George Floyd: System, Mike Freeman looking for a way to clear his murderers Posted by Mel Reeves on May 30, 2020

Mike Freeman the Hennepin County prosecutor has never indicted a White cop for killing a Black person. That’s because Minneapolis is “upsouth”

George Floyd: System, Mike Freeman looking for a way to clear his murderers

Posted by Mel Reeves on May 30, 2020

In the midst of all the protests, riots and outrage stemming from the nearly public lynching of George Floyd, the system still steadfastly refuses to indict all of the cops involved in the horrific murder of George Floyd. And with good reason.  Hennepin County Attorney and prosecutor Michael O Freeman is not trying to indict the cops he is rather working to clear their names.
That’s right don’t be fooled, they- the power structure- are not asking for time to make sure the charges stick as Freeman contends, they are buying time to find a way to help the cops get away with murder.
Even the decision to charge the psychopathic cop Derek Chauvin who had his knee on  George Floyd is calculated. If you or I were with a group of three other people and committed murder we would all be charged with felony murder.
The county prosecutor said it’s a time consuming process, but the truth is even with little to no evidence his office charges Black people every day. And just as importantly they find ways to make the charge stick.
Freeman told the truth in his press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday when he said that “there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge. We need to weigh through all of that evidence to come through with a meaningful determination. Evidence not favorable to our case needs to be carefully examined to understand the full picture of what actually happened.”
“Other evidence?”  “A meaningful determination?” Freeman and the system are looking at evidence that does not support the criminal charge for one reason and one reason alone: to justify Floyd’s murder. And what case is he referring to when he said evidence not favorable to “our” case needs to be examined?
And while he later tried to say that he didn’t mean to say what he said, even his explanation reinforces the suspicion that he and therefore the system he represents, is searching for ways to clear the cops who murdered George Floyd.
Freeman has done it before. More recently he cleared cops of the murder of Terrence Franklin and Jamar Clarke. And he was the same prosecutor who helped justify the cops murder of Tycel Nelson in 1990.  In the Clarke case he made his DNA magically appear on the handle of the gun of the cops Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze who killed him. He made the handcuffs that cops put on him– which a six year old up way past his bedtime testified that he saw– magically disappear. The cops murdered Clarke but Freeman let them off. He even taunted the Black community while doing it, in his press conference he basically said, ‘ yall should have known you had nothing coming from this office’.
Freeman might as well be a southern Cracker. The only difference is he does his dirt with a smile and hides behind a liberal veneer.
His office wrote the following in an attempt to cover up the fact that he exposed his hand. “Mike Freeman made a comment about evidence in the George Floyd case that is being misinterpreted. To clarify, County Attorney Freeman was saying that it is critical to review all the evidence because at the time of trial, invariably, all that information will be used.”
They couldn’t help themselves even in their denial, they give away the fact that they are looking at ALL the information.

Moreover Freeman, nor Senator Amy Klobuchar, nor has any other Hennepin County prosecutor ever charged a White cop with killing a Black person. But Freeman tells half-truths to the public saying his office has indicted cops. No, they have indicted Black cops, namely Mohamed Noor a year or so ago for killing Justine Damond. And they indicted a Black cop for shooting at some Black folks in downtown Minneapolis.

Incidentally the jury in that case refused to charge the Black cop. After all you can’t really harm Black folks if the cops do something to them they surely must have been doing something to deserve it.
Some folks still believe that Floyd did something to bring on us fate. And they would be right: HE WAS BREATHING!
Consequently, no one should assume that this is a done deal and that killer cop Chauvin will actually be convicted. While the prosecutors don’t decide guilt or innocence they control the narrative. And only the naïve believes that the prosecutor’s office that has a cozy almost incestuous relationship with the cops and depend on them to keep the jails full of Black and Brown people, are suddenly going to turn on them with the vigor needed to send them to jail.
Freeman tried to say he was taking his time because he doesn’t want his case to wind up like Freddie Gray’s when all of the cops who killed him got off. But they got off because the prosecutor’s office helped let them off. In the case of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman went free because the state of Florida “threw” the case.  At the time, practically every trial lawyer in the US agreed that the prosecution presented a sloppy case and in essence allowed Zimmerman to get away with murder. The state of Florida decided that White Supremacy is still the order of the day.
And the decision to just try one of them is not motivated by the desire to protect its own. The system does not care about cops. They are simply their foot soldiers, cannon fodder; in the eyes of the power structure they are a dime a dozen.
However in this case, the system is protecting the cops as a way of letting you and I know that we still don’t have power, in other words to use a Star Trek analogy they have the “conn.” What appears to be a stand -off is just the system demonstrating that it has the power to decide who will be prosecuted and who will not.
Ultimately if we really want the cops to stop killing us we will have to decide to replace this power structure with a humane one which won’t have the need to kill Black folks or anybody else because it will be one of the people, by the people and for the people.

Working Hypotheses for the Political Economy of Modern Epidemics By Stavros Mavroudeas

Working Hypotheses for the Political Economy of Modern Epidemics

By Stavros Mavroudeas

1. During the last 30 to 40 years, capitalism has become more and more prone to epidemics, in contrast to the prevailing belief that the advances in medicine and the creation of universal and developed health systems had put an end to such phenomena. Especially after 1975, we have the appearance of the ‘emerging epidemics’, i.e. dozens of new diseases, mainly due to viruses, with a frequency that has no analogue in history. These new epidemics are mainly zoonoses, i.e. animal viruses transmitted to humans.
2. The general explanation of this phenomenon lies in the Marxist thesis on the ‘metabolic gap’, that is, in the realistic argument that capitalism drastically worsens human-nature relations as it blindly promotes the commodification and exploitation of the latter, ignoring natural limitations and social consequences. This thesis does not imply accepting various outrageous ecological views on the return to nature and de-growth, which ignore the fact that (a) all human socio-economic systems intervene and metabolize nature and also that (b) this metabolism is necessary for ensuring even the basic survival of large sections of the human population. But it does mean that capitalism is uncontrollably expanding this metabolism as its central motive is the profitability of capital, which operates with a blind logic (‘après moi la deluge’: I do not care about the system’s survival so long as I get my profit).
3. But this general explanation does not suffice to explain this increase of epidemics during the last 30 to 40 years and needs to be supplemented with historical conjunctural determinations. We can reasonably identify the following factors. First, the uncontrolled growth of (otherwise necessary) industrial agriculture has led to the use of problematic hygienic methods that, however, enhance capitalist profitability and has already caused significant problems (e.g. salmonella). Secondly, due to the internationalization of capital (the so-called ‘globalization’), increasing competition internationally imposes the dominance of these production methods as they involve lower costs. Third, the uncontrolled growth of the capitalist agro-industrial complex dramatically limits virgin areas and brings humanity into contact with diseases and viruses that were previously restricted there and concerned small indigenous communities. The latter had either acquired relative immunity to them or the epidemics were limited to these communities and did not spread significantly. Fourth, the internationalization of capital with the proliferation of transport and communication routes between remote areas of the world facilitates the rapid transmission of epidemics throughout the world, while in the past was more limited and therefore more controllable. Fifth, the commodification of the use and consumption of exotic species enhances zoonotic diseases.
4. Most of these new epidemics (a) do not have strict class barriers but (b) have class asymmetric effects. They do not have strict class barriers because they are transmitted through consumer goods (in the diet) and social gathering and therefore classical methods of class segregation cannot be easily applied (e.g. ‘letting the plebeians die in their ghettos’). However, they have asymmetric effects as workers are more exposed to infections (e.g. ‘front-line workers’), have more unhealthy working and living conditions (e.g. buying cheaper and worse quality consumer products) and of course inferior health care.
5. The neoconservative capitalist restructuring of the past four decades weakened the public universal health systems as it has privatized (mostly indirectly) parts of them and their functions, reduced their funding and strengthened the private health sector. But the public universal health systems are only who can bear the large costs of treating the whole population during epidemic waves because this task is too expensive and non-profitable to be undertaken by the private health sector. That is why the latter, in the face of such epidemics, withdraws and remains only in ‘fillets" that promise significant profitability (extra profits), e.g. research in treatments, drugs and vaccines.
6. Dealing with any new epidemic—and until therapies and vaccines are found—requires restrictions on social and especially economic activities. These restrictions cause a recession or even a crisis in economic activity. This poses a crucial dilemma for capital: which curve to flatten? Meaning that it oscillates between dealing with the health crisis (which aggravates the economic crisis) or vice versa.
7. At the same time, however, capital treats this situation not only as a risk but also as an opportunity. In this way, it is experimenting more and more intensely with the creation of a ‘new’ economic and social normality that will strengthen its profitability and dominance.
8. At the social level, the ‘new normality’ means the imposition of ‘social distancing’ literally as a new dystopian way of life. However, it has a significant benefit for the capitalist system as it intensifies individualization and acts as a deterrent to collective popular mobilizations. Epidemic outbreaks produce mass social psychologies of anger and fear. The first leads to rebellion against the system that leaves society helpless. The second leads to submissiveness towards state power. For the Left, it is crucial to rely on the former and turn it from a blind emotion to a logical understanding (consciousness) and a program of struggle. At the same time, it must not underestimate the latter as there are objective health risks; but without accepting the dystopia of ‘social distancing’. This contradiction has a class dimension that is also manifested differently in countries with diverse levels of capitalist development. The working classes, under the threat of unemployment and poverty, often choose to return to work (even under the threat of an epidemic) in the face of ‘social distancing’: the dilemma of ‘dying of hunger or the virus?’. In contrast, middle-class strata with relative reserves of wealth and obsessions with the ‘quality of life’ become fanatical supporters of the most extreme forms of restriction of social and economic activities and even admirers of literally fascist control measures. Correspondingly, in developed capitalist economies, these layers are stronger and strongly influence developments. In contrast, in less developed capitalist economies (or in politically backward countries such as the United States), the working and popular strata are pushing for a return to work—as long as they have no political conscience to articulate their demands more fully and direct them against the capitalist system.
9. At the economic level, the ‘new regularity’ means extensive experiments with teleworking. The latter offers advantages but also poses problems for capital. Among the advantages are ability to limit and streamline production costs (particularly regarding wage and non-wage costs). Regarding wage, telework can lead to many categories of employees. Especially in the service sector and less in manufacturing, some jobs can be done through telework at home. Here two possible cases appear. In the first, tele-workers belong to the company but are paid lower wages. In the second, tele-workers may be formally independent and employed under a piecework pay system (a method of remuneration that increases surplus-value extraction). In both cases, there is a reduction in wage costs and savings in fixed capital costs. A consequence of all this experimentation is the rapid rise in unemployment (the augmentation of the reserve army of labour), resulting in further wage compression. The problems concern the ability to exercise managerial control and exert continuous pressure to increase productivity. Tele-work can cause difficulties in both these intertwined fields. In the case of piecework pay, the pressure to increase productivity can be facilitated by demanding higher production. But the downside is that there should be even a small increase in pay. In the case of typically waged tele-work productivity increases benefit more easily capital. But the exercise of managerial control is more difficult; and, thus, continuous productivity increases are more difficult to be achieved. That’s why management experiments extensively with cameras, recording operations, multiple teleconferences etc. However, all these processes of controlling and intensifying work require significant time loss and are also costly.
10. In contrast to these experiments by capital, the labour movement and the Left must demand the use of computer and telecommunications tools in order to reduce working time and increase work-sharing. Thus, instead of increasing, to reduce unemployment. At the same time, the use of these tools can only be helpful if they enhance human cooperation and interaction and, of course, help (instead of purging) human contact and collective processes.
This piece will appear as a commentary in the forthcoming issue of the Greek journal Marxism Textbooks.
Stavros Mavroudeas is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Social Policy at Panteion University, Greece.
s.mavroudeas@panteion.gr

It’s Not that I’m Negative, America Really is Screwed. umair haque, May 22

 

 

Why Economics Says America’s Collapse is Probably Irreversible Now

A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse.” Sadly, I think my predictions have proven to be true — though I suppose you can judge that for yourself. 90,000 dead and counting. A president who calls the death toll a “badge of honor.” A paralysed Congress. 40 million unemployed. Today, I often get the question, “Why are you negative, Umair?” or, “What can be done to fix all this?” These are really the same question, and my answer, which you probably won’t like, goes like this: we’re still underestimating American collapse.

The economics of American collapse say that it’s probably too late to fix America. It’s probable that this is the new normal. Chaos, decline, incompetence, malice, poverty, hopelessness, despair.

Let me explain, as clearly as I can.

You can see, right about now, that America is what political scientists call a failed state. A President who tells people to drink bleach during a pandemic. 90,000 dead, of which 90% are needless. A society that’s not able to provide basics for it’s citizens anymore. A nation in which income, savings, life expectancy, happiness, trust are all in free-fall. This is the stuff of epic social collapse.

Now, the reason that America collapsed is straightforward. Americans never invested in building expansive social systems, unlike Europe. Systems to provide healthcare, retirement, childcare, finance, and so forth.

The result has been twofold. One, the average American now goes without these things. That’s because they’re largely unavailable. For example, the fresh food that I can get on any block in Europe is simply absent in huge chunks of the States. You buy processed food, or you don’t get food. The same is true of many, many things, like, say, education, or income. You don’t have a job with guarantees and protections like in Canada or Europe. You have a lower quality — not just quantity — of income.

Two, the the average American pays prices that the rest of the world considers absolutely absurd — because they are — for the very same things. Having a child? That’ll be $50K, thank you. An operation? That’ll be more than a house. Want to educate a kid? There go your life savings. Want a few fresh apples? That’ll be ten times the price Canadians or Europeans pay. These things — the basics of life — are eminently affordable in the rest of the rich world. In America, though, they cost more than the average person can afford.

How do I know that? Because the average American now dies in debt. Their whole life is one long sequence of unpayable debts now. First, there’s “lunch debt” which becomes “student debt” which becomes a mortgage and credit card debt which becomes “medical debt.” The forms of debt in quotes don’t even exist in most other rich countries. In America, though, they define life — precisely because the average American is now a poor person, in the sense that they can’t make ends meet when it comes to paying for the basics of life.

Sure, they might have a big car and big house and a big gun. But the economic truth is this: all those things are had on debt, and the average American now lives like an impoverished person. No savings, no assets, no liquidity. 80% — eighty percent — of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to pay basic bills, and can’t raise say $500 for an emergency. Those are the statistics of a nation having descended into poverty.

Now. I don’t write all that to make some theoretical point, so let’s come back to the question. Can America save itself from collapse? If you really understand the numbers, then the answer above — sadly — is: probably not. The economics say that America has more or less almost certainly reached a point of no return now, and collapse is nearly inevitable.

To stop collapse, America would have to start investing — massively, suddenly, historically — in functioning systems. To stop longevity and health cratering, it needs a healthcare system. To stop happiness and trust cratering, it needs affordable education and retirement. To stop incomes and savings plummeting, it needs retirement systems and protections for workers. And so forth. Every single facet of American collapse requires massive, large-scale, sustained public investment to be turned around, that goes on for a decade or more.

Many Americans even support that much. They get, by now, that without a new social contract, America is finished. Sure, the American Idiot — Trump and his army of bleach-drinking morons — don’t. But maybe the average American does — sure, let’s allow that much. The tragic wrinkle is that it makes no difference. Even if the majority of Americans want a better America — is it too late to actually build one? Probably.

Why? Well, who’s going to pay for it? Remember those dismal statistics above? The average American lives like a poor person now? So who exactly is going to pay for all these expansive new systems? The average person simply can’t afford the very improvements to society that they need anymore. Bang! What happens then? The answer is: nothing does. More of this does: a slow, shocking collapse and descent. Because there’s no other option, choice, alternative. Nobody much has the money for one. You see, if I say to the average American — “let’s fix America. All you have to do is pay ten percent more in taxes, and you’ll have world-class healthcare, retirement, childcare, and so on” — they might even support it, whole-heartedly. They might genuinely want it.

But the economic truth is that they cannot afford it. That ten percent is now crucial income. That’s what “the average American dies in debt” tells us. The average person can’t give up that ten percent. He or she needs it — usually desperately — to pay off simple everyday bills. They have no real savings to speak of. So where is the money to fund this wonderful new social contract going to come from? The bitter truth is this: Americans are now too poor to afford a better social contract. Even if Americans support a Canadian or European style social contract, the hard economic truth is that are probably now too poor to ever have one. Americans are now so poor they can barely afford to support themselves and their own —80% live at the edge — so how can they afford to support anyone else, let alone everyone else?

That’s not just some idle opinion. You can see stark evidence of these fatal economics already doing their work. Americans just rejected their best chance at reform in generations, Bernie and Liz Warren. That was on the left — the 70% or who say they want decent healthcare, retirement, education, and so on. Only they never, ever vote for it, when it comes down to it. Why? Raising the spectre of higher taxes to fund a functioning society is something that simply can’t be borne by even those who want. Nobody can afford it now. Even Americans who say they want a better society don’t seem able — predictably, consistently — to follow through now. There’s a reason for that, and it’s that America is too poor as a country to afford to be a functioning society anymore.

Even if, as Bernie promised, taxes wouldn’t rise — Americans don’t seem to believe it. Why not? It’s not just they don’t — with good reason — distrust their government. It’s also that they can’t bear any more uncertainty. When your whole life and future seems to be going up in smoke, when you bear all the risk in society — the last thing you can take is even more. So while Bernie and Liz might have championed a functioning society at the same tax rate, the risk of taking having to pay for a functioning society is simply now too much for Americans who already live at the edge. What if taxes do end up rising by five percent? When you’re already perpetually struggling? Bang! Then it’s game over. Americans can’t afford to bear the risks or costs of fundamental reforms to a broken society, and that seals in collapse as the only trajectory left to follow.

On the right, by the way, people are so confused and bewildered that, like the protesters above, they’re willing to give up their lives to keep their livelihoods. That’s how desperate things have gotten. See the point: on the left, people might want a functioning society, but never, ever vote for it, because nobody can afford it, while the right has given up on it altogether, hoping only for the chance to be exploited, just so long as food can still be put on the table. That leaves…nobody much…in society…who both wants a functioning nation, and can afford to pay for it.

Sure, it’s true that corporations and the super rich can be taxed. And they should be, heavily. But that’s not enough. There’s a reason that Europe and Canada ask people to pay higher taxes to support a better social contract, and that reason is that is the only way such a contract is sustainable. You can’t get there from a one-off tax on corporations and the rich alone.

It’s also true that if America were to build a better social contract — with say good healthcare and retirement and so forth — everyone’s bills would decline over time. But that doesn’t solve the problem, which is that Americans can’t afford the costs in the first place. Sure, if American had public healthcare, people wouldn’t have to pay $10K per person per year for it. But they do — and it’s not as if someone’s magically going to raise their incomes by that much if they don’t. Do you think corporate America’s going to give anyone a raise just because it’s paying less in healthcare costs? That’s why all the plans for overhauling America’s broken public healthcare system involve, still, employers paying into some kind of fund — nobody wants to give people more money. But without giving people more money, Americans stay too poor to live in anything but…the collapsing society America’s become.

If that doesn’t make sense, just think about it in your own life. Could you really afford to lose 10% of your income right about now? Ever? More likely, like most Americans, your life is balanced right on the razor’s edge. A few percent either way, and — kaput!! — you lose most or everything you have. There goes the mortgage, school, the credit ratin, and so forth. The plainer economic translation of that is: you’re too poor to afford a functioning society. You can barely support your own — how can you support anyone, everyone, else?

So how was America left too poor to afford anything but collapse? In Europe and Canada, there’s a certain kind of fairness that came to prevail. People pay about half their incomes in taxes. Half for me, half for everyone else. But that also means that society’s surplus is distributed far more equitably in the first place. That half you pay in taxes goes on to employ doctors, nurses, professors, public servants of all kinds that simply don’t exist in America. It’s used to invest in hospitals, schools, universities, parks, libraries — every single year. That’s been happening for something like 50 years by now: a cycle of equitable redistribution that became sustained investment and reinvestment. What happens if you invest in a thing like a park, hospital, library for fifty years? It gets better and better. It’s returns grow and grow. There’s more of everything to go around for everyone. The battle for self-preservation doesn’t lock people into poverty, as it has in America. That is what it means to be a truly rich society.

America’s been doing exactly the opposite, for the same fifty years, and longer. See any reinvestment in…anything? Everything’s decrepit, from airports to schools to libraries, precisely because there hasn’t been any. There hasn’t been any — or enough, anyways — because Americans didn’t want to pay those higher taxes Europeans and Canadians did. They believed the strange, foolish, and evidence-free ideologies of trickle-down economics and neoliberalism and all the rest of it — we’ll all be richest if we invest in…precisely nothing together. Nobody should care about anyone else. Nobody should ever support anyone else in the pursuit of anything. Life was to be purely individualistic, adversarial, and acquisitive.

That led Americans straight into a poverty trap. They were paying lower taxes, sure. But their public goods were decaying. Their common wealth was eroding. Their systems and institutions were corroding. What happens to metal that isn’t polished, a street that’s never cleaned, a house that’s never repaired? Well, in the end, you have to pay a bigger bill. But you might not be able to afford it by then. Bang! Then you’re done. You live in that crumbling house until it finally turns to dust, if you can’t pay the roofer, plumber, electrician. That’s where America is now.

Do you know what a poverty trap is? When a poor person spend more than rich people just to have the basics — think of a poor person spending most of their income on low-quality food, transportation, medicine, and so on, because it’s all they can get. That’s where America is now, from a global perspective. In a classic poverty trap. Too poor to ever afford to be rich again, because it doesn’t have the money to invest in it’s own self-improvement or betterment now. Decades of underinvestment mean that there was less and less to go around — until American life became a brutal daily battle for self-preservation. But when all you can do is barely even struggle to preserve yourself, put food on the table, keep your family afloat — what do you have left to give back to a better society? Nothing, is the grim answer, and it’s borne out by America’s spectacularly low — negative — savings rate, aka, everyone but the mega-rich dies in debt.

To achieve European or Canadian living standards, how much would America have to invest now? Think of it: gleaming hospitals for everyone, thriving public squares, expansive childcare, good retirement, jobs that pay the bills, oversight of it all. It would take trillions. Probably dozens of trillions. Much, much more than average Americans all put together can afford to spend now. Those are the brutal economics of collapse. Societies who let themselves become poor can hardly then wave a magic want and become rich.

What it means to be a poor society, which is what America’s become, is also the experience of life in it by now: political chaos, economic ruin, emotional paralysis, cultural degeneration. Europe and Canada, again, have been investing in life for decades, while America’s been ignoring it. The result is that they are ahead now — and America probably can’t ever catch up. America let itself become a poor society, and this — the chaos and dislocation of now — is what it means to be one.

I know this is grim reading. It’s terrible and horrific. Is it “negative,” though? Well, I know that it comes across that way. I want to do a job that the typical pundit won’t, though, which is try to tell you simple truths. The one that economics tells me is this. It’s too late for America to recover. It left it too long. It was arrogant and conceited, paying for things it didn’t need, like wars and mega-mansions, but not those it did. So it didn’t invest when it should have, but now the bill is due, but nobody can pay it. What do you call a society like that? Bankrupt. Just like most Americans are, only they don’t know it. What do you call a whole society of people, after all, who die in debt?America’s broke, my friends. And when you’re broke, what do you have left to invest in yourself?

There’s one way out, by the way, if you’ve followed me closely. Give people money. No strings attached, no questions asked, now, on a large-scale, more or less permanently, forget how much needs to be borrowed to make it happen. So people can fund a working society again. Or else. That’s the big question for America. The rest is noise. Until something along those lines begins to take shape — my answer is simple: Americans made themselves too poor to now afford to have the luxury of a functioning, civilized, modern society. Or is all that a necessity?

Umair
May 2020

After Losing Hope for Change, Top Left-wing Activists and Scholars Leave Israel Behind (HAARETZ )5/23/2020

 

They founded anti-occupation movements and fought for the soul of Israeli society, but ultimately decided to emigrate. The new exiles tell Haaretz how they were harassed and silenced, until they had almost no choice but to leave.
Published on 05.23.20
 
Last December, when no one knew that the coronavirus was lurking around the corner, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, 60, his partner, Eléonore Merza, 40, left Israel for good. They are both well-known in circles of left-wing activists. He founded the organization Zochrot some 20 years ago, she is a political anthropologist, and they co-authored a book on the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” as Palestinians refer to the events surrounding the founding of Israel). Ideologically, politically and professionally, French-born Merza, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Circassian father, simply could not bear the situation any longer. Although she was about to be granted permanent residency status in Israel, she found a job in Brussels and the couple moved there, with no plans to return.
In a phone conversation with Haaretz from the coronavirus lockdown in Belgium, Bronstein Aparicio says he still finds it difficult to believe that he left. “I look on it as a type of exile, a departure from the center of Israel,” he explains.
Born in Argentina, Bronstein Aparicio emigrated to Israel with his parents when he was 5, growing up in Kibbutz Bahan in central Israel. “My name was changed from Claudio to Eitan – I carry the Zionist revolution with me,” he laughs. He describes himself as a “regular Israeli” who did military service, like everyone else. A personal process that he terms the “decolonization of my Zionist identity” led him to establish Zochrot (“Remembering,” in Hebrew) in 2001, an NGO that aims to raise awareness of the Nakba and of the Palestinians’ right of return among the Jewish public. He has five children: Three of them live in Israel, one in Brazil, and the youngest, a boy who’s almost 4, lives with the couple in Brussels.
“There is one point on which I am completely in accord with the move – namely, the need to rescue my son from the nationalist, militaristic education system in Israel. I am glad I got him out of that,” he says, adding, “People with a similar political profile to mine have the feeling that we have been defeated and that we will no longer be able to exert a meaningful influence in Israel. In a profound sense, we do not see a horizon of repair, of true peace or a life of quality. A great many people understood this and looked for another place to live. There is something quite insane in Israel, so to look at it from a distance is at least a little saner.”
Indeed, many of those who belonged to what’s termed the radical left in Israel have left the country in the past decade. Among them were those who devoted their life to activism, founded political movements and headed some of the country’s most important left-wing organizations: Not only Zochrot, but B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Coalition of Women for Peace, 21st Year, Matzpen and others. The individuals include senior academics – some of whom were forced out of their jobs because of their political beliefs and activities – and also cultural figures or members of the liberal professions, who felt they could no longer express their views in Israel without fear. Many came from the heart of the Zionist left and then moved farther left, or looked on as the state abandoned principles that were important to them, to a point where they felt they no longer had a place in the Israeli public discourse.
Eitan Bronstein Aparicio and his partner, Eléonore Merza, in the Golan Heights.Credit: Gil Eliahu
They are scattered around the world, trying to build new lives with fewer internal and external conflicts, very ofout of concern for their children’s future. Most of them shy away from terming themselves political exiles, but make it plain that opposition to the Israeli government is what drove them to leave, or at least not to return. Some declined to be interviewed, from a feeling of unease at leaving and he well-known names no longer living in Israel are the curator and art theoretician Ariella Azoulay and her partner, philosopher Adi Ophir, who was among the founders of the 21st Year, an anti-occupation organization, and refused to serve in the territories; Anat Biletzki, a former chairwoman of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; Dana Golan, former executive director of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence; planner and architect Haim Yacobi, who founded Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights; literary scholar Hannan Hever, a cofounder of the 21st Year who was active in Yesh Gvul; Ilan Pappe, a one-time candidate from the Arab-Jewish party Hadash and a member of the group of “new historians,” who left the country over a decade ago and lives in London; and Yonatan Shapira, a former pilot in the Israeli air force who initiated the 2003 letter of the pilots who refused to participate in attacks in the occupied territories, and took part in protest flotillas to the Gaza Strip.
Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
Operation 'Addictive Candy': How Israel Silenced a Spy Privy to One of Its Darkest Intelligence Debacles
Others include political scientist Neve Gordon, who was director of Physicians for Human Rights and was active in the Ta’ayush Arab Jewish Partnership, a nonviolent, anti-occupation and civil equality movement ; Yael Lerer, who helped found Balad, the Arab-nationalist political party, and was founder of (the now-defunct) Andalus Publishing, which translated Arabic literature into Hebrew; Gila Svirsky, a founder of Coalition of Women for Peace; Jonathan Ben-Artzi, a nephew of Sara Netanyahu, who was jailed for a total of nearly two years for refusing to serve in the Israeli army; Haim Bereshit, a BDS activist, who headed the Media and Cinema School in Sapir College in Sderot and established the city’s cinematheque; Marcelo Svirsky, a founder of the Kol Aher BaGalil Arab-Jewish coexistence group and cofounder of the Jewish-Arab school in Galilee; and Ilana Bronstein, Niv Gal, Muhammad Jabali, Saar Sakali and Rozeen Bisharat, who sought to create a joint Palestinian-Jewish leisure and culture venue in the Anna Loulou Bar in Jaffa (which closed in January 2019).
'I remember vividly the period of the Oslo Accords, the euphoria. There was a feeling that maybe there would be peace, but that feeling hasn’t existed for a long time. It’s a state of constant despair that keeps growing.'
Eitan Bronstein Aparicio
The new “leavers” join those who left for political reasons many years ago, among them: Yigal Arens, a Matzpen activist and son of the late Moshe Arens, a longtime defense minister; Matzpen activists Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr and Shimon Tzabar, who left in the 1960s; as well as the filmmakers Eyal Sivan, Simone Bitton and Udi Aloni, who left in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The word that recurs time and again in when one speaks with these individuals is “despair.” Percolating despair, continuing for years.
“I remember vividly the period of the Oslo Accords, the euphoria – which I shared,” Bronstein Aparicio says. “I remember years when there was a feeling that maybe [the conflict] would be resolved and maybe there would be peace, but that feeling hasn’t existed for a long time. It’s a state of constant despair that keeps growing.”
Thus, after long years of activism, all the interviewees testified that they had lost hope for political change in Israel. Many of them are convinced that if change does occur, it will not come from within Israel. “I think it could come mainly from outside,” Bronstein Aparicio explains. “I have hopes for BDS, which is the only significant thing now happening in the field. From that point of view, political exile like this can have a meaningful role.”
 
Feeling of failure

 
Neve Gordon, 54, launched his political activity when he was 15, attending demonstrations held by Peace Now. He was wounded seriously during his military service as a combat soldier in the Paratroops. At the time of the first intifada (which began in December 1987), he served as the first executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Subsequently he was active in Ta’ayush, which pursues avenues of Jewish and Palestinian cooperation, and was a founder of the Jewish-Arab school in Be’er Sheva. During the second intifada he was part of the movement of refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Although his political activity has been extensive, Gordon may be best known to the general Israeli public primarily for an opinion piece he published in The Los Angeles Times in 2009, when he was head of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. In the essay, Gordon stated his support for the boycott movement and termed Israel an apartheid state. An international furor erupted, and the university’s president at the time, Rivka Carmi, declared that “academics who feel that way about their country are invited to look for different professional and personal accommodation.”
In the years that followed, Gordon’s department at BGU became a target of systematic campaigns by right-wing organizations, notably Im Tirtzu, which demanded its closure because of the political views of a number of its faculty members. In 2012, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar (Likud) called for Gordon’s dismissal. At the end of that year, the Council for Higher Education recommended that the university consider shutting down the Gordon’s department if certain reforms weren’t undertaken, but its decision was ultimately revoked a few months later after a few changes were introduced.
In those tumultuous years, the professor says, he received a number of threats on his life. Three and a half years ago, he and his partner, Catherine Rottenberg, who was head of the university’s gender studies program, together with their two sons, moved to London after both received European Union research fellowships. Gordon is now a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London.
It wasn’t the threats on his life that prompted him to leave, Gordon says, nor the struggle against the higher education establishment. In the end, what tipped the scales was concern for the future of their children. “I don’t see a political horizon, and I have two sons, with all that’s entailed in raising sons in Israel.”
And you also landed an excellent job in London.
“True, but my job in Israel was better by a long shot. I really liked the Ben-Gurion department, I liked the students and also the faculty. I felt I had a community, and it was very hard to give that up. Even when we got to London, we didn’t plan to stay. If we’d been a young couple without children, I’m not sure we would have stayed.” Gordon adds, “It’s not the easiest thing, to get up and leave at the age of 50-something. There’s a feeling of personal failure and the failure of a [political] camp.”
Was there a particular moment when the impossibility of remaining in Israel became clear?
“There was no one moment. Over the years we experienced growing extremism. It reached the point where we felt uncomfortable taking our children to demonstrations, because of the violence. The day-to-day racism is creating a place where I don’t feel I belong.”
The final blow, says Gordon, came when he began to feel it was no longer possible to speak out freely against the racist situation he witnessed. “The dialogue within Israel, which used to be open and which I took pride in, changed. Things that people like me espouse – support for the boycott movement, or terming Israel an apartheid state – became illegitimate,” he says. “And then you are already not only outside the consensus, but outside the true public discussion. You become a curiosity. And then you say, ‘What do I need this for?’”

Diagnosing the West with Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD) 24 Apr 2018, Andre Vltchek

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The Empire Is Obsessed with Perverse Types Of Punishment

Western culture is clearly obsessed with rules, guilt, submissiveness and punishment.
By now it is clear that the West is the least free society on Earth. In North America and Europe, almost everyone is under constant scrutiny: people are spied on, observed, their personal information is being continually extracted, and the surveillance cameras are used indiscriminately.
Life is synchronized and managed. There are hardly any surprises.
One can sleep with whomever he or she wishes (as long as it is done within the ‘allowed protocol’). Homosexuality and bisexuality are allowed. But that is about all; that is how far ‘freedom’ usually stretches.
Rebellion is not only discouraged, it is fought against, brutally. For the tiniest misdemeanors or errors, people end up behind bars. As a result, the U.S. has more prisoners per capita than any other country on Earth, except the Seychelles.
And as a further result, almost all conversations, but especially public discourses, are now being controlled by so-called ‘political correctness’ and its variants.
But back to the culture of fear and punishment.
Look at the headlines of the Western newspapers. For example, The New York Times from April 12. 2018: “Punishment of Syria may be harsher this time”.
We are so used to such perverse language used by the Empire that it hardly strikes us as twisted, bizarre, pathological.
It stinks of some sadomasochistic cartoon, or of a stereotypical image of an atrocious English teacher holding a ruler over a pupil’s extended hands, shouting, “Shall I?”

Brits enjoying Africa (photo by Andre Vltchek)

Carl Gustav Jung described Western culture, on several occasions, as a “pathology”. He did it particularly after WWII, but he mentioned that the West had been committing terrible crimes in all parts of the world, for centuries. That is most likely why the Western mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists have been glorifying the ego-centric and generally apolitical Sigmund Freud, while ignoring, even defaming, Carl Gustav Jung.
The extreme form of sadism is a medical condition; it is an illness. And the West has been clearly demonstrating disturbing and dangerous behavioral patterns for many centuries.
Let’s look at the definition of sadism, or professionally, Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD), which both the United States and Europe could easily be diagnosed with.
This is an excerpt of a common definition of the SPD, which appears in Medigoo.com and on many other on-line sites:
“…The sadistic personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy. Some sadists are “utilitarian”: they leverage their explosive violence to establish a position of unchallenged dominance within a relationship…” 
It is familiar, isn’t it? The Empire’s behavior towards Indochina, China, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East and other parts of the world.
What about the symptoms?
“…Sadistic individuals have poor behavioral controls, manifested by a short temper, irritability, low frustration tolerance, and a controlling nature. From an interpersonal standpoint, they are noted to be harsh, hostile, manipulative, lacking in empathy, cold-hearted, and abrasive to those they deem to be their inferiors. Their cognitive nature is considered rigid and prone to social intolerance, and they are fascinated by weapons, war, and infamous crimes or perpetrators of atrocities. Sadists classically are believed to seek social positions that enable them to exercise their need to control others and dole out harsh punishment or humiliation…” 
Just translate “sadistic individuals” to “sadistic states”, or “sadistic culture”.
Is there any cure? Can a sadist be effectively and successfully treated?
“Treating a sadistic personality disorder takes a long time…”
And many sites and publications carry a clear disclaimer:
“The above information is for processing purpose. The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency…”
And humanity is right now clearly at the crossroads, facing annihilation, not only a ‘medical emergency’. The world may soon have to literally fight for its survival. It is because of the SPD of the West and its Empire.

Punjabi man being flogged by British colonialist (photo by Andre Vltchek)

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So, what is in store for us now; for instance, for Syria?
What will the sadistic psychopath do to a country that refused to kneel, to prostitute itself, to beg for mercy, to sacrifice its people?
How horrible will the “punishment” be?
We have just witnessed 103 missiles being fired towards Damascus and Homs. But that is only what the Empire did to entertain its masses. It has been doing much more evil and cruel things to the nation which constantly refuses to glorify the Western imperialist and its neocon dogmas. For instance, the Empire’s ‘professionals’ have been manufacturing, training and arming the most atrocious terrorist groups and injecting them into the body of Syria.
The torture will, of course, continue. It clearly appears that this time the script will be based on some latter adaptation of the Marquise de Sade’s work, on his novel Juliette, not Justine. You see, in Justine, women were ‘only’ tied up, slapped and raped. In Juliette, they were cut to pieces, alive; they were burned and mutilated.
While Justine can still be read, no normal human being could go through the 700 pages of pure gore that is Juliette.
But our planet has somehow got used to the horrors that have been administered by the sick Western Empire.

Poster of human zoo at Military Museum in Paris (photo by Andre Vltchek)

People watch occurrences in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq or Libya as ‘news’, not as the medical record of a severely ill psychiatric patient.
The most terrible ‘novel’ in the history of our Planet has been written, for centuries, by the appalling brutality and sadism of first Europe and then by its younger co-author – the United States.
And the human beings in many parts of our Planet have gotten so used to the carnage which surrounds them that they do not throw up anymore; they do not feel horrified, do not revolt against their fate. They just watch, as one country after another falls; is violated publicly, gets ravaged.
The mental illness of the perpetrator is undeniable. And it is contagious.
In turn, the extreme violence that has been engulfing the world has triggered various neuroses and mental conditions (masochism, extreme forms of submission, to name just two of many) among the victims.

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Exposure to the constant and extreme violence ‘prescribed’ and administered by the West, has left most of the world in a neurotic lethargy.
Like a woman locked in a marriage with a brutal religious fanatic husband in some oppressive society, the world has eventually stopped resisting against the Western dictates and tyranny, and ‘accepted its fate’.
Many parts of the planet have developed ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: after being kidnapped, imprisoned, tormented, raped and humiliated, the victims have ‘fallen in love’ with their tyrant, adopting his worldview, while serving him full-heartedly and obediently.
This arrangement, of course, has nothing to do with the healthy or natural state of things!

Freedom Equality Brotherhood. For French maybe but not for colonized Vietnamese (photo by Andre Vltchek)

In Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, bizarre things are happening! People from those nations that have been robbed and devastated for centuries by the European and North American despots, have been flying happily and proudly to Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York and other Western cities, in order to ‘learn’, to ‘study’ how to govern their own countries. There is usually no shame, and no stigma attached to such obvious intellectual prostitution.
Many victims are still dreaming about becoming like their victimizers, or even more so.
Many former and modern-day colonies of the West are listening, with straight faces, to the Europeans preaching to them (for a fee) about ‘good governance’, an ‘anti-corruption drive’ and ‘democracy’.
The media outlets of non-Western nations are taking news reports directly from Western press agencies. Even local political events are explained by those ‘wise’ and ‘superior’ Europeans and North Americans, not by the local thinkers. Locals are hardly ever trusted – only white faces with polished English, French or German accents are taken seriously.
Perverse? Is it perverse? Of course, it is! Many servile intellectuals from the ‘client’ states, when confronted, admit how sick the continuous global dictatorship is. Then they leave the table and continue to do what they have been doing for years and decades; the oldest profession in short.
Such a situation is truly insane. Or at least it is extremely paradoxical, bizarre, absurd. Even a mental clinic appears to make more sense than our beloved planet Earth.
However, clinical psychiatrists and psychologists are very rarely involved in analyzing the neuroses and psychological illnesses of the brutalized and colonized planet. They hardly ever ‘analyze’ the perpetrators, let alone expose them for what they really are.
Most of psychologists and psychiatrists are busy digging gold: encouraging human egotism, or even serving big corporations that are trying to ‘understand their employees better’, in order to control and to exploit them more effectively. Other ‘doctors’ go so far as to directly serve the Empire, helping to oppress and to ‘pacify’ the billions living in the colonies and new colonies of the West.
In 2015, I was invited as one of the speakers to the 14th International Symposium on the Contributions of Psychology to Peace, held in Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa (hosted by legendary UNISA).
During that fascinating encounter of the leading global psychologists, I spoke about the impact of wars and imperialism on the human psyche, but I also listened, attentively. And I learned many shocking things. For instance, during his chilling presentation, “Human Rights and U. S. Psychologists’ Wrongs: The Undermining of Professional Ethics in an Era of ‘Enhanced Interrogation’”, Professor Michael Wessells from Columbia University, New York, spoke about U.S. psychologists and their participation in torturing political prisoners.
Instead of diagnosing the Empire with SPD and other violent and dangerous conditions, many psychologists are actually helping to torture those who are opposing this unacceptable arrangement of the world.

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Names of and photos of murdered Chilean people by pro-US military junta (photo by Andre Vltchek)

Those who refuse to ‘learn from the West’, to fall in love with it, or at least to serve it faithfully, are being brutally punished.
Lashes are hitting exposed flesh. Entire nations are being destroyed, genocides distributed to all continents. East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq: it never stops.
I follow the discourses of the US and especially British UN delegations, ‘discussing’ Syria and even Russia. What comes to my mind is Punjab in India. I recall those old, historic photos of Indian men being hanged by the Brits, pants down, and flogged in public.
They have been doing this kind of stuff, for centuries. They like it. It clearly excites them. This is their democracy, their respect for human rights and for other cultures!
If someone refuses to take his or her pants down, they catch the person, rape him or her, then do the flogging anyway.
I also recall what my Ugandan friend used to tell me:
“When the Brits came to Africa, to what is now Uganda, their army would enter our villages and first thing they’d do was to select the tallest and strongest man around. They’d then tie him up, face towards the tree. Then the British commander would rape, sodomize him in front of everybody. This was how they showed the locals who is charge.”
How symbolic!
How healthy is the culture that has been controlling our world for centuries!
One of the most frightening things about mental illnesses is that the patient usually does not realize that he or she is suffering from them.
It is about the time for the rest of the world to treat the West as a mental patient, not as the ‘leader of the free and democratic world’.
We have to think, to gather, to develop a strategy of how to deal with this unfortunate, in fact, terrible situation!
If we refuse to understand and to act, we may all end up in the most dangerous situation: as complacent servants of the perverse whims of a frustrated, extremely aggressive and truly dangerous SPD patient.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.
Cover photo: French colonialists torturing Vietnamese patriots (photo by Andre Vltchek)