Roger Cohen, at the NYT, largely exposes why Israeli governments refuse to make peace with Palestinians

Roger Cohen, toward the end of this outstanding op-ed, tries to find some solace if Netanyahu falls from power over corruption charges, but he is fairly clear that Mohammad Abbas has become a "kapo" to the Israeli government occupation and eventual annexation of the West Bank.

Some kind hearted souls may ask themselves, Why allow the computer specialist and apparently nice guy to leave the West Bank?  Don't the Israelis want people like that to talk with?

Um, no.  Most Jews in the U.S., nay, most Americans of any religious philosophy or none at all--and I am talking to you, Bill Maher--do not know the following:  

In the fall of 1967, Moshe Dayan, reacting perhaps to the Khartoum pronouncement from Arab leaders--the infamous "NO" to negotiations, to recognizing Israel's existence, and no peace with Israel--stated during a meeting of other leaders in his political party:

We don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and will see how this procedure will work out. For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the mountains, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime.

This quote is from a Hebrew-only book, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985), by former Labor Party official, Yossi Beilin, p. 42, but the quote was based upon transcripts that are available to scholars and those who can translate or read Hebrew.  The quote is stated at the Wikiquotes entry for Moshe Dayan, here. 

It is important to remember that Dayan was, in internal Israeli circles, a relative dove, though he continued to show public hawkish tendencies in the period up through the early 1970s before he lost most of his power, as a player, in the wake of the October 1973 War, sometimes called the "Yom Kippur War."*  It is also important to remember that, generally, when Israeli leaders became doves, they lost or were losing the power they had, or, when uttering public statements supporting specific peace proposals, had already lost power.  This was true for David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Nahum Goldmann, Ezer Weizman, Yehosaphat Harkabi, Ehud Ohlmert, Tzipi Livni, and a host of others.  Worse, when people like Shimon Peres, who was largely a dove, had power, they tended to exercise it in a hawkish manner, even when it was obviously counterproductive. Worst, Yitzhak Rabin, who presided over the policy of breaking Palestinians' arms and legs during the first Intifada in 1987, did try to reach peace and move toward a two-state solution in 1993, and ended up the victim of a far-right rabbinic student assassin's bullets two years later. 

The Allon plan regarding settlements was formulated in the late fall of 1967, and it is the plan that has largely been followed in terms of building settlements as "facts on the ground."  The plan was largely formulated by a relative Israeli leader dove, Yigal Allon, but the plan outlasted Allon and became part of a consistent hardening policy toward Palestinians.  It is an error for Americans to look for differences in policies from Labor to Likud and back again when it comes to this issue of the Palestinians and settlement building, as the policies are consistent and harden over each succeeding decade.  We know, too, that the number of settlers in the West Bank increased by over fifty percent and the Israeli government strategically built roads and took over water sources (see this portion of a book by Mark Levine on the subject), which is part of why Arafat did not accept the last ditch "offer" from two lame duck leaders, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, in January 2001.**  Then, of course, there were the walls, and the further acceleration of settlement building in this still new century.  And now there is this pronouncement from the Netanyahu government's own attorney general about seizing Palestinian lands in the West Bank.

This is why I continue to compare what the Israelis are doing to "Manifest Destiny" in U.S. history.  It does not matter how John Quincy Adams wrestled with his conscience during his ill-fated presidency, and in Congress, on issues concerning Native Americans.  He was, in that sense, like, for example, Abba Eban, who, when he became a confirmed dove, became a disdained figure in a majority of Israeli Jewish households right up until Eban's death.  Most historians of 19th Century American policy toward Native Americans recognize that President James Polk was not an aberration in the decades and maybe century long policy of taking land from Native Americans, and either moving Native Americans, pushing Native Americans, or killing Native Americans along the way.  That systemic policy speaks analogously to the policies successive Israeli government continue to pursue in the West Bank. 

I know, I know.  Had the power relations favored the Palestinian leaders, they would have simply ordered all the Jews to be killed, and many of the "peaceful" Palestinians would have gleefully joined in.  For as we know in Europe in the Second World War, there were plenty of Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, etc. who gleefully killed Jews to a point where at least one German S.S. diarist found it chilling.  Ben Hecht's great book, A Guide for the Bedeviled, speaks wonderfully and ironically about the joys some people have over the millennia for Jew-killing.  But, let's not lose ourselves: What has happened over the past fifty years in Israel and the occupied territories is what is happening in our timeline, and, in our timeline, we can see there have been plenty of instances when peace talks could have been started--not, for example, in 2008, when Ehud Ohlmert was on the way out the door from scandal, and he tried to jump start negotiations with offers that the Knesset would never have accepted--and yet, nothing but building more and more settlements.  Abba Eban's famous quip that "Palestinians" never failed to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity applies at least, if not more, to "Israelis."

As I have said on FB, I am not ready to join the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).  I am, however, saying I am ready to say, as an American, I now have no more interest in supporting U.S. government aid to Israel (which is mostly transfers from one side of the U.S. Defense (War) Department to the other), and Israel does not need any economic aid from the U.S. at this point in its own history.  I am disengaging from Israel as the majority of its nominally Jewish citizens do not speak for me, do not speak to my personal values, and are simply people living in a foreign country.  If people were to ask me what the solution there is, I still say it is a two state solution.  But it is clear that the majority of Israeli Jews do not agree with me, and I have deep sadness for Amos Oz, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Bradley Burston, Gideon Levy, Uri Avnery, Avi Shavit, and the various Jewish activists and lawyers who fight for fair treatment of Palestinians, among others.    

*Dayan, for example, had tried, unsuccessfully, to push Golda Meir to accept the U.N. peace proposal from U.N. (Swedish) diplomat Gunnar Jarring in 1971, after Egyptian President (after Nasser) Anwar Sadat accepted it. The Jarring proposal was actually more favorable to Israel than the peace agreement which Jimmy Carter brokered in 1978 at Camp David (the so-called "Camp David Accords") with Sadat and Israel's then new prime minister, Menachem Begin. 

** See Robert Malley's perceptive insider's discussion of those failed negotiations from April 2001 in the New York Review of Books.  Arafat, the target of many Israeli assassination attempts, also likely had the fear that he would be murdered by "one of his own," as was Rabin.  I find it frustrating how American Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, use the failed January 2001 peace talks as if that was the only possible way out, and then use that to avoid pushing Israel to the bargaining table at most points thereafter.

Israeli war crimes, what one still finds lovable about Israel and why that is no longer enough

I write this in the context of my finding it almost impossible to maintain any hope for a two state solution for Israel and Palestine.  

This outstanding article in the New York Times Magazine is about Israeli efforts and actions with respect to targeted assassinations, and how mid and sometimes high level military personnel refused to carry out orders from then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to blow up civilian planes or kill civilians while targeting Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat.  Nonetheless, in the margins, it shows that Israel was carrying out other targeted assassinations along the way, and doing their otherwise best to disrupt any Palestinian leadership.

What is missing from the article is how the Israeli governments, over twenty years or more, not only tried to kill Arafat, but were also building up the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood that eventually became Hamas.  This was another way to undermine Arafat and the PLO, by creating a powerful internal to Palestinians opposition group.  One of the men in charge of military intelligence for Israel in the early days of that strategy, Yehoshafat Harkabi, wrote a book, after his retirement, in the late 1980s about his own change of heart and apology for building up religious fundamentalism among Palestinians, as it was already getting hard to remember that Arafat was an engineer who was a secular person (Christian by birth), and was not enamored with Islamic orthodoxies (Just watch, to take an analogous example, Egyptian president Nasser, in 1966, making fun of right wing Islamic fundamentalists).  Otherwise, one had to read Chomsky's citations from news articles inside Israel and elsewhere for this information.

The article also glosses over a couple of truths that were so virulently denied by most Zionists in the US at the time: (1) Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was not only NOT a defensive war, but an outright, imperialist offensive war.  It was also a disaster as Israel ended up helping destroy Lebanon as a nation (Syria had been doing a good job before, and Israeli fighter pilot bombings since the late 1970s were "helping," too), and from the ashes of that war crime of a war, Hezbollah arose; and (2) Sharon and other military officials knew that allowing the Phalange fighters into the two Lebanese villages, Sabra and Shatila, would lead to a massacre of men, women, and children there.

In the U.S. in 1982,  it was almost impossible find this information unless one was reading the Village Voice columns of Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway (here is an example reprinted from the Institute for Palestine Studies).  They were regularly quoting Israeli newspapers, particularly Ha'aretz and The Jerusalem Post (back when the latter was not a right wing rag), and the reporting of Israel's leading military correspondent, the now late Ze'ev Schiff.  I was stunned by this reporting, and while I was already exposed to Abba Eban and other Israeli doves, had read Mohamed Heikal's (a top Egyptian reporter who was close to Sadat from the beginning of the 1970s) Road to Ramadan (1975), and was also going to the local university library to read, from time to time, the journal of the Institute for Palestine Studies and Edward Said, it was unbelievable to me that the lead story of the war, that Israel went to war in Lebanon because the PLO, stationed in part in Lebanon, had tried to kill the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. (it was in fact the work of an offshoot of the PLO, against Arafat's wishes), was itself a lie in the sense of being a pretext.  Another justification had been that the PLO had been regularly shelling northern Israel in violation of a peace agreement with the PLO, when in fact, it had been almost completely quiet on both sides for the previous year, and it was more often Israel that was doing the shelling.  

Then when the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, there were reports almost immediately that the Israeli generals had approved the Phalange forces to go in and clean up.  It was reminiscent of the way the Germans sometimes let local Lithuanian and other such national forces go in and kill Jews.  Yes, I said it, and it fits.  Sharon knew what would happen.

Ze'ev Schiff eventually co-wrote a book called "The Lebanon War" (1984) that was based upon his intimate knowledge inside the Israeli military machines (fighting machine and intelligence machine) and his access to the commission the Israeli government convened to study what happened, and why the two official reasons for the war were lies. The Kahan Commission's report was partially blocked from release, and Schiff knew its contents.  The weird thing was that the US media did not clearly tell this story, and so many of my fellow Jews in temples and synagogues across the land continued to believe the War against Lebanon was totally defensive, totally necessary, and that the US government and US corporate media were against poor little Israel. And I would say, whoa, read the Jerusalem Post.  Read Ze'ev Schiff.  I started realizing Israeli citizens were, at least back then, getting better news on the subject that was far more critical and open than American citizens on the subject.

I was also optimistic things would be better because, hardly covered in US newspapers and television, there were major demonstrations by Israeli citizens, many of them soldiers, and some freshly back from service in the Lebanon War, during the war itself in 1982 and continuing thereafter.  It was that outcry against the war, against what Sharon was doing to provoke further and wider war, and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, that led to Begin resigning in personal disgrace (he knew he had been misled by Sharon) and the Commission continuing its investigation.

Time Magazine did publish a story on the hidden part of the Kahan Commission report, but Sharon sued for libel, and amazingly won at least a pyrrhic victory, where the jury saw what the ignorant district court judge refused to see, which was that Time was reporting on what was hidden from the public, and was essentially true.  And then some dumb New York socialite-reporter, Renata Adler, yes, she was Jewish, too, wrote articles in the New Yorker covering the case, with the New Yorker embarrassing itself with her pro-Sharon side reportage.*  As a lawyer who was already handling libel cases from time to time, I saw through her shallow and misleading (not maybe intentional, just dumb) reporting, and that Ze'ev Schiff's book had already exposed why Sharon's lawsuit was a lie.  Nobody ever stopped to ask, why didn't Sharon sue Schiff?  Why didn't Sharon sue Schiff in Israel?  Why did the judge in the libel suit accept the Israeli government's refusal to produce the hidden portion of the commission report Time reported on, and accept a misleading summary?  It was a horror show of the American legal system with Americans, including unfortunately American Jews, who instinctively believed the Israeli government when they had no basis to do so.

At that time, and until recently, I always thought the type of individuals the NY Times Magazine article talks about would prevail.  People who stood up to illegal, murderous orders in ways that are outstanding and admirable.  But Israeli society has continued to harden, and those voices are now old, and no longer in power.  Israeli politics is a settlers' politics. The majority of Israeli citizens no longer have any pretense to following better rabbinic values. The type of actions the various immediate subordinates to Sharon took are now less likely to occur at all.  For too many Israelis today see those types of values as "Ashkanazi" weakness, and they exult Erik Lehnsherr aka Magneto values.

* She wound up writing an equally dumb book about the Sharon v. Time Magazine and Westmoreland v. CBS libel cases, where she essentially missed the story that the information about Westmoreland playing games with military information for political reasons was true.  What I had objected to, in real time, in the original documentary on CBS was making Westmoreland's actions too much of a personal centerpiece.  Westy was merely a large cog in a larger machine, and his duplicity for the American National Security State is what got him to where he was leading US forces in Vietnam in the first place. George Crile, the producer and "author" of the documentary, loved to emphasize personalities and not structures or systems.  He did the same later with his book about crazy Congressperson Charlie Wilson and the Russian Afghan War.  The best book on the Westmoreland lawsuit was by a former Vietnam War vet, who was a writer for the Village Voice, Bob Brewin, and it captures the great legal examination and other work of NY super lawyer, David Boies, who beat the crap out of Westmoreland and Westy's lawyers.

UPDATE 1/28/2018: I hesitated to add it, but now will:  One thing I found "amusing" in the New York Times Magazine article is that it further confirmed what I had written about near the end of my novel, A Disturbance of Fate, about the Israeli generals like Sharon and Eitan, who dreamed of a Palestinian state on the Jordan side of the Jordan River, essentially replacing then-King Hussein in Jordan. Of course, in September 1970, King Hussein showed how Arab leaders would have likely reacted if they had defeated Israel in any of the wars up through that time, with the killing of thousands of uprising Palestinians in what is now called "Black September."  In my novel, the Israeli military, in the face of a more pro-revolutionary world, help the Palestinians overthrow Hussein...Well, you gotta read the book to see how and why that becomes feasible and even "logical."

The tangled, twisted party lines of political evangelicals has reached American Communist levels

It was said, quite properly in my view, that the Popular Front coalition of liberals and Communists, during the mid-to late 1930s New Deal era foundered on the increasingly twisted party line changes that the American Communist Party leaders demanded of its members. The Nazi-Soviet Pact (sometimes called the Hitler-Stalin Pact) of August 1939 was truly the biggest breaking point, and many people who were Communists dropped out of at least active party membership, and liberals left organizations which contained significant Communist Party members in droves.* 

I wonder whether the Stormy Daniels revelations, and the ridiculously hypocritical response from evangelical leaders, are moving us ever closer to that sort of break point.  It may not because rich donors to the Republican Party continue to find these faith oriented people useful fodder.  Hence, the new, invigorating anti-immigrant push in these political circles.  And when one considers that one of the evangelicals' leaders biggest political allies are the National Rifle Assn.--Jesus with a gun!--and the N.R.A. may have been useful Russian propaganda tools, well..."Gimme that old time religion" is now being played in a minor key on a balalaika as the hypocrisy in the evangelical and ammosexual ranks build to a polyphonic crescendo.

*This, of course, did not stop Congressional investigators and corporate media pundits from attacking people 20 years later for such membership and coalescing, even though one may rightfully argue that the greatest successes of the New Deal (NLRA, FSLA, Social Security, WPA, CCC) occurred or were given great strength to succeed through that coalition.  It is a point Chris Hedges made in his book, The Death of the Liberal Class, where he posits that liberals needed the Reds to show the public the liberals were the true moderates.  It is why, in our current topsy-turvy political environment where right wing ideologues are so ascendant and racist language now out in the open in our political discourse, that so many of us now see 1950s President Eisenhower through the eyes of the John Birch Society leaders, like Robert Welch, who saw Ike as essentially a Communist, when we consider Ike's refusal to dismantle, and in fact, Ike's willingness to extend New Deal policies in nationwide road building and development, and his support for 90% marginal income tax rates.

An apologist for Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Courtier Historian

Too bad it is behind the NYRB subscription wall, but Sean Wilentz, a noted historian, has written what can only be described as a Neo-liberal Courtier defense of a Courtier historian of the mid to late 20th Century, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.   It is something I hope there are letters in the NYRB to take on Wilentz's essay-review.  Right now, I merely jot my thoughts down, and leave it to perhaps either another time or never to fill in the citations.  My wife is beckoning me to stop this free punditry, at least for the night...:)

Wilentz clearly loves Schlesinger's The Vital Center, written in 1949, as the great liberal anti-Communist tract that holds up well, in Wilentz's view at least.  For me, it is the paradigmatic reason for the failure for liberalism for the next sixty years.  When liberals joined in with Red-baiting, they were sealing their own doom for two reasons:  

(1) They failed to appreciate how the primary reason for Red-baiting from the conservatives and far rightists was to destroy the New Deal consensus and liberalism overall (see page 333 of the Buckley-Bozell book defending Joe McCarthy's second phase of Red-baiting, where Buckley admits McCarthy's conflation of Alger Hiss as alleged Communist spy and Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 1952, is a promising avenue because the primary goal was to attack liberalism and root it out from the nation.  Funny too that Buckley right after says the "Schlesingers" should not worry, but there is the threat there too that Buckley will come for them too...Too bad the Schlesingers never saw it coming); and 

(2) Cold War liberals like Schlesinger showed little or no concern about preserving the distinction between someone being a Communist and someone being a true "spy" for the Soviet Union.  It was one thing to beat up on Joe McCarthy once McCarthy took on the Army (yes, I am saying Edward R. Murrow was not as brave as say Don Hollenbeck), but people like Schlesinger, Joe Rauh, and others in the Americans for Democratic Action from the late 1940s on through the 1960s, never lost a beat with the Buckleys of the world in castigating anyone who stood for Popular Front New Deal politics. And we wonder why Truman's call for national health insurance in 1948 was so hollow then and now from such people, why the promise to repeal 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act went nowhere, and eventually stopped being discussed at all, and, by the way, how the War against Vietnam happened.

I get that it looks like it was inevitable that anti-Communism would become so pervasive.  But it did not have to be that way but for liberal acquiescence.  Had they made clear that Dalton Trumbo was not a security threat, and that even Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss had strong policy reasons for seeking rapprochement in international affairs, including with the Soviet Union, we could have avoided the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about on his way out the presidential door.  We could have avoided the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and what Gore Vidal rightly called "The National Security State."  I have long said, before Oliver Stone and several others, the original sin of American politics post-World War II occurred in 1944, when FDR was ultimately pushed to drop Henry Wallace as his VP and replace him with the shallow machine bred politician, Harry S. Truman.  Truman did have the titular lead in an investigation of oil company gouging in the war effort, but otherwise, he really had no grasp of international politics.  Wallace, though a spiritualist and sometimes eccentric, had a firmer grasp of the moment, and the need to complete the New Deal.  It is remarkable to me that we put up with all sorts of eccentricities in presidents who bow to the National Security State or earlier imperialist impulses (let's recall the Reagans governing the timing of decisions, and sometimes decisions themselves, by astrology; or McKinley thinking God spoke to him to start the war in Spain), but somehow Henry Wallace would have been beyond the pale?

Wilentz literally lays the Vietnam War at LBJ's feet with no sense of historical judgment that JFK would have done the same as LBJ.  Wilentz shows little perspective of how LBJ, JFK and Richard M. Nixon all came of age in national politics just before the big "Who lost China?" political storm of 1949-1951.  Does Wilentz really think JFK was not thinking like Johnson, who we learned from the Johnson tapes, saying to Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) that the nation would call for "impeachment" of a president who left the South Vietnamese government fall to the Communists?  Historians are supposed to help us understand political and intellectual leaders' thinking of the time, and that includes understanding the history as those historical players saw things in their own time.  Wilentz is giving us anachronistic history.  To not see the systemic nature of the War Against Vietnam  is to misunderstand so much insight from so many historians and writers, from George McT. Kahin to Bernard Fall to Telford Taylor to Frances Fitzgerald to David Halberstam to even and especially Chomsky and Zinn.  To just castigate people as "Marxists" is to descend to an anti-intellectualism that really is unbecoming from a professor of history who thinks of himself as liberal-left.

I won't bother to say much about Wilentz's abject fear of political correctness, which leads to some strangely reactionary language that others will more readily see.  Too often, I find there is an abject ignorance of the 1920s through 1940s from most historians of our age, which is why I speak with such passion about the early years of the Cold War and its portending of what followed.

As for Schlesinger himself, Wilentz goes on to admit, in a sly, passively misleading way, that Schlesinger was a courtier to the Kennedys, and that his Age of Jackson book was a partisan reading of the Andrew Jackson era as a way to exult the FDR New Deal years.  That Andrew Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age destroyed most of the Schlesinger narrative about Jackson is left unmentioned in Wilentz's review, and there is no doubt Wilentz knows the Ward book.  I get the feeling Wilentz is not interested in the economics of the Jacksonian era as much as he should be, even though he handled it decently with Schlesinger in his own short bio of Jackson.  Funny, too, that Wilentz never mentions his co-writing of that book on Jackson with Schlesinger in the latter's last years.

Wilentz is most egregious in his discussion of the Clintons.  To think the Clintons are anything other than well meaning bankers is almost pathetically laughable for someone who is considered a serious historian.  To talk about Clinton's capitulation to the right wing on welfare, and then say, sheepishly as he does, that Clinton meant to reform the reform, is naive at best.  Clinton simply did not care about poor people when it came to holding power.  And Wilentz never mentions the NAFTA or the WTO, which was doing the work of international bankers in a way that Harry Dexter White would have found deeply troubling, to talk about ironies.  The "free trade" views of late New Dealers is certainly misplaced when it came to understanding the needs of labor in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond.  What the nation needed from liberals was a re-embrace of tariff policy, industrial policy, and  not free trade nostrums.  Instead, tone deaf courtiers like Schlesinger and now Wilentz continue to ignore how many parts of the US now resemble second rate, and even second world nations after the devastation wrought by a globalization that was the product of policy as much as "natural economic forces." Wilentz said the essence of the political liberal of the mid-20th Century was a sense of "fallibility and tragedy," in other words, a flexibility and humility.  That is why there should have been a jettisoning of "free trade" thinking that was itself a short term response to what was thought to be a reason for the Great Depression--but was not, as Schumpeter and others also recognized.  Unlike too many economists, I think sociologists have much to teach us about political economy.  And too many Neo-liberal historians such as Wilentz seem particularly clueless about these things. What Wilentz calls "Marxist"--in an anti-intellectual manner, I should repeat--is actually a history informed by sociology.  This failure to understand historians to his left causes Wilentz to see only tragedy in the Clinton era's 1994 Congressional results, and doubtless the Obama era's 2010 Congressional election results, when those electoral failures were the product of the same pusillanimous liberalism that dates back to the cave-in to Red Scare hysteria before Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene in 1950, and for too long a period after McCarthy's arrival on the scene.

Wilentz's review should not have been given the green light for at least the reason that Wilentz co-wrote a book with Schlesinger and it is again not mentioned in the review.  This essay-review is clearly a brief for Schlesinger by a party too close to the subject of a biography that Wilentz would have wanted to write himself.  That Wilentz could only criticize the sub-title of the biography--and ironically mention that some who do not like Schlesinger could call him a Courtier historian, as if that would not have been "fair"--and for the book  not covering in detail the last years of Schlesinger's life--which is amusing because maybe Wilentz thinks he should have been given more mention personally...?--is telling, as it feels like Wilentz is gritting his teeth with a review that is mostly positive about the biography.*

One can go on, and I certainly can, but spousal cooperation is the key to a long marriage.  I urge anyone who knows some historians of the American 20th Century to speak up against Wilentz's shallow review of a courtier historian who personified more of the failures than victories of liberalism.  One would get a much better understanding of the period by starting with Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class.  Hedges is no historian, and he is a polemicist.  But his perspective, perception and insight on the topic of his book (not always, as Hedges was a horrible voice in the presidential election of 2016) is far more on the mark than what Wilentz has written.

* And historians who study the historians of the 20th Century should be screaming to see Wilentz place Schlesinger on par with Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, early in the essay-review.  As an amateur historiography student, and student of historians from Richard Hildreth to Eric Foner, I was appalled. 

George Schuyler getting some due in the NYRB

It is about time we see someone in a liberal left journal, namely the New York Review of Books, finding their way back to George Schuyler.  My one criticism of the essay (which is an adapted version of the introduction to the great Schuyler novel, "Black No More,") is Senna calls Schuyler's views in 1931 "vaguely messed up."  They were not at that time.  He was still a committed socialist in the Debsian and A. Philip Randolph tradition.  That he found reason to critique what he saw as hypocrisy in the black leadership of the time, from Garvey to DuBois to Hughes, was a product of his hard-boiled sensibility as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, possibly the most venerated of the so-called "black" newspapers at least during the time Schuyler was writing most prolifically.

"Black No More" is a send up of race as a social construct, and follows a pamphlet Schuyler wrote about massive miscegenation in the American South while with the Courier.  Schuyler wanted to find out just how much "black" was in "white" folks of the South, and vice versa.  What he found, and reported in a pamphlet printed in 1929 was a legacy of rampant miscegenation in that region.  

The dumb line of the dumb historian, Dumas Malone, when faced with critics (such as Gore Vidal) of his beloved Jefferson for Jefferson likely having had sexual relations and fathering children with his wife's half sister, and slave, Sally Hemings, replied to such critics that a "fastidious (Southern) gentleman" would not do such a thing (see page 214 of Malone's hagiographic "Jefferson the President"). Oh, yes they did, and Schuyler's research into racial "intermarriage" was also about those Southern white gentlemen who did not bother to marry the darker skin women they impregnated--and even about Southern white gentlewomen who enjoyed their privilege with enslaved black men.   "Mandingo" was not just a work of fiction in more than a few cases.

A final bonus for readers is to consider a serial Schuyler wrote in the late 1930s, which was later put into book form, called "Black Empire," which is another science fiction oriented story about a mad black doctor who tries to unite Africa to fight against white imperialist colonialism of the "dark continent."  It is a brilliant, radical book that is neither vague nor a mess.  

As I have previously written in the original MF Blog, and perhaps elsewhere on Facebook about Schuyler, I will not comment further on his descent into John Birch Society circles, his fearful contempt of the 1950s through 1960s civil rights movement (his fear was that the white blacklash would be violent and far reaching), and his horrid essay in the wake of King's assassination (reconfirming the fear and essentially blaming King for his own murder), and his final descent into almost complete journalistic oblivion when even the John Birch Society found it could no longer credibly print him.  He was, however, a brilliant mind for the first decades of his career, and one whose works of the first few decades of the 20th Century remain compelling, brilliant, and often fun reading.  His daughter, who led a flamboyant and tragic short life, was to be the subject of an Alicia Keys film that was never filmed, which to me is itself a tragedy.

To watch or not watch "Rotten"...

This show scares me to the core of my subconscious beliefs about the food I consume.

Our children better understand that politics includes food, and food includes politics.  We are the processed, factory farm generation.  Theirs recognizes the ugliness, the destructiveness, and unhealthiness that can come with the processed.  

And I am speaking in generalities, of course, which is the same root as generations.

In other words, I again admit to being afraid to watch this series.....And I fear recognizing that we may have to change our systems surrounding food, and that it may involve laws that appear to coerce us to eat more vegetables and fruits, and less meat products.  It continues to amaze me that a Big Mac costs less than a salad.  And yet, the mark up costs of meat and other animal products still benefit middle people and big retailers, not the farmers.  I remember reading long ago this book, "Merchants of Grain" (1979), by Dan Morgan, and thinking then, this will change for the better--but it only appears to have gotten worse.

And still, no matter what is written, no matter what is shown in this documentary series, "Rotten," I do not think those of us over 40 are ready for most of this, and will find themselves grasping ourselves to the Koch Bros. and their minions, mouthing rhetoric about "freedom," when this very freedom to consume processed food is likely threatening the planet, is cruel beyond our packaged beliefs, and corrupt in ways that make the Clintons and Trump personally seem almost as saints.

Our children's generation cannot save us too soon...Let's watch "Rotten" if we dare.

The Kept Corporate Media and the Faux Cynicism of Slate.com, Vox.com, and the like (With UPDATES)

This interview of James Risen by Jeremy Scahill for The Intercept is a great introduction to those who are still learning about what, perhaps eccentrically, I have called the kept corporate media. And some of our FB friends think the corporate owned media is liberal-left. Bwwwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Anyway, as any knowledgeable student of media history in our nation should be able to tell us, on top of the mendacity of senior government officials, there are venal owners of corporate media who travel deep within the corridors of wealth and power. And then, when some Michael Wolff breaks a story showing how these people speak in private, well, you see corporate media pundits, who represent different parts of the "acceptable" spectrum of corporate owned media, telling us, "Oh don't trust that guy!" 

It's not that those employees and independent contracting hangers on in the corporate media are bribed with money.  It is just that these people instinctively know where to stand, based upon their attending, over the years, enough cocktail parties at the edge of the wealthy and powerful. It is the  so-called liberal-left people, especially, who develop a faux cynicism whenever someone says something bluntly about the culture in the coastal elite corridors or if a Bernie Sanders type of candidate arises. And too many of us, yes, even in social media, mouth this cynicism about what is "acceptable" or "do-able," etc., as if we are auditioning for the role of corporate media pundit.

This attack on Michael Wolff's new book on the first year of the Trump administration is similar to what happened to William Greider when he wrote an article in The Atlantic (later a book) at the end of the first year of the Reagan administration, though the main issue there was an important, substantive issue, i.e. the Reagan inspired income and capital gains tax cuts. And it later happened to a star national reporter like Robert Parry when he pushed too hard outside the bounds of acceptable questioning of how the national government works in matters of foreign policy spilling over into domestic politics. And we know how the corporate media publishers, editors, and reporter/pundit classes worked overtime to literally destroy the life of Gary Webb.

And if anyone thinks this is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is, sadly, not. This sort of professional sniping against reporters who step outside the norms of acceptable reporting and most important non-reporting goes back to the days of I.F. Stone* and George Seldes, who were, like Greider and especially Parry, much more concerned about substantive policy issues of war, peace, macro-economic public policy issues, etc. 

The Wolff revelations are merely emblematic of us living in a farcical period in American history, which farce, of course, we can begin to arrest with some better voting, and then pushing the Doug Jones types who the Democratic Party poo-bahs and corporate media liberal pundits deign to foist upon us into nominating. I also leave the glowing economic reports of the Obama and now into the Trump years to what I call an "Indian Summer" that masks an overall decline as the infrastructure continues to be neglected, wealth inequality generates even more inequality (exacerbated by the new tax cut bill Trump is signing), and as the planet heaves from CO2 and methane.

I think it is important to name some names of the sniping against the Wolff book that has come from those who are in the liberal and even left side of the corporate media culture. I'm talking to you, Vox and Slate. When you read with a critical eye these types of articles, you realize how little is really there in the criticisms and how we are supposed to believe people like Judith Regan, a tribune in the corporate media for all of its worst as well as best values, over a reporter who captures how such people talk when the cameras lights are off.  

Again, the Vox.com and Slate.com people can stamp their collective feet and say, "We're not bribed! We're not told to say this!" Yes, of course. I get that. But there is still something inside these magazines and their pundits who instinctively know what it is like to be on the edge of the corporate media power corridors and trying to stay "relevant." It is a faux cynicism that operates to obscure, mask, and deny the unmasked reality of how the DC and economic royalty speak with each other. 

This is why James Risen's interview with Jeremy Scahill is so interesting not just on a substantive policy level, but the way in which national corporate media actually works. And if you want to rise up in that industry, you learn to know where to instinctively stand. Risen, himself, has some explaining to do why he did not speak out more forcefully, but we know why: Career preservation or career ladder climbing. It happens to all of us, and we have to remember one thing: People we see on television are doing this for money, status or both. It is what makes a Jeremy Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders so scary to those people, for they get scared that Sanders' or Corbyn's egos are not as large as they should be. It is not because those two are perfect, but there is a genuineness and earnestness that drives the faux cynics into abject fear and contempt.

*Stone, after his death in 1989, was attacked even more virulently and falsely as being a Soviet stooge or even spy. I helped balance the facts in the Wiki page bio, in the first paragraph of the section dealing with allegations of espionage, about actual Stone editorials in the 1930s which showed him to be a fairly trenchant critic of Stalin's actions in during the same decade. And then someone added at Wiki, "Nonetheless, his American patriotism and professional integrity were doubted, and I. F. Stone was suspected of being a secret agent of the U.S.S.R." Yes, but...how disgusting and wrong these allegations are.  This 1973 documentary by independent documentarian, Jerry Bruck, remains required viewing when studying the work and personality of Stone.

UPDATE 1/7/2018: Slate.com continues to be played.  See here. Look at the substance of what Bannon was supposedly going to release.  The statement does not deny the statements made regarding Don Jr. and Kushner and treason. The statement simply says, without explaining any "context" whatsoever, that the quotes were "out of context."

This was not released because it was a non-denial, and Bannon realized that it would only solidify Wolff's reporting.

Now, Bannon's publicists likely leaked this phony non-denial denial that was never going to be put out, and are now trying to pass it off as a personal feud between Bannon and Trump--in order to distract people who will only read a headline like Slate.com put in.

Poor Slate.com.  Played like a violin at Carnegie Hall.

Though here is William Saletan at Slate.com, maneuvering around his editors and fellow reporting staff members who are probably sipping lattes at work castigating the oh-so-not-cool Michael Wolff.  After tut-tutting about Wolff being unreliable, Saletan launches into his trademark "Look at me, I'm so smart" routine that posits a "unifying theory" of why the book is so on the mark:  Trump never wanted or expected to be president.  The article is a good read, and I admit it because I have agreed with this from the start of his candidacy.  The South Park guys knew it, too.  But there are two things else to say:  Note how Saletan says twice that even if half or some of the sources turn on Wolff (and Saletan forgets Wolff's assertion about tapes), the story appears true in its essence, which has more going for Wolff's book than the work of Herodotus.  Second, the Boehner anecdote is still likely true, and likely true on three different grounds: (1) Trump literally forgot because he sees all politicians as fungible (the way people in his station do); (2) Trump was saying Who's that?" in a sarcastic "New Yawkah" style as in "You've got to be kidding!"; or (3) Maybe Trump was already starting to lose his short term memory.  That is not beyond the realm of possibility, as he sure does not look physically healthy.

Let's all put this into the perspective of leaks and on/off record talks:  All leaks are controlled by the person who decides to leak, unless there is out-and-out blackmail.  And even then...it is still a controlled leak, just maybe not controlled by the person speaking.  I think these people, including Bannon, spoke because they are concerned at Trump's lack of competency, even though they agree with much of Trump's purported worldview, which they now realize is based on Trump's own narcissism and greed.  And let's remember Bannon has a clear axe to grind against Kushner and Don, Jr., who probably orchestrated Bannon's eventual isolation and removal from the White House circle.  Trump's worldview, however, is not based upon any ideological philosophy, which is why Trump could so easily suggest "Medicare for All" at a discussion regarding health insurance, according to yet another story within Wolff's book.  The silence surrounding the people quoting in the book are pretty stunning.  But like Bob Woodward's infamous William Casey death-bed discussions, there are multiple quotes in Wolff's book from a dead man, Roger Ailes.  Something tells me if those are recorded, it may explain why so many people Ailes mentioned are afraid to counter what they know is probably true.

UPDATE: 1/8/2018:  It gets funnier.  So Sebastian Gorka says he was "told" to speak with Wolff, as they went marching into the office they had Wolff in.  That means the Trump administration saw Wolff as their chronicler as if he was Taylor Branch or Theodore White or someone like that.  That truly is funny.  They may have assumed Wolff would not go public until after the 2020 election was safely behind Trump, assuming, you know, dum-da-dum-dum...Mueller does not come calling and asking for an interview.

Thor: The allegorical and the actual film critique

Finally, and I mean, FINALLY, got to see Thor: Ragnarok last evening. I doubt most saw this as an allegory about Israel and Judaism, but I sure did. 

The thing about the Asagardian people being more important than the land struck me as similar to the Rabbinic response to the destruction of the Second Temple, which eventually converted Judaism from a land-based religion to a universalist religion. Yes, there is the whole "If I forget thee Oh Jerusalem..." language in Jewish Rabbinic lore, but, over centuries, the Rabbinic universalist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible became much more definitive of Judaism than being a people of a particular piece of land. 

This helps explain why most of the so-called orthodox refused to accept the 19th Century European nationalism reflected within Zionism, as the so-called orthodox said only with the destruction of the world in the midst of the Messiah would Jews return to the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They saw Ben-Gurion and Weitzmann as false prophets.* The irony may be that, in their reactionary, twisted way, the so-called orthodox may yet be proven correct, as the so-called orthodox--now wanting to define Israel as land based and the Palestinians become the Canaanites to be played or pushed off the God-given land**--take over more and more of Israeli power corridors, and backward, fascistic elements prevail more and more in the political economy of Israel.

The twist at the end of the Thor film, which should have gotten Netanyahu fans and assorted Israel Firsters very nervous, was Thor's decision to allow the evil to destroy the land forever, and maintain the people elsewhere. 

And then Thor, like Moses, leads his people out of instead of into the land.  Thor as Rabbinic Jewish leader.  

What an interesting set of ironies...

* Of course, quite a few of the nationalist Jews who were the pioneers of Zionism, starting with Herzl, were fine with East Africa for at least a temporary (practically speaking, this would never have been temporary) homeland for Jews (the so-called Uganda proposal, but really in parts of the land of modern Kenya), and, as for Ben-Gurion, when he arrived in Palestine, he thought very little and was largely contemptuous toward Jerusalem. He saw a port city such as Tel Aviv as much more emblematic for a new nation. Ben-Gurion biographer Tom Segev is a most recent source for this point. Oh, such ironies abound...

** Or, as I call the Palestinians, the Least Sympathetic Oppressed people on the planet.  For the Palestinians act like they are the majority and too often their leaders act like they should just slay the Jews rather than live in peace.  It is the Deutscher Conundrum, which is why I, and even Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein (!), have long supported the Two State Solution, a solution less and less of the participants on either side appear to endorse.  

And now for the direct film critique:  This was by far the best and most watchable Thor film.  It was funny, and relatively well-paced.  The sibling rivalry and feudalism narrative, however, continues to make Thor films more Star Wars-y than Star Trek-y.  See science fiction writer and astrophysicist David Brin for his long-held, and I think, proper criticism of the entire Star Wars franchise as an inverted dystopia and reactionary, feudal glorification.  Technological advancement does not automatically revert us to feudalism and war, Brin says, but also liberates us and allows for different species to learn to work and live together.  

But let's note the Star Wars overlaps, such as Odin acting like Obi-Won-Kanobi, coming back from the dead to give the secret to the hero, and Hela saying, essentially, like the Darth Vader character she is, in transgender guise, "I am your Sister?"  Still, this was a really fun film.  You know, like Star Wars? :)

But, also really, the question we viewers should ask is why did the film allow Thor to speak throughout in Star Trek-oriented society language about not wanting to take the throne, showing respect for the Valkyrie female warrior, etc., at the end, blink and accept the throne?  The Avengers (Marvel) and Justice League (DC) are teams of gods and men acting together, equally, and with the tension and sometimes inefficiencies that come with democratic or popular sovereignty. As Holly Hunter's Senator Finch says in the continually abused but actually brilliant Batman v. Superman, film, "Democracy is a conversation...."  

I think Thor's ending would have been better had he not taken the throne and created instead his team as they seek the new land where there are no promises, and no more land-based definition of what makes people Asgardian.  But, at least this Thor film was watchable and delightful overall.

UPDATE: The Daughter informs me the film's director, Taika David Waititi (Cohen) is Jewish-Maori.  The Daughter says that means he has land taker heritage and land taken heritage, both ways, and with religious reasons included in at least part of those ways.  The Daughter thinks the Jewish angle of the film is obvious, and said, "What, Dad, you think that people don't see this?"  Gotta love youth.  Most people I know who saw the film never mentioned it and most corporate media reviewers I doubt even thought of it.  When looking on the web,  all I found was this, which at least is from Jewish Currents magazine.  Glad I'm not quite alone out there, but it is not so obvious to most people, I don't think...:)