Teaching and Resistance in Los Angeles: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Jen McClellan, a teacher in the Los Angeles school district. We discuss her journey to becoming a teacher, the recent LA teacher's strike, and the state of teachers in the US.

What made you want to become a teacher? How long have you been working in the LA school system?

I like the first part of this question. I have so many answers. I'll give just a few.

I was in fourth grade when I gave my first summative assessment. My best friend, a very distracted person like me, was going to spend the night. I wanted her to watch The Tigger Movie with me because I had seen it and I liked the themes or morals of it. I knew we usually couldn't sit through a whole movie paying attention only to the movie the way I could alone, so I made a quiz with questions that would assure my friend got the main points I wanted her to get. She made fun of me, but I knew she would, and I insisted that it was of upmost importance, what this movie had to teach us. I don't remember that particular movie or the lesson that the 4th grade me thought was so important. It was probably something to do with friendship. The best part of that experience though, is that it set precedent for our relationship, one that is still and will infinitely be how I understand the term "soul mate." From that night on, every book we read, every movie we saw, every song we heard, every week of summer camp, every notebook full of poetry, every major life accomplishment and every utterly tragic loss we've held in common, so many pieces of our lives are stamped with a theme. Because of this, we can take a period of our lives, classify it, reflect on it, move on from it, draw connections and distinctions from it, and write about our experiences like our lives are stories that mean something. That's a big deal for us, because we hit nihilism and existentialism hard and young and we held on tight to that reckless abandon for so many years that sometimes it still surfaces and tries to drag one or both of us under.

That didn't make me want to become a teacher, though. That's just one of those things that when I did make the decision to pursue teaching as a career, I realized, I've always been a teacher. Then again, I am absolutely certain that there is no one that is not a teacher, and in that sense, deciding to teach is really about recognizing and stepping up to meet this responsibility consciously; and for money.

Another distinct memory I have that I cited as my inspiration for teaching in my scholarship or college application essays is of Mr. Gill running up to my trouble-maker-ass as I was skateboarding loudly up and down school hallways during class time, shouting with quick, sharp, certainty, "HEY!" and once he was right up in my face, with a final stomp and his outstretched arm dramatically pointing towards his classroom, and in a slightly quieter voice, he goes, "there are students trying to learn in there." That was all he had to say to throw me reeling in my newfound sense of self-awareness. I may forever be trying to attain that Gill level mastery over metacognitive teaching. That kind of teaching where you can't remember the teacher telling you anything except maybe two life-changing truths like, "writers write everyday" or "if you're going to insult someone, publicly and in writing, make sure you know how to spell." Someone had written "Mr. Gill is Satin" on the board. He left it up all day for everybody to see and laugh about. That kind of teaching, like how Basil (my criminal justice professor and Bujinkan Sensei) can lecture for three hours and afterwards none of us students knew we'd been lectured or learned anything because we thought we'd just been having a long, super-engaging conversation, but then when it was time for finals, if you showed up to class you got an A, because we had been learning everything that was in the textbook through his conduction of everyone's experiences and knowledge, supplemented with just the necessary sprinkles of what only he knew.

However, "what made (me) want to become a teacher" was deep, fundamental unhappiness. Not just the philosophical self-imposed kind I mentioned before. Not the psychological, clinically diagnosed and medicated kind; though I certainly had that too. No, because it's hardly describable. It's universal, you know? It's that feeling of knowing how insignificant any one of us is in isolated introspection. It's looking at the stars in the middle of the night in the middle of the Eastern Sierras, seeing the Milky Way, and feeling both incredible awe and unfathomable loneliness. It's the reason we love stories about orphans so much, that permeable sense of abandonment I imagine all beings on this planet must get the very moment they come into conscious life. At least that would explain why the smartest (or most conscious) of us, hurt the most.

As I was saying, I was made to want to become a teacher by my own unhappiness, and after a solid eight years of indulging that spiraling dissent, I found the right combination of tools, practices, and willingness to climb up out of myself. I stole a lot of things before and after I went to jail for petty theft as an 18-year-old, so it wouldn't surprise me if I had stolen the book that made me see my unhappiness as a simple monster. I was twenty-three and in an abusive relationship with a six foot three, two hundred eighty pound, twenty-eight year old, thrash-metal guitarist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal version of myself when I pulled the gold-yellow hardback copy of The Art of Happiness out from the books that lined the uneven floor from the bedside table to my desk in the old workers' quarters I was renting then.

Back in Mesilla, New Mexico, in the pecan fields off the Rio Grande, my insomnia and I watched the packs of wild chihuahuas transform, into the giant toads our pit-bull mutts loved to lick until their mouths salivated with foam, into mosquito swarms so thick I couldn't step outside into the dim light of dawn before I would slap my arm instinctively and look down to see it covered in blood. The fields had been flooded. Another summer was coming to an end. I had gone out there in 2006 after graduating high school with a scholarship to NMSU. And after serving 24 hours in San Luis Obispo Women's County for minor in possession of a stolen fifth of vodka, which stuck me with a lifetime ban from the Vons in Grover Beach and a nine hundred dollar fine that followed me over ten years. It's sad that I left my home town, my family, my friends, my coaches, my mentors and my memories on that note of shame and guilt. It's humorously ironic that when I came back to California to teach, it was the loan money from the state of California to go to school that paid off the remaining eight hundred something dollar fine to - you guessed it - the state of California. And maybe it's karma that the book Howard C. Cutler published, that contained his interview with the Dali Lama about Buddhism in the West, the book that had belonged to someone I once knew as a friend, someone who had revolutionized my ideas of music and politics, of film and art, of how to be a human being, the book that symbolized my betrayal of him and of all those things, and of myself, was the book that made me want to become a teacher.

That September I had reread all the writing I had compiled over ten years. I had started searching for a way out of the suicidal cycle of working thirty to forty-five hours a week in food service for five fifteen to seven fifty an hour just to stay drunk and in so many ways fucked up under transient roofs. Thank God for Mr. Gill and that statement prompting one of our free-writes. "Writers write everyday" gave me the notion that even if I failed at everything else, even if I didn't know what else to do with my life, even if I never fully tried at anything, so long as I kept writing, at least I'd always be a writer. I love and have always loved writers, not always for what they write, but at least for how I could always relate to the shit in their lives. You know? The shit that they had to go through to be able to write anything. The shit they had to go through to write like that was all they had and they could die without anyone ever reading anything they wrote just so long as they didn't have to take all that shit with them into whatever came or didn't come next.

Autobiography and biography. That's my favorite genre if anyone asks. Everything California's public education system ever taught us under the guise of "history" was a lie; propaganda for our modern state. Everything except autobiography, especially those of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and every black person up through Malcolm X, Assata, and Ta Na-Heisi Coats, including every Asian-American, every Chicano and Latin-American, and every indigenous person who ever wrote or inspired one. Everything except biography, excluding any written by or about white settler-colonialists and especially the ones like John Smith's because his ego was so overwhelming, even to him, that he had to write his own autobiography in third person.

Becoming a teacher wasn't ever something I wanted to have to do. I knew, in kindergarten, when the kid at the table near me declared his belief in our beloved teacher's sincere suggestion that we could be "anything" we wanted when we grew up, that I didn't believe anybody could be the president. I knew when he used the picture of Abe Lincoln on the worksheet to guide his answer, that I didn't want to be someone who lied to people or let them think they were smart and "good" for saying or doing what they were obviously supposed to do or say. I knew, increasingly, with every teacher, with every detention, suspension, and Saturday school, that most people in charge, even if they had started out with the right intentions, had become or maybe always were tools. I feel this way about the teachers I have loved the most too.

I have loved them because... well, because as long as I haven't been able to see a way out, I have felt the timeless empathy teachers are able to sustain for their students. Because students are our best selves as we have ever been, and they are all the potential we have ever had and might ever hope to see met.

I didn't ever want, I still don't want all that empathy to come from me. Because empathy means you have the hurt, the pain, the suffering, the particular kind of sadness that someone else is feeling.

I didn't want to have to be a teacher, because for teaching to take place there has to be someone who is willing to receive and someone who is willing to give. The best conditions for teaching are those where people are in need, are searching, are students. Those are the conditions for empathy and empathy is the only bridge I know of that can hold enough authority to see the human race from this world with its globalized late-stage capitalism, rampant individualism, ever expansive militarization, and polarizing dichotomies through communism, through socialism, to the abstract idealistic notions of interconnected autonomy and stateless anarchy that fuels my dreams.

Or if you believe the same misinformation that still confuses us and keeps us from acting in the face of global warming when it says anarchy is chaos, then substitute "anarchy" for "freedom." Anarchy, as I dream it, means I don't have to be what you say I have to be and I don't have to tell you what to do or be. Freedom means I have the autonomy to neutralize gender norms and that I live unhindered in whatever my idea of a home is, on public land. I mean that everything we ever called "public" can't be private, can't be owned, and can't be used to oppress people in any way, shape or form because "public" means we all share it. "Public" means it belongs to everyone and therefore no one. "Public" means you can carry shit around with you and call it yours, call it "personal" but even that ignores the disprovable physical laws of spacetime every human being is linearly confined by. How did you come to be? How did the things you think you own come to be? "No man is an island entire of itself," if you like Donne.

From that gold-yellow book, in September of 2012, the Dali Lama asked me to see myself and he did it a different way, but also the same way that Gill did when we he ran up on me in my high school hallway. After Gill, who I only knew then by reputation through the rumors spread by poor spellers, showed me that new way of seeing things, I sought him out. We don't have much choice or agency as high school students, but I dropped out of AP English the following year because I had learned that Gill taught regular English classes, and when I went on to the next grade and back into AP, I also took creative writing because I had learned that he taught creative writing. I took journalism and wrote a column in the paper too, because if I was going to take creative writing, I might as well take journalism too.

If I could go back and do it all intentionally, I would have studied the sciences. I would have passed pre-calc rather than failing it twice out of a concocted aversion I manifested out of early onset senioritis. I would love to know where that would have taken me. But Charles Gill got to me, so I'm teaching English and I am grateful to read biographies about Einstein, to be able to translate religious texts that give context to phrases like "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds", and to have even the slightest theoretical comprehension of what is being discussed in papers on String Theory. I'm even grateful to have been allowed to audit Charles Hatfield's Science Fiction and Time Travel course, since it's there I last learned that while multi-verses and parallel timelines are widely accepted as possibilities, the only thing that goes wrong more than traversing those, is the story that supposes we can go backwards in time.

Just think, this is only one of my stories about what made me want to become a teacher, and I haven't even finished answering the first half of that question yet! Let me shorten it up by directly addressing the "made" in that prompt. I was made to want to become anything by drugs. Specifically, I abused drugs and alcohol to the point that I was frequently blacking out and overdosing without a second thought past "fuck. Being hungover fucking sucks." My journals said I was a writer and could potentially teach other people to write. The Art of Happiness said it was my right as a human being to be happy and that to be happy I should do less of the things that made me unhappy and more of the things that made me happy. So, I put as much as I could fit in my car while the passed out freckled drunk who would later justify holding me off the ground against the wall in a choke hold as a response to me punching him in the face snored. In the morning I left.

I stopped at the Grand Canyon. I wandered through the woods on the edge of those gaping cliffs in the dark of 2am, with my delirious, sleep-deprived paranoid echoes bouncing off the startled silent forest around me, and with my own madness and fear that this was as far as I was going to make it flying back at me in blinding flashes of lightlessness. After the second sun rose, I decided the things I learned in school were good enough, the things the Dali Lama said were simple enough, and I had gone nowhere enough, that I could at least make it back to California. From there, with a lot of help from a lot of people, I figured out that I wanted to teach.

The way I saw it, I was joining the army or becoming a monk, only I wasn't going to murder anybody with a righteous fist of forced democracy, and I wasn't going the other extreme of disappearing into some other desert or mountain range in a vow of silence. This way, under the guise of teaching English, I would forfeit my ego, be humbled before everyone around me and be of service to their learning, to their seeking and finding, and thereby enter the realm of possibly finding purpose or meaning in my life as I simultaneously repaid everyone and anything which came before me and contributed to me still somehow being alive.

I decided I wanted to teach in LAUSD because the teaching at the school I went to felt too small. San Francisco seemed unattainable, too costly, and I simply felt as though I shouldn't go there. Maybe one day, if I had a real reason, I would go there. Los Angeles, with Hollywood, the ports, LAX, all its smog, traffic, diversity, and skateboarders everywhere, shouted at me like, "aye! Your moms is an hour away. Halfway point. Sleep there for a minute, then come down. Do you really need to think about it?" That was it. I was made to become a teacher by a long series of mistakes, because yeah, you have to make mistakes to learn anything worth knowing, but if you don't do better, do different, you can't really say you're learning anything. I learned that I needed my mom's help then and that I might at any time so I worked to restore that relationship first, and then every other relationship I had. Then I made new ones.

I met Justin Simons in Nenagh Brown's Monsoon Asian Civilization class, after wrestling with the concept of Western imperialism and its effects on China, India, and Japan all semester, after falling asleep for months to Marx and Engles audio readings, on the very last day of the semester. That was May 2013. That summer I started going with Justin to Los Angeles. He showed me the places he knew, like The Bourgeoisie Pig and Amoeba, and his friends' houses. We went to Socialist Party USA's LA local meetings and I learned about alternative structures of power like horizontalism. [1] I learned what the feminist process meant in practice. I threw myself into the LA left, joined the California Student Union (which coincidentally took me on a life-changing weekend trip to San Francisco), started a chapter of the Young Peoples' Socialist League at Moorpark with Justin, took the prerequisite classes I needed to tutor for the college's Writing Center in the library, got to know people in every club across campus as I toured their initial meetings to see who was there and how they did what they did, tabled and used free doughnuts and anarcho-syndicalist zines to lure in new members, got to know the school's groundskeepers, custodians and maintenance workers, asked them and the students, professors and staff about their experiences and working conditions on campus, then with the practices I learned in LA I taught my peers in affluent, conservative suburbia how to earn a reputation as the most active and subversive club on campus. A legitimately recognized and funded club, I might add. Well at first. After a year we outgrew the parameters that came with that status.

So some of us focused our efforts on taking direct action to provide the students that would come after we left with a long term solution to the scarcity of food on campus resulting from a district wide contract with Coca-Cola and the Vending Machine company that claimed sole distribution over all nutritional possibilities and hence left us stuck on a relatively remote campus for up to fourteen hours, not giving a fuck that all we had to eat was gummy worms and the occasional over-ripened apple.

From the summer of 2013 until I transferred to CSUN in the fall of 2015, I learned from Schools LA Students Deserve, the International Socialist Organization, the Valley Socialists (club at San Fernando Valley's Community College off the Orange Line a couple stops north of NoHo), independent organizers, politicians (one of whom became an LAUSD Substitute just in time to go proudly on strike with UTLA the second week of January 2019), members of the International Workers of the World, people like Vanessa Lopez whose identity I can't limit with labels or affiliations, people who stood out to me because in the midst of this new (to me) realm they were able to think ahead and convey to those around them a general, but malleable, flexible and collectively inviting purpose and place to envision direction.

That summer, 2015, I moved into a two bedroom apartment with Jose and Jay who taught me about being American with Salvi parents, about being Korean in LA, about how to bring the motherfucking ruckus almost anywhere, about how to share a kitchen with the smell of abandoned squid, and a hallway with a forth roommate; also from Korea, but he got his own master bedroom and bathroom because he had more money than us - from the App he had invented - and I don't remember his name, but I do remember us all stifling laughter as he marched with the overzealous and disproportionately heavy weight of his own self-importance, up and down the hall, in his saggy off-white underwear). I smoked cigarettes on the roof next to 18th Street tags and watchers who watched the watchmen who always hover above all of us in black ghetto birds. They oppress us with the loud pervasive sound of rapidly spinning blades and thereby they unite the richest diversity of the densest populations in the nation with a common enemy. #FTP

I had been doing Supplemental Instruction which is basically being a TA with mad tutoring and small group teaching skills, at Moorpark. I applied and qualified to be an SI Leader at CSUN when I transferred. So, Fall 2015, I started teaching my own class of freshmen in English for 50 minutes a day, two days a week. Then I had two classes in the spring. That is the valley; I don't know if you count it as LA's school system. But if we're being particular about when I started working as a teacher in LA's schools - I haven't started yet. I'm in my second semester of student teaching (unpaid) as CSUN's credential program requires. I've been a student for, well as long as I've been alive - 30 years. I will be over 40,000$ in debt after a quick two-year AA, two more years for a BA, and this last year and a half for my credential work (not classified as graduate school but is essentially graduate school). If all goes as planned, I'll be paid to teach in LAUSD this fall.

Give us a historical background for this strike. Place it into a larger context of what has been happening to teachers, students, and the school system at large.

I mentioned that when I started going to meetings in LA in summer 2013, one of the grassroots organizations whose meetings I frequented was Schools LA Students Deserve. We called them SLASD then. They were high school students, parents, teachers, staff, and a community of dedicated, unyielding, persistent public education advocates. We met at and near Dorsey and Robert. F Kennedy, in classrooms, auditoriums, cafeterias, and community spaces. I met one of Dorsey's English teachers because she hosted a series of free public classes about how capitalism, industry, and global warming had historically affected and was currently affecting people and their neighborhoods in and around, of and in fact, Los Angeles. She hosted an interesting group of us students, workers, student-workers, teachers, people, at her house off the Expo line in Inglewood. I thought, this is what I want. I want to live in this place that feels like the word neighborhood and brings it new meaning.

For five years I've worked towards that goal. Now it is the end of January and the beginning of 2019. I'll get lost in too many words if I give historical background beyond my personal experience of it, but I can recommend Bill Ring's " Guerilla Guide to LAUSD " for that history.

I felt inspiration, happiness, and hope from Students Deserve's role in the strike. They work to bring a vast, diverse, segregated, and by all means intentionally divided district together to repair, reinvigorate, rebirth, decolonize, demilitarize, and democratize public education in Los Angeles. They have proven that the people have the power. They have it because without people, the rich, white, elite, house of cards currently dictating the abuse of our collective resources does not stand. The current pyramid scheme of a system stands only to be further stacked against humankind's survival. This is not something that can be concealed anymore. The students, parents, teachers, psychologists, nurses, librarians, groundskeepers, custodians, maintenance men, and everyone who hungers for learning or yearns to live rather than to be murdered or just barely survive, have the power. They have social media to make transparent all that might be concealed. They have strategic planning, passion, and humility. Their vulnerabilities are their strengths.

I have explored Marx's critique of capitalism my whole life. Through punk rock, skateboarding, writing, the blues, gender defiance, criticism of those who falsely claim authority, and every breath I take is an effort to teach through action what I, and they, and every person must instinctively know.

Why is it that whenever teachers' strikes occur, people argue that the strikes are related to pay? Why does the media never focus on the other demands of teachers that actually help to aid students learning?

This is a rhetorical question. Have you read George Orwell's " Politics and the English Language " essay? What do you know about the Sapir-Warf Hypothesis? The question you are asking yourself is why are you on the side of teachers rather than the state-run, corporate-sponsored media?

In what ways do you think that this country undermines education?

What comes to your mind when you think of public education? The sentiment I'm hearing is that the education system is "broken." If that's the case, privately owned charter schools aren't going to fix it by taking students, and therefore funding, out of the public sphere. They're just going to profit off of the work of others.

What did you feel about school as you were in your last years of it? I loved learning, the few good teachers I had, my friends, and having somewhere to go be away from my parents. But I got in trouble a lot for challenging authority in various ways. From my experience there, San Luis Obispo County undermined education by denying us the responsibilities, respects, decencies and liberties everybody needs to experience from a young age if they're meant to graduate and go off to college with the ability to sustain a living.

Don't even let me get me started on student debt.

Schools in LA are segregated by race, class, and status. My school had gates and fences around it, but it also had large gaps or holes in the back fences where we'd easily get out into the cow pastures or strawberry fields; circa rural Arroyo Grande, 2002-2006. However, the schools in Koreatown don't even try not to look like prisons. The tracking systems like GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), AP (Advanced Placement), and Honors make sure that the right candidates are given advantages to counter its failing efforts to exclude students by race (aka ethnicity), nationality or citizenship, gender, sexuality, class, or ability.[2] Those that do make it through without conforming to become another agent of this web of oppression are rare.

Those people, the ones that manage to escape the school to prison pipeline or manage to make it in and out of the prison industrial complex are the best educators we have. And most of them probably don't teach in public schools (I'm thinking of bell hooks at The New School or people who teach under other employment classifications). Hence, I see school as the Juvenile Detention Recruitment Facilities that scout for slave labor more than a system of education that should empower citizens of a free nation with the agency and autonomy to actively practice democracy within their local communities, at least.

It seems we pay lip service to the idea of it being a 'great equalizer' but then aren't willing to do the heavy lifting to actually make that a reality.

If you're alluding to the saturation of empty rhetoric our lives are bombarded by, I agree. We are living a crossover of every piece of Dystopian Literature ever written. We let it happen too. Remember when the Simpsons predicted Trump as president?[3]

This gives me insight to another reason I was so happy with the victories won by the recent UTLA strike. The fact that there still exists powerful veins of opposition in an Equilibrium-like dictatorship is amazing when you consider how much it takes to live versus how much it costs to live.[4] Economic surveys give us some ideas about this, though there are so many more un-quantified, unrecorded, and unrecognized variables that should be factored into cost of living. Even so, the abstract understanding I have of wealth disparity from profit driven reports whose audience is intended to be capitalist investors is enough to fill me with humility when I see organizers who work well beyond the legal maximum of 8 hours a day.

My own short-lived period of organizing, when paired with what I am able to observe in LA equates to burnout. How long would you be able to go 16-24 hours a day and seeing people that are basically your grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, or children passed out in the middle of the sidewalk, clothes dirty and falling off their bodies, pushing carts full of plastic bags full of plastic things, discarded human beings hauling around discarded belongings like ghosts? How long would you go into Skid Row to meet with, plan and carry out action with, organize with folks to detail the level of surveillance and control the military and police and corporations have over everybody? How long would you go to "public," "democratic," Board of Trustees meetings to speak in shaking vulnerability knowing all you stand to lose, just to be given a 3 minute maximum time slot in which you are made to stand outside the circle where menacing, suit-wearing demagogues who sit facing each other and ignoring you like the judges, jurors, and executioners of your hopes and dreams?

How long before you burn out? How long before the cynicism overcomes you?

And then what?

Unions are demonized in general, but teachers' unions seem especially hated. Why do you think that is?

An old adjunct professor and mentor of mine is a union representative. Adjuncts are called freeway fliers because universities or community colleges "can't afford" to hire them full time (because they are spending money building facilities that will draw more students who can afford to pay higher tuitions). My friend, the professor who I invited to lunch immediately after Justin Simons told me she was an anarchist, she says adjuncts don't have offices. Then she laughs, unless you count their trunks. She burns an image into my mind, of the post-secondary educator's car filled trunk, back, and passenger seats, floor to ceiling with books, student and personal supplies, as they drive from classroom to classroom dawn to dusk. Before I got butt-raped by the UAW she let me know how useless unions have become. But we are historians, we listen to Eugene V. Debs speeches and read about him in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. We know it's useless, but what else can you do? You have to fight with everything you have left until you die even if all you're doing is pissing them off or slowing them down a little.

I haven't worked in UTLA's ranks yet. I don't know how long I'll last when I do get in there to see how it is. However, I have to hope beyond hope that the reason you or anyone thinks that teachers' unions are hated is because they are most widely supported, most critically strategic, and most international laborers the world has. Teachers are the last resistance and I'm joining up, if nothing else, at least for vengeance.

What labor has not been assembly-lined? What effective union member has not been murdered, banished, enslaved or otherwise lost, broken, and forgotten? Yet here we are with our poetry and banned books, with our librarian allies, with our entire communities of food-deserted, exhausted, fed-up, impoverished families behind us. Here we are, after Raegan, Nixon and Bush and they're dreading us still being here after Agent Orange (Truuu - no I can't say it - he's like Voldemort).

Here we are after the drugs and diseases they've infested us with so they could quarantine us, go to war against us, send us to war against ourselves and make us manufacture all the weapons we use against ourselves while they profit and laugh. And we're still fucking here, because the working-class teacher unions still holding out are punk rock and kung fu. The teacher's unions aren't hated, but the hills have eyes and mouths that spread lies, and that sounds like good news to me. Sounds like it's working, no?

Do you have any regrets about becoming a teacher. I ask this as being a teacher seems to be extremely disrespected, no matter where one is.

I could ask the same of any service member. In fact, I asked my fiance, an Iraq Army Veteran of the U.S. Calvary, a similar question once. He said that when he found himself pointing his gun at women and children, he found himself knowing he was being made to do things entirely opposite of what he had signed up for. He came back from a dirty war, after being blown up more than once, with PTSD. I won't even tell you what he had planned to do before he started coming to Socialist Party USA meetings. I'll just say that even after the straight-up, downright, real human love we gave him dissuaded him from carrying out those plans and even after Agent Orange became Commander in Chief, he was considering rejoining because he thought that was his only option. But then we got together as I was graduating with my BA and talking about how it would only be another year or two before I was a salaried teacher with summers off and a strong union. Then he proposed and re-enrolled in community college and I don't doubt that he'll get to be whatever he wants to be in life. Right now he dreams of being a director and a father. We lost our first baby 7 months in utero and he's currently delayed from school to work 6 months to extend his VA benefits. We won't let anything stop us though, you know? We've got a foundation of unconditional love and acceptance, between us, with our families, with our neighbors, and in our community at large.

Really terrible shit happens all the time and it's unavoidable that we do things to contribute to the horrors of life and death. But I think once you see clearly what the things are that people to do cause suffering to themselves, to other people and all manner of living beings, then you have the opportunity to stop. From that point on the more you do contrary to all that horrible shit gets you further and further away from the guilt and shame and regret that would eat you alive while keeping you trapped in that cycle of destruction. Regret is a negative feedback loop.

So, no. I have had no regrets only ever since I decided to become a teacher. And I think, so long as you have a genuine love and conscious intent to practice compassion, as long as you work to cultivate or revitalize a support network, as long as you know that your purpose is to make meaning by holding fast to the ropes, and as long as you remember that he who fears death cannot enjoy life and those who hesitate are lost... then you have no cause for regret.

Endnotes

1: Marina Sitrin, "Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements," Dissent, Spring 2012 ( https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements )

2: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, United States Department of Education, https://sites.ed.gov/idea/

3: Maya Salam, "'The Simpsons' Has Predicted a Lot. Most of It Can Be Explained," New York Times, February 2, 2018 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/television/simpsons-prediction-future.html )

4: Investopedia,

Cost of Living https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-of-living.asp

Boricuas Seek Support for Protecting Indigenous Sites: Threats to Bateyes in Jayuya highlight need for community vigilance

By Liliana Taboas Cruz

On the morning of Friday 18th of January 2019, a call on social media was made by visiting Boricua archaeologist Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo asking for urgent help in protecting an archaeological site in Jayuya. The site, known as Bateyes Sonadero and Muntaner, is located in the Barrio Jauca in Jayuya. According to records at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), is known to contain a batey (Caribbean ceremonial plaza and ball court, outlined with stones which include monoliths), remnants of a village, ceramics, and lithic material. Archeologist who reported the land movements on site, Adalberto Alvarado, told local press "Ese yacimiento era de uno de los yacimientos que tenia menos impacto en el pueblo" (This archaeological site was one of the less impacted sites in the area.). Alvarado had been inspecting the known batey sites following hurricane Maria. The owner of the property used heavy machinery to clear land for agricultural purposes. In Puerto Rico, land removal requires permits to protect archaeological sites. The owner did not have proper permits to comply with the 112 law. Though the ongoing threat had been reported earlier in the week through formal channels, it wasn't until that Friday morning that the owner forced the archaeologists off the property and started the land removal despite warnings of the illegality of his actions. It was at this point that the social media call was made by Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo, who pleaded with the Institute of Culture and the general public to intercede.

The call was answered by many native Puerto Rican and indigenous activists. Personal visits were made by a local Boricua archaeology students to the ICP office in Old San Juan, who informed that archaeologist Dr. Carlos Perez, head of the archaeology office at the ICP, would visit the Jayuya site that Friday evening. Since then the ICP representatives have assured that the destruction has been delayed, though claiming the severity of the removal was still unclear. Their investigation is ongoing.

In Jayuya, local indigenous elder and activist Margarita Kukuya informs that the damage to the site has been extensive and "devastating," describing a scene where batey stones are pushed into a nearby river, while others piled up and broken with debris from the land clearing. This particular site had been the subject of study in 2007 by Dr. Yasha N. Rodriguez Melendez as part of her doctoral thesis. She wrote, "Bateys are endangered and their study becomes increasingly difficult as fewer of them remain." Yasha described bateys as "a permanent structure that has become part of the landscape and visibly identifies a space as different from the rest." These statements only reinforce what indigenous communities have tirelessly expressed. These sites, having immense cultural value and significance, need to be protected and should remain undisturbed.

Indigenous activists have used this opportunity to highlight the need for community vigilance of archaeological sites which have immense historic, social, cultural, and spiritual value to Boricua People, Caribbean Indigenous Peoples, and as Global Patrimony. The need for further education to generate more public awareness and pride in these important historical sites is critical to their preservation. For Caribbean Indigenous Peoples these sites represent the presence of their ancestors and connection to their traditional lands and should remain undisturbed. For archaeologists, the invaluable information contained in these places are completely destroyed with any disturbance and represent a loss of cultural and historic knowledge for the people of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the world. For local Boricua, as well as those in the diaspora, these sites are meant to be cared for and protected for future generations.

Indigenous Puerto Ricans do not belong to any federally-recognized tribe, they remain as part of the hundreds of non-recognized tribes and indigenous peoples in the United States, despite the US adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, which, among many others, includes the right of self-determination. Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico are currently facing one the of worst political, economic, and humanitarian crises in modern times, dealing with a colonial government, an imposed control board, the whims of the federal government, and a debt negotiation where they have no say. The austerity measures being imposed to pay for the debt (parts of which are already being declared illegal) directly affect healthcare, education, natural resources, energy production, pensions, and security. These issues took a turn for the worse after hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017, causing the death of over 3,000 people and the exodus of hundreds of thousands in a single year.

Caribbean Indigenous Peoples and all living in Puerto Rico deserve better than this. This call is for URGENT support and assistance to those organizing to protect their sacred sites and cultural patrimony, as well as highlight the need for education that includes indigenous perspectives, methodologies, and philosophies that generate the social consciousness needed to protect these sites as a united community.

Let the ICP know you support indigenous participation and perspectives when it comes to access, protection, and management of sacred sites, as well as to demand the strict application of Puerto Rico's laws that protect archaeological sites so that they may be respectfully enjoyed and studied by future generations. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena can be reached by calling (787) 724-0700.

Let your local representative know you support a just recovery for Puerto Rico, reject the undemocratic federal control board created by PROMESA, and support a full audit of the debt of Puerto Rico, a US colony.

If you wish to support the indigenous coalition, Pueblo Indigena Taino Unido, created to address these issues, please contact vigilantesboricuas@gmail.com for further information.

Lili, Jibaro-Boricua/Taino

Cupey, Boriquen

I humbly present these words to all those willing to receive them. Seguimos.

Decade of the Animals: Eco-Horror and the Cinematic Lessons of the 1970s

By Sean Posey

When Michael Myers donned the Captain Kirk mask in the 1978 classic Halloween (yes, that's a mask of William Shatner) he helped change horror movies forever. For most of the next decade and beyond, the horror subgenre of the slasher film dominated drive-ins, multiplexes and video store shelves.

But before Halloween surged at the box office, another now almost forgotten horror genre made waves by combining the environmental anxieties of the era with giant, murderous rabbits, vengeful dogs and bloodthirsty frogs, among other angry critters. The "Nature Strikes Back!" films of the 1970s ran the gamut from schlock masterpieces and haunting classics to the downright unwatchable. However, these films are also part of a time capsule - giving us a glimpse into an era when a building environmental crisis seemed to provoke real soul searching. What were we doing to animals and the natural world? What might they in turn do to us?

In the opening of her seminal 1962 book "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson describes an idealized American town where nature and man are still in balance, at least for a time. Foxes and deer frolic amidst orchards and fields of grain, and a general bucolic feeling pervades. But soon "a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community," Carson writes. In particular, the birds disappeared. "It was a spring without voices."

She was writing about the chemical industry and the destructive effects of pesticides on animals and the environment. "Silent Spring" played a key role in ushering in the environmental movement, which gained strength as the 1960s progressed. But in the film world, in an unplanned coincidence, Alfred Hitchcock answered Carlson's question: "The birds... where had they gone?"

The Birds hit theaters less than a year after "Silent Spring" debuted, and it quickly captured the nation's imagination. The site of something so benign as the common avian viciously turning on man terrified audiences and helped redefine horror. But it wouldn't be until the 1970s that the "eco-horror" film fully blossomed.

The 1972 cult classic Frogs, which ushered in the era's eco-horror films, replaces Hitchcock's birds with an unlikely assortment of reptiles and amphibians - all bent on extracting revenge on a polluting Florida patriarch and his unlikeable family. In the film, Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) is a cranky millionaire intent on wiping out the frog population in and around his private island so that he and his clan can properly celebrate the Fourth of July.

A wildlife photographer named Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott), who is working on a story in the area and encounters the rampant pollution, tries to dissuade him from launching his own private war on the local frog population, to no avail. "I still believe man is master of the world," Crockett tells him.

But the amphibians and reptiles are one step ahead of the game. Guided by the omnipresent frogs, which never seem to directly attack anyone themselves, a bevy of snakes, lizards and even an alligator snapping turtle wreak death and destruction on the dullard cast members. Smith leads a small contingent off the island, where it appears that a mass animal uprising is under way. Crockett refuses to leave and is trapped in his mansion as hordes of frogs - in all of their croaking wrath - descend on him.

Frogs was released the same year DDT - which was applied over Florida for years in a quest to eliminate fresh and saltwater mosquitoes - was banned. The first Earth Day had been held two years previous. "Environmentalism, much like the anti-war subculture, started to influence not only activists and the newfound socially aware, but also the style and consciousness of the new eco-horror films," writes Lee Gambin.

After Frogs, the eco-horror genre gathered steam. Perhaps the most unintentionally funny film to follow was Night of the Lepus, which premiered only months after Frogs. It opens with a news broadcast reminiscent of the TV segments from Night of the Living Dead. But instead of warning of the walking dead, the broadcaster informs the audience of the growing problem of invasive species in Australia and the American Southwest - namely the rabbit. This was a real-life problem, and the issue of invasive species was one of the most readily recognizable environmental topics of the time. Interestingly enough, the broadcaster compares rapidly multiplying rabbits to the human population explosion, a popular intellectual to subjects after Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" debuted.

As the film opens, a beleaguered rancher (Rory Calhoun) enlists a group of scientists to help tame a scourge of rabbits in Arizona. They attempt to use an experimental serum in order to scramble the animals' breeding cycle, but one of the scientific team's children switches an injected rabbit she's fond of with one in the control group. When the rabbit makes it back to the wild, it helps breed a group of oversized killer bunnies.

The director used close-ups scenes to depict "giant rabbits" in miniature sets, and in scenes where they attack up close, actors in fuzzy bunny costumes were used. Never again will you hear rabbits referred to being "as big as wolves and just as vicious." And never again will you see a character grimacing in horror as he watches a caravan of adorable but murderous rabbits appear in his rearview mirror. But beneath the bargain-basement special effects is a message about humanity's harmful tampering with ecosystems and the deleterious effects of introducing invasive species.

Oddly enough, despite featuring a fearsome animal munching on unsuspecting bathers, Jaws, released in 1975, isn't much of an eco-horror film. As entertaining and suspenseful as it is, there's a never a concrete reason given for the great white's assault on Amity Island. If anything, Jaws is more about masculinity and the relationships between men than it's about man's relationship with animals and the environment. Nevertheless, it helped spawn numerous '70s films about how tampering with animals and the natural world will bring down nature's wrath, including Piranha (Then... you were shocked by the great white shark - Now... you are at the mercy of 1000 jaws!), Tentacles (It's turning the beach ... into a buffet! ) and Grizzly (Not since JAWS has the terror been like this!).

So many eco-horror films were made in the '70s that sub-genres soon emerged, including films dedicated to deadly domestic animals. Before Cujo became a household word, 1977's The Pack introduced man's best friend as a murderous foe. In the film, a swift tourist trade is part of the backbone of a small fishing island during season, but well-heeled visitors from the city have a bad habit of leaving their recently adopted dogs behind when it's time to return to their regular lives.

The film follows one such canine that's abandoned by a departing family before joining a pack of wild dogs living in a derelict building. When a readily available food supply runs out, the dogs come for the island's human population. The Pack shows that humanity's disregard for animal life doesn't stop at wild fauna.

A group of trapped tourists who are part of the main cast are depicted as either clueless or venal. It's left to a scientist, played by Joe Don Baker, to save the group. However, Baker's character also sympathizes with the attacking animals, and at the film's end, after the main pack has been destroyed, he saves the helpless abandoned dog we've been following throughout the movie from being killed by a vengeful tourist. In The Pack, man's carelessness and disregard for the animal world extends even to a subspecies that's been his companion for at least 14,000 years.

In 1974, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California found that chlorinated fluorocarbon gases, then found in everything from aerosol spray cans to refrigeration units, were seriously damaging the ozone layer, which helps block ultraviolet light from the sun. That environmental emergency was used as the central conceit in the 1977 film Day of the Animals, which incorporated a real-life environmental emergency to a greater degree than most eco-horror films.

The central plot involves a group of hikers ascending a mountain in Northern California just as a mysterious psychosis begins to effect wild animals in the area. The higher the altitude they ascend to, the more animals begin to act strangely, until finally, they attack. What's driving them? The hole in the ozone layer is allowing in ultraviolet radiation that in turn is causing the animals to kill, though in a karmic twist, they only target humans.

The cast consists of an assemblage of telling archetypes: a Navajo Indian who is the first to sense the rift in the natural world, a racist and misogynistic advertising executive (Leslie Nielsen) who himself goes crazy, and a New York socialite (with no love for nature) who berates her put-upon son. In the town below, news reports reveal the connection between the ozone hole and attacking animals. "God sent a plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no-good fellers," one of the yokels exclaims.

Mountain lions, bears, wolves and snakes (left over from Frogs?) proceed to chomp, tear and dismember the hiking expedition and the nearby town as martial law is declared and troops in environmental suits move in. But the animals themselves also soon die and the "shift in the ozone level" normalizes, according to news reports.

The film's pre-credit sequence announces that this is a scenario that "COULD" actually happen. As silly as it is (and as awesome as a shirtless Leslie Nielsen challenging a bear to a wrestling match is), Day of the Animals is an earnest film that's a time capsule from an era when a pending environmental crisis could be counted on to at least inspire some political action. CFCs were ultimately phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

Probably the best of the many '70s eco-horror movies is the Australian classic The Long Weekend. Focusing on an estranged couple seeking to rekindle their relationship over a weekend getaway to an isolated seashore in the bush, the film is much more of a psychological horror picture where the danger is never fully shown. The screenwriter gradually reveals the deep rifts that have eaten away at the couple's relationship as the tension builds, one that is echoed by the rifts between man and the natural world. As the two fight, litter, spray insecticide and, in the case of the husband, shoot a dugong (a kind of sea cow), animals and the landscape around them begin to grow hostile.

"My premise was that Mother Nature has her own autoimmune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, she attacks," screenwriter Everett De Roche said in a 2012 interview. No one animal (a mutated bear in 1979's The Prophecy or worms in the case of 1976's Squirm) is responsible for the mayhem that ensues.

It's as if the environment itself wants to do away with the couple. In a way that few other films of its kind succeed in doing, The Long Weekend gives the viewer the sense that the ecosystem and all the animals it supports are attempting to strike back against humans.

This is reflected in the atmospheric soundtrack. A long, slow death rattle punctuates parts of the film, almost as if nature itself were crying out in agony and outrage. The Long Weekend is not only one of the best eco-horror films of any age, it's also a grim warning from the end of a decade where the environment, albeit briefly, seemed to take center stage in the cultural and political world.

By the 1980s, eco-horror films were on the wane. Dystopian productions such as the Mad Max series - also classics of Australian cinema, like The Long Weekend - figured strongly in a cinematic decade more concerned with nuclear annihilation and urban collapse than ecological crises. Films such as Escape From New York, Blade Runner,The Running Man, The Quiet Earth and Night of the Comet cashed in on the new trend. In more recent years, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road have been among a spate of films with an even grimmer outlook than the '70s eco-horror genre.

The idea of animals taking revenge against man now seems quaint. Indeed, we are currently going through what scientists call the Sixth extinction or the Holocene extinction. Approximately 20 percent of all species on Earth face extinction - a number that could increase to 50 percent by the end of the century. It wouldn't make much sense to produce a film like Frogs today as amphibian populations have been in decline for the past 20 years, according to Science magazine. A third of amphibian species are currently at risk of extinction with chemical pollution being a large contributor to their plight. Perhaps the Jason Crocketts of the world won in the end?

The eco-horror films of the future might feature poisonous jellyfish, sea snakes and other creatures that could expand their natural ranges as ecosystems change due to global warming. Or perhaps now we've come to realize that man is the most dangerous and terrifying animal of all. Rising seas, desertification, chemical pollution, scorching temperatures and other disasters (e.g. California wildfires) - all linked to manmade climate change - now seem to be nature's way of dealing with us. And that's a reality more horrifying than any screenplay.

Between Developing and Defending the Cuban Revolution

By Joshua Lew McDermott

Recently, I picked up Leon Trotsky's forgotten classic "Their Morals and Ours: Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality." The pamphlet offers a scathing critique of what today is known as the "horseshoe theory," wherein the far left and far right are considered morally identical from the standpoint of liberalism, because both employ radical (and sometimes) violent tactics. This viewpoint will be familiar to anyone who has watched the corporate media decry anti-fascist activists as indecipherable from the neo-Nazis they combat.

The crux of Trotsky's argument, which is astoundingly relevant today, is not only that liberals are embarrassingly inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to passing moral judgments (the lack of outrage from moral crusaders on Yemen's genocide, Hillary Clinton's destruction of Libya, and many other instances of imperial aggression has long been deafening), but the fact that liberals derive their morality from an ahistorical universalist ideal means that liberal morality inherently serves the rich and powerful. Adherence to abstract and eternal moral laws such as "thou shalt not steal" or "always obey the laws of the land" leads to a remarkably reactionary system of ethics. For example, is it immoral for a starving man to steal a loaf of a bread from a bakery owned by a wealthy business owner? In liberal societies, in which property is the ultimate sacred cow and morality is not contingent upon material/historical context, the answer is "yes." Never mind the relevant economic and legal structures which enabled the business owner to become wealthy and led the other man to starvation.

What's more, Trotsky also grapples with the notion of "the ends justify the means" morality, a sentiment which was doubtlessly tested by Communist regimes throughout the 20th century, sometimes to indefensible ends. Yet, the cynical exploitation of sincere revolutionary upheavals by authoritarian figures does mean that there is a divine law which proves that means can never be justified by ends, as pragmatist John Dewey pointed out in his relatively agreeable response to Trotsky's piece. Again, the true determent of morality for any activist who sincerely cares for other humans being must be based upon a sober calculation of real-world facts and contexts and driven by a sincere desire to create a fair world for all people. As Che Guevara famously said, "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

I do not bring up this moral debate to comment on morality as such or to arbitrate in the often absurd, abstract, and counterproductive clashes within the leftist social media sphere between what's become known as "tankies" and "ultraleftists," but because I found the deficiencies of liberal moral outrage especially cogent and consequential while on a recent educational trip to Havana in July 2018 which I took with a small organization known as La Luchita (run by a lovely and well-meaning husband and wife couple) tailored towards building networks between grassroots American and Cuban organizers and activists.

In an interesting dynamic, the American group, of which there was maybe fifteen of us, largely consisted of vaguely progressive activists, mostly in their late-twenties, who were nonetheless highly critical, or even outright dismissive, of Cuba's socialist project. For one week, we met with a cross-section of Cuban activists, from civil-society activists to students to university professors, all with legitimate critiques and praises of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As one would expect, almost none of our hosts viewed "the Revolution" (as it is referred to on the island) in simple black-and-white terms, though some were more apologetic than others. The same cannot be said for many of the Americans, who were quick to confirm any anti-revolution bias by latching onto any critiques offered by the Cubans, but slow to acknowledge any triumphs of the revolution. The Americans were, as far as I could tell, not conscious that their knee-jerk responses to the most laudable aspects of the revolution (when finding out that wealthy persons were forced to give up any extra homes they owned in order to provide housing to the poor, some of the Americans audibly gawked) were highly reactionary, a condition indicative of so many American progressives. This blindness is symptomatic of gaining a "progressive" education sans any sort of class-analysis, a condition which defines so many well-meaning activists here. This is a symptom of hailing from an imperial heartland wherein questions of class are largely considered irrelevant, where billionaires such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey are even considered radical by some. This selective blindness is the result of not of an absence of ideology, but the product of living deep beneath an invisible ideological shroud: for my colleagues, it seemed, anything good in Cuba was the result of some nebulous category vaguely defined as "Cuban culture" and anything bad in Cuba was due to socialism. For example, on nights out socializing in the city, the beauty of the fact that people from all professions (one night we went out to a jazz club with a group of Cubans comprised of a dentist, a professor, students, a cigar-factory worker, and a janitor) and races intermingled to an extent unimaginable in the U.S. seemed largely to be lost on my American counterparts. "That's just how Cuba is," I imagine they assumed, not realizing the huge strides made for the poor and Afro-Cubans since the fall of the Batista regime.

As a Chinese colleague of mine who travels to Cuba regularly once pointed out to me, Cuban society does not rest on a cult of personality, as in China, nor is it defined by social engineering and violent state control: police presence was almost non-existent within the city. At risk of romanticizing a country with many serious problems, I felt a deep authenticity and cohesiveness in Cuban society I have not experienced in any other country. The difference between Havana or Mexico City or Freetown, Sierra Leone, or any major American city could not have been starker.

I experienced the absolute strangeness of walking across a major city at 1am while seeing children and families enjoying the public parks free from fear, of knowing that every person I saw had full access to one of the world's best healthcare systems and the right to basic human necessities such as housing and employment, still makes my head spin. Where was the oppressive state presence I had heard so much about? The crime-filled streets? I felt I had caught just a small glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the potential harmony that we, as human beings, could achieve in society. What stood out to me most, perhaps, was the prevalence of dignity. Yes, Cuba has tremendous poverty. But the poverty is different than that in the U.S., where social isolation and a lack of access to even the most basic goods abounds despite our unfathomable wealth.

When I raised these insights with my fellow American travelers, the response was not surprising, nor altogether wrong: "you can't tell someone else to be grateful for what they have if you have more than them," one American told me when I expressed concern that the thawing of Cuban-American relations would hasten the-already-quickening erosion of Cuban social welfare. Many of the Cubans we met were under the impression that this would mean more, not less, prosperity for all islanders: to build upon Steinbeck's famous "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" sentiment: it seemed that many of even the poorest pro-American Cubans assumed (in large part due to American cultural influence that the government has long tried to keep out of Cuba) that they themselves would be the casino and resort owners once capitalism comes back to the island (this was often spoken of as an inevitably). Imagine the surprise of some of my Cuban friends, then, when I told them of growing up in America without health insurance, of experiencing homelessness and abject poverty. As any international traveler can attest, American cultural products, such as Hollywood films, have been remarkably successful at one thing: convincing many of the world's poor that poverty does not exist in the U.S.

Regardless, my American traveling companion was right: as an American who benefits greatly from being a citizen of the world's imperial center (take for example, the ease with which I can attain a visa for travel) with just a few relatives from Cuba and little experience on the island myself, I am in no position to tell Cubans they ought to be grateful for living under a government which has, undoubtedly, at times weaponized the threat of imperialism to silence legitimate dissent. Like many other members of my generation and as a young adult recovering from a childhood in Mormonism, there is little I dislike more than living subject to a governance structure which cannot allow for deviation. But, context and material facts do matter if we, as socialists and activists wanting to change the world, are to give any sort of fair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution. The liberal, postmodern project which reduces all legitimate political activism to thoughts and actions based solely upon one's own life experiences and identity categories is antithetical to social solidarity and all forms of class-politics and anti-imperialism. Case-in-point: after informing another American colleague that I was, in fact, a communist, she replied: "I believe subscribing to any sort of label or ideology destroys the political imagination." I don't doubt her sincerity, but neither do I doubt that her aversion to an actively radical ideology was inherently ideological. It is precisely this sort of nebulous belief in the moral superiority of the (nonexistent) apolitical which explains why so many well-meaning liberals can call a revolution which eliminated illiteracy and homelessness in a generation "monstrous," just because some wealthy people lost their second homes.

Regardless, it's important that all freedom-loving people acknowledge the right of Cubans to self-determination, whatever that means for Cubans. Yet, it's also important that anyone who puts stock on truth and morality acknowledges the great successes the revolution has entailed for inhabitants not only of the island, but for the poor all throughout the world, including especially Africa, where Cuban soldiers helped fend off apartheid and Cuban doctors continue to save countless lives. Socialists, in particular, have a political and moral obligation to denounce the U.S. embargo and calls for regime change.

As for appraising what the revolution can teach non-Cuban socialists about how to fight for a better world going forward, the crux of the matter was illustrated for me in a debate over a single word. One of the Cuban activists, an anarchist, asked me: should Cubans be "defending" or "developing" the Cuban Revolution? To defend the Revolution, he told me, assumes that the revolution was a specific historic event that occurred in 1959 and is now complete. According to him, this imagining of the Revolution entails stagnation, nostalgia, authoritarianism. Instead, he argued, Cubans must develop the revolution; this means emphasizing the need for evolution, growth, self-reflection. For him, an end to Cuba's socialist economy (in its present form) would be a step in the right direction as it would mean an easing of state control and an allowance for the sort of dissent necessary for evolution.

For a communist activist I met, however, if one is not defending the revolution, one is working with the project of American imperialism to defeat it. "The revolution has this much room to maneuver," he told me, squinting through an imperceptible slit between his thumb and index finger. This does not mean that this individual was uncritical of the Communist Party; on the contrary, he offered some of the most insightful critiques of the Cuban system. Nor does this mean that the anarchist comrade was not aware of the threat of U.S. economic imperialism. But to act like it will be good for Cuba to simply throw open its borders and government to unchecked American influence, as many American liberals attest, is not only naive but ideological par-excellence: an end of the Cuban socialist project will no doubt mean suffering for the average Cuban.

In other words, the Cuban revolution is not black-or-white. The Cuban government has long been stuck between a rock and hard place. We have an intellectual and moral responsibility to note that if the Cuban socialist government does, in fact, fall, it is more than likely that the millions of Cubans that the revolution lifted out of poverty, taught to read, offered education and healthcare, will face dire consequences in that brave new world of authoritarian neoliberalism that has always defined counterrevolutionary regimes in Latin America, from Pinochet to the newly elected president of Brazil.

Socialists in the 21st century have an obligation to acknowledge the successes of the revolution and to reject the off-hand moral denunciation that liberals are so quick to heap upon any political organization which dares to buck the conventions of the capitalist ruling system. Is Cuban Socialism perfect? No. No system made by humans will ever be and workers should always be free to critique and develop existing socialist projects. But resistance to capitalist exploitation, to poverty, to imperialism, cannot exist if we hold ourselves to an absurd, abstract, and inconsistent moral standard designed to protect the status quo. Revolution is not easy nor morally straightforward. But Cuba has lifted millions from abject poverty and offered its people and people throughout the world dignity and true sovereignty. For this, it deserves our praise, solidarity, and defense, as do all Cuban people, whether they believe in developing or defending revolution. Ultimately, what the Cubans decide to do about their revolution is up to them, but all socialists have an obligation to defend the island and its revolutionary government from outside aggression.

The Actuality of Revolution

By Jodi Dean

This essay originally appeared at Liberation School .

Revolution today names more a problem than it does a solution. We know that revolutions happen, but we have a hard time believing in revolution. We have a hard time believing in revolution because we are no longer confident that the revolutionary process leads in an emancipatory egalitarian direction. There are revolutions, but they are not for us, not the revolutions we were hoping for, not proletarian revolutions.

We no longer believe in revolution because we no longer adopt the perspective from which we see ourselves as revolutionaries, the perspective of the communist party. Absent this political perspective, only capitalism with its permanent crises, innovations and transformations appears as capable of effecting revolutionary change. Fortunately, the crowds and demonstrations of the last decade suggest that a new party perspective may be emerging. The collective practices and intensities exhibited in current struggles, as well as the limits against which these struggles falter, are renewing the salience of the party question on the Left. As people experience their collective power, the desire for something like a party is reemerging, a party as the organized site of our belief in revolution.

In this essay I focus on two, seemingly opposed, approaches to organization and revolution. I begin with Georg Lukacs's account of the Leninist innovation: the realization that the core of historical materialism is the actuality of the proletarian revolution. The force of this innovation comes from anticipation, the capacity of the future revolution to coordinate the actions that will bring it about. I then turn to the present and the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The problem with their account is that it precludes the temporality - or conception or logic of time - that would produce revolutionary practice. Revolution is present as potential, a possibility that flows out of what we are already doing. There is no revolutionary break, no negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials in the forwarding of emancipatory egalitarian aims. Theirs is thus a "revolution without revolution." In contrast, the future projected in Lenin's assumption of the actuality of revolution coordinates political action to bring revolution into being. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that makes revolution possible not just as an outflow or overflow of present possibilities, but as an effect of the negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials and the forcing of others.

My argument relies on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of "projected time." Dupuy introduces "projected time" as a name for "coordination by means of the future," that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics wherein "the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn causally determines it. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in retrospect"(1). From the perspective of the future, what led to it was necessary. It could not have been otherwise because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it appears inevitable, destined. Projected time assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide upon present actions.

Projected time might seem strange. Dupuy explains that it is actually "the temporality peculiar to someone who carries out a plan that he has given to himself to carry out"(2). Planning makes clear how projected time is not a prediction of what will happen, a fantasy about what one wants to happen, or a set of proposals regarding what should happen (3). Instead, a certain outcome generates the processes that lead to it. Again, in this temporal metaphysics, the future is not the inevitable effect of a chain of causes. The future is itself the cause. The future produces the past that will give rise to it.

Dupuy developed the metaphysics of projected time in the context of an investigation of catastrophe. People have a hard time believing in imminent disaster, even in the face of abundant information that the worst is about to happen. Dupuy concluded that the obstacle preventing people from acting is not one of knowledge but one of belief. They know what will happen, nevertheless they do not believe that it will happen. Projected time addresses this level of belief. Dupuy wagers that since it is "more difficult to reject a fate than to avoid a calamity, the threat of catastrophe becomes far more credible if it appears to be something that is inevitable"(4). That very inevitability can mobilize the determination and imagination necessary for avoiding the inevitable.

A view from the future

Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought is Lukacs' account of the enormity of Lenin's theoretical contribution: Lenin realized Marxist theory in practice. Because he grasps "the actuality of the revolution," Lenin can explain the events around him in its terms. He posits a certain future - the revolution - and lets this future guide action in the present. Lenin thus identifies the mechanism through which organization mediates between theory and practice. The projected future of revolution generates the practices that materialize the belief necessary for its realization.

Projected time tells us how to read Lukacs's claim that "the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism" (5). The revolutionary future determines the actions that bring it about. Historical materialism is not primarily an account of the past. It is a relation to a specific future, one where "revolution is already on its agenda" (6). A distant future lacks coordinating capacity. Lenin, however, made the actuality of revolution into the point from which actions are considered. This certain future enables choices and decisions. It cuts through the manifold conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses, as well as the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism's own response to crises.

The actuality of revolution is the presupposition on which Lenin's concept of the party rests. The projected future of proletarian revolution causes the Bolsheviks to select "single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole." The party does not make the revolution. Nor does it try to pull along inactive masses and present them with a fait accompli. Instead, it anticipates the revolution. Given that the period is revolutionary, that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, what form of organization follows? Lenin's answer is the "strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society" (7). Why? Because of the way the proletariat develops its own class-consciousness and becomes able to put it to use in the context of revolutionary upheaval.

In the course of its revolutionary movement, the proletariat encounters differences within and without it. The internal differences involve economic differentiation within the proletariat (e.g., the infamous "labor aristocracy"). The external differences refer to the other classes that are part of the revolutionary alliance. Differences within the proletariat hinder class unity. Some workers, perhaps those with more education or experience in union leadership, tend to see their interests as allied with the bourgeoisie. Differences between the proletariat and other social strata create confusion, particularly as crises intensify and the revolutionary period gets nearer. The multiplicity of interests within the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed pulls them in different directions. Not every potential present in the masses forwards the revolution. Figuring out the correct path, and keeping together the alliance through which all can win, becomes increasingly difficult.

Lenin's model of the party responds to the pull of these differences by providing an independent organizational space for the "fully conscious elements of the proletariat." Lukacs writes, "It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution " (8). In the party, even the most seemingly trivial decision becomes significant, that is, made in light of the projected future of proletarian revolution. A party decision cuts through myriad possibilities, directing action in one way rather than another.

Lukacs's account makes clear that even as this view of the future provides the party with its organizational form, it is the party that sustains the view. He addresses the debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky argues that the party is the precondition of revolutionary action. Luxemburg argues that it is the product of revolutionary mass movement. Lukacs finds each view one-sided: "Because it is the party's function to prepare the revolution, it is - simultaneously and equally - both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement" (9). The party's role as producer is itself a product of the projected future of proletarian revolution. The party is a product not only of events as they unfold and to which it responds but also of the future that calls it into being, the future that enables it to guides its responses toward it.

Crucial to Lukacs's argument is the party's combination of flexibility and consistency. The party has to learn from the struggles of the masses, adjusting its interpretations and practices as necessary. Responses to the present in light of the projected future are inscribed into party structure and theory. Learning from the struggles of the people is possible because of the party's anticipation of the revolution. The party thereby unites the discoveries that arise from the mass struggle with the actuality of the revolution. Belief in revolution arises out of the combination of theory and action: actions appear as revolutionary because the future revolution is calling them into being.

In sum, Lukacs presents the actuality of revolution as a projected future. Every decision, every tactic, every compromise anticipates the revolution. To the extent that party practices are coordinated by the future, they both manifest belief in it - as opposed to the more abstract knowledge of revolution posited by social democrats - and help bring it about. Lukacs insists that the actuality of revolution distinguishes Lenin's position from both social democrats and left-wing purists. From the perspective of the former, the revolution is always too far off, the proletariat never mature enough, the unions still too weak. From the perspective of the latter, the ripeness of the moment dictates a pure politics, a radical insistence on principles without compromise. Unlike either, the actuality of revolution involves the political time of anticipation and struggle, a time when the future guides the party prepared to usher it in.

Revolution today

In the final volume of their influential trilogy, Hardt and Negri announce: "Revolution is now, finally, becoming the order of the day" (10). Their theory of revolution arises out of an account of the biopolitical character of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Networked communications have transformed the process of production, contributing to its homogenization, decentralization/deterritorialization, and informatization. Knowledge, affect, and communication play a greater role; labor has become "increasingly immaterial" (11). The result is a fundamental change in the relation between production and the reproduction of life: rather than separate from and subordinated to the demands of productive work, "life infuses and dominates all production" (12). With its biopolitical turn, capitalism subsumes the entirety of the social.

On the basis of their analysis of changes in production, Hardt and Negri claim that today "the perspective of revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon" (13). Such a revolution is a "revolution in life," that is, a revolution that exceeds the range of demands and expectations associated with the labor movement.

Biopolitical revolution has a distinct temporality. In contrast to the projected future provided by the actuality of revolution, revolution today "is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an "exceeding" present that in some sense already contains the future within it" (14). Instead of a future with the capacity to coordinate action in the present, revolution coexists with and within non-revolution. Unable to imagine a future revolution, we cannot use its actuality to decide our tactics. As a distinct component of political action, tactics falls by the wayside, displaced by potentials within biopolitical production.

Hardt and Negri imagine revolution as an analogous "kind of simultaneity," the excess and limit to capitalist command over the biopolitical production it can never fully capture or control. Biopolitical labor is generally autonomous from capitalist command, emerging out of networked cooperative practices. Capital seeks to capture, expropriate, and discipline these practices, even as it itself depends on the creativity that their autonomy unleashes. Bypassing commodification, capital extracts value directly from social relations themselves.

Hardt and Negri highlight the democratic dimension of biopolitical labor: the same networked, cooperative structures that produce the common generate new democratic capacities, and even "make possible in the political sphere the development of democratic organizations" (15). For this reason, Hardt and Negri reject "vanguard organizations." The vanguard party corresponds to a different, earlier, structure of labor (a different technical composition of the proletariat). According to their periodization, the vanguard party fits with the early twentieth century's professional factory workers. The deskilled workers of the mid-twentieth century fit with that period's mass party. The political form appropriate to biopolitical labor, the one appropriate to us now, they argue, must be democratic, cooperative, autonomous and horizontally networked. The vanguard party is inadequate, "anachronistic," because it doesn't look like the networks of contemporary biopolitical production.

This argument is not convincing. Complex networks are not the horizontal, cooperative and autonomous forms that Hardt and Negri imagine. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's work on complex networks demonstrates, free choice, growth and preferential attachment produce hierarchies, dramatic differences between the one that is most chosen and preferred and the many that are not (16). The most popular node or item in a complex network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular and so, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This hierarchical structure is pervasive in communicative capitalism. Blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and giant internet hubs like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Baidu all reflect the power law distribution of links in complex networks. The few get a lot; the rest get very little, almost nothing. The idea appears in popular media as the "80/20 rule," the "winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy," and the "long tail" of the many. The ostensibly creative, cooperative and democratic character of networked communication does not eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us. And, as Barabasi's work on complex networks makes clear, this hierarchy is not imposed from above. It is an immanent effect of free choice, growth and preferential attachment.

A political form mirroring biopolitical production would not be horizontal and democratic. Its democracy would produce power-law distributions, unequal nodes or outcomes, winners and losers, few and many. We see this phenomenon on Twitter as people fight through trending hashtags: hashtags provide common names that serve as loci of struggle. When they trend, they rise above the long tail of the millions of unread, unloved Tweets coursing through the nets. The democratic element - people's choice to use and forward - produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant. The fact of emergent hierarchies suggests that an emergent vanguard may well be the political form necessary for struggles under biopolitical conditions.

The structure of the complex networks of biopolitical production indicates that, contra Hardt and Negri, a vanguard party is not anachronistic at all. It is instead a form that corresponds to the dynamics of networked communication. This structure indicates an additional problem with Hardt and Negri's rejection of the vanguard party. They characterize Lenin's party as involving an organizational process that comes from "above" the movements of the multitude. Historically, this insinuation is clearly false. The Bolsheviks were but one group among multiple parties, tendencies and factions acting in the tumultuous context of the Russian Revolution. They were active within the movements of the oppressed workers and peasants. The movements themselves, through victories and defeats, short- and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organization gave rise to the party even as the party furthered the movements.

Finally, Hardt and Negri criticize Lenin's party on the grounds of identity. For them, the party is a "new identity," and they think that revolution today must aim at the abolition of identity (17). Lenin's party is not an identity; it is a process whereby the distinctions of what Hardt and Negri associate with identity are smoothed out and a collective revolutionary will is generated (18). The party functions through the installation and maintenance of a gap within the field in which identity is given, not as a new identity.

For Hardt and Negri, the goal of revolution is "the generation of new forms of social life" (19). They describe revolutionary struggles as a process of liberation that establishes a common. Such a process, they argue, consolidates insurrection as it institutionalizes new collective habits and practices. Institutions, then, are sites for the management of encounters, extension of social rupture, and transformation of those who compose them.

The resemblance between these institutions and the vanguard party is striking. The party involves a common name, language, and set of tactics. It has practices that establish ways of being together. Its purpose is occupying and extending the gap within society that class struggle denotes. As Lukacs insists, Lenin's concept of party organization prioritizes flexibility and consistency; the party has and must have a capacity for self-transformation. What Hardt and Negri describe as the extension of insurrection in an institutional process is another way of theorizing the party.

Because they disavow the party, their version of democratic organization lacks a position that can anticipate the revolution and thereby materialize belief in its actuality. The future does not exercise coordinating capacity. Hardt and Negri emphasize that revolution is "squeezed in the vise between past and future, leaving it very little room for maneuver." They write, "even when revolutionaries think their actions are sufficient to launch us into the future, the past bursts through to reimpose itself." And they conclude, "Revolution's creation of a new form of government holds off the past and opens toward the future" (20). Rather than products of the revolution they produce, revolutionaries in Hardt and Negri's version remain at a distance from the future. Their actions seem disconnected from it, uninformed by it, and hence all the more under the sway of the past. Revolution opens to the future, but a projected future does not call into being the forces that will have produced it.

Lacking a vision of the future capable of orienting action, Hardt and Negri outline instead a platform of demands without a carrier, without a body to fight for them. Their model of institutions suggests that a party or parties could be such a carrier, but rather than presenting their platform as a party platform, Hardt and Negri present them as demands to be made to existing governments and institutions of global governance. The demands are for the provision of basic means of life, global citizenship and access to the commons. They acknowledge that "today's ruling powers unfortunately have no intention of granting even these basic demands" (21). Their response is laughter, "a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present" (22). No wonder they do not present their demands as the platform of a party. The demands are not to be fought for. They mark potentials present already in the biopolitical production of the common, limits to capitalist control.

The identification of egalitarian potential in what generally seems a bleak and miserable present is laudable. Absent a party oriented toward its realization, though, it is hard to believe that this potential is stronger than, say, a neo-feudalism of globally connected fortress-cities surrounded by impoverished scavengers competing for access to a better life via networked gaming platforms and desperately defending their last bits of fresh water and arable land from refugees fleeing ever intensifying resource wars while the tiny class of global billionaires eat caviar in gold-plated jets. No practices coordinated by means of the future materialize this belief. Precisely because our setting is one of exploitation, ownership, competition and struggle, our sense of the present has to be tied to the future that results from the realization of some potentials rather than others. The party is the form for this realization insofar as through it the future can produce the actions that will have brought it about.

Conclusion

Across the globe, crowds are rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. These mobilized crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Having come up against the limits of immediacy and horizontality, activists and organizers alike are thinking again about institutional forms like the party.

Hardt and Negri imply that the party form is outmoded. I have argued that not only do contemporary networks produce pow- er-law distributions of few and many but that emergent hierarchies - particularly when understood in terms of the vanguards and practices that already emerge out of political movement - point to the ways that party organizations emerge. Current examples of this tendency include the adoption of common tactics, names and symbols that bring together previously separate, disparate and even competing struggles. When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation.

A global alliance of the radical Left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. If this new party is to be an agent of revolutionary time, it will have to continue to foster and even amplify the common practices and tactics capable of materializing revolutionary belief. This fostering and amplification requires discipline, choices, conscious planning, and decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to allocate resources and energies. Precisely because of the multiplicity of the experiences of the oppressed, we need the party as the form through which we discipline ourselves, through which we produce the collective political will that will push revolutionary tendencies in an emancipatory egalitarian direction.

Many of us are convinced that capitalist crises have reached a decisive point. We know that the system is fragile, that it produces its own grave-diggers, and that it is held in place by a repressive international state structure. Yet we act as if we did not know this. The party provides a form that can let us believe what we know.

References

1 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the Future, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 110.
2 Dupuy, 116.
3 Projected future thus functions differently from the program put forth by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future,
London, Verso, 2015.
4 Dupuy, 129.
5 Luka�cs, 12.
6 Ibid. (italics in original)
7 Luka�cs, 30.
8 Luka�cs, 29.
9 Luka�cs, 32.
10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 344.
11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, Empire 365.
12 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 365.
13 Commonwealth, 239.
14 Commonwealth, 242-243.
15 Commonwealth, 354.
16 See my discussion in Crowds and Party, London, Verso, 2016, 12-13.
17 Commonwealth, 334.
18 As Luka�cs writes in �Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,� �the Communist Party as the revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature,� 316, italics in original; and, �the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out,� 326�the distinctions Luka�cs is referring to are stratifications within the class.
19 Commonwealth, 354.
20 Commonwealth, 360.
21 Commonwealth, 382.
22 Commonwealth, 383.

This essay was originally published in our book, Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World , published on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

"A Free Palestine from the River to the Sea": The Nine Dirty Words You Can't Say (on TV or Anywhere Else)

By Bryant William Sculos

No Justice, No Peace

It is not uncommon for a mainstream media commentator to be fired for a bigoted or violent comment on air-or off air. As far as I know, there was never a person specifically fired for advocating non-violence and the equal treatment of a group of people. I'm sure untold thousands have never been hired in the first place because of these views-but that's not the same as having those kinds of views being known and then later fired for articulating them for the hundredth if not thousandth time. That was until November 29, 2018, when CNN fired paid commentator (and Temple University Full Professor) Marc Lamont Hill for articulating a nuanced position of peace and justice through non-violence in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Hill called for the equal freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people, a people long violently oppressed and attacked by a colonizing power.

These facts are not in question. What is in question is whether Hill, at the end of the invited speech delivered at the United Nations to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, also invoked a dog whistle for the extermination of Jews and the eradication of Israel. Despite the complete inconsistency of this interpretation with the previous twenty minutes of Hill's speech (and everything he has probably ever said and done), this was hardly enough to prevent the far-right wing media circus and pro-Israel/Zionist lobby, which dominates the U.S. media landscape and the whole of the two major political parties and their pundits, from unleashing on Hill. Within hours, it was widely believed that Hill was a virulent anti-Semite. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Hill has repeatedly stated and explained in multiple statements since.

A rigorous and righteous critique of Zionism is not identical to a hatred or even criticism of Jews or Jewishness. There is plenty of evidence and argumentation from Jews themselves that unquestioning support for Israel itself does a disservice to the Jewish tradition and Jews worldwide, as well as those in Israel. This argument was made most recently by Cornel West in his defense of Marc Lamont Hill.

The words in question are "a free Palestine from the river to the sea"-the latter four ostensibly being the genocidal dog whistle, a phrasing used by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas (both organizations have been previously criticized by Hill for their use of violence in various contexts). If Hill's detractors had displayed any knowledge of anything about his politics, activism, or even the previous 99.9% of the U.N. speech, their outrage would be less disingenuous. If his detractors could show why his final statement, interpreted as a call for mass violence, was in any way consistent with any part of the rest of the speech or Hill's political or intellectual perspectives, they could be taken seriously, at least on a superficial level. This simply is not the case.

Furthermore, I contend, it was not the last four words that people had a problem with; it was the first three: a free Palestine. A free Palestine for a free Palestinian people. Free and equal Palestinian people. This is the true source of the grievances, which led to Hill being fired from CNN-and since, Hill has been targeted by Temple University for possible censure and/or firing, despite the fact that Hill has an endowed chair and the ostensible protection of tenure (to say nothing for comprehensive free speech rights, which since Temple is a public university, are fully guaranteed by the oft-referenced and little-read U.S. Constitution).

While it is unlikely that Hill will be fired or forced out, the relatively recent cases of George Ciccariello-Maher (formerly) at Drexel University and Steven Salaita (formerly) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show that there are no guarantees for public critics of white supremacy, global capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. The most critical topics in need of vociferous dissent are the ones being most aggressively censored.

I'm less specifically worried about Prof. Hill losing one of his side jobs than I am about the multitude of others who share and express his views who will never be given a job, either on cable news or in academia. The chilling effects-especially for early-career scholars, teachers, and journalists, who are the most vulnerable to sanction-are palpable and devastating, the results of which will surely harm millions if not billions around the world, not least of all the Palestinian people.

Apples, Bananas, and the Last Human Voice

The tragedy of Prof. Marc Lamont Hill's firing from CNN is worse for its broader implications. Hill was the only consistently leftist voice on cable news - yes, ALL of cable news. He has been a long-time critic of police violence, structural racism, U.S. imperialism, and economic injustices in the U.S. and around the world. He has accepted both the label socialist and Marxist at times, and his arguments on TV and in his books are broadly consistent with those traditions-though they rarely involve the jargon typically associated with those traditions. He chooses his words carefully, but his meanings are rarely unclear. He has stood for working people, the poor, the oppressed, the colonized, the degraded, and the murdered.

He was the only cable commentator to oppose Hillary Clinton from the left. He was browbeaten by other CNN commentators and analysts. His appearances weirdly were fewer and further in-between. Hill refused to change his position on U.S. imperialism, and if one is a critic of U.S. imperialism, one cannot go on TV and call for people to vote for her. Putting aside debates about lesser-evilism and its dangerous pitfalls, going on TV to advocate for an imperialist would have ingratiated Hill with CNN and his Democratic Party consultant colleagues. More people have complied than haven't. He refused.

CNN has always been a network that turns war, death, murder, and injustice into spectator sports for profit. It has always been a network more comfortable paying neo-fascists, bigots, and regressive morons than it is with paying thoughtful left critics. CNN claims to be a "facts first" network. They run ads equating bananas with falsehood and apples with truth. Some are clever; most are not. Marketing criticisms aside, CNN continues to disgrace and debase itself with this decision. As I write this, Rick Santorum, a man who believes that gay and transgender people are inherently mentally-ill and criminals, that climate change is a hoax, that women should not have reproductive rights, and that none of us deserve affordable quality healthcare, is still employed at CNN, appearing regularly on its prime-time shows. But Marc Lamont Hill called for violence (in a speech about non-violence)? He must be purged! Talk about being fucking bananas.

It was already a tragedy nearing its end that there was merely one regular left voice on cable news. With the firing of Marc Lamont Hill, the process of recessing all the truly radical critics from regular appearances on mainstream airwaves is complete. While young people tend to get their news and information from "non-traditional" media, where there are thankfully far more left voices, what happens in the mainstream media, which is still consumed by the majority of Americans, still matters a great deal.

CNN didn't make this choice out of principle. Hill's appearances were seemingly increasingly irregular as he refused to play into the dominant narratives that hyper-focused on President Trump, so it was easy calculus for them. Avoid any semblance of anti-Israel (and by some perverse twist of illogic, anti-American) sentiment and fire Marc Lamont Hill. They did it for PR reasons. They did it for profit. I'm sure they are satisfied with their decision.

Though perhaps they should rethink that: Fox News' host, and rat sphincter wearing human skin, Sean Hannity, was giddy discussing Hill's firing-and of course took several moments to connect an egregiously mischaracterized version of Hill's comments to the entire "insanity" of CNN and its unprofessional anchors who are "too opinionated." The irony was lost on him completely, and the meaning of Hannity's and Fox News' celebration of Hill's firing was likely lost on CNN as well.

Sorry, Not Sorry

With all of that said, despite his righteous and radical declaration of freedom, equality, peace, and justice for the Palestinian people, Marc Lamont Hill penned an apology for The Inquirer. He apologized not for standing with the Palestinian people. He apologized not for opposing Israeli-Zionist settler colonialism. He apologized not for suggesting that the violence of the colonized was not equivalent to the violence of the colonizer. Instead, he apologized for triggering the misinterpretations of his comments that led to the outrage and subsequent firing.

There is one crucial flaw in this apology however, beyond it being completely unnecessary and equally understandable for all those familiar with Marc Lamont Hill. He has a profoundly generous and magnanimous reputation. The problem with the apology is that it is articulated with a factual inaccuracy baked into Hill's words (a factual inaccuracy he is no doubt aware of): the outrage that led to his firing and the now-informal inquiry by the Board of Trustees at Temple was not a good faith misinterpretation. It was not accidental. It was not a "natural" reaction to his supposedly genocidal words at the U.N. The misinterpretation was intentional from the start, and the outrage was exaggerated for political purposes. The people attacking Marc Lamont Hill-including CNN-are not rightly offended by a scholar and activist's "poor choice of words." His choice of words was perfectly fine. The outrage that Hill's words spawned were because of their normative content; because of whom they were delivered to defend and support: the Palestinian people-as well as the entity they were deployed to criticize: the Israeli state.

Any genuine offense that was created by Hill's words were undoubtedly not from Hill's words themselves, but rather from the feigned offense of others intentionally mischaracterizing Hill's words for political effect. His most recent book Nobody is a testament to his scholar-activist credentials and deeply felt compassion and care for the oppressed and exploited in the world. No one-nobody-could read the actual words in that book and genuinely think that this author would ever defend the extermination of a people (not even cops). There are undoubtedly millions of people who could intentionally misread what he wrote, and he has no need to apologize for those intentional misinterpretations any more than he should have apologized for the intentional misconstruing of his comments on Israel and a free Palestinian people.

By apologizing as he did, while certainly representative of Hill's humility and selflessness and certainly clarifying for those on the left who may not have heard the original speech, I fear some of this ill-motivated criticism may have been unintentionally legitimized. The accusations of anti-Semitism were not offered in good faith in any way and treating them as good-faith misinterpretations threatens to offer a glean of honesty that neo-fascist Zionism will continue to abuse. Marc Lamont Hill shouldn't be blamed for this possible outgrowth of his apology; he was responding to an existential threat to his ability to make a living-and perhaps some perceived genuine misinterpretation that I simply refuse to believe exists.

For Palestinians, Not Palestine

This is just one contribution to an ongoing and undoubtedly continuing discussion about the Palestinian people's right to exist as living beings with dignity, respect, and equaliberty, but it is important to emphasize here that there should be no defense of nationalism implied, interfered, or articulated. While anti-colonial nationalism is preferable to imperial bourgeois nationalism, it is a political dead end nonetheless. In the context of Israel-Palestine, while the discursive move of asserting the right of the Palestinian people to be citizens of a democratic nation-state is assuredly a positive and productive move insofar as it challenges US and Israeli capitalist imperial power, the liberation of the Palestinian people (and the working class people of Israel, many of whom do not support the far-Right Likud Party or the heinous war crimes of the Israeli state) will only be accomplished with aggressively solidaristic internationalism. Demanding political, economic, cultural, and social equality and freedom within all relevant political structures that affect the lives of Palestinians is not inconsistent with a ruthless critique of the modern state system and all of its attendant injustices.

This speaks to the final tragedy of the firing and ongoing assault of Marc Lamont Hill. It was precisely for his passionate, thoughtful, informed words of solidarity and support for the freedom of all people, especially the Palestinians, that he is being punished. While we must match his act(s) of solidarity with the Palestinians with our own words and deeds of solidarity with him and against his detractors, I don't think it is too bold of me to suggest that Marc would want us to put doubly more energy into supporting the cause of peace with justice and freedom for all peoples, which his own passionate support of has precipitated this absurd circumstance.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and, beginning in January 2019, will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Worcester State University teaching in a variety of areas of global politics. Bryant is also an occasional adjunct professor in political theory at Florida International University. He is a member of Socialist Alternative-CWI in the U.S. and regular contributor to The Hampton Institute, New Politics, Public Seminar, and Class, Race and Corporate Power - where he also serves as Politics of Culture section editor.

From Cruze to Cruise: False Consciousness and Dialectical Conflict in the GM Paradigm Shift

By Werner Lange

On Monday, November 26, General Motors publicly announced its decision to shut down all production at five major plants in 2019, including the sprawling Lordstown Assembly Plant in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, home of the Cruze model, and shift major investment to mass production of all-electric autonomous vehicles through its Cruise subsidiary, headquartered in California's Silicon Valley. This grand paradigm shift from traditional cars to autonomous ones marks a major change in GM operations, ones which will leave abandoned communities economically devastated and thousands of terminated workers financially paralyzed, while simultaneously paving a path toward zero-emission cars. Yet the resultant communal and private havoc imposed upon victimized communities will likely not lead, as it should, to a workers' revolt and political uprising; at least not in northeast Ohio. That disappointing but realistic projection is based upon the potency of widespread false consciousness among the masses, the seductive temptation of subscribing to false hopes, and the emergence of a new dialectical conflict uniting labor and management in an existential struggle against climate change.

November 26 marked the second Black Monday brutally imposed upon the Mahoning Valley located in the heart of de-industrialized America. The first one occurred in September 1977 when steel corporations precipitously closed several major plants in Youngstown, a catastrophic economic blow from which this once vibrant, but now largely impoverished, city has never substantially recovered. A similar fate of an accelerated decline now awaits Lordstown and surrounding communities like Newton Falls, my hometown for the past 30 years. During that time, despite sporadic sparks to the contrary, this part of America's broad Rust Belt has gotten collectively more rusted, but nevertheless reliably remained a Democratic stronghold - until 2016. The mass frustration of hard-pressed communities and working families stuck seemingly forever in economic stagnancy spilled over into a passionate desire for qualitative change during the last presidential election. Only one major-party candidate appeared in substance and style to offer qualitative change, whereas the other candidate, unlike her progressive opponent in the primary, painfully projected business as usual. After voting overwhelming by 23 points for Barack Obama in 2012, voters in Trumbull County, home to the Lordstown plant, gave a 6-point victory margin to Donald Trump in 2016. Revealingly, the only other Republican presidential candidate who won Trumbull County since 1960 was Richard Nixon in 1972. Masters of deceit have been able to occasionally tap into pervasive false consciousness within this largely working-class community, but never with the ferocity of the most recent presidential election. This, of course, comes as no surprise to progressive social thinkers familiar with the roots and consequences of false consciousness among labor and working-class communities.

The ability to successfully colonize the mind of the oppressed with the carefully construed values and deceitfully manipulated images of the oppressor characterizes all tyrannies to some extent. The cultural substrate for this common success of mass deception is based upon the objective reality that the ruling ideas of any stable society are the ideas of the rulers. Those who dominate a society economically also do so ideologically. It is their agents of socialization which substantively shape the mindset of the new generations, and it is their institutions which seek to sustain that self-defeating mindset throughout adulthood. Rebels are demonized, deviants dismissed, conformists applauded, and out-groups scapegoated. Fascists, in particular, are adept at creating and manipulating false consciousness and suppressing class consciousness. The very name of Hitler's fascist party, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), for example, would have a bitterly frustrated and justifiably angry German citizen think the party promotes socialism and embraces the interests of the working class. Instead it routinely executed socialists (along with communists and many others), turned masses of workers into industrial slaves, and channeled mass frustration into displaced aggression against the vulnerable and marginalized Other. This repressive pattern is largely repeated in Trump's America with his regime's unbridled attacks upon immigrants and journalists, constant invocation of big lies, demonization of liberals, and conversion of the Republican Party, in substance, into what Noam Chomsky recently called "the most dangerous organization in human history." None of this would have been possible if class consciousness (instead of false consciousness) guided the behavior of America's working-class masses. In fact, the antithesis of the Trump regime would now be in power if the working class-in-itself would transform into a working class-for-itself, a work still in progress.

If false consciousness propelled the rise of the Trump regime and aided the fall of GM Lordstown, then false hope is designed to keep victimized workers and communities passive. The emergent false hope is not identical to the false promises made by Trump in his 2017 visit here, claiming the lost jobs were all coming back and "we're going to fill those factories back up." Everyone, except the hopelessly deluded, now knows that to be an outright lie. More pernicious is the emergent, projected hope for a new fossil-fueled product to be allocated to the soon-to-be-idled GM Lordstown plant sometime in late 2019. "Future products will be allocated to fewer plants next year," stated GM's CEO in officially designating the five targeted GM plants as "unallocated," but leaving the door theoretically open for one of the coming "five vehicle architectures" to resurrect perhaps one of these comatose plants back to full life, thus setting up a bitter competition in 2019 among the impacted communities to win this ephemeral prize. In anticipation of this divisive competition, the regional Chamber of Commerce launched its "Drive It Home" campaign, which, according to its website, is a "coalition of local businesses, community, religious leaders, consumers, and workers, as well as their families, coming together to urge GM to support growing their investment at the Lordstown Complex"… and to "create a positive environment and build good relations with local management." This is in stark contrast to the "labor-management wars of the late 60s and early 70s," as one current local UAW leader castigated the strikes, revolts, and progressive activism at Lordstown two generations ago.

Yet that is precisely the type of protest and activism now needed to avoid community devastation. After all, the dialectical conflict inherent to capitalist management-labor relations has lost none of its validity, despite loss of manifested vitality. Maximizing private profit inevitably translates into minimizing community needs; and expanding labor-created surplus value invariably comes at the expense of labor's necessary value. The objective interests of private capital and labor are not identical in the old industrial setting, regardless of projections to the contrary. To create a community-wide "positive environment" in begging GM for a new allocation is tantamount to suppression of any public criticism of the utter corporate greed driving its "vehicle portfolio optimization," as GM characterizes its termination of several models, including the Cruze. Silence in the face of this economic tyranny is the voice of complicity. On its knees begging for a second chance is not the proper posture of organized labor; but rather, it is firmly standing upright and fearlessly speaking truth to power and forcefully demanding justice. For starters, that demand entails full repayment of the $50-billion loan given GM in corporate welfare a decade ago - an outstanding bill of some $10 billion is still owed taxpayers. Better yet would be implementation of corporate alimony, a mandate requiring corporations to justly compensate communities they abandon after benefitting from decades of enrichment there. Yet, to date, not even a murmur along these lines; just a call from community leaders to be hopeful and quietly wait and pray for a miracle. A recipe for disaster.

However, beyond the viability of the labor-management dialectic, there is another dynamic at work in this transition from traditional cars to electric cars which deserves greater attention and analysis. We live in perilous times of grave existential threats to humanity from the growing challenge and increasingly devastating crisis of man-made climate change. The science on climate change is abundantly clear. Unless radical changes are globally and timely implemented to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep them exceedingly low, the very future of humanity and other life forms is at risk. This grave environmental crisis creates a new dialectic, one which supersedes and transcends the traditional labor-management one. Required in this dangerously new context is a paradigm shift of consciousness from conflicting class consciousness to harmonious covenantal mindsets within both labor and management and beyond, a unified humanity confronting a common existential threat. The thesis/affirmation of humanity and other life forms in covenantal union are contradicted by the antithesis/negation of climate change producers and deniers. Unlike the economic and particular labor-management dialectic, this new one is an existential and universal one. Whereas the former arrives at a synthesis of higher quality of life through class consciousness converting an objective class-in-itself to a subjective active class-for-itself, the current existential conflict encompasses all humanity - all classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures - on one side of this colossal dialectical conflict and climate changers on the other. Conflicting class relations in this new context are superseded by complementary covenantal relations, ones that unite labor and management as well as all humanity facing a common foe in climate change. That objective covenant-in-itself must be transformed into an active covenant-for-itself if the current existential crisis is to be overcome.

In that regard, General Motors is to be applauded for its explicit goal of zero emissions through its all-electric autonomous Cruise operations which are slated to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019. By 2023, GM intends to have at least 20 all-electric models on the market globally in paving the way toward a zero-emission future in the automobile industry. In direct contradiction to a zero-emission future, on the other hand, are potent political and economic forces bonded to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, like the Trump regime and mother earth frackers who foolishly promote the existential threat of climate change and thereby constitute the negation of this new dialectic. America's ruling class is clearly split on this question of energy options, and therein lies real hope for needed qualitative change. While the majority still favors and actively fosters fossil-fuel industries, a growing minority within corporate America, as evidenced by GM's embrace of a zero-emission future, has become enlightened to the urgent need for clean energy everywhere. That enlightenment must expand at all levels of our deeply divided society to ensure sheer survival, let alone safety and security. If and when this new global consciousness based on covenantal relations grips the mind of the masses along with the corporate and political power elite, climate change and global warming will not only be reduced; these existential threats will be negated altogether, and a new chapter in human history will open. The alternative is not only unacceptable, it is unthinkable.

"The Ability to Define Phenomena": A Historiography of U.S. Empire in the Middle East

By Derek Ide

In November 1938, during the midst of the Japanese occupation of China, Mao Tse-tsung proclaimed what eventually became a lightning rod for revolutionaries around the world: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."[1] Over three decades later, in June 1971, Huey Newton declared: "power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner." [2] Although Newton had earlier drawn significant inspiration from Mao and the Chinese Revolution, these definitions could not be further apart. However, if one accepts that in the last instance coercive force is what determines power relations, but in intermediary periods of struggle power is defining phenomena and having an impact on the direction in which these phenomena move, then perhaps the chasm between the two definitions is not so wide.

This essay intends to explore academic engagement with the role that the United States has played in the Middle East, particularly the Arab world. I have delineated four distinct "camps" in the historiography: euphemism-as-elision, empire-as-celebration, imperial-as-lens, and the anti-imperialist camps. These four conceptual categories are predicated upon two variables: the manner the authors address (or, conversely, refuse to address) U.S. empire and imperialism and who they either explicitly or implicitly target as their audience. I defend the use of the word "camps," with all of its martial connotations, as opposed to other more moderating words like "traditions," because I contend those involved in these questions are not simply individuals who exist purely as part of a larger academic community where power ceases to exist and intellectual exchange is the sole modus operandi. Instead, they are, a la Newton, engaged in decisive battles over how to define phenomena (in this case U.S. empire) and struggle to make that phenomena act in a desired manner (via the audience they are attempting to influence).

As such, what follows is not a purely chronological historiography that traces the development of "U.S. in the Middle East" literature over the decades. Other scholars have completed this task exceptionally well. [3] Nor is it a comprehensive list of the most recent scholarship regarding the region. Rather, this essay explores the various relationships academics have to U.S. empire in the Middle East. Given that imperialism is a global phenomenon, however, it would be impossible to completely ignore the theoretical and historiographical contributions that have been made by scholars of imperialism who study areas outside of the Middle East. The essay will begin by defining imperialism. It will then provide a brief overview of the European forms of imperial knowledge production that the U.S. borrowed from in the aftermath of World War II. Finally, it will analyze the four delineated above.

U.S. Imperialism in the 20th century

A problem that arises in the study of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East is the mistaken assumption that imperialism functions exactly the same in all historical eras. Many academics continue to cling to the European imperialism of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which were necessarily territorial empires. Julie Greene, in her work The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal, challenges the notion that the creation of the Panama Canal was "unconnected to imperialism" in order to provoke a "broader rethinking of America's 'new empire' in the aftermath of 1898." [4] She argues that the essence of this project involved the construction of a "global infrastructure" that required state intervention on an international level. This new global infrastructure laid the groundwork for an American empire that eschewed formal territorial control in favor of economic and commercial control, supplemented by regular doses of military intervention.

By laying out the logic of non-territorial empire in this way, academics are catching up to the kinds of analyses articulated by Arab political actors themselves as early as the 1950s and 1960s. For example, the Arab Nationalist Movement, a forerunner to George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, articulated their opposition to imperialism in the 1950s:

When we say imperialism… we mean direct imperialism such as the one imposed on South Arabia. We mean by it imperialism hiding behind treaties as in the case of Libya and some other Arab countries in the Maghreb. We mean by it masked imperialism embodied in alliances such as the Baghdad Pact and the Eisenhower project. And last but not least, we mean economic imperialism obviously represented in the monopoly exercised by the oil companies over our natural resources. Liberation means to be free from the shackles of foreign exploitation no matter what shape or form it takes. [5]

As the late Samir Amin argued, the "state of permanent war" in the Middle East is a cornerstone of Washington's project of global hegemony. As Amin explains, the "war of 1967, planned in agreement with Washington in 1965, pursued several goals: to start the collapse of the populist nationalist regimes, to break their alliance with the Soviet Union, to force them to reposition itself on the American trail, to open new grounds for Zionist colonization." Permanent war allows the United States to enervate the Arab world and denies the possibility of "a rich and powerful modernized" Arab bloc that could "call in question the guaranteed access of the Western countries to the plundering of its oil resources, necessary for the continuation of waste associated with capitalist accumulation." [6] Although Amin was writing in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the interventions of 2011 onwards, notably in Libya and Syria, are a direction continuation of this policy.[7]

Political scientist Michael Parenti, who has written extensively on U.S. empire, provided a succinct working definition of imperialism in the 1990s: "The process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people." [8] As seen from this definition, territorial acquisition is simply one variable of imperialism. The insertion of "dominant politico-economic interests" as a qualifier is important in this definition and complicates the idea of "national interests," which so many writers in the euphemism-as-elision category rely upon.

A significantly more thorough definition of empire comes from Richard Drayton. Although he writes specifically about the historiography of British imperialism, his critiques can be broadened to include the literature addressing U.S. imperialism. Drayton argues that the "cultural turn" represented an "ascent of idealism" that was "remarkably compatible with the neo-liberal moment." [9] The literature became preoccupied with how the colonized were perceived by the colonizers or developed a "focus on subjectivity" and agency, where "how people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America thought about things, displaced examination of practical and material experience. Historians appeared to be more bothered by 'epistemic violence' than the real thing." [10] Drayton makes a clarion call for historians to be clear about the reality of imperialism, arguing that it is "a useful category through which we may make sense of a phenomenon which recurs in world history wherever a power gap allows one society to become predatory towards others." Indeed, Drayton's conception of imperialism is worth quoting in full:

Imperialism, in all its contexts, is a regime through which external entities derive maximum gain from the labour and resources within a territory. A foreign power, with or without formal colonization, although always with local collaborators, secures a protected and privileged sphere for its economic actors. There the relationship of labour to capital is manipulated via the suppression of taxes, wages, social or environmental protections, by forms of coercion which drive labour towards that direction of employment and limit its legal or practical ability to resist the regime, and from which tribute, commodities and profit may be freely expatriated. The social rent paid by capital is minimized, as both the costs of social reproduction (childhood, ill health, aging) are borne from the wages of labour and the costs of infrastructure through which the external actor derives extraordinary benefit - roads, deepwater harbours, airports, electricity networks, local policing and repression - are funded mainly out of taxation of the wages and consumption of the squeezed wages of labour… Violence is a constant and necessary corollary of such an order, needed to install, defend, discipline and replace local collaborators… But Imperialism always comes wearing the mask of community, promising that its form of domination is in the universal interest. To such a claim historians and their colleagues in the social sciences lend active help. [11]

Drayton's definition, emphasizing the material sinews of empire, points the historian to material forces underlying imperialism. This perspective includes both the processes of extraction, as well as its points of vulnerabilities. These functional definitions of imperialism inform the analysis of the historiographical traditions below.

Early knowledge production of the Middle East

Early American knowledge production about the Middle East is largely indebted to the British. Direct inter-imperialist collaboration was a routine occurrence, with American officials studying European colonial administrations to derive lessons about intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency, developing efficient models of colonial life, etc. As Karine Walther has pointed out in the context of the Philippines, "American military officers engaged in 'colonial tourism' in Egypt, India, Java, Borneo, and Malaysia."[12] This reliance upon British knowledge production about former colonial possessions did not disappear immediately at the end of World War II. It would take many years for the U.S. to develop adequate institutions of knowledge about its newly acquired spheres of influence. One indication of how deeply U.S. officials and academics relied upon British knowledge production about the Middle East could be seen in 1945, when the State Department had no alternative but to recommend only that the British be asked to invite position papers from both sides on the Palestine question. [13] Another example can be seen as late as 1951 from an annotated bibliography compiled by the American Council of Learned Societies about the Near East. The bibliography listed a total of fifteen books on the modern history of Egypt, three of which were written directly by British colonial officials. Nearly all of the anthropological works cited were completed by British and French researchers.[14]

American knowledge production about the Middle East during the first part of the twentieth century relied heavily upon American missionaries in the region, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The kind of knowledge produced about the region during this period was often racist and Orientalist, but allowed for the framing of "imperial expansion in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention." [15] These ideas existed within a broader "hierarchy of heathenism" where American missionaries ranked cultures according to their receptiveness to the Christian imperial civilizing mission.[16] A second source came from Orientalist scholars in academic institutions, many of them who studied the ancient world and not the modern Middle East in any meaningful way. During World War I, a group of specialists came together to serve in Woodrow Wilson's think-tank called "The Inquiry." [17] This "team of experts" played a vital role in the Paris Peace Conference, and represented one of the first times that the former territories of the Ottoman Empire registered on the American radar. As such, the Inquiry represented an "early attempt by Washington to develop contemporary expertise on foreign areas."[18] Exemplifying the close missionary-state relationship, ABCFM members like James Barton submitted reports for the Inquiry arguing that "Islam was the central problem of Turkish rule and the spread of Christianity was the ultimate solution."[19] In the interwar period, Osamah Khalil posits that missionary universities like the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the American University in Beirut acted as "sheet anchors" that not only produced knowledge about the region but were also instrumental in acting as a bulwark against communist ideas in the Arab world.[20]

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services and the Army Specialized Training Program acted as "precursors of university-based area studies programs."[21] In 1947, the British government created the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies in Britain (also known as the Scarbrough commission). As Zachary Lockman notes:

…this body had been appointed by the British government to investigate how that country's teaching and research resources on various regions might be sustained and developed; the commission's report, issued that same year, recommended additional funding for universities to strengthen their capacities in this area… the meeting seems to have contributed to the determination of the [American Council of Learned Societies] and the Rockefeller Foundation to at long last get things moving in Near Eastern studies. [22]

President of the Social Science Research Council and first dean of Harvard's School of Public Administration, E. Pendleton Herring, openly called for a "national symphony" of "governmental, business, and academic elites."[23] The Korean War convinced U.S. policy makers of the dire need for area based studies programs. At the time the University of Michigan declared it was "ready to serve in the National Emergency." [24] This "national symphony" quickly developed into a broader national security state, with one of its integral functions being the production of knowledge about the Middle East. Given the increasingly vital role Arab oil to the U.S. economy, it was unacceptable for imperial planners that U.S. knowledge production about the region was so weak. Around 1950, Zachary Lockman suggests there were no more than half a dozen members of the American Political Science Association with a working knowledge of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.[25] Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies was established in 1954 with William L. Langer, of OSS and CIA fame, serving as director. That center was created "after consultation with the State Department, the CIA, U.S. Army Intelligence, Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) and of New York (later Mobil) and Aramco." [26]

The Iraqi coup of 1958, which largely caught U.S. officials off guard, helped convince planners of the need for advanced language training. $61 million was quickly designated for Title VI language programs. [27] For Middle East Studies, the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 was particularly important. Private corporations like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations provided massive funding for area studies, viewing their interests as part and parcel of U.S. state expansion into other parts of the globe. In 1961 the Carnegie Corporation funded a program, run by Princeton, to train candidates at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS) in Lebanon. As Lockman explains, the Center was originally established "by the British Foreign Office at that location in 1947 to teach Arabic to its staff" and many "Lebanese often called it the 'spy school' because a substantial number of its graduates were reputed to work for British or other intelligence agencies." [28] Thus, from the outset of the Cold War academic institutions became directly bound to the U.S. state and its imperial apparatus. However, as Melani McAlister notes, for "various bureaucratic and intellectual reasons, however, Middle East studies in the U.S. did not become fully institutionalized until 1967, when the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) was founded." [29] But even MESA, early in its existence, launched an effort to solicit donations from a broad range of corporations, including oil companies and military contractors. [30]

The euphemism-as-elision camp

This category of literature situates U.S. actions in the Middle East within a series of euphemisms in order to elide the question of empire entirely. "Foreign relations," "diplomatic history," "international relations," "counterinsurgency," and "U.S. assistance" are some of the rhetorical devices employed to conceal the nature of U.S. action in the Middle East. Such rhetoric is meant to dissuade scholars from adopting imperialism as either a lens of analysis or challenging it as an actually existing entity. These authors also tend to write with an imperial audience in mind, including diplomats, policy makers, and other academics implicated in imperial policy-making.

At Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research (BASR), responsible for evaluating U.S. propaganda in Western Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, "euphemism-as-elision" became a kind of official doctrine. In 1950, BASR's Paul Lazarsfeld and Charles Glock explained: "While it is inappropriate to talk about an American empire, it is entirely in place to discuss the large and growing sphere of American influence."[31] One BASR sociologist, Siegfried Kracauer, in his "Appeals to the Near and Middle East," argued that the "Arabs might prove sensitive to Communist intolerance if they get the impression that it is a variant of their own fanaticism."[32] Quintessential Cold War American historians like Walter Laqueur, in his Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (1956), perpetuated such arguments, drawing direct comparisons between the legacy of Islam and the potential flourishing of communism in the Islamic world: "The exhilarating feeling of mission, of purpose, of being engaged in a collective adventure to accelerate the historically inevitable victory of the true faith over the evil infidels are common to classical Islam and to Communism."[33] Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s knowledge production about the Arab world necessarily travelled through imperial circuits while simultaneously denying U.S. empire as an existing phenomenon.

The trend of knowledge production intended to service empire without acknowledging its existence continued throughout the neoliberal decades (mid-1970s onward). These texts now had enough distance to begin producing knowledge on prior chronological eras. One representative text in this tradition is Phillip Baram's The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945, which argued that the United States strategy in the interwar and World War II era was fourfold: 1) enervate the old European powers 2) do not openly engage with the Zionists 3) isolate the Soviets and 4) "encourage individual Arab states to be free, sovereign, and pro-American." [34] David Painter analyzed U.S. oil policy in the first decade of the Cold War, suggesting that the U.S. state developed a symbiotic relationship with the oil companies where the former combatted Third World nationalism while the latter ran quotidian extraction operations. He concluded by suggesting, despite ARAMCO occasionally presenting diplomatic difficulties for the U.S., that this business-government partnership was the most appropriate set-up for the Middle East in the early Cold War era. [35]

As Douglas Little notes, the "nature of Russia's intentions in the Middle East during the late 1940s and the appropriateness of America's response have sparked much scholarly controversy." [36] Whereas scholars like Bruce Kuniholm argued in 1980 that American military aid and diplomatic bravado fended off the Soviets, other scholars like Melvyn Leffler posited twelve years later that American officials exaggerated the Russian threat during the Truman years. [37] One cannot help but notice the timing of each monograph, with the former at the height of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the latter after the Soviet collapse. Scholars like Peter Hahn suggest that while London sought to maintain informal empire in the Middle East, U.S. aspirations were "anticolonial" in nature and meant to contain the Soviets. [38] One prominent scholar, Barry Rubin, suggested U.S. policy towards Iran was "paved with good intentions."[39] The question of U.S. imperialism does not arise at all.

In Egypt, early US contacts with the Nasser government appeared promising, and U.S. scholars have debated what soured relations. Barry Rubin argues it was Nasser's commitment to pan-Arab nationalism, while others blame variously the British, the Soviet Union, or Israel. [40] Something of a consensus had emerged in the 1980s that the Eisenhower administration had overestimated "American economic leverage in Egypt" and underestimated "Nasser's willingness to seek help from the Soviet bloc." [41] Even Douglas Little, who has the widest grasp of the literature discussing the U.S. role in the Middle East, often employs euphemisms that suggest the U.S. was a "stabilizer" in the region. [42] Little further suggests that Kennedy used "personal diplomacy" and American wheat to channel Nasserism into "constructive channels" while encouraging more conservative government to institute reforms. [43]

Little explains that every administration after Lyndon Johnson employed his "three pillars approach" (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran) in order to "promote regional stability," "preserve Western access to Mideast oil," and "protect American interests."[44] Likewise, Little posits that the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958 after the July 14 coup in Iraq was representative of "Ike's ability to restore law and order in Beirut without becoming mired down" in religious strife. [45] Utilizing the language of "national interests" and "law and order" in relationship to U.S. empire is a questionable technique that both conceals the nature of imperialism and discourages the basic question: cui bono? As his career progressed, Little inched closer to employing the word "empire," first in his text American Orientalism (2008), when he casually mentions "America's national security empire" once without any explication. [46] Even his use of "orientalism" is subject to many of the critiques that Melani McAlister levels against using orientalism as a framework in the U.S. context. [47] By 2014, however, Little had identified America's "Informal Empire in the Middle East" in an article for America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941 .[48] This kind of imperial knowledge production has instrumental value to U.S. imperial power and continues to represent a significant trend in academic fields like diplomatic history.[49]

A particularly pernicious development in recent years has been to appropriate and distort the concept of "agency" to obfuscate imperial reality completely. Perhaps the most infamous example of this kind of charlatanry is Roham Alvandi's Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah (2014). Alvandi's text seeks to challenge the well-established view, accepted more or less globally, that the Shah of Iran was simply a client state of the United States. Alvandi contends that the "American proxy" model accurately characterizes the US-Iran relationship of the 1950s, but that the early 1970s represented a brief period where the Shah was an "active agent of history who often abetted and manipulated the superpowers in the pursuit" of regional interests. [50] As with all post-modern academic phrases of dubious design and intent, Alvandi easily employs the "agency" brush to paint the Shah of Iran as something other than a client of US empire. The logic rests on tenuous grounds, notably on the fact that no "partner" can so seamlessly be reduced again to a "client" in a span of a few years, with the shifting of a few individuals in government. Furthermore, Alvandi's suggestion that the Shah took some small-scale prerogatives on his own hardly qualifies as a negation of client-state status.[51] While Kissinger and Nixon may have maintained a more personable relationship with the shah, Iran received nothing on either the scale or scope of the secret memorandum signed by the U.S. and Israel in 1975. [52] As such, his grandiose claims about the Shah's partner status are hardly warranted. Undoubtedly 1979 was a major blow to US imperial prerogatives. The shah's illusions aside, the empire lost a client state, not an imperial partner.

Although the various intellectuals and historians surveyed above have distinct specializations, varied and divergent opinions, and often times express serious disagreement both with each other and their predecessors, two consistencies bind them together: 1) they reject the idea of U.S. empire as an actually existing phenomenon and 2) they write with an imperial audience in mind (those capable of having some influence on imperial policy). As such, whether missionaries cementing American ideological hegemony, BASR sociologists employing Orientalist tropes, or historians analyzing policy while simultaneously denying empire, a vast tradition of knowledge production about the Arab world exists and continues to flourish that is directly bound to U.S. imperial power. By employing euphemism-as-elision, these historians both sanitize the past and project a sense of innocuousness onto policy during the present, stripping the U.S. of its imperialist content.

The empire-as-celebration camp

A more recent phenomenon, particularly after 9/11 and the emergence of the "War on Terror," has been the growth of a literature that explicitly celebrates and encourages U.S. empire. One of the defining features of this literature is that it forcefully asserts the reality of imperialism, positing it as the most auspicious path for the future instead of critiquing U.S. empire as a pernicious force. The distinction between this camp and the euphemism-as-elision camp is not just its emphasis on embracing the notion of empire, but also its audience. Whereas academics who deny the existence of empire service it by cleansing the past and appealing to the ostensibly noble or at least pragmatic intentions of policy makers, the "empire-as-celebration" camp maintains two different audiences. First, like their euphemism-as-elision counterparts, they seek to influence policy. Second, they seek to disperse the idea of the benevolence of U.S. empire amongst the U.S. population more generally. Their choice to publish in popular presses is one way they seek to have a wider impact than highly specialized academic monographs with high-price tags would normally allow. Although this camp may end up as a flash-in-the-pan, they have received a wide audience and it does a disservice to exclude them from the historiography of empire in the Middle East.

Three key figures in this emergence of "empire-as-celebration" camp at the turn of the twenty-first century were Max Boot, Robert Kaplan, and Niall Ferguson. Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace (2002) is a chronologically broad analysis of U.S. economic and military intervention from 1800 to the early 2000s. Borrowing from Kipling, Boot argues that the U.S. has regularly engaged in small "savage wars of peace" intended to "suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world." [53] These wars are, according to Boot, "imperial wars" that also require "chronicling the political course of American empire."[54] Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts (2006) is a much more contemporary account that describes the author's "odyssey through the barracks and outposts of American Empire."[55] Imperialism, according to Kaplan, is "but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world, and in the process to become subject to all the world's anxieties."[56] It is a muddy definition, one that hardly means anything or elucidates the actual motor forces of imperialism, but this kind of definition also lends itself to a sort of celebratory cause. Kaplan asserts that this definition of empire implies that those carrying it out are often in "half denial." Unlike the conscript armies of World War II, there now exists a "professional military that, true to other imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its own sake." [57] Truer to reality than many of the euphemism-as-elision camp, Kaplan argues that "the very opposition to imperial influence constitutes proof of its existence." [58] Afghanistan and Iraq form two of the core objects of imperial policy for Kaplan.

Niall Ferguson makes what is perhaps the most important intervention in this literature. The Oxford and Hoover Institution research fellow has earned himself a spot on Time's 100 most influential people list. While it is true that his scholarship is rife with errors, particularly with regard to the Middle East,[59] academics that dismiss his work do so at their own peril. Leaving the realm of popular engagement to the most reactionary and overtly imperialist scholars, even when they are objectively wrong about simple facts, entails sacrificing the possibility of engaging with a wider audience outside of the confines of the ivory tower. Ferguson's 2004 work Colossus posits a fourfold thesis: 1) the U.S. has always been empire, functionally if not self-consciously; 2) a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but 3) financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and 4) therefore the American empire will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.[60] Ferguson implores an American audience to embrace their imperialist role, and adopt a self-conscious and long-term form of empire building. To deal with the "manpower deficit" required to maintain a massive military presence overseas, particularly in the Middle East, Ferguson puts forward a solution: "If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army." [61] Simply because academics dismiss the empire-as-celebration camp does not render them politically impotent, as Niall Ferguson's advisory role to John "100 Years in Iraq" McCain in 2008 exemplifies.

The "imperial-as-lens" camp

The "imperial-as-lens" camp is also a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that has thus far remained a largely academic exercise. One of the most ardent proponents of this tradition is Paul Kramer, who in 2011 penned an important piece titled "Power and Connection: Imperial history of the United States and the World." In it, he argues forcefully for the "imperial-as-lens" analysis, arguing that older generations of both Marxists and Foucauldian scholars have employed either "structural" or "all-saturating" accounts of power, respectively. [62] This "thinning of empire" to only include its "exceptionally repressive" attributes mistakes a "part for a whole."[63] In its place, Kramer posits the need for:

….a category of analysis, not a kind of entity, something to think with more than think about… A language of the 'imperial' rather than 'empire' can help avoid connotations of unity and coherence-thingness-that tend to adhere to the latter term, and move to the side the mostly unproductive question of whether the United States is or has "an empire"-and if so, what type it is, and whether or not it measures up to the rubrics built to account for other empires. Far more is to be gained by exploring the imperial as a way of seeing than by arguing for or against the existence of a 'U.S. empire.' [64]

Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework thus eschews the question of whether or not the U.S. is an empire, rejecting generations of analysis by scholars and revolutionaries alike that have identified it as such.

Kramer's most renowned work, Blood of Government (2006), deals with the question of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines (a subject that hardly benefits from the "unproductive question" of whether the U.S. is an empire, given how blatant the imperial project was). The lack of theoretical rigor can be seen when Kramer describes empire as "exercising sovereignty and power over peoples denied the rights that were increasingly coming to define the modern nation-state: it meant inventing ideologies to calibrate inclusion in these expanding and hierarchical polities." [65] The reader quickly notices that imperialism is a fundamentally non-economic act for Kramer. Instead, empire is primarily a question of race and power. To what ends remains unclear; perhaps a reflex of modernity, perhaps as an end in itself. Nothing appears to actually drive empire in Kramer's narrative, given that he offers no explanatory power for the nature of imperial expansion. At his worst, Kramer makes assertions that mean virtually nothing at all, such as the following: "Along the multiple nodes that linked colonizing and colonized societies, simultaneous glances upward and downward along novel axes of power formed new symbolic economies of hope, terror, and identification." [66] Unintelligible passages such as these raise questions regarding the efficacy of the "imperialism-as-lens" approach.

Examples of the "imperial-as-lens" framework being applied to the Middle East exist, and represent various levels of usefulness. For instance, Karine Walther's Sacred Interests (2015) approvingly cites Kramer's "imperial-as-lens" framework in her introduction. She rather successfully explores how different American actors "justified their impingement on Muslim rulers' sovereignty as part of a broader imperial civilizing mission rather than a crude commercial or strategic grab for territory and power."[67] By noting how missionaries and non-state actors adopted an imperial mindset in their dealings with the Muslim world, she pushes the chronological boundaries of U.S. imperialism backwards and explains how these developments set the ideological stage for future material endeavors. Yet, as others have noted, with the exception of the section on the Moros of the Philippines, "the link between religion and diplomatic/imperialist action could be more fully substantiated." [68] Walther's emphasis on "the imperial" does not help the reader interpret calls for an interventionist foreign policy particularly when the U.S. did not pursue one, as in many of the book's case studies.

Osamah Khalil's America's Dream Palace (2016) is another text that fits within the imperial-as-lens camp. Although Khalil does acknowledge the U.S. as an empire, his primary focus is on the imperial gaze and how U.S. actors of varied stripes understood the Middle East. [69] Khalil contends that U.S. national security interests were a driving force in the emergence of Middle East expertise. A "mutually beneficial relationship" [70] developed between the national security establishment and academia that galvanized Middle East studies programs and area studies more broadly. Eventually, as the national security state relied less on academia, intelligence became privatized as think-tanks supplied state actors with "useful knowledge." Borrowing from Said, Khalil asserts that "Orientalism influenced the analysis, formation, and implementation of American policies" in the Middle East over the past century.[71] In short, the development of Middle East studies was "an articulation of American power, Orientalism and exceptionalism, as well as their limits." [72] One of the problems with Khalil's text is the framework of Orientalism that he employs does not always elucidate how the process of knowledge production informs actual policy. For instance, despite racial and religious tropes inherent in orientalist discourse (particularly vis-à-vis the inferiority of Islam), the reader never gets a sense from Khalil's book that U.S. imperial policy was frequently to support reactionary religious elements to stifle secular leftist politics.

One direction this "imperial-as-lens" analysis has taken more recently is to deal with the way non-state actors in the imperial center, particularly the Black liberation movement in the U.S., have engaged with the Arab and Muslim world. The text that opened the door for this new wave of scholarship was Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012) by Sohail Daulatzai. On Daulatzai's heels came two major academic works discussing the subject, Geographies of Liberation (2014) by Alex Lubin and A Shadow over Palestine (2015) by Keith Feldman. Notwithstanding some quality content, these works all suffer from the deficiencies intrinsic to esoteric academic postmodern discourse (a juncture where the question of audience is particularly vital). In this case, the intellectual frameworks designed to understand transnational solidarities and their anti-imperialist content lack theoretical rigor. Daulatzai's "Muslim International" relies heavily on Chatterjee's "fragments of the nation" concept.[73] Furthermore, the entire analysis is plagued by a sort of poststructuralist analysis that is both exhausting to read and largely meaningless. [74] Lubin's "geographies of liberation" introduces an entire lexicon of jumbled postmodern (occasionally "countermodern") jargon. [75] In Feldman there is much of the same.[76] Although the question of intellectual frameworks is possibly ancillary, it is also an area of the historiography that desperately needs clarity.

The anti-imperialist camp

Historians emphasizing the concrete realities of empire, what may be called the anti-imperialist camp within the historiography, stand in rather stark contradistinction to the "imperial-as-lens" camp and its obsession with discourse. These writers not only recognize U.S. empire, they tend to actively criticize it and, with varying levels of vigor, encourage resistance to it. Works like Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire (2004) and Sowing Crisis (2009) explicitly consider the U.S. as an empire. Some popular texts, such as Robert Dreyfuss' Devil's Game (2005), have also tried their hand at documenting the nuances of imperial policy. In Dreyfuss' case, this includes detailing the ways in which the United States "spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold War allies," and explicitly calls for the U.S. to "abandon its imperial pretensions in the Middle East." [77] A few of the recent and representative texts include Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings (2009), Robert Vitalis' America's Kingdom (2006), and Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (2013).

In many ways, Lloyd Gardner's Three Kings sits most squarely in the intellectual lineage of William Appleby Williams and his critique of U.S. Empire as "tragedy." [78] In essence, Gardner argues that the Truman Doctrine was the "essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II" and laid the foundation for the "imperial presidency." [79] The purpose was not to "fend off the Soviets" but to "shore up friendly governments in strategic areas." Finally, the doctrine addressed the problem of how to replace the British in Middle East. Although John Foster Dulles adopted "International Communism" as an ideological weapon, the principal purpose of American imperial policy was not to deter a Russian attack but to "ensure the loyalty of the countries receiving aid and to maintain their governments in power against internal threats." [80]

America's Kingdom by Robert Vitalis is a text that places "our understanding of ARAMCO… in the long history of empire" and challenges American exceptionalist accounts that purport "to prove American enterprise to be anything but agents of empire." [81] One of the ways he does this is by articulating the vital function of race to the organization of oil production. ARAMCO fought tooth and nail to perpetuate a system of racial discrimination, including significant differentials in wages, working conditions, and housing. In large part this system was intended to lower costs but also enervate the organizational capacities of workers. The American oil giant explained deportations of oil workers by suggesting they were adherents of the "'the Communist line, particularly as regards evils of capitalism and racial discrimination.'" [82] At other junctures ARAMCO's security department worked with Saudi forces to imprison and deport organizers. Unfortunately, Vitalis' understanding of the function that Israel plays as part of parcel of U.S. empire is flawed, and detracts from the analytical rigor of his work.

Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy is a vital intervention in the historiography of oil and oil politics in the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to British and later U.S. imperialism. Challenging the older literature that focuses solely on the corrupting influence of oil money, Mitchell persuasively argues that oil as a commodity, including its physical properties, is fundamental to understanding political power. Mitchell posits that coal allowed, for a brief period of time at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the "era of the Mass Strike" (a la Luxemburg). In essence, Mitchell posits that "dependence on coal" provided the opportunity to "build more democratic forms of politics" [83] while the "conversion to oil provided imperialists like Churchill with the means to evade those democratic demands."[84] The transition to oil was a conscious effort on behalf of U.S. imperial planers in the post-World War II era, utilizing the Marshall plan (half of all oil supplied to Marshall plan countries was subsidized by U.S. companies during 1948-51, making U.S. oil companies the largest beneficiaries of Marshall Plan aid) to reconfigure European energy. [85] Most importantly, Mitchell departs from the three other camps by urging the reader to identify the "points of vulnerability" in the current "socio-technical system" in order to be able to leverage collective forms of power and reshape the world in a more egalitarian and democratic manner. [86]

As seen above, authors in the anti-imperialist tradition, whether they are analyzing specific U.S. policies in a more traditional diplomatic manner or discussing the socio-technical vulnerabilities of carbon politics in the Middle East, tend to both accept U.S. empire as an existing structure and encourage some kind of resistance to it. Mitchell, for instance, by citing the examples of coal workers attempting to engage in mass strikes at a time when such ventures were made possible by material conditions, encourages the readers of today to identify new points of vulnerability. By publishing in a popular press like Verso, Mitchell also avoids falling into the trap of reaching out only to other academics. While still engaging in mainstream academic life, Mitchell avoids, as per the warning of E.P. Thompson, becoming "wholly dependent upon establishing institutions." [87] The anti-imperialist tradition has done well describing the sinews of U.S. imperialism, analyzing some of its strengths and exposing some potential vulnerabilities. In the future, the anti-imperialist tradition must deal seriously with transnational anti-imperialist solidarities, their relationship to imperialism and U.S. empire more broadly, and potential vulnerabilities that could arise (outside of the realm of discourse alone) for anti-imperialist actors. Thus far, transnational solidarities have been largely left to the "imperial-as-lens" tradition, and as such remain relatively confined to the ivory tower.

Conclusion

The four camps delineated in this essay represent fundamentally distinct historiographies. Two variables, the author's relationship to U.S. empire and their audience, help determine these conceptual categories. The euphemism-as-elision camp denies the existence of U.S. empire and generally sets as its audience other academics, policy makers, diplomats, etc. (in order to tweak certain policies and make U.S. empire function more smoothly). The empire-as-celebration camp gleefully embraces U.S. imperialism, and sets as its audience both policy makers as well as the general population (who it attempts to convince of the merits of self-conscious imperial subjects). The imperial-as-lens camp tacitly accepts the existence of U.S. empire, or at least embraces the need for an "imperial historiography," but often does so primarily with other academics in mind (and as such this camp remains largely confined to academia). Finally, the anti-imperialist camp not only accepts the existence of U.S. Empire, especially its structural form, but actively encourages resistance to it, both by academics and those outside of academia. Given that academics lack the sort of political power which grows from the barrel of the gun, our definition of the phenomenon of U.S. imperialism is one of the most powerful weapons we possess. As such, the camp we choose to align ourselves with, in order to make the phenomenon of empire act in the manner we desire, is a question of significant strategic importance.

Notes

[1] "Problems of War and Strategy" (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224. Available here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm

[2] Huey Newton, "Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I," June 5, 1971 in David Hilliard, The Huey P. Newton Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2002). Newton's definition came in the midst of his schism with Eldridge Cleaver, who continued to cling to the more militant Black internationalist path while Newton attempted to redirect the Black Panther Party along communitarian and reformist lines. See Sean Malloy, "Diverging Directions in Oakland and Algiers, 1970-1" in Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Cornell Press, 2017).

[3] See Douglas Little, "Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East Since 1945," in Michael J. Hogan, America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

[4] Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009), 9-10.

[5] Quoted in Walid W. Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and his Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism (St. Martin's Press, 1975), 61.

[6] Samir Amin, "The US Imperialism and the Middle East."

[7] For more on Syria see Patrick Higgins, "The Enemy at Home: U.S. Imperialism in Syria," Viewpoint Magazine (Feb. 2018) and "The War on Syria," Jacobin (Aug. 2015).

[8] Michael Parenti. Against Empire (City Lights, 1995), 1. Two decades later, Parenti modifies this definition slightly: "The dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country." The Face of Imperialism (Routledge, 2011), 7.

[9] Richard Drayton, "Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism." Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 2011), 679.

[10] Ibid., 680.

[11] Ibid., 680-1.

[12] Karine Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 170.

[13] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009). See Chapter 2, "The United States Moves into the Middle East."

[14] Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2016), 101.

[15] Walther, Sacred Interests, 9.

[16] Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell Press, 2015).

[17] See Osamah Khalil, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State (Harvard University Press, 2016), 10-22.

[18] Khalil, 38.

[19] Walther, 297.

[20] Khalil, 117-120. Ironically, these missionary schools often exercised a level of independence from U.S. policy that their stateside counterparts, the real "Cold War Universities" of the 1950s and 1960s, were unable to maintain. AUC, for instance, seriously challenged Truman's position on Palestine in 1947-8, while AUB was derided by British officials as a "center of communist activity in the Middle East." Ibid., 125.

[21] Khalil,40.

[22] Lockman, Field Notes, 82.

[23] Khalil., 97.

[24] Ibid., 92.

[25] Lockman, 102.

[26] Lockman, 134.

[27] Khalil, 165.

[28] Lockman, 158.

[29] McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (University of California Press, 2005), 36.

[30] However, as Lockman points out, its only positive response came from Northrop Grumman. By the 1980s, however, MESA did receive modest donations from other large oil companies, 194-5.

[31] Khalil, 187.

[32] Ibid., 190.

[33] Walter Laqueur, Nationalism and Communism in the Middle East (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1956), 347. See footnote 19.

[34] Philip Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East, 1919-1945 (KTAV Publishing House, 1978), 56-7

[35] David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1954 (John Hopkins University Press, 1986).

[36] Little, "Gideon's Band ," 467.

[37] Bruce R. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, 1980) and Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992).

[38] Peter L. Hahn, United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill, 1991).

[39] Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (New York, 1980).

[40] Barry Rubin, "America and the Egyptian Revolution, 1950-1957," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 1 (Spring, 1982).

[41] Little, "Gideon's Band," 479. Here Little cites Gail E. Meyer's Egypt and the United States: The Formative Years (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1981) and Geoffrey Aronson, From Sideshow to Center Stage: U.S. Policy toward Egypt, 1946-1956 (Lynne Rienner, 1986).

[42] "After Eisenhower's dollar diplomacy forced Britain out of Egypt… the United States stood ready to try its hand at stabilizing the Middle East." Ibid., 485.

[43] Douglas Little, "The New Frontier on the Nile: JFK, Nasser, and Arab Nationalism," Journal of American History 75 (September 1988)

[44] Little, "Gideon's Band," 497.

[45] Little, "Gideon's Band," 489. Little rather uncritically borrows from Alan Dowty's 1984 work Middle East Crisis: US. Decision-Making in 1958, 1970, and 1973 to praise Eisenhower for "wisely relying on a tightly knit and level-headed group of decision makers who shared an 'operational code' that placed a high premium in July 1958 on ensuring American credibility with pro-Western regimes in the Middle East."

[46] Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). It is fairly easy to dismiss this as a kind of metaphor or simply rhetorical flair.

[47] See McAlister, Epic Encounters. These critiques can in some ways be leveled against Osamah Khalil's work America's Dream Palace as well.

[48] "Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America's Informal Empire in the Middle East," in America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941, edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014, pp. 212-35.

[49] Many of these articles read like policy briefs. See, for instance, Eric Jacobsen, "A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba'th Regime," Diplomatic History, vol. 37 (November 2013). One notices the neutrality of the term "monarchy," the ambivalent use of "regime," and the quite pejorative employment of "dictatorship." For more on the 1963 coup, see Matthews, Weldon C. "The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Ba'thist Regime." International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43 (November 2011). Writing about 1968 Ba'athist coup against the Nasserist 'Abd al-Rahman 'Arif, Avneri Natenal argues that the "State Department was too sanguine regarding the Ba'th approach towards the IPC and its neighbors."[49] Furthermore, while some U.S. actors may have had connections with opponents of the 'Arif government, Avneri assures the reader that "the American government tried to move away from foreign intervention at this time." See Avneri, Netanel. "The Iraqi Coups of July 1968 and the American Connection," Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 51, no. 4 (2015), 659.

[50] Oddly, the author presents the Shah as a "third world actor," hardly a title the Shah would willingly apply to himself. Roham Alvandi. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 2014), 3.

[51] Nearly all client states have some autonomy to pursue small-scale initiatives. Furthermore, on most things of importance to grand imperial strategy, the Shah was forced to receive U.S. backing. . The shah's selling of the Kurds down the river was, in the long term, negligent to US empire, who a few years prior cared little about the Kurdish question. To Alvandi's credit, his chapter on the Kurds is by far the most intriguing, as it details the Iranian-Israeli-US intervention in (and facilitation of) the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict. In essence, Alvandi argues that the US was reluctantly drug into the Kurdish situation by the Shah. Both the Mossad and SAVAK had ties with Barzani and the Iraqi Kurds as early as 1958, with both intelligence agencies bent on destabilizing the revolutionary Qasim government and, later, the Ba'ath government. The "reluctant Americans" were brought in only later, and US aid started flowing in large quantities in 1972. As late as September 1974, Ford approved Israeli support in the form of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles of Soviet manufacture.

[52] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. 26, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1974-1976, Memoranda of Agreement, September 1, 1975 (Document 227).

[53] Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Military Power (Basic Books, 2002). E-copy (read in Microsoft Edge), no page numbers available.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military On The Ground (Vintage, 2006).

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.,

[59] See, as one example, Ferguson's sloppy chronology and merging of fundamentally distinct organizations (with widely disparate strategies and ideologies) into a kind of monolithic threat: "Though the PLO had been struck a severe blow by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1980s saw the emergence of new groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas. Whereas the PLO had owed more to nationalism and Marxism, this new generation of terrorists identified themselves primarily with Islam." Neither Abu Nidal nor the PFLP were founded in the 1980s, and in fact the PFLP's strength was already waning by then (their heyday in the 1970s). Neither could Abu Nidal or the PFLP be associated with a new generation of Islamists. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin, 2005). E-copy, read in Microsoft Edge, no page numbers available.

[60] Ferguson.

[61] Ferguson continues: "One of the keys to the expansion of the Roman Empire was, after all, the opportunity offered to non-Romans to earn citizenship through military service. One of the mainsprings of British colonization was the policy of transportation that emptied the prison hulks of eighteenth-century England into ships bound for Australia. Reviving the draft would not necessarily be unpopular, so long as it was appropriately targeted."

[62] Paul Kramer, "Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World," American Historical Review (December 2011), 1378.

[63] Ibid., 1378.

[64] Ibid., 1350.

[65] Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

[66] Ibid., 3.

[67] Walther, 9.

[68] Jay Sexton. Review of Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 by Karine V. Walther. The American Historical Review, Vol. 122, Issue 2 (April 2017), 472-4.

[69] Still, he provides no definition of empire, and it is unclear exactly what he means by this.

[70] Khalil, 3.

[71] Ibid., 5

[72] Ibid., 8

[73] Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxiii. For a rather convincing and forceful demolition of Chatterjee and his brand of subaltern studies, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital.

[74] For Daulatzai the "Muslim International" is "not geographically located." Furthermore, it "is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition." It "recognizes that there is no space outside of domination and that power is omnipresent." He claims that since universalizing claims and grand narratives "have the potential to warp our sense of how power works and operates, the Muslim International also sees the local and everyday as potential sites for movement, activity, and subversion." Power, then, is "far from being static and top-down" but is instead a "process that is activated and actualized everywhere." Finally, the Muslim International is a "space where the very idea of the 'political' can come under scrutiny" by the fact that "all activity is political." As such, the Muslim International "can be a shadow or parallel space to the state." Daulatzai, xxii-xxvii.

[75] See Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7-8. For his reading of intersections as "countermodern" see the following: "In this project, I read modern histories of black Americans, Palestinians, and Jews relationally and in terms of shared histories of exclusion, exile, and countermodern political imaginaries." Lubin, 13.

[76] Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7-16. Despite his convoluted prose when explicating his primary framework "U.S. imperial culture," the idea is generally intelligible and coherent; other frameworks not so much. His sections "On Racial Relationality" and "On Comparativity" are significantly more convoluted and, hence, significantly less useful.

[77] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan, 2006), 1 and 15. Mitchell articulates a new portmanteau "McJihad" used to explain why the "more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics." See Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 201.

[78] See William Appleby Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams, from UW-Madison, was a prominent New Left historian who would eventually inspire a generation of historians to rethink the Cold War, including Gar Alperovitz (best known for his revisionist thesis on the use of the Atomic bomb in Hiroshima), Walter LaFeber (who has been highly critical of U.S. empire in Central America, for instance), and Lloyd Gardner.

[79] Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (The New Press, 2009), 3.

[80] Ibid., 14

[81] Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2006), Vitalis, xiv.

[82] Ibid., 118. Although occasionally officials did admit that not all the workers "followed the communist line" and that some were "not even aware of the communist line." See 104 and 152.

[83] The fact that coal required an immense concentration of human labor for extraction, transportation, and conversion to energy was one factor. Coal also faced important bottlenecks in transportation due to the dendritic transit routes it relied upon. Finally, coal was largely delimited by the geographic region it was mined in and was not easily transportable across oceans. These factors combined allowed for workers to leverage these points of vulnerability and make society-wide social and economic demands.

[84] Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013), 61. In contrast with coal, the transition to oil was meant partially to permanently disempower workers in the post-World War II era. The reasons for this are many. First, oil requires less human labor, and is significantly more capital than labor intensive. Whereas coal was confined geographically, oil is a fundamentally global commodity, with production points all over the world controlled by a handful of corporations. Oil is easily moved via pipelines and tankers, and as such moves more along a grid-like system then the dendritic networks of coal. This grid-like system of movement means oil is significantly less vulnerable when stoppages or sabotage occurs, significantly weakening the power of organized labor.

[85] Ibid., 29-30.

[86] Ibid., 241.

[87] E. P. Thompson argued that radical academics had to occupy "some territory that is, without qualification, their own: their own journals, their own theoretical and practical centers - places where no one works for grades or for tenure but for the transformation of society." Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 459-60. It is my hope that the Hampton Institute continues to contribute to that objective for a long time to come.

US-Saudi Ties: Drenched in Blood, Oil, and Deceit

By Joyce Chediac

Why do Donald Trump and the CIA disagree about the recent killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Turkey?

The CIA concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, personally ordered the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi. In an extraordinary statement for a U.S. president, Trump disputed the CIA findings. He said it didn't matter if MBS-as the Saudi ruler is known-was or was not involved in the Khashoggi killing, and that U.S.-Saudi relations are "spectacular."

Trump's statement reflects his narrow cultivation of business relations with MBS, while the CIA's announcement reflects the view that that MBS has become a liability for the U.S. ruling class as a whole. The spy agency, which has deep ties to Saudi intelligence, fears that bin Salman's reckless and impulsive actions could jeopardize the security of the whole Saudi ruling clique, endangering U.S. ruling class interests in Saudi Arabia and the entire Middle East.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has been one of the most strategic and valuable U.S. client states, and the CIA wants to keep it that way. Support for Saudi Arabia is completely bi-partisan. This partnership is drenched in blood, oil, and deceit.

A review of U.S.-Saudi ties shows that Saudi Arabia anchors the U.S. empire in the Middle East. The kingdom, with the greatest oil reserves in the world, is a source of fabulous wealth for U.S. oil companies. The Saudis use their oil capacity to raise and lower world prices to further U.S. foreign policy aims. In the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan, got the Saudis to flood the market with oil to reduce the world price as part of an economic war against the Soviet Union.

The kingdom willingly uses religion as a cover for imperialism's aims, exporting thousands of schools, mosques, and other centers that preach intolerance and recruit jihadists for U.S. wars. It allows the U.S. to invade other Arab countries from its territory and has funded covert CIA actions on three continents. It is treated like a cash cow for U.S. corporations and banks. It uses its vast stash of petrodollars to buy billions of dollars in Pentagon weapons at inflated prices, as well as other high-price U.S. products and services.

The country is ruled as the personal fiefdom of one family, the al-Sauds. The government is one of the most repressive and misogynistic in the world. There is no parliament or legislature. The first elections, and then only on a municipal level, took place in 2005, 73 years after the country was formed. Women were only allowed to vote in 2015. These incontestable facts go unmentioned by U.S. officials, Democrats and Republican alike.

While Washington claims to be a protector of human rights abroad, the Pentagon has pledged to send in troops if a mass movement tries to overthrow the Saudi regime.

A country birthed by imperialism

Britain and France emerged victorious after World War I. They carved Western Asia into more than 20 countries, drawing borders to weaken and dismember Arab and other indigenous national groups, and to facilitate imperialist domination.

That's when Saudi Arabia was created. Its rulers, the al Saud and the Wahhabi families and followers merged into a political-religious alliance. The Saudi Arabia we know was established 1932, when the Saudis agreed to stop harassing other British protectorates, and to accept Britain's definition of their borders.

Saudi Arabia's rulers were among the first far-right Islamists assisted by imperialism. They set up an absolute monarchy and theocracy. The only constitution was the Koran as interpreted by the royal family. Slavery was legal until 1962.

Wahhabism, a form of Islam aggressively intolerant of other currents of that faith, and in opposition to secular governments, became the state religion. Saudi Arabia's control of the most important sites in Islam-Mecca and Medina- gave it prestige it had not earned in the Muslim world.

Enter U.S. oil companies and the Pentagon

In 1933, the kingdom granted Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) exclusive oil drilling rights. Huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938, promoting the formation of ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) by Standard Oil and 3 other U.S. partners that later became Texaco, Exxon, and Mobil.

Saudi Arabia would soon be the country with the world's largest known oil reserves. It would be the greatest oil producer in the world. And U.S. companies were pumping it.

Diplomatic recognition soon followed. In 1943, President Roosevelt declared the security of Saudi Arabia a "vital interest" of the United States. The U.S. opened an embassy in the country the next year.

The Pentagon soon arrived to secure the oil. In 1950, the U.S. established the Sixth Naval Fleet as a permanent military presence in the Mediterranean. In 1951, after signing the Mutual Defense Agreement, the U.S. began arming the Saudi government and training its military.

Since World War II, the U.S. empire has been built on controlling the oil flowing from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was the linchpin of this control.

Waging holy war for Washington: 'Our faith and your iron'

Following World War II, a wave of militancy and nationalism swept the Arab world. Mass secular movements in Algeria and Iraq overthrew colonial puppets. South Yemen declared itself socialist. The Egyptian and Syrian people deposed imperialist client rule. Many of the new progressive regimes and liberation struggles were aided by the Soviet Union

The thinking of U.S. policymakers was, as Rachel Bronson puts it, "that religion could be a tool to staunch the expansion of godless communism."

Saudi rulers happily complied. The founder of modern Saudi Arabia told U.S. Minister to Saudi Arabia, Colonel William A. Eddy, "Our faith and your iron."

Arab anti-imperialism was especially inflamed by the 1948 destruction of Palestine and the creation of Israel. To undercut this, the Eisenhower administration set out to increase the renown of King Saud, making him 'the senior partner of the Arab team."

A State Department memo documents expectations that the Saudis would redirect Arab anger from Israel to the Soviet Union:

"The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the "holy war" aspect. [Secretary of State] Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a "holy war" they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism."

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Saudis gave shelter to extremists seeking to topple nationalist governments. The kingdom started funding a network of schools and mosques that recruited jihadists for the CIA in Soviet republics with Muslim populations, and in poor Muslim countries in Asia and Africa. This included " facilitating contacts between the CIA and religious pilgrims visiting Mecca ."

The oil weapon

Some members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have advocated using oil as a weapon to force Israel to give up Palestinian land. Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer of OPEC, has staunchly opposed this. While calling for "separating oil from politics," the kingdom has repeatedly raised and lowered world oil prices to advance U.S. foreign policy.

There have been exceptions. To maintain credibility among the Arab world, Saudi Arabia joined the OPEC oil embargos against the U.S. and other governments supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. The 1967 embargo lacked OPEC consensus and was not effective. Saudi Arabia agreed to join the 1973 embargo only after the U.S. promised $2.2 billion in emergency military aid to Israel, giving it an advantage in the fighting.

The 1973 oil embargo did not cause international shortages, as many oil producers didn't honor it. However, U.S. companies used the embargo to hold back oil supplies, raise prices, and increase profits. Occidental Petroleum's 1973 earnings were 665 percent higher than those the year before. By the end of 1974, Exxon Corporation moved to the top of the Fortune 500 list. Four other oil companies-Texaco, Mobil, Standard Oil of California and Gulf-joined Exxon in the top seven rankings .

In 1970, the Saudis organized the "Safari Club," a coalition of governments that conducted covert operations in Africa after the U.S. Congress restrained CIA actions. It sent arms to Somalia and helped coordinate attacks on Ethiopia, which was then aligned with the Soviet Union. It funded UNITA, a proxy of the South African apartheid government fighting in Angola.

More recently, the Saudi government likely drove down oil prices in 2014 in order to weaken the Russian and Iranian economies as punishment for supporting the Syrian government.

However, the U.S. ruling class has had it both ways with Saudi Arabia several times. While the country is a key client state of the U.S., the Saudis have also served as convenience scapegoats. When energy costs spike, causing considerable hardship among U.S. working-class families, for instance, the U.S. rulers hypocritically and suddenly start talking about the Saudi royal family, its thousands of princes, their gold bathtubs, and other extremes paid for by petrodollars.

Manufacturing a Sunni-Shia rift

In 1979, a mass revolutionary upsurge in Iran overthrew the Shah, a hated U.S.-backed dictator, establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new government nationalized Iran's huge oil reserves. That same year, an armed band of Sunni fundamentalists denounced the Saudi royal family and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking tens of thousands of religious pilgrims hostage. Hundreds of hostages were killed in the retaking of the mosque. Both events shook the Saudi rulers to their core. They responded by diverting attention to Iran. They began a religious campaign against Shia Iran, claiming they were enemies of Sunni Islam. They upped funding for Sunni jihadists worldwide, encouraging them to hate other strains of Islam, other religions, and secularism.

There was no significant conflict between Sunnis and Shias in the modern era. Saudi rulers fomented it in an attempt to turn Sunnis against the Iranian revolution. Since then, all national liberation struggles or groups fighting for some degree of independence that have Shia members have been falsely labeled as agents of Iran. These include Hezbollah-viewed by Arab progressives as the central force in the national liberation movement of Lebanon-the amalgam of forces fighting Saudi domination in Yemen, and oppressed Shia minorities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis bought out the ARAMCO oil company in 1980. But this did not make Saudi Arabia independent. The oil was still controlled by U.S. companies, especially ExxonMobil, through their ownership of oil pumping and other technology, oil tanker fleets, storage facilities, etc.

Funding the Mujahideen and the Contras

In 1978, the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan took control of the country in a coup. It promoted land distribution and built hospitals, road, and schools in one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. It did this with the help of the Soviet Union. The new government banned forced marriages and gave women the right to right to vote. Revolutionary Council member Anahita Ratebzad gave the new government's view in a New Kabul Times editorial (May 28, 1978).

"Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention."

Seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government, the U.S. covertly supported rural tribes that were opposed to the recent social changes, especially women's rights and secularism. The groups attacked the new rural schools and killed women teachers. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent in troops to support the government.

From 1979-89 the Saudi kingdom recruited reactionary mujahideen forces and financed them to the tune of $3 billion. The CIA formally matched the Saudi funding.

In 1984, when the Reagan administration sought help with its secret plan to fund Contra militias and death squads in Nicaragua , the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. pledged $1 million a month. Saudi Arabia spent a total of $32 million supporting the Contras. The contributions continued even after Congress cut off funding to the them.

U.S. would stop an internal revolution

In 1981, Ronald Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said that the U.S. would not let the Saudi government be overthrown, and that it would send troops to defend the Saudi regime if necessary: "We would not stand by, in the event of Saudi requests, as we did before with Iran, and allow a government that had been totally unfriendly to the United States and to the Free World to take over." The U.S. would intervene "if there should be anything that resembled an internal revolution in Saudi Arabia, and we think that's very remote."

This is a regime that allows no human rights or freedom of speech; where virtually all the work was done by migrants who are super-exploited and have no chance of becoming citizens; where all women are considered legal minors and require an appointed male 'guardian' to supervise them and give permission for getting married, obtaining a passport, traveling, enrolling in a school; where in some court cases, a women's testimony is worth half as much as man's.

Saudi Arabia, 9/11, and extremism

Decades of funding extremist centers to recruit shock troops for CIA wars helped create radical Islamist groupings and individuals. Al-Qaeda's founder, Osama Bin Laden, is a prime example. He was a Saudi citizen and a key recruiter of Saudi fighters to Afghanistan.

Fifteen out of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 1, 2001 were Saudi nationals. One might think that if the Pentagon were to retaliate against any country for the 9/11attack, it would be Saudi Arabia. Not so. While it took a few months to sort things out, the upshot was tighter security ties between Washington and Riyadh.

Instead, Washington sent troops to Afghanistan ostensibly to force the Taliban government to turn over Bin Laden, who was seeking shelter there (even though the Taliban offered to surrender Bin Laden). Ironically, another reason cited was to protect Afghani women from the Taliban that Washington installed. Many believe, however, that a more pressing reason for Wall Street and the Pentagon was that the Taliban government would not permit the U.S. to build gas and oil pipelines through Afghanistan to bring oil from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

In 2010,Wikileaks published secret Saudi diplomatic cables revealing that the Saudis had the dubious distinction of being the "most significant" source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups (like al Qaeda) worldwide.

Other published cables confirm how the the Saudis cynically use religious shrines in their control. Jihadists soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims. They then set up front companies to launder and receive money from government-sanctioned charities.

In 2013, under operation Timber Sycamore, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. partnered to fund, arm, and train jihadists in Syria.

The wars on Iraq

As the Soviet Union neared collapse, the Pentagon took aim at governments in the Middle East that weren't fully under its thumb. Iraq was the first target. When Kuwait waged economic war against Iraq, including the use of slant drilling technology to penetrate the border and steal Iraqi oil, the Iraqi government sent troops into Kuwait. This was the pretext for the U.S. to form an imperialist coalition to invade Iraq. The Saudis officially requested the U.S to send in troops. The Pentagon stationed 500,000 soldiers in the kingdom, and used Saudi soil as a base to invade Iraq, and later to enforce sanctions and a no-fly zone.

The Sept. 11 attack served as a pretext to invade Iraq in 2003. The corporate media whipped up a hysteria that Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, even though the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda were on opposite ends of the Middle East political spectrum, had no relations, and did not cooperate. U.S. and British leaders fabricated "evidence" that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons and posed an imminent threat to the world.

Once again, Saudi Arabia proved essential. U.S. coordinated attacks on Iraq out of the Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, where some 10,000 troops were stationed. U.S. Special Operations Forces operated out of the country, which tapped into oil reserves to stabilize oil prices.

Subsidizing the U.S. arms industry

For decades, the Saudis have bought large amounts of U.S. weaponry at inflated prices. These purchases peaked under the Obama administration when Saudi Arabia agreed to spend over $110 billion on U.S. weapons, aircraft, helicopters, and air-defense missiles. This made it the largest purchase of U.S. arms in history. These weapons are not for defense. The purchases are far more than is needed for any purpose for a country with 22 million people. In effect, the Saudis are subsidizing the U.S. arms industry. Most of the military equipment sits in the desert.

Of course, the arms are used when needed. When the people of neighboring Bahrain rose up against a backward and repressive regime and Saudi ally in 2011, the Saudi military rode across sovereign borders on U.S. tanks and crushed the uprising. There was no outcry from Washington.

Waging genocide in Yemen

Additionally, in 2015 Saudi Arabia started a war to dominate Yemen. The war is currently at a stalemate, with the Saudi bombings and blockade responsible for a cholera epidemic, indiscriminate civilian deaths, and starvation, in what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of children have died from disease and starvation. The war is waged with U.S. arms. U.S. advisers provide intelligence and training on the ground. Until this month, U.S. planes were refueling the Saudi planes bombing Yemen.

The U.S. has also been conducting its own operations within Yemen as part of the so-called "war on terror." These operations include drone warfare, raids, and assassinations.

The Saudi rulers clam that the conflict in Yemen in a Sunni-Shia one. But Saudi Arabia didn't think twice in the 1960s about backing Shiite royalist rebels in Yemen-the grandparents of today's Houthis-against Sunni troops from Egypt supporting a progressive Yemini government.

A cash cow for U.S. corporations

Saudi Arabia continues to be a cash cow milked by U.S. businesses. The kingdom bought $20 billion in U.S. products last year, from Boeing planes to Ford cars. It recently signed a $15 billion deal with General Electric for goods and services, and put $20 billion into an investment fund run by the Blackstone Group.

U.S. banks love Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has paid $1.1 billion to western banks in fees since 2010. And truly giant bank fees are in the offing for JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, who are working with ARAMCO to take that company public.

U.S. universities and corporations grease the wheels for these giant business deals by training the kingdom's managers and politicians, and promoting mutual interests. Many Saudi rulers begin their careers working for U.S. banks and businesses. Fahad al-Mubarak, who governed the central bank from 2011-2016 was previously chairman of Morgan Stanley in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Ministers, include those of finance and petroleum, got their degrees in the U.S.

The kingmakers in this oil-rich country have always been the princes of Wall Street. And the only god worshiped by the U.S.-Saudi unholy alliance is the almighty dollar.

This was originally published at Liberation School .

The New European Left: Reasons for Resurgence and Rejection

By Kacper Grass

The events of 1989 which culminated in the success of the Polish Solidarity Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively sterilized the revolutionary left in Western Europe. Insurgent militant organizations such the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups in Spain, Action Directe in France as well as the Italian Red Brigades and West Germany's Red Army Faction, lost their patron in Moscow. Moreover, Marxism's failure to contend with global capitalism/imperialism widely discredited the remaining communist parties which sought to seize power through electoral means. Thus, it seemed as though Francis Fukuyama's end of history prophecy was becoming a reality, and neoliberalism was indeed to be the final form of humanity's sociopolitical evolution. In a desperate struggle for survival and relevance, that which remained of the European left was forced to accept the status quo and abandon revolution for reform.

This status quo went largely unquestioned for two decades, and as a result the left had no choice but to move its ideological orientations towards the center, campaigning on social-democratic platforms and often compromising its positions in order to form governments with parties from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Faith in this status quo, however, was immensely shaken by the shock of the European debt crisis in 2009, which was most strongly felt by the Eurozone's southern member states like Greece and Spain. The gravity of the recession made many people, especially those most affected by the crisis, look more critically at fundamental EU institutions such as the European Central Bank, which they saw as the root of the crisis. The right's reaction to the issue was a long line of austerity policies in many countries, which sought to resolve the national crises at the cost of the working-class citizens most dependent on the welfare state. The center-left parties' inability to find an alternative solution to the recession made them practically indistinguishable from their right-wing counterparts in the eyes of many, thus creating a political establishment whose member factions differed merely in name alone. As a result, a large class of unemployed students, workers, and struggling small business owners felt marginalized by the existing system and betrayed by a nominal left which no longer represented their interests. The time had come for an international movement that would change the political landscape of the European Union and put new life into the largely defeated or disappearing European left. This movement, however, would have its limits.

The wave of rebirth for the left did not reach the eastern reaches of the Union, where the 2009 recession was not experienced with the same intensity as it was in Southern Europe. There, the liberal center's rule went largely unchallenged since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as the newly added members of the 2004 EU expansion slowly made progress down the path of social and economic integration into the European Union. Although rarely questioned and generally applauded, this decade of progress was first threatened by the Union's second major emergency in the 21st century, that of the 2015 migrant crisis. As Germany and the European Commission mandated quotas of Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers to be accepted by each of the Union's member states, many Eastern Europeans felt threatened by what they saw as an attack on their sense of national identity and state sovereignty. What resulted was a firm rejection of the "refugees welcome" slogan, which was largely viewed not only as the product of Angela Merkel's Christian democracy, but also of Western Europe's rising new left. Thus, the fears of many citizens in nations like Hungary and Poland, still mindful of the memories of four decades of communist repression, needed a voice on the European stage. That voice came in the form of a reactionary wave of right-wing nationalist movements unseen since the fall of Western European fascism in the 1970s.

Resurgence of the Left in Greece and Spain

In the words of Watkins (2016), "the common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after several years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the US and UK are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008" (Watkins 2016, 6). She adds that "a second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win 'Formula Two' of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe's Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts… This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats-often into 'grand coalitions' with the conservatives-opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum" (Watkins 2016, 7).

At the forefront of this movement was Greece, where a strong left-oriented political culture dominated the Third Hellenic Republic in reaction to seven years of dictatorship by far-right military juntas that ended in 1974. The first free elections saw the reemergence of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) as well as the formation of the significantly less radical Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which maintained a strong presence in parliament for nearly 40 years, usually competing for electoral majority with the New Democracy (ND) party on the center-right. Nonetheless, a poll conducted in 2011 by the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini and the television network Skai TV revealed that 92% of people surveyed felt disappointed by the current PASOK government, while only 5% believed that a PASOK government would be best for the nation in the upcoming general elections (Kathimerini and Skai TV 2011). That same year, massive anti-austerity protests in the country's capital revealed the root of people's disenchantment with the ruling establishment, and a political vacuum was created by the absence of an electoral force capable of adequately representing the frustrations of a bankrupt nation in Brussels. That vacuum was filled, however, when "Syriza was founded as a unified party in [2012], through the fusion of the half-dozen groups that had formed an electoral 'coalition of the radical left' in 2004; at that stage its dominant component was Synaspismos, itself a coalition around one of the Greek communist parties, then with some 12,000 members. The new Syriza established a traditional structure: an elected central committee, on which the different factions were represented, a secretariat and a parliamentary group, centred round [Alexander] Tsipras's office and only nominally accountable to its base" (Watkins 2016, 13). Under Tsipras's charismatic leadership, the unified Syriza won a majority of 35% in the 2015 general elections and managed to form a government, putting Tsipras in the position of prime minister of Greece as well as making him the standard bearer of Europe's new left (Ministry of Interior of Greece 2015). Neither job, however, would prove to be an easy task.

Watkins (2016) explains that "by the time it entered office, the Syriza leadership was pledged to keep the euro and negotiate with the Eurogroup. Tsipras refused point-blank to explore Schäuble's offer of support for a structured exit in May 2015, as some of his Cabinet were urging. Syriza was reduced to begging for a debt write-down, abandoning one 'red line' after another, scrabbling for funds from hospitals and town halls to pay the ECB and IMF, until Tsipras was finally confronted with the choice of radicalizing his position, with the overwhelming mandate of the July 5 referendum, or submitting to the will of 'the institutions' and signing the harshest Memorandum yet" (Watkins 2016, 19-20). The party has also struggled in forming a coherent stance on immigration, as "Syriza switched from an avowed policy of anti-racism-closing down the previous government's notorious detention centres-to rounding up refugees for forcible deportation, in line with the EU's new policy" (Watkins 2016, 23).

In many respects, Spain's modern political history runs parallel to that of Greece's. The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 marked the end of his fascist regime, and free elections saw the restoration of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the formation of the right-wing People's Party (PP) by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga. Both parties took turns ruling in what became a de facto two-party system, as the 1986 foundation of the radical coalition United Left (IU) failed to ever become an electoral threat to the PSOE. By the peak of the debt crisis, however, it was becoming quite clear that the PSOE was out of touch with much of its left-leaning voter base. This sentiment of growing popular indignation against the political establishment was ultimately manifested in a nation-wide anti-austerity movement that began with protests in Madrid on May 15th, 2011. Like in Greece the same year, a political vacuum had been created. As Watkins (2016) explains, "Podemos sprang into existence in January 2014, the initiative of the nucleus around [Pablo] Iglesias, who put out a call for a new, anti-austerity platform for the Europarliament elections. Nearly a thousand local 'circles' began forming almost spontaneously, built by 15-M and far-left activists. Podemos was formally constituted as a Citizens' Assembly in October 2014, with over 112,000 members signing up online to vote on its founding documents… Coalitions with regional left forces, sealed by support for a Catalan independence referendum, helped lift Podemos to 21 per cent of the vote in the December 2015 elections, with 69 deputies in the Cortes, nearly a quarter from Catalonia." (Watkins 2016, 14).

Unlike Tsipras, though, Iglesias remained in the opposition following prolonged government formation negotiations that resulted in a second election the following year. This time Podemos ran on the same ticket as the IU under the label Unidos Podemos and finally secured third place in parliamentary seats, behind the PP and the PSOE respectively. In terms of platforms and ideologies Podemos and Syriza share much in common, Iglesias even having referred to Tsipras as "'a lion who has defended his people' in September 2015" (Watkins 2016, 20). Regarding immigration, however, Podemos takes an even more radical stance than Syriza, as the party's "2014 programme called for full citizens' rights for all immigrants" (Watkins 2016, 23).

As Watkins (2016) summarizes, "the founding purpose of the new left oppositions is to defend the interests of those hit by the reigning response to the crisis-bailouts for private finance matched by public-sector austerity and promotion of private-sector profit-gouging, at the expense of wage-workers. In the broadest sense, this is, again, a defence of labour against capital, within the existing system" (Watkins 2016, 28). She adds that "Podemos has… established itself as a fighter for those afflicted by foreclosures in the housing-bubble meltdown, a demand that exceeds-or post-dates-classical liberal democracy. The fruite en avant of Syriza Mark Two towards the social liberalism, or neoliberal austerity, of the other, formerly social-democratic, now tawdry centre-left parties, serves to confirm rather than contradict the general rule" (Watkins 2016, 29).

Rejection of the Left in Hungary and Poland

As Euroscepticism in the south was being fueled by a still unresolved debt crisis, the anti-Brussels sentiment spread eastward following the unprecedented influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants that began in 2014. The following year, the European Commission with Germany's backing set quotas on the number of asylum seekers to be accepted by each member state in an attempt to lessen the burden on Greece, Italy, and the other Mediterranean countries that served as the initial points of arrival for many migrants. The mandate, which was viewed as a violation of state sovereignty by many Eastern Europeans, sparked a wave of nationalism in the largely ethnically and religiously homogenous countries of the Visegrád Group. The political landscape of the group, which serves as an alliance between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic within the European Union, has experienced a significant shift towards the right, with all members effectively rejecting the European Commission's quotas following the wave of illiberalism that began in Hungary and later spread to Poland, the group's largest member state, before also finding fertile ground in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Hungary held its first free elections the following year. After the transition to democracy, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and adopted a considerably more moderate social-democratic stance, competing for dominance in parliament with the originally libertarian Fidesz party since the 1998 elections. Nonetheless, in 2010 the MSZP was defeated by an increasingly nationalist Fidesz, and the 2014 elections marked the start of another term in office for prime minister Victor Orbán following the landslide victory of a coalition between his Fidesz party and the socially conservative Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), which together won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats. In order to compete for second place with the far-right Jobbik party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) had to enter into a coalition with four other center-left parties, finally winning 38 seats compared to Jobbik's 23. The remaining five seats were won by the centrist green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP) (National Election Office of Hungary 2014). With an absolute majority in government and the additional support of Jobbik, Orbán had a free hand in determining Hungary's stance on the migrant crisis. The result was two years of nationalist rhetoric leading up to a referendum on the issue set for October 2nd, 2016. The referendum posed the question: "Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?" While the poll was finally considered invalid for its low voter turnout of 44.04%, an overwhelming majority of 98.36% voted 'no' while only 1.64% voted 'yes' in response to the question (National Election Office of Hungary 2016).

Much like Hungary, Poland held its first free parliamentary elections in 1991 following the end of communist rule two years before. More than 100 registered parties participated in the first elections, with the political landscape changing frequently until the elections of 2005, in which the liberal Civic Platform (PO) and the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party emerged as the main contestants. The moderate Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), founded largely by ex-members of the dissolved communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), was pushed into opposition after holding president Aleksander Kwaśniewski in office since 1995. By the elections of 2015, the composition of the Polish Sejm was very reminiscent to that of Hungary's parliament. In reaction to the migrant crisis, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński adopted a significantly more nationalist and conservative rhetoric, which proved effective in winning his party an absolute majority of 235 of 460 seats, effectively forming a government while also enjoying support from the smaller right-wing Kukiz '15 (K'15) party, which won 42. The opposition was dominated by the PO, as it earned 138 seats, and was supported by the smaller liberal Modern (N) party, which won only 28. The agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL) won 16 seats while the regional German Minority (MN) won a single seat (National Electoral Commission of Poland 2015). The election was notable for two principal reasons. Primarily, it was the first time in Poland's democratic history that a party managed to win an absolute majority in the Sejm. Secondly, it was the first time that a left-wing party did not manage to secure any representation. Following the election, the newly inaugurated president Andrzej Duda reversed the previous government's promise to accept 2,000 refugees, adding that he "won't agree to a dictate of the strong. [He] won't back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries regardless of their national interests" (Moskwa & Skolimowski 2015). Following Orbán, Duda has since raised the prospect of holding a referendum on the issue.

Germany Caught in the Crossfire

The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 resulted in the merger of two extremely different political cultures into a single democratic state. Despite this initial obstacle, the country soon recuperated and advanced to become the economic and political hegemony of the European Union in the 21st century. Assuming office in 2005, Angela Merkel of the liberal Christian Democratic Union has been a central figure in European politics from the start of the recession throughout the ongoing migrant crisis. Much as in the cases of Greece and Spain, the onset of the recession proved that the existing left-wing establishment, represented in Germany by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had compromised too much of its leftist ideology to remain competitive with its opponents in the Bundestag.

As Bergfeld (2016) explains, "the mass movement that emerged in the mid-2000s to oppose Schröder's Hartz welfare- and labor-market reforms led to a significant breakaway from the SPD. Labor and Social Justice - The Electoral Alternative (WASG) was founded in 2005 by activists frustrated with the ruling Red-Green Coalition. The WASG would go on to form one main component, alongside the East German-based Party of Democratic Socialism, of the new Die Linke. After nearly ten years of collaboration, differences between the East and West wings of the party remain stark. Sections of the party based in the former East Germany are eyeing state governments or already hold office in federal states (like Thuringia), while the West German section is not represented in any federal state parliaments, with the exception of Hessia" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). He continues by noting that "Die Linke's founding represented a historical opportunity for the German parliamentary left to move beyond the SPD. Today, it is the main opposition party in German parliament. For all the problems it entails, the party's institutionalization has facilitated the construction of a sturdy platform for antiwar and anti-neoliberal voices in mainstream politics. It was Die Linke that first popularized the demand for a national minimum wage, which was taken up by the trade unions, the SPD, and later on Merkel herself before becoming law in early 2015" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Despite this, "The party has never acted as a catalyst for social, economic, or political struggles and is unlikely to ever do so. It has been able to involve itself, to varying degrees, in labor mobilizations and social movements initiated by others, most notably the demonstrations against Europe's largest fascist rallies in Dresden in 2011 and 2012. Even Bodo Ramelow - now prime minister of Thuringia - participated in mass civil disobedience to block the fascists from marching" (Bergfeld 2016, 4).

Since the beginning of the migrant crisis, the fascist rallies against which Die Linke demonstrated in 2011 and 2012 have since become an organized political force, opposing Merkel's neoliberalism from the right of the political spectrum. "To Merkel's dismay, her modernization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has enabled a nationalist-conservative party to develop to her right. The Islamophobic and Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged on the main stage of German politics as Merkel's positions have become indistinguishable from mainstream social-democratic ones" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Indeed, the chancellor's inability to secure an absolute majority in the 2017 Bundestag elections illustrates the challenge that the neoliberal status quo faces from both the new left as well as the reactionary right in the very heart of the Union.

Conclusion

Thus far, the events of the 21st century in Europe-from the beginning of the debt crisis in 2009 to the continuing migrant crisis-have done little to reflect the positivity felt by many at the close of the previous century. The neoliberal status quo is not only being openly put to question, but it is under attack by the rise of a new left movement, whose resurgence can be traced back to its Greek and Spanish instigators. There are two principal reasons why Syriza and Podemos were able to win the massive support that put them at the forefront of Europe's new left movement. First of all, they emerged in countries whose left-leaning political cultures were shaped by the lingering trauma of fascist dictatorship. Secondly, by framing the recession as the fault of neoliberal institutions such as the European Central Bank and blaming the political establishment for implementing austerity policies at the cost of the working class, their proposed leftist platforms had a particular appeal to citizenries desperate for economic relief.

Nonetheless, this is not to say that the development of the new left has gone unchallenged. The Eastern European countries of the Visegrád Group, starting with Hungary and Poland, managed to avoid the worst of the debt crisis but under cultural and historical pretexts reacted in stark opposition to the European Commission's assignment of migrant quotas on the grounds that the policy jeopardizes their respective national identities and effectively makes an assault on their rights as sovereign states. Moreover, the still-healing wounds of four decades of repressive "communist" regimes have made it easy for right-wing nationalist movements to blame the migrant crisis on the new left parties that take much more radical pro-immigration stances than do the neoliberal establishments in Brussels and Berlin.

Finally, as the new left continues its trend of resurgence and reactionary right-wing movements continue to form in order to reject it, Germany will be only one case of many where oppositions from both sides of the political spectrum arise to challenge the existing neoliberal status quo. In fact, as is the case in Germany of Die Linke and the AfD, in France Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise is fighting a similar battle against Marine Le Pen's National Rally with Emmanuel Macron caught in the middle. The same can be said of the opposition to Italy's ex-prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, which ultimately resulted in the victorious coalition of Luigi Di Laio's Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini's Lega Nord in the general elections of March 2018. Even in Great Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn fights to return the Labour Party to its leftist roots, Gerard Batten has taken up the work of Henry Bolton in leading the UK Independence Party towards an exit from the European Union. If this trend continues, the parliaments of Europe will continue to be turned into political battlegrounds where the Union's ideology, policies, and future are at stake. If this polarizing trend continues, the Europe of the 21st century may not resemble the perpetual liberal democratic union envisioned by Fukuyama. It could instead devolve into something more reminiscent of the previous century, the age of extremes.

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