Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

The anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s most remarkable novel is an opportunity to recognize literature’s capacity to provoke, instruct, and inspire independent thought and action. (Photo: David von Blohn / NurPhoto / Corbis via Getty Images)

“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Those words were published 75 years ago in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the greatest political novels and the most quoted of the last century.

By Peter Marks

University of Sydney
Religion and Ethics
ABC News Australia
10 June 2024

Phrases, concepts, and images from a book published before the coronation of Elizabeth II have entered and remained in the public imagination and its speech. “Big Brother is Watching You,” “Thought Police,” “Doublethink,” and the adulteration of history and the dangers of mass surveillance — these are all part of the cultural vernacular and are frequently repeated by politicians, journalists, and public figures alike. Even those who have never read the novel are sufficiently familiar with these terms that a popular surveillance-based reality television show could adopt the name Big Brother.

But it is those darker elements of the novel — from government monitoring, the control of language, and attempts to manipulate reality to the use of mass hatred as a tool of politics — that speak most pressingly to our political fears. Nineteen Eighty-Four even spawned an adjective to describe such circumstances, “Orwellian”: a label so influential that opposing political wings deploy it to describe those actions and policies they most despise.

Legislator Claudia Mo Man-ching holding up a copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” next to photos of President Barack Obama and Edward Snowden, on 14 June 2013 (Photo by Felix Wong / South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

What is most striking about Nineteen Eighty-Four is its power and ability to achieve a fresh urgency and relevance for each generation. It frequently shoots back up the bestseller lists — in 2013, for example, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelation of massive and secret surveillance by American agencies on citizens and governments worldwide. To ward off mounting global criticism, then-President Barack Obama said:

               “In the abstract, you can complain about “Big Brother” or how this is a potential program run amok. But when you look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.”

However much of his statement might have been received with skepticism, the very fact that an American president would invoke a novel that was published more than a decade before he was born indicates its enduring power.

In 2017, Nineteen Eighty-Four climbed to the top of bestseller lists in the United States once again after Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s media advisor, described the outright falsehoods told by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer as “alternative facts.” The echoes of that disturbing phrase still have the capacity to trouble.

Graffiti by an anti-vaccine activist on the surface of an electrical box in London on 30 December 2021. (Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images)

Nor is the novel’s influence restricted to the West. The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg recently drew attention to the George Orwell Library in Russia, a spirited if probably doomed attempt to keep the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four books alive in a state whose manipulation of reality within and beyond its borders has worrying implications in the lead up to the American presidential elections. A recent conference paper I attended in Slovenia featured a photograph from the ongoing conflict in Gaza of “1984” sprayed on a bare wall, a sign of what the protester presumably felt was an Orwellian reality.

Illegally printed editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, moreover, have been part of resistance to totalitarian regimes. When such regimes fall or are in a state of hopeful transition to a more liberal condition — as in Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR in the 1980s or Ang Sang Suu Kyi’s Myanmar in the 2010s — publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is heralded as a sign of that nation’s move to intellectual and social freedoms. Some of these regimes do return to authoritarianism — Russia and Myanmar among them — but that is a failure of the political culture of the nation, not of the book and the ideas it expresses.

Is Big Brother still watching?

The reality of surveillance capitalism has superseded the specter of state monitoring conjured by Orwell in 1949. Today, traditional notions of privacy have been eroded to the point of seeming irrelevance as people happily curate their own lives on social media, monitor themselves with health apps, share their locations, and track each other constantly on their phones. As Shoshana Zuboff has demonstrated, surveillance has become so integrated into our personal, social, and economic lives that we are willing accomplices in surveilling and commodification — all for the benefit of tech giants.

All this is true enough, but it would be wrong to imagine that the state surveillance depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four has disappeared. The state’s surveillance capabilities have significantly increased due to technological advancements, terrorist threats, and the public’s willingness to sacrifice privacy for security and convenience.

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What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen.

WELCOME TO THE THIRD WORLD

When War on Terror proponents ignored laws to target Muslim terror suspects, American liberalism rightly objected. Once Donald Trump became the target, critics joined the mob.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Steve Bannon’s jailing will be of a type not seen since the days of the Red Scare and the “Hollywood Ten.”

By Matt Taibbi

Substack.com
12 June 2024

Last Thursday, a federal court ordered former chief strategist for Donald Trump, podcaster and symbol of All Things Evil Steve Bannon, jailed for defiance of a Congressional subpoena. Convicted in 2022 for refusing to appear before a House Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riot, Bannon, on July 1st, will join former Trump aide Peter Navarro in a select group of Americans jailed for contempt of Congress since the meat-grinder days of McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC).

Detractors celebrated the timely benching of Bannon, the host of War Room, which garners millions of downloads as the most influential pro-Trump media program.

               “Steve Bannon being off the air… is very beneficial for the pro-democracy movement,” chuckled political strategist Rick Wilson, noting that while Bannon was going away for four months, they’re “four crucial months.” A former aide to Dick Cheney, Wilson, in his Republican days, was best known for an ad questioning whether Max Cleland, who lost three limbs, had the “courage to lead.” He added: “Steve, when you’re in prison, you’re going to want to show dominance on the first day.”

Welcome to the Third World, America.

We crossed a big line in the last two weeks, first with the conviction of a presidential frontrunner on comic-book charges, now the revival of a contempt of Congress maneuver we haven’t seen since the Hollywood Ten. Nobody’s been sent to a logging camp or car-bombed or given a hot lead cure in a doorway, but as any current or former resident of authoritarian countries will tell you, the jailing of political opponents is a sure sign we’re on that road.

I returned to America a year after 9/11, following a decade in the burgeoning Russian autocracy of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. That experience allowed me to see how quickly even limited freedoms of speech or assembly can be vaporized. People blinded by dislike of Trump or Bannon should imagine trying to summon sympathy for people like Vladimir Gusinsky and Misha Khodorkovsky, oligarchs who got rich in very dubious privatization schemes but were early targets of political prosecutions in the Putin years (Gusinsky was raided by armed agents four months after Putin’s inauguration). For those protesting that Bannon is only headed inside because he’s scum who broke the law, political prosecutions always involve a legal violation, often even a real one. Americans don’t know what that looks like.

Half the country has been conned into looking at the recent lawfare craze in isolation, not as the last stages of a long-developing drift toward autocracy started decades ago by Wilson’s former boss. The twist that sent the Dick Cheney revolution to new heights was a rebrand. When we switched post-9/11 focus from Islamic terror to Trump and “Domestic Violent Extremism,” left-liberal America suddenly embraced every form of overreach it once opposed. Now, chickens are coming home to roost. Once we started ignoring laws to pursue terror suspects in the early 2000s, it became inevitable the reflex would return to infect domestic politics. Trump accelerated that process, and if the cackling of someone like Wilson doesn’t remind you of how this authoritarian slide started, nothing will. It’s a straight line from there to here:

After 9/11, Cheney told us we would have to work through “the dark side” to defend ourselves, democracy being too feeble to hold up in a fight. We deployed the PATRIOT Act to expand police power, the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) to give the White House more “nimble” war-making authority, introduced “enhanced interrogation” and watchlisting, and created carve-outs to the Geneva Convention and habeas corpus through the Military Commissions Act. This was in addition to approving new surveillance procedures with massive physical expansion of the spy state, spearheaded by establishing the 260,000-employee Department of Homeland Security.

Democrats denounced Cheney as a threat to the Bill of Rights and the architect of a dangerous form of government built on secrecy and concentrated presidential power. His ideas were even called un-American.

As Conor Friedersdorf put it in The Atlantic, Cheney

               “advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the Founders' intentions.”

It was no accident liberals in 2008 rallied around constitutional lawyer Barack Obama, marketed as a “transformative” figure who’d reverse Cheney’s vision and reinvigorate our ideals.

When Obama won, though, appointees quickly indicated they might not “change the status quo immediately,” as White House counsel Gregory Craig euphemistically put it. When the “transformative presidency” vanished like a silverware-stealing houseguest, sad-trombone headlines ensued (“Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas,” sighed the New York Times), and Democrats plunged into disillusionment.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said a person suspected of funding al-Qaeda and caught in the Philippines could be considered “part of the battlefield” and subject to indefinite detention without trial, which sounded a lot like Bushian legal theory.

Similarly, when new Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if he agreed that a person who “commits to going to war against America” should “be held off the battlefield as long as they're dangerous,”

Holder answered: “I do.”

These answers contained the seeds of the now well-developed theory of borderless existential warfare that drives the belief that any means must be employed to stop “enemies of democracy.” We didn’t notice then because the Obama administration was so expert in applying a new cosmetic face to Cheney’s revolution. Instead of Dubya boasting about smoking terrorists out of their holes, Obama re-cast decisions to institutionalize tools like the “Kill List” as somber exercises of “hard choices.” This was how easy it was to con fans of Obama like — me. I was one of millions of Americans who thought it meant something that the new president was at least frowning and affecting reluctance about the War on Terror in public appearances, as opposed to Bush’s Slim Pickens-style “Bring it on!” cowboy routine.

Obama also wisely moved away from Bush’s Manichean rambling about good and evil and began emphasizing technocratic terms like “necessity” and “legality” when describing what was now his War on Terror. When his Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, made public comments about drone assassinations in 2013, he spoke about satisfying  “the legal requirements to ensure that we were doing this carefully,” a statement people took seriously, even though the administration essentially invented most of the “legal requirements” surrounding its policies.

Holder, for instance, had come up with a novel hack of the 5th Amendment guarantee of due process rights, stating that “‘due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not the same,” and “the Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” In other words, “due process,” according to the nation’s top law enforcement official, could now be satisfied without the target’s participation via secret deliberations within the Executive branch about who may and may not be assassinated.

Obama told the National Defense University in 2013 that he based the droning of American Anwar al-Awlaki on the fact that he “helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two US-bound cargo planes.” This couched the bombing as punishment for the never-tried crime of an American citizen, which made even that action conspicuously illegal, to say nothing of the killing of al-Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman. But Obama sounded like he cared about the law, so this churning of kill lists and launching of military operations — even when they were conducted under a more arbitrary authority than that claimed by Bush and Cheney — acquired an air of respectability.

Another small cosmetic change occurred when the US Army eliminated the term PSYOPS in 2010. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mentioned it connoted “propaganda, brainwashing, manipulation, and deceit.”

The replacement term was the less eerie-sounding “MISO,” or “Military Information Support Operations,” which “sounds like a soup, but what can you do?” explained then-defense official Rosa Brooks (who later co-founded the controversial Transition Integrity Project). Dropping “PSYOP” was unpopular among defense analysts, who resented the implication that they should feel ashamed of efforts “to shape emotions, attitudes, and behavior in support of United States political and military goals.”

Seven years later, after Trump was elected, the Army took the unusual step of formally restoring “PSYOP.” The justification was based on a judgment about the spread of the global struggle. The thinking was that Russia, after incidents like the occupation of Crimea, had already brought the “influence” war to the US through efforts to influence American opinions about that action, while our government was refusing to compete with these foreign psychological operations for the same hearts and minds using equivalent weaponry.

From the Military Review:

               US and Western IO actions and programs to respond to Russian actions have increased since the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. NATO member states have recognized the increasing threat of Russian efforts to influence their internal politics and exacerbate divisions. However, these Western programs are an order less than Russian activity because of the power of Russian corruptive influence…

               The essential element of both U.S. and NATO PSYOP and influence doctrine centers on the persuasive messages… being based upon truthful information to influence the target audience. As the NATO manual states, “PSYOPS must be based on true information. Using false information is counter-productive to the long-term credibility and success of PSYOPS.” This is both a strength and a limitation… the limitation is that Russia has no such constraints to its influence campaigns.

Who knew back then that there were people in government who considered telling the truth a limiting factor in war?

If you look, you’ll find papers authored by high-ranking NATO officials as recently as 2022 pushing the idea that the traditional American concept of sticking to an “inform, not influence” strategy in its messaging is based on “flawed logic.” and “incorporating the argument of propaganda as a co-produced strategic process of deception” would better “serve NATO.”

This all started when officials prosecuting the later stages of the original War on Terror became convinced of a bizarre James Bondian concept. Forget terrorism: the new problem was an organized league of authoritarian rogue states that thrived on chaos and used the Internet to foment destabilizing actions ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Brexit to the Trump campaign. These informational assaults were so sophisticated, analysts believed, that democracy itself would be vulnerable to collapse if our military didn’t stop worrying about “truthfulness” and “credibility” in information operations.

TRUTHFULNESS: NATO officials once worried about “long-term credibility.”

I would never have had a clue about this, except the Twitter Files forced people like Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, Paul Thacker, and me to search for the origins of the weird authoritarian concepts found in the documents. We were repeatedly led to that period between roughly 2010 and 2017 when politicians convinced themselves terrorism was old news and “great power competition” was the new thing. Former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel, the first head of the new counter-messaging agency Barack Obama created by Executive Order in 2016, the Global Engagement Center, was convinced it was all connected, man. This is from Stengel’s book Information Wars:

               Donald Trump entered the American presidential race, and everything suddenly connected. The information battles we were fighting far away had come home. Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS. Russian propagandists had been calling Western media “fake news” long before Donald Trump…

I have no clue what percentage of the leadership of agencies like GEC believed they were facing an organized ISIS-Russia-China-Brexit-Trump conspiracy and how many saw shifting from counter-terrorism abroad to counter-populism at home as a contracting necessity. Either way, none of our analysts (except dissidents like the CIA’s Martin Gurri) could entertain the idea that domestic discontent and distrust of institutions like NATO, the Defense Department, and the FBI could be rooted in real failures like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the illegal surveillance of agencies like the NSA, the absence of prosecutions of Wall Street crooks, etc.

No, these people are so steeped in PSYOP culture that they figure domestic unrest has to be spurred by “active measures” campaigns by foreign enemies, in particular, the ex-Soviet Russian state. Once you grasp that the bulk of America’s intelligence and enforcement apparatus genuinely sees populist unrest as the result of outside meddling — a realization that took me a long time to accept because it’s so idiotic — the responses of the last eight years suddenly make sense. If you think of the Trump campaign as some FSB chief’s idea of a second front, no punishment of the candidate is too harsh, no lie too outlandish. Hamilton 68, the Steele Dossier, the various COVID manias, Nord Stream, and countless other public deceptions become acceptable if one believes we’re at war.

Similarly, if people like Trump and Bannon are war belligerents instead of ordinary politicians cashing in on blowback from decades of incompetent rule, then it would be irresponsible to eschew the use of any weapon against them. The new lawfare campaigns, making use of everything from criminal prosecutions to ballot access challenges to intelligence leaks to Klan Act suits to intimidation of lawyers to political espionage, censorship, and, now, the use of contempt of Congress charges to jail a media irritant, are all inbounds, if you think this is war. The problem is, you’re no longer “protecting democracy” if your method of taking on someone like Trump involves unleashing the War on Terror goodie-bag of anti-democratic methods on the domestic population.

Those protesting that Bannon is going to jail because he’s a lawbreaking scum and deserves it never spent time in an autocracy, where political prosecutions always involve a legal violation, often even a real one (see below). Many Americans have defied congressional subpoenas dating to the fifties and not gone to jail.

The group includes:

               former Attorney General Eric Holder, current Attorney General Merrick Garland, Hunter Biden, former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Congressman Scott Perry, and countless others in both parties.

No one disputes Congress has the power to issue subpoenas or that it’s a crime to refuse them. But fear of abuse and bad memories about where aggressive use of these tools leads have kept us from taking this extreme step for about 70 years.

People of my generation were taught about HUAC and Dalton Trumbo and the excesses of the post-war congressional red hunts. They had it drilled into us that whether it’s Steve Bannon or Kermit the Frog, we don’t jail people for contempt of Congress. I see arguments that Bannon needs to pay for his role on January 6th, which again strikes me as crazy because one of the major takeaways of Supreme Court reviews of the Red Scare days was that the legitimate role of Congress — investigating social problems with an eye toward legislative solutions — “must not be confused with any of the powers of law enforcement.” Like censoring, violating attorney-client privilege, conducting illegal searches or political prosecutions, presuming guilt, executing without due process, and other practices, we don’t use this tool to make up for crimes we aren’t able to charge. Not long ago, even kids knew this.

Those “We just don’t do that” instincts seem outdated, How could they not be? We spent two decades telling citizens the world is a battlefield where rules don’t apply. Now we’ve made home the battlefield, and Americans better be ready for what that will look like.

THE CEASEFIRE DEAL THAT WASN’T

The proposal Biden put forward last week had little basis in reality.

President Joe Biden delivered remarks on the war in Gaza at the White House last Friday. / Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

By Seymour Hersh

Substack.com
6 June 2024

The political panic is on, as it should be, in the Biden camp, and the president’s latest whopper, so far unremarked upon by what passes these days for the major media in America, came at an abruptly scheduled presidential briefing last Friday, a day after the conviction of Donald Trump.

The president, after praising the judicial system as the cornerstone of America, turned to the Middle East and announced:

               “I want to update you on my efforts to end the crisis in Gaza. For the past several months, my negotiators … have been relentlessly focused not just on a ceasefire that would inevitably be fragile and temporary but on a durable end to the war.

               Bringing all the hostages home ensures Israel's security, creates a better ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and sets the stage for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

               Now, after intensive diplomacy carried out by my team and my many conversations with leaders of Israel, Qatar, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries, Israel has offered a comprehensive new proposal. It’s a roadmap to an enduring ceasefire and the release of all hostages.”

Pure Political Bunkum

The talk sounded tremendous and made a lot of headlines. As I learned, it was also speaking with a well-informed American official, pure political bunkum.

There was no breakthrough offer of a “comprehensive new proposal” from Israel. As they would make clear in subsequent days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders in Tel Aviv had no idea what the president and his increasingly desperate political aides were talking about.

Members of the American team headed by CIA Director William Burns were similarly unaware. The team has been involved for months in ceasefire talks about the Gaza war. I was told that one analyst on the team raised hell in a cable to Washington because, he wrote, he and his colleagues “were never told about the plan but heard about it from the Qatari government.”

The nonexistent [FAKE] Israeli proposal, as spelled out by Biden, called for three phases:

The first phase, lasting six weeks, would include a total ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza, and the release of “several hostages—including women, the elderly, the wounded—in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. . . . Palestinians—civilians—would return to their homes and neighborhoods in all areas of Gaza, including the north.” The president’s statement made no mention of the fact that, after eight months of bombing and tank assaults, there are few homes and neighborhoods to return to.

The second phase called for the release of all remaining living hostages. At that time, the president said: “Israeli forces would withdraw from Gaza, and as long as Hamas lives up to its commitments, a temporary ceasefire would become, in the words of the Israeli proposal”—Biden garbled a few words at this point—“‘the cessation of hostilities permanently.’”

“Finally,” Biden said, “a major reconstruction plan for Gaza would commence in phase three. And any final remains of hostages who have been killed would be returned to their families.”

“That’s the offer that’s now on the table, and what we’ve been asking for is what we need.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was nowhere to be found in the days immediately after Biden’s unilateral proclamation, was said in the Times to be facing “crunch time” because Biden announced what could be a war-ending truce.

A touch of caution came when Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s chief foreign policy adviser, told the Times of London that Israel was not rejecting a ceasefire deal but ominously added: “There will not be a ceasefire until all our objectives have been met.”

At the time, the Israeli military, at Netanyahu’s command, was continuing to bomb, starve, and maim Gaza and its people while conducting a deadly search in its tunnels for the leadership of Hamas.

John Kirby, who has emerged as the White House’s principal foreign policy spokesman, was asked Sunday about the initial noncommittal response from Falk. His response had little of the president’s earlier certitude.

“It’s an Israeli proposal,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “one that they arrived at with intense diplomacy with their national security team and over at the State Department.”

The American official I spoke to depicted Biden’s Friday afternoon “Peace is at hand” speech as a panicked White House effort to gain some political traction at a time when Biden has been unable to take a firm moral stand in opposition to the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza: “But wait,” he said, “if this were the Israeli proposal and Hamas accepted it, then the war is over. The IDF goes home, as do the Gaza residents. The hostages come home, and the Israeli taxpayers rebuild Gaza as compensation for their aggression.”

“Why come up with this fairy tale?” the official asked. “Nobody believes in fairy tales except the Irish. But let’s pretend that Netanyahu proposed, and Biden said yes, and we support it. The Israeli public would kick Bibi’s ass out of office. They support this war.”

It is not known what Biden will say or do next in his frantic scramble to stay in office, but the Democrats have a problem that can’t be fixed by looking the other way.

Lying about a non-existent peace proposal is just the beginning.

BOTH ISRAEL AND HAMAS COMMITTED WAR CRIMES – UN

An independent international commission has found evidence of crimes against humanity in Gaza and Israel.

An Israeli tank is pictured near the city of Rafah in Gaza on May 29, 2024. © Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen

12 June 2024

Israeli authorities have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza since October 7, a United Nations-backed commission has found following an independent investigation. The probe also found that Palestinian armed groups were responsible for war crimes in Israel.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, set up by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), released its report on Wednesday. The UNHRC described the document as the UN’s first in-depth investigation of the events that took place on and since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise cross-border attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages. West Jerusalem responded with retaliatory strikes on Gaza.

According to the UNHRC, the report was based on interviews with victims and witnesses, open-source items verified through advanced forensic analysis, submissions, satellite imagery, and forensic medical reports.

The commission found that Israeli authorities were “responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention, and outrages upon personal dignity.”

The report also found that some statements made by Israeli officials had “amounted to incitement and may constitute other serious international crimes.”

Concerning the October 7 attack on Israel, the report found that the military wing of Hamas and six other Palestinian armed groups had been responsible for the war crimes of intentionally targeting civilians, “murder or wilful killing, torture, inhuman or cruel treatment,” taking hostages, and other crimes.

“It is imperative that all those who have committed crimes be held accountable,” said the commission chair, Navi Pillay. “The only way to stop the recurring cycles of violence… is to ensure strict adherence to international law.”

The commission urged Israel to “immediately stop” its military operations in Gaza, including the assault on the city of Rafah. It also demanded that Palestinian armed groups immediately cease rocket attacks and release all Israeli hostages.

The council noted that the Jewish state had obstructed the commission’s investigations.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, the Mission of Israel to the UN in Geneva dismissed the report as “biased.” It accused the UN-backed commission of “systematic anti-Israeli discrimination.” The mission condemned what it described as attempts to “draw a false equivalence between IDF soldiers and Hamas terrorists.”

The death toll from the eight-month offensive by Israel in Gaza has surpassed 37,000 people, according to the health ministry in the enclave.

_________________________

Editor’s Note | Terrorism

               “On June 5, 1967, I crossed the Israeli-Jordanian border at Jabelal-Radar in the Jerusalem Hills. I was a young soldier, and, like many other Israelis, I was called to defend my country.

               When I reached the station, soldiers who had arrived before me told me that Palestinian refugees from the Six-Day War had been systematically shot while trying to return to their homes at night. Those who crossed the Jordan River in broad daylight were arrested and, one or two days later, sent back across the river. My assignment was to guard the prisoners held in a makeshift jail.

               One Friday night in September 1967 (as I remember, it was the night before my 21st birthday), we were left alone by our officers, who drove into Jerusalem for their night off. An elderly Palestinian man, who had been arrested on the road while carrying a large sum in American dollars, was taken into the interrogation room.

               While standing outside the building on security detail, I was startled by terrifying screams from within. I ran inside, climbed onto a crate, and, through the window, observed the prisoner sitting tied to a chair as my good friends beat him all over his body and burned his arms with lit cigarettes. I climbed down from the crate, vomited, and returned to my post, frightened and shaking. About an hour later, a pickup truck carrying the body of the “rich” old man pulled out of the station, and my friends informed me they were driving to the Jordan River to get rid of him.

               I do not know whether the battered body was tossed into the river at the very spot where the “children of Israel” crossed the Jordan when they entered the land that God himself had bestowed upon them. And it is safe to assume that my baptism into the realities of occupation did not occur at the site where St. John converted the first “true children of Israel,” which Christian tradition locates south of Jericho.

               In any event, I could never understand why that elderly man had been tortured, as Palestinian terrorism had not yet even emerged, and no one had dared put up any resistance. Perhaps it was for the money. Or maybe the torture and banal murder had simply been the product of boredom on a night offering no alternative forms of entertainment.

               Only later did I come to view my “baptism” in Jericho as a watershed in my life."

Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Land of Israel (p. 1, 6). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

_________________________

DMITRY TRENIN | HERE’S HOW RUSSIA CAN PREVENT WW3

For 80 years, the Atomic bomb has prevented a repeat of the horrors of the 1940s – Russia needs to leverage it again to stop American aggression.

© Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

By Dmitry Trenin, a research professor at the Higher School of Economics and a lead research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He is also a member of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).

Nuclear deterrence is not a myth. It kept the world safe during the Cold War. Deterrence is a psychological concept. You have to convince a nuclear-armed adversary that it will not achieve its objectives by attacking you and that if it goes to war, its destruction is assured. The mutual nuclear deterrence between the USSR and the US during their confrontation was reinforced by the reality of mutually assured destruction in the event of a massive exchange of nuclear strikes. Incidentally, the abbreviation for Mutually Assured Destruction is MAD. And that’s very apt.

There are several reasons for ‘mythologizing’ nuclear deterrence. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a widespread belief that every conceivable reason for nuclear war has disappeared. A new era of globalization, emphasizing economic cooperation, has dawned. For the first time in history, the hegemony of a single power, the US, has been established globally. Nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the great powers - though fewer than at the height of the confrontation - but the fear of their use has faded. More dangerously, a new generation of politicians has come to the fore, unburdened by the memory of decades of confrontation or a sense of responsibility.

The American belief in its exceptionalism and European ‘strategic parasitism,’ devoid of any sense of self-preservation, is a dangerous combination. It’s in such an environment that the idea of inflicting a strategic defeat on the nuclear power that is Russia – in a proxy conventional war in Ukraine –has been born. Russia’s atomic capabilities are being ignored. The parallels that Moscow tried to draw with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when Washington considered the possibility of a nuclear war with the USSR in response to the deployment of Soviet missiles in the neighbourhood of the United States, were rejected by the Americans as far-fetched.

In response, Moscow was forced to activate the deterrence factor. Under an agreement with Minsk, Russian nuclear weapons have been deployed in Belarus. Russian non-strategic nuclear forces have recently begun exercises. Nevertheless, Western countries continue to pursue escalation in the Ukrainian conflict, which, if left unchecked, could lead to a frontal military confrontation between NATO and Russia and a nuclear war. This scenario can be prevented by further strengthening deterrence - more precisely, by ‘nuclear sobering up’ our adversaries. They must realize that it is impossible to win a conventional war involving the vital interests of a power armed with the bomb and that any attempt to do so will lead to their destruction. This is classic nuclear deterrence.

The word ‘deterrence’ has a defensive connotation, but theoretically, the strategy can also be used in an ‘offensive’ sense. This can happen when one party succeeds in dealing the first disarming blow to the enemy and, with its remaining forces, threatens the weakened opponent with destruction if they strike back. The Anglo-American version of deterrence is more appropriate here, which means ‘to intimidate.’ By the way, the French use the term ‘dissuasion’ in their concept.

The impact of non-nuclear weapons on nuclear deterrence policy

Non-nuclear weapons certainly influence atomic deterrence policy. This is a fact.

The US has built up a vast arsenal of non-nuclear methods to achieve its goals. It has not dismantled its military alliances, expanded them, and created new networks. In the current environment, Washington is demanding more and more real commitments from those allies to preserve the US-led global system. Fifty states participated in meetings to organize military aid for Kyiv under the ‘Ramstein’ format. The result is the idea that it is possible to defeat a nuclear power, but on condition that it does not require resorting to nuclear weapons.

The only thing left to do is to convince a nuclear power not to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances and to allow itself to be defeated - in the name of saving the whole of humanity, and so on. This is an extremely dangerous illusion that can and must be dispelled by an active nuclear deterrence strategy, including the lowering of the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, which is currently too high. The critical condition for use should not be a ‘threat to the existence of the state’ but a ‘threat to the vital interests of the country’!

A new phase in the relations between nuclear powers has begun.

We can say that a new phase in relations between the world’s nuclear powers has begun. Many of us are still psychologically somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s. That is a kind of comfort zone. Back then, relations between the USSR and the US were based on the two superpowers’ strategic and political parity. In the military-strategic sphere, Washington was forced to deal with Moscow on an equal footing.

After 1991, this parity disappeared. Since the 1990s, Russia has been a declining power for the US, throwing its weight around, constantly reminding itself of its former greatness, snapping back, even dangerous at times - but on a downward spiral. The difficult opening phase of the Ukraine conflict gave the Americans hope that the fields of that country would be the grave of the Russian superpower. They have since sobered up a bit, but equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question for them.

This is the main difference between the current state of relations and the ‘golden’ period of the Cold War—the 1960s and early 1980s. Russia has yet to prove the Americans wrong.

As they say, it is always difficult to predict anything, especially the future. But today, we have to assume that a long confrontation with the West, led by the US, lies ahead of us for about a generation. The future of our country, its position and role in the world, and to a large extent, the state of the global system as a whole, will depend on the outcome of this confrontation, the main front of which is not in Ukraine, but within Russia: in the economy, in the social sphere, in science and technology, in culture and art.

Internally, the enemy realizes the impossibility of defeating Moscow on the battlefield but remembers that the Russian state has collapsed more than once due to internal turmoil. This may, as in 1917, result from an unsuccessful war. Hence, they bet on a protracted conflict in which they know they have more resources.

Nuclear polycentricity reflects the world’s growing multipolarity

During the Cold War, there were five nuclear powers, but then the only real poles were the US and the USSR, plus China with its then small nuclear arsenal. Now, Beijing is moving towards (at least) parity with America and Russia, while India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel remain independent players (unlike NATO members Britain and France).

The classic Cold War notion of strategic stability—i.e., the absence of incentives for the parties to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike—is inadequate and sometimes inapplicable to characterize relations between the great powers today..

Look at Ukraine: Washington is increasing arms supplies to Kyiv, encouraging and providing for its provocative attacks on Russia’s strategic infrastructure (early warning stations, strategic airfields), while at the same time proposing Moscow resumes dialogue on strategic stability!

In the emerging world order, strategic stability must mean the absence of reasons for military conflict (even indirect) between the nuclear powers. This, in turn, will be possible if the powers respect each other’s interests and are ready to solve problems based on equality and the indivisibility of security.

Ensuring strategic stability between all nine powers will require enormous efforts and the formation of a fundamentally new world order model, but it (strategic stability in the broad, i.e., objective sense of the word) is quite realistic between pairs of states (Russia-China, the US-India, etc.). Only three of the other eight nuclear powers - the US, Britain, and France - remain problematic for Russia.

Arms control is dead and will not be revived!

As far as arms control in the classical form of the Soviet/Russian-American agreements or multilateral agreements in Europe (CFE Treaty) is concerned, it is dead and will not be revived. The Americans started to roll back the system two decades ago. First, they withdrew from the ABM Treaty, then the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty. They refused to implement the adapted Treaty on Armed Forces and Armaments in Europe. In the area of strategic nuclear weapons, one treaty remains, START-3, but it expires in 2026, and Moscow has stopped inspections under this treaty amid the conflict in Ukraine.

We will need new treaties and a basis for negotiations and agreements in the future. It will be necessary to co-develop new concepts, set new goals and objectives, and agree on the forms and methods of their implementation. Greater Eurasia - conventionally known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) - could become a platform for creating a new international security model on the scale of a vast continent (or at least most of it). The SCO includes four nuclear powers: Russia, China, India and Pakistan. Another SCO member, Iran, has an advanced nuclear program. SCO members Russia and China have close security ties with North Korea. There is a vast space for work, new ideas, and original solutions.

No continuation of nuclear arms reduction talks between Russia and the US is in sight.

Negotiations on nuclear disarmament are possible, and they can even produce results: a treaty banning nuclear weapons was adopted in 2017. But there is one thing to bear in mind. Only a few nuclear powers are among the signatories. Moreover, the US, UK, France, and Russia have already declared that they will never sign the treaty because it does not correspond with their national interests.

As for the issue of nuclear arms reduction, the long-standing confrontation between Moscow and Washington rules out any continuation of this practice. China, for its part, intends to build up its nuclear arsenal rather than reduce it, probably to achieve parity with the US and Russia in the long term. The Americans, who have officially identified Russia and China as the main threats to their security, are considering how to balance the combined nuclear potential of Moscow and Beijing. So there is no hope here.

The main problem, however, is not the quantity of nuclear weapons or their presence per se but the quality of relations between states. The world order is experiencing an acute systemic crisis. In the past, such crises inevitably led to wars. Now, nuclear deterrence is working, albeit with some issues. To prevent a world war, it is necessary to strengthen deterrence by activating the nuclear factor in foreign policy, restoring fear, and building a ladder of escalation.

However, we don’t want to go to the abyss and then fall into it, instead preventing a catastrophic development of events. Nuclear weapons have already saved the world once – by threatening to destroy it. That mission continues.

BUILDING THE BRIDGE! | A WAY TO GET TO KNOW THE OTHER AND ONE ANOTHER

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Photo Credit: Abraham A. van Kempen, our home away from home on the Dead Sea

By Abraham A. van Kempen

Senior Editor
Updated 19 January 2024

Those who commit to 'healing our broken humanity' build intercultural bridges to learn to know and understand one another and others. Readers who thumb through the Building the Bridge (BTB) pages are not mindless sheep following other mindless sheep. They THINK. They want to be at the forefront of making a difference. They're in search of the bigger picture to expand their horizons. They don't need BTB or anyone else to confirm their biases.

Making a Difference – The Means, Methods, and Mechanism for Many to Move Mountains

Accurate knowledge promotes understanding, dispels prejudice, and awakens the desire to learn more. Words have an extraordinary power to bring people together, divide them, forge bonds of friendship, or provoke hostility. Modern technology offers unprecedented possibilities for good, fostering harmony and reconciliation. Yet its misuse can do untold harm, leading to misunderstanding, prejudice, and conflict.

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