] Marc A. Thiessen, "On North Korea, Trump deserves more latitude and less attitude," Washington Post, June 15, 2018 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-deserves-more-latitude-and-less-attitude/2018/06/15/3be1edde-6fee-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html?utm_term=.d85c6087ab39 )

[38] Dick K. Nanto, Mark E. Manyin, China-North Korea Relations , Congressional Research Service, December 28, 2010, pg 7

[39] Ibid. pg 9

[40] Ibid, pg 8

[41] Walter Diamana, Strategic Alliance: China-North Korea, International Policy Digest, https://intpolicydigest.org/2015/07/02/strategic-alliance-china-north-korea/ (July 2, 2015)

[42] Ibid

[43] Russian National Committee of the Council of Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, "The Korean Crisis Management: A Russian Perspective," Korea Review of International Studies 13:2 (2010), pg 83

[44] Ibid. pg 85

[45] Anthony V. Rinna, "Russia's Relationship With North Korea: It's Complicated," The Diplomat, February 1, 2018 ( https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/russias-relationship-with-north-korea-its-complicated/ )

[46] Jacqueline Westermann, Australia, don't underestimate Russia's interests in Korea , The Strategist, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/australia-dont-underestimate-russias-interests-in-korea/ (May 9, 2018)

[47] Geetha Govindasamy, Chang Kyoo Park, Er-Win Tan, "The Revival of Russia's Role on the Korean Peninsula," Asian Perspective 37:1 (2011), pg 141

[48] Ibid

[49] Jeffrey Bale, The Chechen Resistance and Radiological Terrorism, Nuclear Threat Initiative, http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/chechen-resistance-radiological-terror/ (April 1, 2004)

[50] Preeti Bhattacharji, Chechen Terrorism (Russia, Chechnya, Separatist), Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chechen-terrorism-russia-chechnya-separatist (April 8, 2010)

[51] Adam Edelman, "Japanese citizens simply vanished. North Korea had abducted them. But why?" NBC News, June 11, 2018 ( https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/japanese-citizens-simply-vanished-north-korea-had-abducted-them-why-n881546 )

[52] Tsuneo Akaha, "Japanese Policy Towards The North Korean Problem," Journal of Asian and African Studies 42:3 (2007), pg 302

[53] Norimitsu Onishi, "Japan Rightists Fan Fury Over North Korea Abductions," New York Times, December 17, 2006 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/world/asia/17japan.html )

[54] Byron Tau, "Abe's Window of Time for Amending Japan's Pacifist Constitution Narrows." Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2018 ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/abes-window-of-time-for-amending-japans-pacifist-constitution-narrows-1534075201 )

[55] Kosuke Takahashi, "Japan Needs Constitution Change to Have Capabilities to Strike Enemy Bases," Japan Forward, December 23, 2017 ( https://japan-forward.com/japan-needs-constitution-change-to-have-capabilities-to-strike-enemy-bases/ )

[56] Emma Chanlett-Avery, William H. Cooper, Mark E. Manyin, Weston S. Konishi, Japan-US Relations: Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, November 25, 2009, pg 9

[57] Ibid

[58] Charlie Campbell, "'This Is All We Can Do': How the Japanese Are Preparing for a North Korean Nuclear Attack," Time, September 20, 2017 ( http://time.com/4949262/north-korea-japan-nuclear-missiles-drills/ )

[59] Tom O'Connor, "North Korea Crisis: Japan is Growing Its Military For The First Time Since World War II Because Of Kim Jong Un," Newsweek, September 21, 2017 ( https://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-crisis-japan-bigger-military-role-ashes-war-669217 )

[60] World Politics Review, Japan Aims to 'Lock' the U.S. in Asia With a Sweeping Military Revamp , https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/24549/japan-aims-to-lock-the-u-s-in-asia-with-a-sweeping-military-revamp (April 11, 2018)

[61] Elias Groll, Dan De Luce, Jenna McLaughlin, Armageddon by Accident, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/18/armageddon-by-accident-north-korea-nuclear-war-missiles/ (October 18, 2017)

[62] Defense-Aerospace, North Korea's Military: How Does it Actually Stack Up?, http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/186531/how-does-north-korea%E2%80%99s-military-compare-to-south-korea%E2%80%99s%3F.html (September 5, 2017)

[63] Alex Lockie, "North Korea has a massive air force - here's why it's basically a joke," Business Insider, June 21, 2018 ( https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korea-has-a-massive-air-force-heres-why-its-basically-a-joke-2018-6 )

[64] Dave Majumdar, North Korea's Army by the Numbers: 4,300 Tanks and 200,000 Lethal Special Forces, The National Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/north-koreas-army-by-the-numbers-4300-tanks-200000-lethal-24301 (February 1, 2018)

[65] Armed Forces, Korean Armed forces, http://armedforces.eu/North_Korea

[66] Global Firepower, 2018 North Korea Military Strength, https://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail.asp?country_id=north-korea

[67] Stratfor, How North Korea Would Retaliate, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would-retaliate (January 5, 2017)

[68] Nuclear Threat Initiative, North Korea, http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/chemical/ (April 2018)

[69] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/north-koreas-army-by-the-numbers-4300-tanks-200000-lethal-24301

[70] Simon Denyer, Amanda Erickson, "Beijing warns Pyongyang: You're on your own if you go after the United States," Washington Post, August 11, 2017 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-warns-north-korea-youre-on-your-own-if-you-go-after-the-us/2017/08/11/a01a4396-7e68-11e7-9026-4a0a64977c92_story.html?utm_term=.3d010f091b13 )

[71] Robert Beckhusen, The U.S. Military Is Not Prepared to Hunt This Many North Korean Missiles , War Is Boring, https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-military-is-not-prepared-to-hunt-this-many-north-korean-missiles/ (March 5, 2018)

[72] Robin Harding, Bryan Harris, "US rhetoric on North Korea runs into logistical reality," Financial Times, December 27, 2017 ( https://www.ft.com/content/1cf44ab8-de1a-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c )

[73] Deng Xiaoci, "China should prepare to defend against war in Korean Peninsula: expert," Global Times, December 17, 2017 ( http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1080722.shtml )

[74] Dan Falvey, "Russia plan for military intervention in North Korea to stop a nuclear apocalypse," Express, December 2, 2017 ( https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/886615/North-Korea-nuclear-missile-war-vladimir-putin-military-action-kim-jong-un )

Colin Kaepernick, the Black Panthers, and Fred Hampton

By Simon Wood

"When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In the 2016 preseason American football games of the San Francisco 49ers, quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to sit rather than stand for the US national anthem. In an interview, he explained his stance:

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

He later chose to kneel instead of sit, explaining that this change was to express more respect for past and present US military service members.

A year on the controversy has exploded, dominating news agendas and social media feeds. There is a hashtag [#takeaknee] and numerous opinion pieces, expressing sympathy and condemnation in broad measure, have achieved broad circulation. US President Trump has joined the fray, expressing the standard view from the right that the actions of Kaepernick are disrespectful and unpatriotic. This has in turn served to trigger the 'liberal left' in a way that decades of inequality, police violence against black people and mass carnage abroad has never quite managed.

Indeed the coronation of Donald Trump has been a stroke of genius for the US and global ruling classes. His unparalleled boorishness and ineptitude has been the perfect distraction for a generation force-fed decades of identity politics, people who see war and class oppression as abstract concepts to be frowned on and soberly discussed while foaming at the mouth over, say, the various classifications of gender, in those moments when they are not victims of all the other distractions on offer.

The chances of any serious movement arising to topple the financial elites and their collaborators under these circumstances are zero. 'Trump out!' goes the slogan, with the sloganeers all too happy to see this particular puppet replaced with another Obama, the man who personally ordered numerous drone strikes in full knowledge of the fact that 90% of the victims were civilians, some toddlers and infants.

Whatever Kaepernick's and his followers' good intentions, they must be aware that any movement that gains popularity and has potentially revolutionary appeal will be either subverted and rendered harmless by the state apparatus, or - if or when that fails - mercilessly crushed. That second stage has not been reached here, and it will not, as all the signs are there of a major media operation to re-direct and dilute the mass of outrage away from the true target, namely class oppression and the system that enables it - capitalism. By giving support and condemnation, the media subverts the anger of the people and crafts the debate on its terms. Black versus white, the people versus Trump, freedom of speech - whatever. What it absolutely must not ever mention or encourage understanding of is the reality that this injustice stems directly from oppression by the ruling classes. Just keep the people arguing among themselves. Divide and rule.

This is a class issue, and to understand that requires class awareness, the very concept identity politics was deployed to destroy. The one single thing that petrifies the looting warmongers in control of the world's 'democratic' institutions is a mass awakening of class awareness, from which follows the ability to discern between truth and fraud, fact and misdirection, reality and illusion - in other words, the only means to tackle the disease. If you listen carefully, as the right bang on and on about respecting the flag and the left argue among themselves, demanding some kind of vague 'justice' for the victims of police violence, on a quiet night you can hear the ruling classes laughing over champagne in their ivory towers. You may also hear the sound of Fred Hampton rolling fitfully in his grave.

Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. He understood that revolutionary change was the only answer to the long, deep injustice suffered by the oppressed. In a speech at Northern Illinois University in November 1969, he expressed this in his own inimitable manner:

You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that's anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, "Well, I can't dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle."

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class--the oppressed--those other class--the oppressor. And it's got to be a universal fact. Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution.

[...]

If we never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that when you, the by-product, what comes off of racism, that capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to take money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that capitalism had to, through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.

Anybody that doesn't admit that is showing through their non-admittance and their non-participation in the struggle that all they are, are people who fail to make a commitment; and the only thing that they have going for them is the education that they receive in these institutions-education enough to teach them some alibis and teach them that you've gotta be black, and you've gotta change you name. And that's crazy.

[...]

And a lot of people think now that their hands are getting dirty. We call them ideological servants of United States fascism. And that's what they are, because they serve fascism by doing nothing about it until the law goes over and then they apologize for it, they get apologetic. But we say it's the same press that we'll look at and believe and think is bona fide; the same press that talked us into believing that we was somebody when in fact we were nobody.

I don't think there's anything more important. I think that what Malcolm says is important. Now think back. Those students were laughing at Malcolm. Can you dig it? They were laughing at Malcolm. Why? Regis Debray, he says the revolutionaries are in the future. That militants and pork chops and all these people, radical students, are in the present, and that most of the rest of the people try to remain in the past. That's why when somebody comes that's in the future of a lot of us can't understand him. And the same thing that you don't understand Huey P. Newton now, you didn't understand Malcolm when he was living. But we know that when Malcolm left, the well almost ran dry. You don't miss the water til the well runs dry, and it almost ran dry.

[Excerpts selected for relevance]

A month later, Hampton was murdered by the police on the orders of the FBI. A short examination of the circumstances leading to his death are relevant as they provide an object lesson of citizen actions the state is concerned about, as well as those that the state is not, and also the lengths to which the state will go to destroy potential threats to power.

While Hampton impressed many of the people with whom he came into contact as an effective leader and talented communicator, those very qualities marked him as a major threat in the eyes of the FBI. Hence, the bureau began keeping close tabs on his activities. Subsequent investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover saw the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions forged by Hampton in Chicago as a frightening steppingstone toward the creation of such a revolutionary body that could, in its strength, cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. Hampton's mother's phone was tapped in February 1968, and Hampton was placed on the Bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader" by May. In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited an individual named William O'Neal, who had recently been arrested twice, for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and a monthly stipend, O'Neal apparently agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative. He joined the Party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter security and Hampton's bodyguard. In 1969, the FBI special agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that the agent's investigation of the BPP revealed that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying that the career prospects of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means".

By means of anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and the Rangers, with O'Neal himself instigating an armed clash between the two on April 2, 1969. The Panthers became effectively isolated from their power base in the ghetto, so the FBI went to work to undermine its ties with other radical organizations. O'Neal was instructed to "create a rift" between the Party and SDS, whose Chicago headquarters was only blocks from that of the Panthers. The Bureau released a batch of racist cartoons in the Panthers' name, aimed at alienating white activists, and launched a disinformation program to forestall the realization of the Rainbow Coalition but nevertheless it was formed with an alliance of the Young Patriots and Young Lords. In repeated directives, Hoover demanded that the COINTELPRO personnel investigate the Rainbow Coalition and "destroy what the [BPP] stands for" and "eradicate its 'serve the people' programs".

Documents secured by Senate investigators in the early 1970s revealed that the FBI actively encouraged violence between the Panthers and other radical groups, which provoked multiple murders in cities throughout the country. On May 26, 1969, Hampton was successfully prosecuted in a case related to a theft in 1967 of $71 worth of Good Humor Bars in Maywood. He was sentenced to two to five years but managed to obtain an appeal bond, and was released in August. On July 16, there was an armed confrontation between party members and the Chicago Police Department, which left one BPP member mortally wounded and six others arrested on serious charges. In early October, Hampton and his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson (now known as Akua Njeri), pregnant with their first child (Fred Hampton Jr.), rented a four-and-a-half room apartment on 2337 West Monroe Street to be closer to BPP headquarters. O'Neal reported to his superiors that much of the Panthers' "provocative" stockpile of arms was being stored there and drew them a map of the layout of the apartment. In early November, Hampton traveled to California on a speaking engagement to the UCLA Law Students Association. While there, he met with the remaining BPP national hierarchy, who appointed him to the Party's Central Committee. Shortly thereafter, he was to assume the position of Chief of Staff and major spokesman.

Here we observe several tactics of division and subversion such as infiltration, sowing distrust, publication of controversial materials under false pretenses, even the instigation of violence and so on.

Once Hoover - seeing Hampton and the Black Panthers as a major threat - had ordered an intensified FBI campaign to destroy them by any means necessary, a sequence of events eventually led to a raid on the apartment where Hampton often stayed in Chicago. On the evening of December 3rd, 1969, the FBI informant O'Neal slipped a sleeping agent into Hampton's drink to ensure he would sleep through a raid planned for that night. Unable to awaken when the raid occurred, Hampton was wounded in the shoulder as he lay next to his heavily pregnant fiancé. Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton."

"Is he dead? Bring him out."

"He's barely alive."

"He'll make it."

Two shots were heard, later discovered to have been fired point blank into Hampton's head. According to Johnson, one officer then said: "He's good and dead now."

Demanding social justice is a fine thing, one that raises a person above the many who have been so deeply indoctrinated that they care only for the things they are programmed to be concerned about. The propaganda apparatus is well prepared for such outrage, however, and successfully plays billions of people for fools again and again, ensuring that any and all protest organisations never attain a revolutionary aspect and actually start taking direct strategic actions against their oppressors. A concerned citizen or activist must be smart, aware of all the tricks of misdirection that are employed to ensure essential harmlessness from all possible threats. Being impervious to these methods is a necessary, key step toward freedom and progress. And therefore justice.

The Kaepernick issue is one such case. Yes, it is about social injustice and freedom of speech, but all this stems from the overriding issue - as Hampton explained so clearly - of class. Make it about that, strive to organize and/or join marches and other direct actions on as large a scale as possible to bring down the mass-murdering war apparatus of the Pentagon and the CIA and the financial networks that simultaneously fuel and profit from them. Forget the personalities (like the pathetic Trump) and focus only on the system that permits such evil and incompetence, the system that threatens all our lives.

This was originally published on Simon's blog. Simon is available on Twitter @simonwood11

From Turmoil to Tribute: How the Trump Presidency Will Ultimately Fortify the Status Quo

Michael Orion Powell

If you grew up in the United States as a Millennial or in Generation X, many of the historical names seem like a natural part of our environment. A main street is named after Martin Luther King, Jr. in close to every major city in the country, while New York's busiest airport is named after John F. Kennedy, parks and streets in major cities like Washington D.C. are named after Malcolm X, an airport in Kansas is named after Dwight Eisenhower, and a major stadium in Washington D.C. is named after Robert F. Kennedy.

It's normal for monuments to be named after leaders, but the process where it becomes finalized often occurs after a tumultuous period. The 1960s and 1970s were just that. Deemed "a long national nightmare" by President Gerald Ford (who also has an airport named after him in Michigan), that period started off with promises of "a new frontier," only to go through an unpopular war, multiple assassinations, the resignation of a president, inflation, an oil crisis, and social, class, and racial tension and conflict throughout the country.

Currently, we are passing through a similar phase. The eulogy of John McCain last week signaled a bipartisan group of former American heads of state coming together to actively spurn the sitting president, Donald Trump, while simultaneously building up a legacy for the Arizona Senator they were mourning.

Several comments seemed directed at Trump. One was from George W. Bush, who said, "Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power. He could not abide bigots and swaggering despots. There was something deep inside him that made him stand up for the little guy - to speak for forgotten people in forgotten places ... We are better than this. America is better than this."

Barack Obama added on by saying that "so much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that."

Trump is going to go down. At least every few days is a strange new accusation, departure, or friction between him and someone else, including people within his own administration. A few weeks ago, it was the departure of political aide Omarosa Manigault. As of this writing, it is bizarre accusations from veteran political journalist Bob Woodward of Trump behavior in the White House, including calling Attorney General Jeff Sessions "mentally retarded" and "a dumb Southerner" while imitating his accent in a Foghorn Leghorn manner. Woodward also claimed that he was told by an inside source that Trump wanted to "fucking kill" Syrian leader Bashir Assad, a strange accusation for someone who "colluded" with Russia, given Russia's decades-long support for Assad and his father.

And now, in perhaps one of the most shocking moments in modern political history, an anonymous op-ed published by the NY Times titled, " I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ," whereas a reported "insider" goes on to talk about an organic resistance that has developed within Trump's own circle in an effort to "thwart Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

With the eventual exit of Trump will be a gift for his predecessors, who will be hoping to shore up their legacies as America's "legitimate" statesmen. Donald Trump, the Alt Right, Russia, and whatever other far-right elements are associated with him, will be pinned with the nadir of American society that the country now sits in, instead of the destructive policies that led America toward Trump in the first place.

The true legacy of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, no matter what role they are playing now, was war and decline.

Bush talked of a "humble foreign policy" while running for president, while one of Obama's first political appearances was at an anti-war speech in Chicago. The only change that Obama brought was changing how theatrical war appeared. Instead of relying on "troops on the ground," to coin a phrase from Secretary of State John Kerry, special forces and drones were used to maintain American supremacy in Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere.

Bush's policies promised the end of terrorism, only to create a breeding ground for Al Qaeda to transform into ISIS and then Boko Haram. The invasion of Iraq touted democracy and the rule of law, but created so much chaos that people whose ancestors had lived in the Lavant for generations fled for Europe by the millions.

Obama promised "post-racialism," a phrase used often upon his election, only to see a small (and mostly one-sided) war between police and the black community escalate, as the federal government distributed military equipment to the nation's police departments.

All of this will be forgotten as the erratic housing tycoon-turned-president Donald Trump eventually falls, however. In the mainstream imagination, Trump will represent the treasonous forces of darkness that usurped those who wanted progress. Just as Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and the like were venerated in the aftermath of Nixon's resignation, national holidays, monuments, and buildings will be memorialized after the establishment figures who stepped up against him - all with the purpose of whitewashing recent history and fortifying the status quo.

The reality of what all the last American presidents, Trump included, really is stands beyond what a theater of difference they stage. As Vladimir Putin put it in an interview with Oliver Stone, "It's very curious. Your presidents change but the policy never changes." The truly powerful people who run the United States only change the face of the United States every few years. If we go through difficulties, it's their doing and not the spokesperson they pick. This reality, while tested by the tumultuous Trump, will only be strengthened in his ousting.

Learning from our Elders: Kwame Somburu and Scientific Socialism

By Colin Jenkins

A dear friend of mine passed away in 2016. He was a lifelong revolutionary activist and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world (sorry, Dos Equis guy). His name was Kwame Somburu, formerly Paul Boutelle.

I came into Kwame's life through chance when, after a journey that resembled more than a dozen lifetimes, his eclectic path led him to Albany, NY. It was 2012, and Kwame was well into his 70s when he entered the capital district activist scene. He was a bit of an enigma, presenting a uniquely powerful blend of principled conviction and carefree humor. Unlike many activists, he was immediately lovable; not bitter, not rancorous, not pushy, and not self-inflated. He was grizzled, yes, but in an old-school way, where you could almost see the wisdom oozing from his pores. He had every reason in the world to possess a runaway ego, but nonetheless carried a calm humility that could not be mistaken. In an oft-aimless world, he was the personification of guidance.

Kwame undoubtedly carried the emotional scars of growing up Black in America, as well as the spiritual exhaustion of being on the front lines of struggle for five decades. Yet he was bulletproof, unfazed by the cruel confines of American society, which he had long broken from in his push to lead a fierce and principled revolution against the roots of this society: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Kwame's list of achievements and experiences would require an entire book to do them justice. He had run for public office nine times throughout the 60s and 70s, once as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He spent these decades speaking on the street corners of Oakland and Harlem, giving lectures at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows, most notably partaking in a contentious debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 on Buckley's popular show, Firing Line.

Kwame was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (early 60s), participated in the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam (1965), spoke at numerous Black Power Conferences through the 60s, and assisted in organizing 400,000 people from the Native Sioux, Puerto Rican, and African-American communities to rally at the United Nations in 1967.

In 1970, Kwame served as the chairman of the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, an organization that spoke out against the U.S.-supported crimes of the Israeli government. Representing an early voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, Kwame toured Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as a guest of the General Union of Palestine Students. In 1993, Kwame engaged in a speaking tour throughout Europe to discuss Malcolm X, the film about his life, and in defense of Black Nationalism and Socialism.

Despite all of this, Kwame's most endearing quality was his ability to inject his principles into humor. After living a few years in upstate New York, he regularly joked that there was "only one kind of white supremacy that cannot be denied…snow." He always made a point to immediately correct someone's usage of "history" by responding with, "it's herstory…because you can't have man without womb-man." He talked about his nationally televised appearance-turned-debate with William F. Buckley like a pugilist would talk about an old street fight in their prime: "Buckley had no idea how to respond to historically-informed analysis…he was a mental midget."

Kwame was proud of his performance on Buckley's show [ watch the entire episode here -Eds.], and rightfully so. He would encourage folks to watch it whenever he had the chance. He did this not in a boastful or braggadocios manner, but in a way that was meant to empower those of us in the trenches-as if to say, "here I was, a Black man in the belly of the beast and from modest beginnings, largely self-taught, staring down an Ivy League-educated white man and conservative icon who came from one of the most privileged paths imaginable." On national television. And not only staring down, but bodying on all levels-intellectually, ideologically, logically, historically, and morally, ala Malcolm X at the Oxford debates.

He masterfully defended the Cuban revolution to Buckley, justifying the harsh treatment of Cuban reactionaries by explaining that if a people's revolution occurred in the US, "I'm sure there will be a lot of Mississippi sheriffs who would be put on trial." To counter Buckley's misrepresentation of socialism, Kwame accurately described his party as "a party which represents social forces that desire change" due to a deadly and exploitative capitalist system and its embryonic Native genocide and "500-year slave trade" that resulted in the deaths of "100 million black people." When pressured further about his beliefs, Kwame brilliantly flipped the script, telling Buckley, "What are you representing? You're representing George Washington, you're representing Custer, you're representing an imperialist, oppressive, racist system. So, don't attack socialism on the assumption that the system you represent-which is full of lies, hypocrisy, and murder-has been so perfect. The only thing capitalism has done is to provide opportunists like yourself with the opportunity to be parasites on the backs of oppressed people." When Buckley tried to shut Kwame down by claiming, "American Negroes are free," and that he would "get more Negro votes" if he ran, Kwame nailed the coffin by snapping, "I'm sure of one thing… if you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were free, you would be running and it wouldn't be for office."

During our time together, Kwame described his ideological development in his own words: "In 1960, after a few years of independent study (from a scientific perspective) in many and varied historical/contemporary areas, but mainly African and African American history, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and acquired knowledge from life experiences, I declared myself to be a Black Nationalist-class definition-and a Scientific Socialist." Within a multitude of wisdom and guidance, it dawned on me that this unassuming portion was perhaps his most important-scientific socialism.

Or maybe it wasn't so unassuming. When describing his political orientation, Kwame was intent on always including "scientific" before socialist. Whenever bluntly asked if he was a socialist, Kwame would quickly respond "scientific socialist," always with an emphasis on the scientific part. If engaged in a political or theoretical discussion, he would sometimes refer to socialism, only to quickly correct himself with a "that is, scientific socialism." He wanted folks to understand that socialism goes deeper than utopian idealism; that it is rooted in a scientific, materialist analysis. It's safe to say the commitment to this message was obsessive. So much so that it may have been easy for many to view it as a trivial quirk.

And while I always appreciated his relentless effort of being literal, I too underestimated the importance of the emphasis. That was until 2015, when Bernie Sanders emerged as a formidable candidate for president.

To those of us in radical circles, Bernie was always viewed as an interesting member of the entrenched political class-a man who spent his entire career as a U.S. Senator flopping back and forth between maintaining the imperialist state and serving as a thorn in the side of wealthy capitalists. Bernie was known for his Senate hearings, where he would routinely grill a CEO or financier, denounce economic inequality and poverty, and put on a valiant show in the name of morality. In a bit of a stretch and with some exaggeration, he could be given some credit for helping to spark the Occupy movement. However, not a whole lot beyond that. Despite his entertaining interludes, capitalism and its war machine always continued unabated, running roughshod over much of the world and many Americans.

Despite his predictable impotence while serving as a cog in a rotten machine, Bernie's emergence onto the national stage was beneficial in one way: It paved the way for the fateful return of the term "socialism." As a result, socialism has entered public discourse once again, millennials in droves are now referring to themselves as socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have experienced historic swelling in their ranks, from 5,000 members in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018 , and it led The Guardian to ask the question, " Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America ?" even several months before the 2016 election. This development also indirectly helped authentic socialist candidates, like the Socialist Party USA's (SP-USA) Mimi Soltysik, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva, and the Workers World Party's (WWP) Monica Moorehead to gain more momentum in their abbreviated tours across the country.

However, along with this sudden resurgence has been a lot of backlash and confusion. The backlash has come in the form of sensationalist tactics that are undoubtedly the product of an intentionally dumbed-down society. Red-baiting is being deployed from both sides of mainstream politics-by conservatives through their typical anti-intellectual and ahistorical knee-jerk reactions, and by liberals through a bizarre and equally ahistorical conflation of Trump, Russia, and Communism, which has reached the absurd level of associating the hyper-capitalist boss, Trump, with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that stands for industrial and agricultural workers uniting in opposition to capitalist bosses. The latter development has led to the chronic overuse of the term "democratic socialism"-a redundancy born of red-scare and cold-war propaganda-by those who moonlight in liberal spaces.

The confusion has come in the form of hordes of young people embracing a term that they have not researched or read up on. If you ask a few dozen, newly-ordained "socialists" in the United States what socialism is, you may get a dozen different answers. Many will be sure to insist that "socialism is not communism!" out of a residual fear still emanating from corporate media. Many describe socialism as nothing more than New-Deal liberalism, a tame form of capitalism that includes stronger social safety nets - an explanation surely rooted in the Sanders candidacy and Bernie himself. Others may give half-baked answers, vaguely referring to Nordic countries, cooperative business models, and even Guaranteed Basic Incomes in an attempt to separate themselves from the confusion.

In coming full circle, the answer to this backlash and confusion is found in my late friend, Kwame Somburu, or more specifically in his unapologetic, principled, and informed embrace of scientific socialism: The use of scientific methods, rooted in the work of Karl Marx (a materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism), that adequately analyze both the structure and evolutionary functioning of the capitalist system to expose inherent contradictions, exploitative and alienating underpinnings, surplus value, and the laws of accumulation of capital.

In "plain, proletarian English," scientific socialism is genuine socialism-an accurate breakdown of capitalism and a realization that it must come to an end if we have any hopes of living in a just and sustainable world. It means a constant, deliberate focus on pinpointing and destroying all forms of oppression, or as Kwame succinctly put it, "analysis of capitalism/imperialism, fascism, racism, and colonialism" with the purpose of "worker's revolution, colonial revolution, self-determination for all peoples, and relevant contribution towards a working-class world revolution." This does not mean a tightly monitored form of capitalism; it means no more capitalism. It does not mean government control; it means worker control of the means of production. It does not mean guaranteed income for all; it means workers, families, and communities finally enjoying the fruits of our labor. It does not mean "bread lines"; it means reducing massive amounts of waste through community-run production and the de-commodification of basic human needs. It does not mean equality; it means justice.

Although he never waned, Kwame would be rejuvenated by recent developments. But he would also be praising the merits of scientific socialism like never before. In a time of confusion, let's follow Kwame.

This was originally published at Monthly Review .

Trump's Muslim Ban is a Declaration of Perpetual War

By Amir Khafagy

After months of anticipation, the Supreme Court has finally made their decision on Trump v. Hawaii, better known as the Muslim ban. In a close 5-4 ruling the court has ruled to uphold Trump's ban. The decision has outraged many, yet the decision was expected given the court's conservative majority. Plastered all over my Facebook feed I'm bombarded with invites to protests and rallies that will achieve nothing but satisfy the collective catharsis. Say No to Trump's Muslim Ban, the invites enthusiastically read. Thousands have already taken to the streets in nationwide days of action to show solidarity with Muslims and in defiance of the court's decision. During a rally in Foley Square in Manhattan, Democratic politicians and nonprofit leaders took to the stage to lambast Trump. New York City Council Member, Carlos Manchaca, addressed a crowd which seemed to be comprised of mostly white non-Muslims by stating to roaring applause that Trump "doesn't represent New York and American values."

As a Muslim and an Arab American, one would think I would be the first to jump on the bandwagon of resistance to such an abhorrent policy. You would also think that I would be grateful to see so many non-Muslim liberals pledging to stand up for me and other Muslims. However, I can't seem to stomach any of it. Maybe because those who are in opposition of the ban are opposed to it for the wrong reasons. Politicians like Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren pledge to defend Muslims in America, yet their support for military budgets that bomb, main, and kill Muslims abroad go unchallenged. Everyone is quick to react, but few are critically thinking. Trump's travel ban isn't a Muslim ban at all; it's a hit list. If it was truly a Muslim ban, meaning every majority-Muslim country was on the list, I would feel quite differently. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What is the case is the fact that every country on Trump's list is a country that the United States is currently at war with.

Let me first briefly explain what the travel ban is. On January 27, 2017, Trump signed the first travel ban, Executive Order 13769. In addition of blocking Syrian refugee's entry into the United States indefinitely and suspending U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, it also barred nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the country. Immediately after the executive order was announced, liberal activists around the country sprang into actions. Rallies were held at JFK airport to support the travelers who were being turned away at customs. Upwards of over 700 travelers were detained, and nearly 60,000 visas were revoked. After numerous legal challenges and the public outcry, the Trump admiration grudgingly revoked the order, replacing with a modified and rebranded Executive Order 13780. The new travel ban was a much more diversified list that restricts travel from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Trump called the new travel ban the "watered-down, politically-correct version." Again, activists protested the plan and again the administration modified the list, this time only removing Chad. Soon after the third version of the travel ban went into effect, the state of Hawaii sued the administration, arguing that the ban was racially and religiously discriminatory because it specifically targets Muslims.

Hawaii's argument isn't wrong, per se. As far as that's concerned, I do agree to an extent that the ban is a bigotry policy that is intended to pander to Trump's Islamophobic and racist base. What I don't agree with is the simplistic view of the travel ban that ignores the relationship between it and America's imperial foreign policy. For instance, none of America's middle eastern allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, made the list, even though all the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of those two countries. Those two oppressive and dictatorial regimes are firmly nestled in America's pocket by being the recipients of massive amounts of military aid. It's not just happenstance that the travel ban aligns with American overt or covert regime-change operations abroad. Are we quick to forget that America has been conducting drone strikes in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen? Or the fact that American boots are on the ground in those countries? Additionally, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran are subjected to crippling economic sanctions and their governments are being constantly undermined by American intelligence services. If anything, those countries should have a travel ban in place against us.

What really makes the so-called "Muslim ban" dangerous is that it taps into the fear of Muslims, an irrational fear that is so pervasive in our culture, to further legitimize American imperialism. It's worth noting that retired four-star general, Wesley Clark, has remarked that the State Department and Pentagon have planned since 2001 to "take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." With the exception of Lebanon and the removal of Sudan and Iraq, Trump's travel ban list is identical to the Pentagon's "kill list." So, it should be safe to assume that the travel ban has more to do with justifying war than it does with banning Muslims. Thus, the ban serves as a de facto declaration of perpetual war, sanctioned by the highest court of the land. After all, if we aren't afraid of Muslims, how can we be persuaded to fight them indefinitely?

Most of the criticism of the ban from Democrats is mute when it comes to attacking America's foreign policy. It focuses on the politics of identity rather than the politics of the reality. The Democrats want us to focus our outrage on Trump and the racist Republicans instead of understanding that the Democrats are just as complicit in their bipartisan support for the military industrial complex. Just last year, Trump signed into law a whopping $700-billion military budget with overwhelming, bipartisan support. Interestingly enough, the budget stipulated increased military spending for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. The Democrats have no problem bombing Muslims, they only take issue with banning them.

Which reminds me, this whole paternal obsession with refugees is also misguided. During one of the protests I attended, I noticed a woman holding up a sign that read, "We Love Refugees." During the rally, another politician stood at the podium and declared, "We welcome the refugees fleeing their war-torn countries." Maybe it's just me, but I found this whole love affair with refugees to be quite morbid. I couldn't help but think if we weren't busy bombing and destabilizing their countries, there wouldn't be a refugee crisis in the first place. But, of course, no one made mention of that. As always, liberals in attendance were quick to diagnose the symptom but failed to acknowledge the disease. In this case, the disease is, as Martin Luther King, Hr. put it so eloquently so many years ago, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."

The 2001 Terrorist Attack on American Soil Wasn't the Only "9/11"

By Matthew Dolezal

On the morning of September 11, 2001 , four commercial airliners were hijacked by 19 members of the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda. One plane was deliberately flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan, closely followed by another crashing into the south tower. About 30 minutes later, a third plane collided into the western wall of The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. The forth and final aircraft crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board.

The unprecedented coordinated attack resulted in a loss of nearly 3,000 lives, making it the deadliest act of terrorism in American history.

This surreal assault was monstrous and tragic beyond words, but unfortunately it wasn't the first "9/11". On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed military coup ousted Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, paving the way for two decades of brutal dictatorship under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. More than 3,000 people were murdered by Pinochet's regime, and approximately 32,000 were tortured . During this tyranny, Chile was part of a broad network of Latin American despots and death squads known as Operation Condor , which was assisted by a CIA base in Panama. This episode is but one example of violent American hegemony that has contributed to global resentment and even blowback, such as the aforementioned terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

In a series of interviews (published as a small book entitled, "9-11"), famous linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky discussed terrorism as a global phenomenon, including the Western double-standard regarding the term. By detailing an array of examples, such as Kosovo, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Sudan, Chomsky observed that, based on the conventional definition of the word, the U.S. is a top global purveyor of terror. The immediate death, destruction, trauma, and misery caused by this vicious tactic is abhorrent, but this violence can also perpetuate itself, often continuing for generations. Regarding the 9/11 attacks and the origins of al-Qaeda specifically, Chomsky explained:

"The CIA did have a role, a major one in fact, but that was in the 1980s, when it joined Pakistani intelligence and others (Saudi Arabia, Britain, etc.) in recruiting, training, and arming the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to fight a 'Holy War' against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan."

The term "blowback" was coined by the CIA to describe the unintended consequences of covert actions undertaken by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. The word was first used in this context during internal speculation after the agency helped overthrow the Iranian government in 1953 (which I summarized in a previous article ).

In his groundbreaking exposé of said phenomenon, the late Chalmers Johnson vividly chronicled the far-reaching tentacles of the post-war American empire. He explained how this multi-faceted hegemony causes profound resentment and hatred throughout the world, sometimes even leading to cases of blowback. Such incidents have included terrorist bombings against Americans abroad, with targets like U.S. embassies in Africa, a Pan Am flight above Lockerbie, Scotland, and an apartment building in Saudi Arabia that housed American soldiers. Blowback also includes organizations and foreign leaders whom were once armed and/or supported by the U.S. later becoming enemies of the U.S., as was the case with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. And the presence of roughly 700 American military bases in 130 different countries only seems to fan these flames.

A post-9/11 manifestation of blowback was the formation of the gruesome terrorist organization known as ISIS , which was only possible thanks to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Though ISIS committed shocking acts of violence, this outcome wasn't shocking at all; it was entirely predictable, based on the U.S. military's own research . In 2004, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld requested a report from the Defense Science Board Task Force regarding the efficacy of American policy in the Middle East. The task force's response included the following:

"American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the U.S. to single-digits in some Arab societies.[…] In the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.[…] Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies."

This unsavory, yet sober analysis of our problematic role in foreign conflicts is often omitted from mainstream discourse because it is profoundly embarrassing to many of our prominent institutions and public officials. Acknowledging our own role in perpetuating mass violence calls into question the popular notions of American exceptionalism and American moral benevolence. President George W. Bush's explanation of the events of September 11, 2001 (which occurred early in his first term) revolved around the phrase "they hate our freedoms." Bush's evaluation was vastly different from the words of the actual perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, who outlined his motives in a detailed "letter to America". Though the missive is laced with Wahhabi rhetoric, it also elucidates bin Laden's political grievances, including verification that 9/11 should be categorized as "blowback."

Bin Laden's objections to U.S. policy included its support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine (including the killing of civilians and destruction of homes), its sanctions against Iraq (resulting in at least half a million civilian deaths), its military bases throughout the Middle East (including in Saudi Arabia), its military actions in Somalia, and its support for regimes that have killed and oppressed Muslims throughout the world. This al-Qaeda kingpin may have been an extremist and a mass-murderer, but his explanation certainly holds more water than Bush's glib retort.

The devastation caused by the 9/11 attacks inspired a beautiful outpouring of support and solidarity among people from all backgrounds coming together to assist and comfort one another. However, the aftermath of this atrocity also unleashed pervasive nationalism, ethnic and religious profiling, violations of constitutional rights, and imperialistic mass murder in the Middle East.

The 9/11 slogan became "Never Forget." As a nation, we certainly won't forget such a large-scale catastrophe, but in a sense, we also "Never Remember." Instead of starting the timeline only when an event affects us directly, we should analyze the historical context of such events, and have the courage to look in the mirror and see our decades of relentless global violence, both covert and overt. We should also - as participants in a democracy - evaluate our role in the profound suffering, sorrow, resentment, and blowback these policies have generated.

The Korean War may help put this in perspective: American military aggression in North Korea between 1950 and 1953 resulted in the equivalent of hundreds of 9/11s, based on the respective death tolls. The same is true of American aggression in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and '70s. In recent decades, the so-called "War on Terror" has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people . The scope of these blood-drenched foreign conquests, combined with consistent historic U.S. support for dictatorships and death squads , makes it easy to see why America is widely perceived as the greatest threat to world peace .

On this dark anniversary, let's honor the victims of September 11, 2001 by overcoming our tribalistic tendencies and remembering the victims of our own terrorism as well. If we change our ways, we can address the root causes of these conflicts, and prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Let's acknowledge our history, confront our current complicity in mass murder (in Gaza and Yemen , for instance), and work to end this cycle of violence.