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      The Real Scandal of Chinese Hacking

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      The image most people have of the world of espionage spans an intriguingly varied cast of contrasting personalities. It includes the colorful, the creepy, the beautiful but also the deceptively ordinary. It features a sexy Mata Hari and Christine Keeler. It stretches across history from Christopher Marlowe to the Cambridge Five, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And most people retain the image of the world-weary Cold War spies that have populated the novels of Graham Greene and John le Carré and the movies inspired by them.

      The advent of the internet has significantly transformed the landscape of spy-duggery. To be a spy used to require a solid education followed by intensive behavioral training and cross-cultural awareness. But in contrast with the past, the people identified as spies these days tend to be nerds: hackers, digital pirates and cyber-spies. Just as drone operators sitting in a remote location operating what resembles a video game console have increasingly replaced the soldier on the battlefield, the spies in today’s news are faceless operators. Their personalities are unknown and biographies singularly devoid of color and drama.

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      The picture becomes even more complex when we consider how the stories told about the cyber-spies emerge in the media. The source tends to be a government exposing them. But with so little substance to expose other than designating hidden lines of code, the public can’t even be sure that a newly-identified spy is real. And given that any clever coder motivated enough to rise to the challenge can hack the most secure target, the act that is identified as espionage may just be a feat of coding prowess by a teenager seeking to impress a few cyber-friends.

      We must not forget the need of some politicians in democratic nations to raise the alarm from time to time either to justify exceptional security measures they wish to impose, possibly for other reasons, or simply to prove to the electorate how vigilant they are in defending their vulnerable nation. In such circumstances, decoding the political intent behind incidents caused by coding becomes a major challenge. It is in such a context that, over the past week, the governments of the US and the UK have signaled at least two cases of spying by everyone’s favorite enemies in treachery: Russia and China.

      In the harvest of spy alerts from the past week, there was also what has become the obligatory mention of Russian meddling in Western elections (the Scottish independence referendum of 2014). But in the two contemporary cases that made the headlines, the goal turned out not to be the usual military, electoral or cultural goal (“sowing doubt” and “creating confusion”) but medical. The spies in question were seeking to hack research into the responses to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

      According to The Guardian, the US Justice Department has indicted two Chinese hackers “for seeking to steal Covid-19 vaccine research” and other acts of industrial espionage. “Justice Department officials said Li [Xiaoyu] and Dong [Jiazhi] targeted biotech companies in California, Maryland, Massachusetts and elsewhere but did not appear to have actually compromised any Covid-19 research.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Compromise:

      Allow an idea, concept, process or object to escape from the hands of a person or institution that has been jealously hoarding the idea, concept, process or object with a view to reaping the maximum profit from it

      Contextual Note

      The message that nothing was compromised will reassure the public. But, as often in these cases, the motivation and the supposed agency of the Chinese government are implied rather than proven. With its typical lack of clarity, CNN clarifies: “While the indictment does not specify if the hackers had been working at the behest of the Chinese government as they targeted the coronavirus projects, senior national security officials have been warning of Chinese government attempts to steal coronavirus research from US institutions for months.”

      In other words, much like Russiagate, if “national security figures” warned that something might be initiated by an identified agent (the Chinese government) and then something (but not exactly the thing they feared) does seem to happen, the conclusion requires no further investigation. That is exactly how conspiracy theories are built and justified, but it is also how the best scoops in the media are constructed.

      Historical Note

      In the world of geo-diplomatic intelligence spawned by the Cold War and continued by all nations who can afford it ever since, spying, hacking and spreading disinformation have become a kind of operational norm. This means that whenever a political leader needs to create a scare, there will always be one available for immediate exploitation. Over the past 70 years, alarms about spying and foreign meddling only burst into the media at moments in which leaders judge it expedient to draw such incidents to the public’s attention. In the midst of an intractable pandemic that has caused severe political grief to the leaders of the US and the UK, this is one of those moments.

      Most of these cases produce mild diplomatic incidents that may have immediate pragmatic consequences but rarely alter the balance of power or degenerate into forms of durable conflict. In today’s case, pitting China against the US, after the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, the consequences appear to be far from negligible. It is, after all, an election year in the US and Donald Trump’s chances of getting a new four-year lease on the White House are rapidly dwindling. This may be just the first act of a four-month drama or an alternative scenario — alongside the Israel-Iran conflict — for Trump to have the tail towag the dog.

      Embed from Getty Images

      With the ultimate prospect of an intercontinental war, no one in the media seems to notice what is special and different about the idea of hacking research on COVID-19 treatments, cures and vaccines. That is because both the media and politicians have failed to ask the basic question: Why would anyone want access to urgent medical research?

      In a rational world in which nearly 8 billion people find themselves assailed by fear of contamination, accompanied by the gutting of their economies and the violent transformation of their way of life, research on treatments and cures should logically take the form of a universal collaborative project spontaneously shared among all competent experts and researchers across the globe. Instead, we are passively witnessing a competition driven solely by the profit-motive of a few.

      The real question is: Why isn’t this research already being shared? Why must it be hacked? Everyone knows the answer to that question. It is too obvious, too much a part of the landscape to mention. That is why they dare not even ask the question or assess the consequences. The winner of the race expects to be handsomely rewarded, benefiting from a monopolistic position. And the nation that harbors the winner will be the first to exploit it, with the option of hoarding.

      That is how today’s world order works and everyone seems to accept it as normal, even in these far from normal times. It’s a unified ideological system that governs both geopolitics and the economy. Competition, profit and what Thomas Piketty has called the “sacralization of property,” including industrial property, are the pillars of our historical heritage from the industrial age. 

      Secrets permit monopolies. Monopolies guarantee excessive profit. The rule of the game is that researchers on one side of the world must be unaware of the progress of their colleagues elsewhere. May the best researcher win. Yet this not only slows down progress toward a satisfactory solution, but it also increases the risk that the winning solution may be flawed or incomplete.

      In today’s world, sharing means compromise. But that is deemed unacceptable for a simple reason: Compromise means being compromised. Totally unacceptable.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Travails of America’s Higher Education

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      American universities are among the best in the world. Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale, to name but a few, attract the best and the brightest of their generation, year after year. The competition is brutal. Most applicants are rejected. American universities, however, are not only among the best in the world — they are also among the most expensive. A non-resident student at one of the top public universities, such as UCLA, Berkeley or the University of Virginia, pays more than $ 150,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. A professional master’s degree, such as business or law, costs you well over $100,000 a year. No wonder that higher education has become a multibillion-dollar quasi-corporation, with university presidents behaving — and being remunerated — like CEOs.

      Until COVID-19, business was booming. The pandemic, however, has thrown a monkey wrench into the works, and university administrators are at a loss of how to respond to the crisis. The problem is that as higher education in the United States morphed into big business, it increasingly reached out beyond America’s borders, actively seeking to recruit international students. Last year, for instance, there were some 90,000 German students enrolled in American universities. Their numbers pale, however, in comparison to Chinese students, who in recent years amounted to over 350,000. Universities love foreign and non-resident students if only because more often than not they pay full tuition.

      Up in the Air

      The combination of COVID-19 and Trumpian nativism poses a serious threat to this arrangement. As the pandemic spread across the nation, universities were forced to close their doors and go online. And with the pandemic threatening to engulf the whole nation, largely thanks to the administration’s incompetence and utter lack of preparedness and empathy, the immediate future of higher education is completely up in the air. Foreign students are in the United States on a visa that requires them to pursue their degree at a (physical) university. As universities become virtual, switching to online teaching, this no longer applies, or so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced in early July.

      This meant international would be required to leave the country or face deportation. Immigration suggested that international students whose university moved online consider transferring to another university that still offered in-person instruction – under the circumstances a rather ridiculous proposition. In any case, ICE announced that the Department of State would no longer “issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester” nor would immigration authorities “permit these students to enter the United States.”

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      In response, a number of major private and public universities filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the measure. In the days that followed the administration reversed course, admitting the “proposal” had been “poorly conceived and executed.” This, however, failed to smooth the waves of academic indignation. On July 14, the president of MIT, Dr. L. Rafael Reif, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he claimed that America needed foreign students. Foreign students, he charged, were essential for American competitiveness and innovation. “As a nation,” he maintained, “when we turn our backs on talented foreign students, we not only lose all that they bring to our classrooms and laboratories, we also give up a strategic asset.”

      To illustrate the point he chose as an example Chinese PhD students — not particularly felicitous given the current anti-Chinese sentiments prevalent in America today. Most recent data showed, he wrote, “that 83 percent of Ph.D. students from China, the kind of highly trained scientists and engineers who drive American innovation, were still in the United States five years after completing their degrees.”

      The Resentment of the Privileged

      The New York Times allows its readers to comment on op-ed pieces. It is difficult to know if Reif was prepared for some of the responses he got from his readers. Quite a number of commentators questioned the MIT president’s motives behind his defense of foreign students, and particularly Chinese students. Others insisted that American students should get preference. Others charged that foreign students were “squeezing out” qualified American applicants for the simple reason that American top universities put them in a position to do so. Undoubtedly, resentment transcends class boundaries.

      There are, however, good grounds for this resentment. One of the most burning socioeconomic issues today is inequality. COVID-19 has once again drastically shown that inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon, related to a range of markers — gender, race, class and particularly education. Take, for instance, “assortative mating,” which refers to the tendency of people to choose a partner with a similar background, such as education level. Studies show not only that assortative mating has steadily increased over the past decades, but also that it has a non-negligible impact on socioeconomic inequality.

      It has also been shown that parents’ education level has a significant impact on their child’s educational attainment. Children from families where the parents are highly-educated are more likely to succeed in high school, more likely to attend and graduate from university and more likely to get a well-paying job. In this way, inequality is passed on to the next generation.

      A second reason for the resentment expressed by some of the comments in The New York Times is probably more mundane, more “human, all too human.” Top American universities are the incubator of America’s elite, similar to Oxbridge in the UK and the grandes écoles in France. With top universities seeking to attract foreign students, there are fewer spaces from the “native-born.” Given the profile of the average reader of The New York Times, the resulting resentment is quite understandable. Nativism is usually associated with “ordinary people” having to compete with migrants for scarce resources such as social welfare.

      This does not mean, however, that the privileged are immune to nativism. And the resentment of the privileged is bound to increase in the years to come. Until now, highly educated professionals in the West were largely protected against international competition. Studies suggest that COVID-19 is going to boost trade in services. The acceleration of trade in services, in turn, is likely to affect a range of professional services — finance, consulting, accounting, legal services, even medicine — hitherto shielded from international competition. Under the circumstances, the resentment of the highly educated is perfectly understandable. Foreign students from China and India at Harvard and MIT are the likely competitors of their offspring a few years ahead. And they are likely to win the race.

      Luxury Good

      It appears American higher education is in a pickle, some of its own making, some not. The reality is that higher education has become a luxury good in the US. For most Americans today, college education represents the second-largest expense after buying a home. Over the past three decades or so, tuition costs have more than doubled, in some cases significantly more. One of the reasons has been deep cuts by states for higher education, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession: Since 2008, tuition and fees in four-year public schools increased on average by more than 30%.

      At the same time, however, universities are also to blame. One of the main reasons for the spiraling costs of higher education is the dramatic expansion of university bureaucracy. In the years following the Great Depression, and state funding cuts notwithstanding, administration costs skyrocketed. According to Forbes, between 1980-81 and 2014-15 school years, administrative costs at private and public schools increased from $13 billion to $122.3 billion. During the same period, instruction costs increased from $20.7 billion to $148 billion. In the process, the number of administrators has steadily risen largely outpacing the hiring of full-time faculty. In fact, in today’s universities, a significant part of the teaching is done by part-time faculty more often than not paid a pittance — around $3,000 per three-credit course.

      As has been the case in so many other areas, COVID-19 has brutally exposed the complete lack of awareness of what is happening in the “real” world and of preparedness for contingencies on the part of those supposed to be in charge in higher education, namely its highly remunerated administrators. In a recent scathing critique in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Johns Hopkins University professor has released all the pent-up anger that has accumulated over the years: “Even as they continue enriching themselves,” he charges, “university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk. In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency. Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.”

      The professor’s ire is understandable, given the heavy losses Johns Hopkins has projected it will incur as a result of the pandemic and its impact on its faculty. The university expects losses for the next fiscal year to amount to more than $350 million, partially to be met by cutbacks. In addition to restrictions on new hiring, the possibility of furloughs and even layoffs, the president of the university announced that JHU would suspend the university’s contributions to individual retirement accounts — for all practical purposes amounting to a pay cut.

      COVID-19 marks a rude awakening for America’s premier universities, laying bare all the problems associated with the “corporatization” of the institution of the university and “the monetization of just about everything within the institution” that are at the root of their current predicament. Under the circumstances, the MIT president’s op-ed piece is understandable. It certainly won’t fix the system of higher education.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Under Pressure, Will Trump Wag the Dog?

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      As commentators in the US media continue to track and assess the accelerating decline of President Donald Trump’s prospects for reelection, some are wondering whether he will be tempted to organize a spectacular “October surprise” to magically overcome his ever-increasing gap in the polls. His behavior in recent days has appeared increasingly desperate, as demonstrated in this week’s shambolic Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

      Some have speculated that Trump may now be feeling the need to assert leadership in foreign policy after singularly failing to do so on the real crisis at hand: the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Alexis Dudden, an expert on Korea and Japan, evokes two hypotheses that concern North Korea: “If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to fly to Pyongyang and meet Kim in an effort to appear presidential, he will. If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to order a militarized attack on a North Korean nuclear facility in an effort to appear presidential, he will.”

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      The Intelligencer sees another scenario, one that is less speculative based on events that are already taking place. In an article with the title, “Could War With Iran Be an October Surprise?” the author, Jonah Shepp, reviews recent events concerning a series of mysterious explosions affecting Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is more than a strong suspicion that Israel is responsible for at least some of the unusual incidents. Shepp highlights the value escalation may have for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been under extreme pressure for more than a year through a series of inconclusive elections and is now desperate to find a way to escape the possible consequences of his trial for corruption.

      Mitch Prothero, writing for Business Insider, suggests a direct connection between Netanyahu’s dilemma and Trump’s quandary in an article with the title, “Israel keeps blowing up military targets in Iran, hoping to force a confrontation before Trump can be voted out in November.” Trump may also be hoping that if Israel takes the lead, he will be justified in following through, with the hope that the nation would fall in line behind a wartime president.

      Both Shepp and Prothero focus on the sense of urgency felt in Israel to profit from what may be the last few months of Trump’s presidency before he becomes a lame duck, as now seems nearly certain. Prothero explains that, for the moment, Israel’s decision has been “to follow the Trump administration’s lead of exerting ‘maximum pressure’ on the Iranians.” Prothero quotes an EU intelligence official: “The attacks appear to be part of a campaign of “maximum pressure, minimal strategy.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Maximum pressure:

      In 21st-century diplomacy, political sadism directed against civilian populations to persuade them to respect interests and values that may be foreign to their culture 

      Contextual note

      Shepp calls Israel’s attacks “short-of-war actions.” He predicts that an administration led by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “would probably not continue Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran and would not be as solicitous of Israel’s covert operations.”

      The EU official quoted above believes that “the Israeli plan here is to provoke an Iranian response that can turn into a military escalation while Trump remains in office.” The Israelis would thus aim at drawing the US deeper into a struggle that includes a very real potential of turning into a war. Trump is likely to play along if he believes it will make him look like a wartime president in the weeks before the November election.

      The situation is risky for numerous reasons. None of the parties would welcome war itself, but the ratcheting up of tensions to the point at which the fear of hostilities becomes palpable might be seen as the last-minute trick that allows both Netanyahu and Trump to hold onto the reins of power that appear to be slipping from their respective hands.    

      Historical note

      Following the disastrous experience of George W. Bush’s never-ending wars in the Middle East in what might be called more than maximum pressure on nations that fail to follow the American game plan, the past two US administrations have tended to turn to economic sanctions as the principal means of “persuading” governments to obey their dictates. Donald Trump has turned the policy into a reflex in his foreign policy. He routinely directs sanctions not only against recalcitrant nations but even against individuals, such as the members of the International Criminal Court who have dared to threaten an investigation of American or Israeli war crimes.

      In an article on Al Jazeera, Eva Nanopoulos reminds readers that it was US President Woodrow Wilson who first launched the idea of economic sanctions. Once the trauma of World War I had passed, Wilson got to work looking for ways of imposing order while avoiding the messiness of war. His promotion of the League of Nations was a crucial element. The key to making the League of Nations work could only be economic sanctions, which Wilson described in this way: “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly [and] terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      President Wilson invented the logic of maximum pressure that has become the most used and abused tool in the foreign policy toolbox under the Trump administration. “There always was a degree of irony in Wilson’s juxtaposition of peace and death,” Nanopoulos writes. 

      Paradox might be a more appropriate word than irony to describe a policy that is both “peaceful” and “deadly.” There can be no greater moral failure and manifestation of hypocrisy than the deliberate inversion of a widely understood moral concept. Because people spontaneously think of war as a form of organized killing, they can be persuaded to think that so long as a state of war doesn’t exist, economic sanctions, which indirectly but just as surely cause death and suffering, may no longer be considered killing. After all, if there is no smoking gun, no crime has been committed.

      Nanopoulos describes the result: “All served the same cause: to advance imperial ambitions without assuming the risks and responsibilities of war. With the establishment of the League of Nations, multilateral sanctions became part of an international arsenal used to effectively preserve the colonial status quo.”

      It has become customary to invoke the famous “rule of law” that we use to characterize the world order after 1945. The aftermath of World War II saw the creation of the United Nations and a global financial system given a stable structure at Bretton Woods. It didn’t eliminate war, but it kept wars local while developing global trade. Nations and the UN began deploying the threat and the application of economic sanctions. Still, we should not lose from sight the links to European colonialism and emerging American imperialism that Wilson built into the notion of sanctions when he described them as being both peaceful and deadly.

      Maximizing sanctions avoids war. But going to war can still have its merits, mainly in terms of electoral advantage for insecure and contested leaders. Margaret Thatcher demonstrated the principle in the Falkland Islands in 1982. This is traditionally called the tail wagging the dog. Whether it is done through war or simply through Wilson’s and Trump’s maximum deadly pressure, Shakespeare’s Macbeth probably had it right when — allowing for an appropriate adjustment in the spelling — he called it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Political Behavior and Basketball Correctness

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      Like an elementary school, the United States has a permanent problem defining and enforcing the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It has reached a point at which every issue becomes focused not on general interest but on individual behavior, largely because the notion of social behavior appears to have been definitively lost.

      Recent weeks have seen an acceleration of the trends associated with what is often called the “culture wars.” Politics itself has been increasingly reduced to accepting or denouncing someone else’s rules to live, work and breathe by. Ironically, in some cases, breathing itself has become the issue.

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      In a context in which the deprivation of one man’s breath has spawned massive and ongoing protests, the National Basketball Association (NBA), a sports league comprised of a majority of black players, announced that it would allow its players to display on their jerseys a message of solidarity in response to the questions raised by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

      US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — a populist Republican in a state that not only has no NBA team but has, in recent years, been rocked by racist violence — audaciously stepped in to deviate the discussion toward themes he considers more legitimate. In the face of recent attacks against the tradition of slavery, Hawley has embraced the sacred cause of defending the memory of the Confederacy and its heroes. He accuses his enemies, the Democrats, of using the pretext of anti-racism to dismantle the police, neuter the military and erase the history of the Confederacy. In his mind, none of those three entities can be suspected of racism, not even the Confederacy, which was just about brave white people defending their traditions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As a senator, Hawley has no authority over a sports league. But he does have access to public platforms, which he uses to promote his political agenda. He complained that the NBA “is limiting its social messages on jerseys.” Hawley wants the NBA to include in its list of authorized messages his own preferred political mantra, “Free Hong Kong,” which of course has nothing to do with the Floyd drama or with the players’ lives, or, for that matter, the US Senate.

      One of the most respected commentators on the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski, reacted on Twitter with a simple but deliberately impolite message: “F–k you!” What he meant was: You may be a senator but you have no stake in this; you don’t have the faintest idea of what it is about or what it means to the players, and, moreover, this has nothing to do with China or any other demagogic message you probably want to broadcast to your electoral base.

      That might have been too long for a tweet. The two words he used conveyed the message much more succinctly.

      Alas, for Woj (as the commentator is familiarly known), once Hawley expressed his shock at the crudity of the response, his employer, the sports network ESPN, suspended the seasoned reporter after making this statement on July 13: “This is completely unacceptable behavior and we do not condone it. It is inexcusable for anyone working for ESPN to respond in the way Adrian did to Senator Hawley. We are addressing it directly with Adrian and specifics of those conversations will remain internal.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Unacceptable behavior:

      The expression of justified emotion toward an impertinent figure of authority by someone employed by an organization professionally dedicated to containing expression within a rigidly controlled framework that must avoid offending its audience

      Contextual Note

      Senator Hawley framed his message in populist terms, complaining that by refusing to mention Hong Kong, the NBA was stifling the players’ freedom of expression out of fear of upsetting the Chinese government and losing the lucrative Chinese market. In his letter to the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, Hawley claimed “that the league’s policy on social injustice messages ‘appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities.’”

      Hawley remembers that the NBA’s delicate attitude toward China had briefly become a hot-button issue in 2019. It resonated with the populist anti-China sentiment pushed by the Trump administration. But that issue has since been eclipsed by something far more dramatic that directly impinges on the lives of players and their families.

      As a senator and supposedly responsible citizen, Hawley should be aware that the NBA’s intention was not to turn players’ jerseys into a new open social media platform for the expression of random political opinions, but rather as an opportunity to express solidarity on an issue that affects their lives.

      Hawley, the politician, sees it as an occasion to score a political point that has nothing to do with the question of racial justice. It would even have the effect of undermining its importance. Race is not a serious issue for Hawley, certainly not as urgent as protecting the political rights of the Hong Kong Chinese. He seems less concerned by the plight of the Saudis, who are far more oppressed.

      As a response to such twisted reasoning, Woj found the best two words to use in the English language.

      Historical Note

      In a speech on June 11 from the floor of the Senate, Josh Hawley invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and even called one of the most violent battles of the American Civil War a “shared struggle.” He seems to have retained the idea that when two groups of brave people spent four years massacring each other, they were engaged in an act of sharing.

      In a fundamentally hyperreal way, Hawley has a point. Intolerance and even murderously violent behavior in the US have come to exist as a form of sharing to the extent that everyone willingly and often eagerly participates. His message about the Civil War seems to be that white people disagreed only to end up agreeing in the end, which allowed them to emancipate the slaves for the betterment of the nation.

      This view of history implies that once that was done, the problem ceased to exist. That may be why Hawley feels that what the NBA should be focusing not on saving its season interrupted in March by the COVID-19 pandemic, nor on allowing its players to grapple with their racial identity in US society, but addressing the issue he considers vital for his constituents in Missouri: humiliating the Chinese government, if only to comfort President Donald Trump’s and other Republicans’ chances of being reelected.

      In defending the tradition of the South’s role in the war, Hawley claims that his aim is “not to embrace the cause of the Confederacy, but to embrace the cause of union, our union shared together as Americans.” This is particularly ironic coming from a senator from Missouri, since the status of Missouri played a key role in provoking the Civil War. But, as Hawley notes, once the bloodshed and the sacrifice of more than 600,000 American lives was over, the nation came together.

      As author David Rothkopf notes in an article in Haaretz, Trump “has embraced a defense of the losers in the American Civil War as a central theme of his campaign.” Hawley has stepped up to support both of those causes: defending the memory of slave-holders and reelecting Trump. “Let us work together … to build on the history and the responsibility that we share as Americans,” Hawley said. He never stops insisting that it’s all about “sharing.”

      On July 16, Hawley asked for an investigation of a prosecutor focused on the needs of the black community. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, an African American, “has sought to reduce incarceration and low-level marijuana cases and has angered the St. Louis police union with her reform efforts.” Most objective observers agree that Gardner’s efforts correspond to the most basic reforms aimed at reducing the patent inequality of a system designed to disproportionately imprison members of the black community. Gardner described Hawley’s demand as “a dog whistle of racist rhetoric and cronyism politics.”

      Some of the new “enlightened” populists on the right, such as the otherwise open-minded and anti-racist Saagar Enjeti, see Hawley as a hero, a defender of a working class that includes oppressed minorities. Adrian Wojnarowski begs to differ. A generation of descendants from former slaves probably feels the same way.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      What Will Future Generations Say About Us?

      by

      This week, 216 years ago, one founding father killed another in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. On that early July morning, the vice president of the United States squared off against the former secretary of the treasury. As virtually everyone in America now knows, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton didn’t survive the shootout with Aaron Burr.

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      At the beginning of this month, Disney released the film version of Miranda’s blockbuster musical, “Hamilton.” So, I could finally see this extraordinary synthesis of history, biography, music and dance. As a musical, it’s riveting. As political commentary, however, it’s surprisingly dated.

      America’s Musical

      “Hamilton” debuted five years ago, in the middle of Barack Obama’s second term as president. Just as Obama was daily reimagining the American presidency, “Hamilton” reimagined the American Revolution and the creation of the United States.

      By casting people of color as the Founding Fathers — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison —  the musical speaks to the universality of that 18th-century struggle and visually links the oppression of Americans at the hands of British colonialism to the oppression of people everywhere. It’s both a projection backward of Obama’s breakthrough and a lyrical version of an Obama speech.

      “Hamilton” is radical in form: the casting, the incorporation of rap. The content, however, is quite mainstream. Aside from a couple of references to slavery and the interests of wealthy bankers, it celebrates the spirit of 1776 in a way that Americans of all political persuasions can embrace.

      And have embraced. On November 18, 2016, only a week after that gut punch of an election, Mike Pence attended a show, which prompted the actor portraying Burr to say at the close, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” It was a message from one rogue vice president to another.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Pence “appeared to enjoy the show and applauded liberally,” NPR reported. And for the next three years, he ignored the remonstration. Pence and Donald Trump, too, portrayed themselves as revolutionary underdogs — rather than the reactionary overlords they really were — who wanted to be in “the room where it happens.” They, too, were not going to throw away their shot.

      Now, in perhaps the supreme designation of mainstream status, Disney has made “Hamilton” available to the masses. How times have changed.

      In 2020, thanks to the coronavirus, live theater seems impossibly risky (why are the performers touching each other? How can the audience sit so close together?). And, with protesters on the street challenging Washington and Jefferson over their slave ownership, the musical suddenly seems behind the times, though not nearly as backward as Aunt Jemima and the soon to be former Washington Redskins.

      As A.O. Scott recently pointed out in The New York Times, “There’s been a bit of a backlash from the left against what’s perceived as an insufficiently critical perspective on slavery (and also on Hamilton’s role in the birth of American capitalism). At the same time, the extent to which Miranda celebrates America’s political traditions has been taken up as a cudgel against the supposed illiberalism of the statue-topplers and their allies.” Miranda himself has acknowledged the criticisms from the left. History doesn’t stand still for anyone, not Jefferson, not Hamilton, not Lin-Manuel Miranda.

      The Great and the Not-So-Great

      What’s remarkable, of course, is the speed with which the political temperament has changed. In a few short months, statues have fallen throughout the United States, and not just those dedicated to the Confederate cause.

      Also torn down or relocated are statues honoring figures associated with the genocide of indigenous people (Christopher Columbus), with slave-owning (Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler) and with racist policing (former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo). Statues connected to colonialism have fallen in the UK, Belgium and elsewhere. Everything, it seems, is up for debate, even monuments to the heroes of the American Revolution.

      We fully expect books and plays written in the 1950s to seem dated. Ditto those produced in the 1970s or even the 1990s. But 2015? The critiques of American failings — slavery, colonialism, racist policing — are not new. What’s changed is that the powerful have been forced to listen.

      Perhaps “Hamilton,” despite its slighting of slavery and reverence for the Founding Fathers, even played a role in preparing the powerful for this shift. But let’s be real: The destruction of images — literally, iconoclasm — is a lighter lift than the transformation of structures. It’s one thing to take down Confederate statues, but quite another to remove racism’s grip on housing, education and employment. Likewise, it’s more politically palatable to recast a play about the Founding Fathers than to grapple with the ugly truths that accompanied the founding of this nation.

      At a deeper level, the musical and the statues share a common veneration of the great person. History, we are constantly reminded in art and monuments, is the product of founding fathers, great conquerors, kings, presidents and prime ministers. Campaigns are launched to diversify those numbers to include women, people of color, perhaps even an activist or two like Martin Luther King Jr. But the focus remains on the individual, not the countless people who turned the gears of history, planted the fields of history, occupied the streets of history and, ultimately, changed the course of history.

      As “Hamilton” acknowledges, great persons are always a product of their time and place, and they’re always flawed in some way or another. Sometimes, those flaws are of an individual nature, like Alexander Hamilton’s adultery (or, more recently, the sexual harassment charges against Park Won Soon, the progressive activist and former mayor of Seoul who committed suicide last week).

      More often, the famous personages are as blind to their faults as most everyone else in their society. Transforming society requires a collective effort to shine a light on these blind spots, as the Black Lives Matter movement has done, at home and abroad, around police violence, racist iconography and the legacy of colonialism.

      Iconoclasts of the Future, Unite!

      So, perhaps it’s time to conduct a thought experiment. We’ve seen how quickly culture has moved on and left the blind spots of “Hamilton” more readily visible. How will future generations condemn us for our blind spots as they tear down today’s statues tomorrow?

      I can almost hear our children gathering in the street to pull down the statues of the famous as they chant, “Carbon hog!” For will not contribution to the destruction of the planet ultimately be seen in the same light as colonialism, as the plunder and robbery of future generations?

      The emancipation of slaves was a radical act in 18th-century America. The Polish revolutionary Tadeusz Kosciuszko berated Jefferson — his friend — at length to free his slaves, and Jefferson ignored him because, just as Pence shrugged off Burr, he could. Jefferson certainly had mixed feelings about slavery, but he was able to maintain the contradiction in his life of slave ownership and sentiments like “all men are created equal” because popular opinion, as opposed to Kosciuszko’s opinion, allowed him to do so.

      Future generations may feel the same way about our simultaneous recognition of the perils of climate change and our car ownership, air travel and use of air conditioning. Greta Thunberg, our generation’s Kosciuszko, similarly berates world leaders and with as little immediate impact.

      Future generations may also look askance at our nationalism. Why do we believe that we owe debts of obligation to strangers who live within certain borders and not strangers who live outside those borders? How could we countenance the return of desperate migrants and refugees to, in many cases, their certain death?

      And what about all the statues raised to military leaders? It seems rather ridiculous to honor men who oversaw the slaughter of others just because they were on the winning side. Future generations may well look at all the celebrated generals as so many mass murderers.

      Speaking of mass murder, how will future generations feel about the millions of animals that we kill every day for our own consumption? Or even the millions that we own as pets? The list of potential blind spots is long indeed, and there are plenty of motes in my own eye. History is constantly evolving. There is no timeless art; there are no timeless values.

      Everything reflects the moment of its production, from the American Constitution to the latest iteration of “Hamilton.” We are engaged in a long, collective conversation enlivened by a soundtrack of insightful speeches, catchy tunes and the rising roar of street protest. As for those future statues, I dearly hope that they are pulled down, defaced, disgraced. Because that would mean, in a future of superstorms and nuclear threats and periodic pandemics, that at least there are still people around to take them down.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Two Deaths Raise the Specter of Lynching in California

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      On the morning of June 10, 2020, the body of a young black man, Robert Fuller, was found hanging from a tree in a park opposite City Hall in Palmdale, California. The police initially ruled the death a suicide. Suspicions were raised though when the body of a 38-year-old homeless African American man was discovered hanging from a tree in Victorville, a town some 50 miles south of Palmdale. Again, the police initially ruled the death to have been a suicide. A coincidence? Since these deaths occurred in the middle of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, it seems hard not to be suspicious. The FBI has now entered the case.

      Racially-motivated lynching was a primarily Southern and border-state phenomenon. The Tuskegee Institute’s database records some hundreds of these murders in the decades following Reconstruction. Until American entry into World War II in 1941, Southern mobs killed dozens of black people during the Depression decade. Since Congress was dominated by Southern legislators, bills seeking to make lynching a federal crime failed to be enacted into law. Astonishingly, this continues to be the case as of June 2020.

      Out of Fashion

      Despite violent Southern resistance to racial integration during the postwar civil rights era, between approximately 1958 and 1970, lynching went out of style. Race-based bombings and shootings took its place. Out of fashion but not out of mind. For example, on occasion, nooses were found in the lockers of newly hired African American policemen and firemen when they seemed to be breaking long-standing racial barriers in these professions.

      This brings us to Palmdale. Palmdale and the adjacent town of Lancaster are located about 35 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Antelope Valley, on the edges of the Mojave Desert. These communities are close to Edwards Air Force Base, the site of flight-testing of advanced fighter planes during the Cold War — the early sequences in the film “The Right Stuff” were located at Edwards. Rents and housing prices are somewhat lower than those in Los Angeles. Palmdale-Lancaster attracts largely lower-middle-class residents who don’t mind living in a high desert environment surrounded by Joshua trees and tumbleweed. In recent years, these communities have attracted a growing number of African American families for the same reasons that drew whites to the area.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Palmdale-Lancaster has a political history that draws our attention. During the postwar era, John Wesley Swift, initially a follower of the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith, a prominent anti-Semitic preacher, founded his own church in Lancaster in 1948. Like Smith, Swift toured southern California seeking to revive the Ku Klux Klan in the Los Angeles area and beyond. The effort met with some success: A cross was burned near Big Bear Lake shortly after Swift’s visit. Swift also played a major role in the formation of the California Anti-Communist League and the equally racist and anti-Semitic Christian National Crusade.

      Our interest in Swift’s ecclesiastical career is based on the fact he was crucial in the transformation of what had been British-Israelism — a religious doctrine that asserted British people were the descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel — into the new postwar American religion of identity. From his church in Lancaster, Swift preached that the Jews were the “seed of Satan” and that people of color were sub-human “mud people” who should be deported from North America and returned to their countries of origin in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

      One of Swift’s congregants at his church in Lancaster was Richard Girnt Butler, an engineer working at a Lockheed Aircraft facility in the area. Michael Barkun, in “Religion and the Racist Right,” reports that Butler found Swift’s sermons electrifying and quickly became an adherent of the new religion: “He [Swift] was the total turning point in my life. The light turned on. He had the answers I was trying to find.”  

      Of Particular Interest

      In 1973, Butler left Swift and his Lancaster church behind and formed his own Aryan Nations (and Church of Jesus Christ Christian) at a compound near Hayden Lake in Idaho. Butler’s departure and Swift’s later demise was not the end of Lancaster-Palmdale as a location for radical-right activities.

      Of particular interest are the Nazi Low Riders (NLR). Originally a prison gang and an offshoot of the more widely known Aryan Brotherhood, the NLR first appeared outside California penitentiaries — the California Youth Authority especially — in the early 1980s. Despite its name, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdog organizations describe the group as both violent and essentially white supremacist rather than anti-Semitic. Specializing in illegal drug trafficking, the NLR has been able to recruit members beyond its original cluster of young ex-inmates.

      The NLR has also proven durable. As of 2019, the group was still active. So far as our suspicions are concerned, the Low Riders have been visible both in the Palmdale-Lancaster area and San Bernardino County, where the town of Victorville is located. Several years ago, NLR members were arrested for attacking a black man in Palmdale.

      The Low Riders are hardly unique. California abounds with what the SPLC labels as hate groups. According to the SPLC’s annual report, in 2019 there were 88 such groups active in the Golden State, many of them clustered in the Los Angeles area. Not all of them, though, are sufficiently violent to carry out a nighttime lynching. Those that do would include the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division and Feurkrieg Division, some of whose members have already killed opponents.

      It may be that the two deaths by hanging mentioned at the beginning of this observation were suicides, as the police concluded originally. Or, if murder was involved and these really were lynchings, the perpetrators need not have had an affiliation with an organized group. Still, given the current heightened atmosphere in the United States, it is hard not to be suspicious.

      *[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right is a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Price of America’s Complacency in the Face of COVID-19 Is Survival

      by

      On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered many businesses statewide to shut down in response to the raging resurgence of COVID-19 in nearly all 50 US states. That same day, a friend of mine landed in San Francisco after having spent six months living in Japan. On his flight, a United employee sitting behind him failed to wear a mask, as did numerous other people on the flight. No one said or did anything. Upon arrival, he was not asked where he had been or if he had any symptoms of the virus. His temperature was not taken and there was no mention of any requirement for 14 days of quarantine. He boarded a connecting flight and was on his way — six months after the pandemic that has ravaged the world began.

      Countries the world over have gotten so many basic elements of the battle against the virus right. Why not America? The unfortunate politicization of COVID-19, the failure to implement mandatory and consistent rules nationwide, the absence of rule enforcement, selfishness, laziness and a culture of silence are all combining to doom us to the consequences of our shared failure. Our collective apathy, complacency and idiocy are killing us.

      Should We All Have Been Wearing Masks From the Start?

      READ MORE

      Not long ago I was in Whole Foods, in the produce section where foods are not packaged, and a perfectly healthy-looking woman in her 30s was the only one not wearing a mask. No one said a thing until I approached her and said she needed to wear a mask and that it had been the law in Connecticut since April. I was told to mind my own business. It is my business, of course, and everyone else’s business in that store, yet no one said or did a thing as she continued to breathe all over the produce. I even went to store management and said something. They had to let her in because she said she had an underlying medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. It just so happens that the law in Connecticut allows for that exception, but no doctor’s note is required.

      There are plenty of reasons why America continues to lead the world in COVID-19 infections and deaths, but our own stupidity and selfishness have not been talked about much in the media. Every time we see someone not wearing a mask, or wearing it over one’s mouth but not the nose, or under the chin, we should be going up to that person and saying something. Every time. Our culture of silence is raging every bit as much as the virus in this country.

      So is local, state and national authorities’ failure to make mask-wearing and social distancing mandatory in all public places throughout the country, backed up by enforcement, which is a critical ingredient that is missing. Many governments across the world have backed their policies with strict enforcement measures and fines. That is why countries such as China and South Korea have been able to successfully battle the virus, and why Morocco, which just started doing the same, now has a reasonable chance of beating down infection rates.

      America is capable of doing all this, but the politicization of the virus and silly interpretations of what freedom of action means under the US Constitution have prevented us from following their example. Yes, you are free to take your own health and life into your own hands by being stupid and selfish, but you are not free to do the same with someone else’s health and life. And that is what the “Live Free or Die” movement and conspiracy theory believers among us fail to acknowledge.

      Every one of us needs to remind ourselves that other peoples’ actions impact us, and start to act accordingly. Say something when you see someone not wearing a mask in public, or failing to wear it properly. If everyone did so, those who are failing to do so would stop. The majority of us who are now wearing masks and social distancing have the power, but our own complacency is preventing us from taking control of inconsiderate fellow citizens. We have a responsibility to ourselves and everyone else to say something. We should also be putting pressure on lawmakers to crack down on violators and enforce mandates.

      Until America gets smarter about how to battle the coronavirus, we will continue to lead the world in infections and death, and we will deserve it. We have only ourselves to blame for being so dumb and failing to take corrective action. America has the resources to get COVID-19 under control, especially if we start treating this as a war and start acting like our collective survival depends on it — because it does.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      America Is a Nation in Darkness

      by

      As America’s 2020 Independence Day fades from memory, many things are clearer. Americans love to go to beaches and bars as their petri dishes of choice, masks are a better idea than they were before Independence Day, there will never be a national pandemic response as long as Trump is president, and it is beyond time for Trump to wear a ball gag in lieu of a mask. It is also clear that way too many Americans know way too little about the history of their nation and even less about the birth of the nation.

      Independence Day is celebrated on July 4, the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence. However, it is a safe bet that most Americans know more about the contents of a margarita than they do the Declaration of Independence.

      America’s Problem With Racism Has Become Clearer

      READ MORE

      Some will note Thomas Jefferson’s stirring words near the beginning of the document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

      Practically no one will know that immediately following these words, the Declaration goes on to state: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  

      Much of the rest of the document is a list of grievances against the British king and his minions leading to the conclusion that the colonies should be free and independent states absolved of any allegiance to the British Crown and free of any political connection to Great Britain. So there you have it, a quick history lesson. But before moving on to the US Constitution, pause a moment and actually think about what should be the cornerstone of this document: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

      We know that the “self-evident” language was never actually self-evident, and that the notion that all men are created “equal” remains at the core of America’s living historical lie, birthed even before there was a Declaration of Independence. But the part that presents the solution, the path forward, is a declaration that government deriving its powers from the consent of the governed should be how a nation organizes itself to provide for and protect its sovereignty and its people, how it defines and enables life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

      Broken Government

      Now with America’s national government completely broken, the consent of the governed nowhere to be found, and the actual right of the people to alter or abolish their government at issue with every new and imaginative effort to suppress voting, the Declaration of Independence rings hollow. But if it means anything today, it is to be found in the concept that human beings living within some demarcated landmass should be free to institute a “new” government around a set of principles and organizational mandates required to protect public safety and provide some foundation for societal well-being.

      There have been times before, and surely now it is America’s time again — the time to wrest power from the corrupt and corrupted, the venal and the vengeful. There is Trump’s Independence Day performance, practically begging the nation to again take up arms against itself. There is significant social unrest because aged institutions have failed for centuries to include a huge swath of those supposedly equal folks. There is the daily inventory of undermined governance rendering the present government incapable of protecting public safety and promoting social well-being.

      And most of all, there is the sight of our government “leaders” standing by unmasked as the fools that they are, while death and disease permeate the land. I want to be clear about this: Trump has blood on his hands, McConnell and most Republican politicians at the national and state levels have blood on their hands. And, those around Trump who have enabled his vile ignorance to prevail have blood on their hands. America’s present government is literally draining the life from this land.

      Today’s catalog of legitimate grievances is even stronger than those of 1776, for they demonstrate just how far the nation has strayed from its lofty ambition. Today, when we well know that the words “all men are created equal” rang hollow then but seem even more devoid of meaning now, the failure to fight hard enough for that ideal in modern times dwarfs the earlier willingness to fight for words that meant so much less then.

      A New Revolution

      Without wishing for a renewed revolutionary war, I do wish for a new revolution. The time has come to stop America’s national retreat from an imperfect union to an even more imperfect union. In a nation that loves its Constitution, just reading the Preamble should be enough to know that the text to follow has failed us miserably: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 

      Not one objective set out in that Preamble to the US Constitution is happening now. The institutions brought to life by that document in the text that follows are not working today to meet any of the lofty goals set forth in the Preamble. Think about it, read each one carefully, reflect on gaping societal divisions, reflect on today’s attorney general, reflect on marchers in the streets demanding racial and social justice, reflect on US allies discarded like vermin, reflect on poverty and lack of access to meaningful health care laying waste to many, and reflect on warriors in our streets supposedly “protecting” us from ourselves.   

      It is truly unfortunate that the world had to watch a black man die in the street before our eyes amid a raging tableau of disease and despair for many finally to see what America has become. When national institutions born centuries ago fail so completely to protect lives and save lives, they have failed in their original purpose.

      Now is the moment for we the people to argue loudly that the time has surely come to fundamentally alter what we have and replace it with something much better.

      *[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More