b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Tina Lupton and Heiko Henkel — The Speech Corbyn Is Not Giving

    Tina Lupton and Heiko Henkel — The Speech Corbyn Is Not Giving

    Tina Lupton and Heiko Henkel

    Here in the UK, Labour is looking frantically for the right candidate to unite the country.  But in many ways they have that candidate.  We wrote this as a speech that Corbyn could give now.  Would this be the platform we’d vote for?  Perhaps not––we wished heartily to see the UK stay in the EU––but many people would, and the availability of this position would move us beyond the impasse we currently face.

    The Speech Corbyn Is Not Giving

    I would not have called this referendum.  And although I thought we should have stayed IN and tried to reform the EU from the inside, I also knew that the chances of such reform were slim. You all saw that I was not a keen campaigner.  Now that it’s over, I can say that what held me back were the terms of that referendum:  Those who wanted to show Westminster the Red Card for its ruthless austerity policies were forced to join forces with those who sought to consolidate their power there.  Now that it’s over, I can also tell you that, unlike the engineers of that referendum, I am prepared to embrace its outcome. Let us rally together and take this unique opportunity to restore democratic power to the British people.

    The EU has always been a problematic entity.  One of the great peacekeeping and redistribution institutions of the twentieth century, it has also prevented us from developing our own national agenda for equality.  By drawing on a cheap labour force, we’ve lost sight of the rights and strengths of our own workforce.  A common market has depleted the originality of our local industries.  An inflated and centralised bureaucracy has sapped our initiative and capacity for self-governance.  These are good reasons to leave, and even if they were not the ones that drove your vote, now is the time to own them. Those of you who ticked that box have created an opportunity; you who did not have been given one.

    As we embark on reinventing the United Kingdom, we need to remember that we cannot simply go back.  We need also to remember that we can’t work alone.  There is urgent need for an inclusive project of a better kind than the EU has proved to be: one that will reach out to those within our still united nation, as well as those around Europe who have their own critiques of Brussels. Bearing in mind that the Scottish people have a constitutional right to refuse it, we must reach out our hand to them in these next months, asserting that we are in many ways better placed to share the SNP agenda than we were a week ago.  And we need to look internationally, to those other movements on behalf of working people in South Asia and Latin America.

    Many of you voted, of course, in the belief that we needed to close borders: that Britain is too full.  It’s time to disassociate ourselves from the ugliest versions of this cry, lest we undermine respect for our own movement and introduce parallels with the worst moments in European history. However, we must recognise those who hold that agenda dear will need a place in the new government.  If I am elected as Prime Minister, it will be my job to hold another referendum––not one that undoes what we achieved last week, but one that allows you to vote for proportional representation.  It is only with proportional representation that we can create a legitimate place for those who today have no choice but to rally around UKIP to voice their demands.

    Something extraordinary happened last Thursday.  People voted against what they were told was their own economic interest.  Whether or not this turns out to be the case, we must harness the energy that comes with knowing that such a vote is possible.  In days of strained environments, when the project of ever-increasing economic growth looks less viable than it ever has in human history, we have proved that people do not simply vote with their pockets; that united in the right way, we will vote for something else.  A new government must listen to this, must not assume that only money speaks to the people, and must see that those of you in Wales and Cornwall, places of extraordinary natural beauty, have a special role to play in a Britain of which me might be proud in the coming decades.  In partnership with the Green Party, we must acknowledge that the industries working for sustainable energy can as well be British as European.

    With our exit from the EU––and make no mistake, I will urge that Article 50 is invoked as soon as humanly possible, for the sake of our friends in Europe as well as those of you who expressed this as your will––we face both long- and short-term projects.  The long-term one involves winning back those young voters, very many of whom feel betrayed by what happened last week, to a socialist project in Britain, the likes of which they have not seen in their lifetime.  We must make sure that they do not lose their opportunities to study and work abroad, or their will to return home.  In the short term, we must call and win a general election.  Your hard work of revolt against those currently in power will mean nothing if they inherit this result on their own behalf.  Division, at the party level and beyond, is precisely what serves the status quo. As long as we refuse to work with those elsewhere in Europe and the world, as long as we reject those who share our hopes for the future but who voted differently on this occasion, we won’t achieve the change we want and need. As long as we’re divided, the people in power will look and act as they’ve always done. Whether or not you chose this future, there is a chance right now to make it ours.

     

    Dr. Christina Lupton is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.  

    Heiko Henkel is a Visiting Lecturer at the London School of Economics.

     

     

  • Jorge Amar and Scott Ferguson — Podemos and the Limits of the Neoliberal Order

    Jorge Amar and Scott Ferguson — Podemos and the Limits of the Neoliberal Order


    Photo courtesy of ATTAC TV

    by Jorge Amar and Scott Ferguson

    No private character, however pure, no personal popularity, however great, can protect from the avenging wrath of an indignant people the man who will either declare that he is in favor of fastening the gold standard upon this people, or who is willing to surrender the right of self-government and place legislative control in the hands of foreign potentates and powers.

    William Jennings Bryan, “Cross of Gold,” 1896

    In the wake of Syriza’s disappointing challenge to the Troika’s punishing austerity politics in the Eurozone, leftists around the globe are now turning their eyes, and hopes, to Podemos in Spain. Podemos grew out of the 15-M, or Los Indignados, anti-austerity protests back in 2011. The organization took myriad local government seats after forming an official political party in 2014. And as of the national parliamentary elections held in December 2015, Podemos has emerged as a viable third-party counterforce to Spain’s historically two-party neoliberal government. During the recent elections, the ruling, conservative People’s Party (PP) lost sixty-four seats, while the opposing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) hemorrhaged twenty seats. Podemos, by contrast, earned sixty-nine seats, coming in just 300,000 votes behind PSOE and securing roughly 20% of the votes within the Spanish parliament. And in fourth place was Ciudadanos, the smaller, center-right “Party of the Citizenry.” Ciudadanos won a sizeable forty seats in parliament, but this was far less than early polling predicted.

    Commentators have dubbed Podemos’ and Ciudadanos’ upset of Spain’s two-party system a political earthquake, while the international left is characterizing the battle ahead as source of great hope and an opportunity to bring real change to Europe. Here, however, we dampen the leftist enthusiasm surrounding the Spanish election, and regarding Podemos in particular, putting pressure on what we argue to be the party’s under-theorized and rather conservative program for economic change. Specifically, we offer a critique of Podemos’ commitment to so-called “sound finance,” as well as the tax-and-spend liberalism upon which its proposed solution to Eurozone austerity is supposed to hinge. But we also suggest a more promising way forward: that Podemos join forces with the fifth-ranking Unidad Popular party. Unidad Popular’s primary economist has turned to the heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), coming to see what Podemos takes to be economic truths regarding the Eurozone as neoliberal myths that should be overtly politicized and rejected as such. By collaborating with Unidad Popular, we conclude, Podemos stands to not only pose a serious threat to Eurozone austerity, but also supplant the neoliberal order with an alternative and more just political-economic regime.

    Political Crossroads

    The general elections results that some people are characterizing as the end of the Spain’s hegemonic ’78 Regime are not quite as promising as such pronouncements let on. Podemos still lacks the necessary votes to command real power in the government, and the neoliberal bipartisanism comprised of the false choice between PP conservatives and PSOE socialists will continue to rule Spanish politics for some time. What Podemos’ electoral gains do represent is a crucial political challenge. Now it is time for Podemos to decide whether to openly collaborate with others, thereby creating a relatively stable government that can reverse austerity, or to refuse cooperation, likely forcing a new election cycle.

    Though constrained in its own right, this is essentially Podemos’ decision to make. The dominant PP has no chance to win a working parliamentary majority without the endorsement of the PSOE. With an electoral base that is, demographically speaking, doomed, PP received more than 7,215,000 votes in the election, but lost more than 3,500,0000 votes from 2011. PSOE, meanwhile, saw its worst outcome since 1977: 5,530,779 votes, losing more than 1,500,000 since 2011. This leaves Podemos to negotiate between three future scenarios. None are certain. And each comes with its own rewards and pitfalls.

    In the first scenario, the PP could form a government through more or less open cooperation with the PSOE and Ciudadanos. This arrangement would look something like the political makeup of the current German government. However, open collaboration may prove dangerous for the PSOE. As some regional leaders of that party are explicitly warning (if not threatening), the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez should not rush too quickly to show support for the PP, since such an action may incite a mass defection of voters from the PSOE towards Podemos. Podemos’ recent gains have gone far to unmoor the decades-old truism that the PSOE is the Spanish left’s only feasible tool for combating PP conservatives, and the PSOE are now visibly worried.

    Under a second scenario, the PSOE can attempt to constitute a new government by aligning itself with the third party, Podemos, and the fifth party, Unidad Popular. But this is also unlikely, considering the fact that Podemos rose to power by rejecting Spain’s bipartisan regime and calling for a new constitutional process. Podemos won its power from voters who resist the PP and PSOE duopoly, seeing both parties as more or less equally guilty of alienating the citizenry and exploiting the revolving doors between government, industry, and finance. Podemos disparages this class as the casta (caste) and vows to overturn it. To renege on this promise could prove politically deadly. One way to for Podemos to skirt this problem would be to demand the PSOE accept certain far-left measures, such as the referendum about Catalonia’s (and other regions’) “right to decide.” Podemos’ allies in these regions are unwavering on this issue, and persuading the PSOE to sign on to such a measure would go far to secure Podemos’ political base. Unfortunately, however, the PSOE has historically refused this policy and in all likelihood will not adopt it.

    Finally, in a third scenario no coalitions are built between the reigning parties and we see a repetition of the same general elections in few months. This scenario is most likely, given the obstacles suggested above. In this case, the bipartisan regime will continue its decline and Podemos will use the PSOE’s rejection of its own faux leftism to erode more of the PSOE’s electoral base. Such a process may result in Podemos overtaking the PSOE and eventually taking command of parliament. But there are clearly many moving parts at work here, rendering the future of the Spanish left at once promising and uncertain.

    Podemos’ Economic Program

    Such are the political crossroads that Podemos and the Spanish left in general will face in the months ahead. But there is still another and, we would claim, more important matter to consider, and one that fundamentally shifts the ground beneath this unfolding story. This is the issue of political economy and specifically, the economic program Podemos aims to install, if and when it manages to take hold of parliament.

    Surprisingly, Podemos’ economic platform has received inadequate critical attention by the leftist commentariat. This is especially true of English-language media. Much has been written about Podemos in the US, UK, and elsewhere. But such writing tends to focus on Podemos’ leader, Pablo Iglesias, and devote most of its energy to weighing the relevance of Podemos’ status as a popular political movement in relation to similar efforts around the globe. As a consequence, English speakers are offered little concrete discussion about the specific economic policies Podemos is proposing. Iglesias himself has published articles in English-language publications such as New Left Review, Jacobin, and The Guardian. These pieces explore political struggles, communication strategies, and grassroots organizing. Yet Iglesias devotes very few words to outlining Podemos’ economic program in such texts, leaving most English-language readers in the dark.

    In truth, Podemos’ economic program has evolved quite a bit since the party’s initial formation. But this economic program seems to become more and more conservative as time progresses. At first, for instance, Podemos proposed a Basic Income Guarantee and debt relief for citizens, in addition to making more general promises about ending austerity. Yet month by month, Podemos has dropped both the Basic Income Guarantee and the debt relief program, as well as myriad other proposals. To be sure, the party remains committed to its central promise, which is to repair and expand Spain’s welfare state. But Podemos has conspicuously pared down its economic platform in compliance with the reigning economic orthodoxy in an effort to secure political legitimacy both within Spain and abroad.

    The Trouble with Podemos

    Although Podemos’s grassroots-driven rise to power should be seen as meaningful and genuinely exciting, the party’s economic strategy is simply inadequate to win the political struggle it aims to conduct against the neoliberal order. The real problem with Podemos’ political economy lies less in the specific proposals the party is offering, but rather in the unreflected neoliberal assumptions that underlie the party’s shifting economic platform. First among these assumptions is Podemos’ apparently blind commitment to the doctrine of sound finance: the mythic principle that a healthy national economy requires government to balance its budget, whether in the short run or over the course of the business cycle. As Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown, this principle is not only inimical to economic productivity, but also debilitating for equality and justice. Meanwhile, this principle rests upon another noxious maxim Podemos holds dear: the false notion that states are revenue constrained and that a government must tax before it can spend toward the public good.

    The only scenarios under which a sovereign government might be constrained in this way, contend MMT economists, is when international gold standards or currency-peg agreements force states to accept debt obligations in a currency over which they assert little control. Such arrangements not only limit public spending to the tax revenues the state is capable of collecting, but also force governments to bend to the dictates of international creditors. Put another way, metal standards and currency pegs transform sovereign nations into de facto colonies of other political bodies.

    This is why MMT economists such as Bill Mitchell have long spoken out against the bankrupt neoliberal logics that undergird the Maastricht Treaty. Signed in February 1992 by the members of the European Community in Maastricht, Netherlands, this treaty robbed European member states of their fiscal sovereignty and established the Eurozone as a monetary union without the strong fiscal union that would be required to support it. This has resulted in an abstract and especially cruel version of an old-time gold standard, which paradoxically forgoes any basis in gold bullion. Against the warnings of a dissenting minority, the Eurozone’s quasi-gold standard has crippled European nations by restricting public spending to a finite pool of value and in turn forcing governments into brutal debt agreements.

    The dominant narrative sees the resulting sovereign debt crises as the crux of the Eurozone disaster, thought to be the consequence of profligate governments being unable to live within their means. However, these crises are mere symptoms of the Eurozone’s faulty structure. The true cause of this disaster is the Eurozone’s shackling of government spending to a false finitude and treating this subjugation as a natural state of affairs. Though written in somewhat technical language, Mitchell’s account of the Eurozone’s structural failings is instructive:

    It is a basic characteristic of any monetary system that government can only create risk free liabilities if they are denominated in its own currency. … [However], the current design of the Eurozone determines that the Member State governments are not sovereign in the sense that they are forced to use a foreign currency and must issue debt to private bond markets in that foreign currency to fund any fiscal deficits. … The member state governments thus can run out of money and become insolvent if the bond markets decline to purchase their debt. … Their fiscal positions must then take the full brunt of any economic downturn because there is no federal counter stabilization function. Among other things, this means the elected governments cannot guarantee the solvency of the banks that operate within their borders.i

    Governments require the political capacity to create money, or “risk-free liabilities,” on demand, Mitchell explains. Such powers are needed to maintain the solvency of banks, as well as to use fiscal policy to counter recessions and depressions. The Eurozone, however, strips member states of this spending capacity and requires them to borrow on international bond markets. The result transforms sovereign governments into cash-strapped debtors, makes economic recovery for individual nation-states impossible, and dooms the entire Eurozone system to failure.

    Fellow MMTers L. Randall Wray and Dimitri B. Papadimitriou describe the historical consequences of the Eurozone’s lethal design as follows:

    From the very start, the European Monetary Union (EMU) was set up to fail. The host of problems we are now witnessing, from the solvency crises on the periphery to the bank runs in Spain, Greece, and Italy, were built into the very structure of the EMU and its banking system. Policymakers have admittedly responded to these various emergencies with an uninspiring mix of delaying tactics and self-destructive policy blunders, but the most fundamental mistake of all occurred well before the buildup to the current crisis. What we are witnessing are the results of a design flaw. When individual nations like Greece or Italy joined the EMU, they essentially adopted a foreign currency—the euro—but retained responsibility for their nation’s fiscal policy. This attempted separation of fiscal policy from a sovereign currency is the fatal defect that is tearing the Eurozone apart.ii

    As Wray and Papadimitriou have it, the Eurozone crisis is not the direct outcome of pro-business policymaking and anti-social austerity programs, as vile as these measures are. It is, rather, an effect of the calamitous finitude baked into the EMU project. The Troika can say, “Pay up!” and “Tighten your belts!” until they are blue in the face. But European governments will be structurally incapable of settling such debts as long as their monetary sovereignty remains fettered. To make matters worse, Germany’s tendency to hold money surpluses as the Eurozone’s net exporter further exacerbates the debtor positions of other member states. If the money supply is finite in the Eurozone and the German economy hoards its export profits, this means that there is simply not enough money to go around and that import-dependent economies such as Greece, Spain, and Italy will continue to suffer deficits no matter how successfully they manage to tax their distressed populations.

    Europe’s phantom gold standard has not only immiserated populations, but also quashed Syriza’s resistance to the ongoing devastation in Greece. This is not merely because the Troika rejected what Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis consistently referred to as Syriza’s “modest proposal.” It is because, unlike during previous eras when metal standards were both popularly contested and philosophically denounced, neoliberal ideology has come to wholly naturalize the Eurozone’s shrouded cross of gold. This has made real transformation unimaginable, as Varoufakis and his team sadly discovered in July 2015.

    For this reason, Podemos will have to directly thematize and politicize the Eurozone’s taken-for-granted finitude if it wishes to make meaningful and lasting transformations. First and foremost, this means reclaiming the state’s monetary sovereignty and boundless fiscal capacities. But it shall also require a major propaganda campaign, aimed at persuading ordinary people that the state is limited only by real resources and productive infrastructures and simply cannot run out of an abstract unit of account. It must be made clear that only by seizing government’s power to spend as needed can Podemos hope to end austerity and create the conditions for full employment and widespread prosperity. However, for all its leftist rhetoric and broad grassroots support, Podemos remains ill-equipped to end austerity since it does not dare imagine liberating Spain’s public purse from the Troika’s asphyxiating grip.

    Podemos’ economic program is thoroughly consistent with the gold standard metaphysics of sound finance. Party leaders imagine they can simultaneously adopt this ideology and succeed in accomplishing what Syriza could not: acting against austerity while playing along with Eurozone budgetary rules. Upon these faulty premises, Podemos then treats what is in reality a very conservative tax-and-spend liberalism as the crux of its economic strategy. A Podemos-led government would seek to reverse social spending cuts by increasing some taxes, creating a slate of new taxes, and reinforcing the mandate of the AEAT (the Spanish equivalent of the IRS) of fighting tax evasion. Believing that public programs should be funded by this revenue, Podemos thus plans to tether the recovery and expansion of the Spanish welfare state to the futile task of fighting tax avoidance within a zone that permits free trade and capital movement. In such a zone, every private person and corporation can shuffle money easily between countries without notice. Barring a common tax authority and total multinational cooperation, even the most vigilant efforts to collect taxes are bound to fail.

    Podemos’ chief economist, Nacho Alvárez Peralta, is quite explicit about the party’s devotion to sound finance and tax-and-spend economics. Alvarez expressly supports government budget-balancing. He breaks with the European Central Bank only on the timeline he asserts is required to achieve the criteria outlined by the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). Alvarez is also the architect behind Podemos’ tax-based strategy to fix the welfare state, which he presumes to be the only way out of the current mess.

    Podemos thinks it can somehow accomplish what Syriza did not. However, it must learn the true lesson of the Greek fiasco: As long as a nation-state remains inside the Eurozone and subject to its SGP budget requirements, there shall be no alternative to austerity or the neoliberal order. And with the EU Commission’s latest demand that the next Spanish government cut another 9 billion euros to meet stringent deficit targets, the stakes of learning this lesson could not be higher.

    Another Future

    With MMT’s critique of political economy in focus, a more promising way forward presents itself for the Spanish left, one that refuses the neoliberal premises that have come to frame Eurozone politics. As we suggested at the outset, this will require Podemos to join forces with Unidad Popular, an avowedly socialist and feminist party of the left now headed by economist and MMT advocate Alberto Garzón. As opposed to Podemos’ Iglesias and Alvarez, both Garzón and Unidad Popular’s chief economist, Eduardo Garzón (Alberto’s brother), hold a view of political economy that is very close to MMT’s understanding of monetary sovereignty, fiscal spending, and taxation. Garzón is well aware that Eurozone rules have perniciously, and needlessly, choked off the Spanish government’s spending powers, severely contracting what MMTers such as Stephanie Kelton refer to as the “fiscal space” that is necessary to sustain and enlarge a national economy.

    In addition to restoring and developing the Spanish welfare state, Unidad Popular’s key economic proposal takes its cue from MMT’s idea for a federal Job Guarantee program. Garzón’s proposal is a modestly scaled version of MMT’s Job Guarantee. It is designed to provide community-focused, living-wage employment to Spain’s chronically under- and unemployed, which would not only provide immediate relief to destitute Spaniards, but also reverse the nation’s deflationary economy. Going beyond Keynesian pump priming, this Job Guarantee is meant to be a permanent public institution that expands countercyclically in lockstep with market downturns. If permitted to become a truly universal program, Spain’s Job Guarantee would serve a powerful new mediator of social production and value. In addition to setting just minimum standards for wages, working hours, and benefits, the Job Guarantee would carve out a larger space for public works that are free from market imperatives, place the program’s means of production in workers’ hands, socialize and compensate much unremunerated care work, and give everyday people a say in the shaping of their world.

    What is more, Unidad Popular’s Job Guarantee scheme makes no mention of needing to meet the arbitrary budget goals of the SGP in order to fund such a program. This is because Unidad Popular roundly rejects the neoliberal premises of such goals. Indeed, if challenged by the Troika, the party is wholly prepared to set the crucial question before the body politic: Should we continue to obey the Troika’s crippling mandate in order to remain within the Eurozone? Or, shall we refuse the Troika’s dictates and risk ejection from the Eurozone? This is the question Syriza could not, or would not, ask. Yet what the Syriza tragedy has proven is that this is the key question upon which the fate of Europe shall depend.

    Before the recent Spanish election, Podemos and Unidad Popular were in conversations to form a coalition. At the last minute, however, Podemos’ leaders broke off these talks for what we considered to be tactical reasons. Our hope is that there will be another chance to forge a coalition when the new elections are convoked. Of course, nothing will ensure the success of the Spanish left. All we have is our solidarity and commitment to struggle. But to fight against the neoliberal order while uncritically adopting neoliberal assumptions is to forfeit the contest from the start. Unless Podemos or any other leftist party is prepared to proffer a substantive alternative to the rules of the neoliberal game, we will no doubt suffer a disaster that is far greater than the one we are currently witnessing in Greece.

    Such is the promise of MMT for the contemporary left: While MMT’s understanding of money as a limitless public instrument can free us from debt and austerity, its community-focused Job Guarantee provides means to build a new political economy, which transfigures social and ecological relations from the bottom up. Yet this is what other critical-theoretical appeals to MMT do not seem to comprehend. Reticent to appropriate and reshape the state apparatus, critics such as Nigel Dodd and David Graeber have called upon MMT’s understanding of money as a public balance sheet to challenge the inevitability of neoliberal power. In our estimation, however, MMT is more than a weapon for negating neoliberal domination. It is also a powerful tool for cultivating a positive and enduring alternative to the neoliberal catastrophe—first in Spain, then beyond.

     

    Jorge Amar is a Spanish economist, president of the APEEP (Asociación por el Pleno Empleo y la Estabilidad de Precios, or Full Employment and Price Stability Association), and a doctoral candidate in Applied Economics at the Universidad Valencia. Recently, Amar served as economic advisor for Spain’s Unidad Popular party within the Grupo de elaboración política (Policy Elaboration Group), a provisional task force coordinated by economist Eduardo Garzón.

    Scott Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an assistant professor of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is also a Research Scholar at the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. His essays have appeared in CounterPunch, Screen, Arcade, the Critical Inquiry blog, Naked Capitalism, Qui Parle, and Liminalities.

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    Mecpoc’s YouTube channel. 2010. “Keynes Celebrates the End of the Gold Standard.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1S9F3agsUA.

    Mendizabal, A. R. 2015. “Pablo Iglesias tranquiliza a Wall Street: ‘No hay alternativa a la economía de mercado.’” Capital Madrid, June 20. https://www.capitalmadrid.com/2015/6/20/38568/pablo-iglesias-tranquiliza-a-wall-street-no-hay-alternativa-a-la-economia-de-mercado.html.

    Mitchell, Bill. 2012. “Budget Surpluses Are Not National Saving – Redux.” Bill Mitchell: Billy Blog, August 7. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=20536.

    Mitchell, Bill. 2016. “Democracy in Europe requires Eurozone Breakup,” Billy Blog, January 6. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=32730.

    Mitchell, Bill. 2015. “Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory.” Institute for New Economic Thinking, March 19. http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/interviews-talks/demystifying-modern-monetary-theory.

    Mitchell, Bill. 2013. “Options for Europe: Part 1.” Bill Mitchell: Billy Blog, December 31. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=26667.

    Moreno, Felix. 2014. “50% Youth Unemployment in Spain Fuels Radicalization of Protests.” RT, March 24. https://www.rt.com/op-edge/radicalization-of-protests-in-spain-809/.

    Myerson, Jesse A. 2015. “Monetarily, We Are Already In The Next System…” The Next System Project, October 8. http://thenextsystem.org/monetarily-we-are-already-in-the-next-system-we-just-dont-act-like-it/

    Nelson, Fraser. 2015. “Political Earthquake in Spain as Podemos Takes 20pc of Vote.” The Spectator, December 20. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/political-earthquake-in-spain-as-exit-poll-shows-podemos-surging-to-22pc/.

    Parguez, Alain. 1999. “The Expected Failure of the European Economic and Monetary Union: A False Money Against the Real Economy.” Eastern Economic Journal 25, no. 1: 63-76. http://college.holycross.edu/eej/Volume25/V25N1P63_76.pdf.

    Pargeuz, Alain. 2011. “Guest Post: A Fresh Proposal for Escaping the Euro Crisis.” Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World. http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2011/11/25/a-fresh-proposal-for-escaping-the-euro-crisis-guest-post-by-alain-parguez/.

    Pérez, Claudi. 2015. “Bruselas señala que el nuevo Gobierno deberá recortar casi 9.000 millones.” El País, November 5. http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/11/05/actualidad/1446714490_704857.html.

    Pierce, Dale. 2013. “What is Modern Monetary Theory, or ‘MMT’?” New Economic Perspectives, March 11. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/03/what-is-modern-monetary-theory-or-mmt.html.

    Rojer, Rebecca. 2014. “The Job Guarantee.” Jacobin, January 10. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-job-guarantee-video/.

    Rojer, Rebecca. 2014. “The World According to Modern Monetary Theory.” The New Inquiry, April 11. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-world-according-to-modern-monetary-theory/. 

    Rucinski, Tracy, and Finoa Ortiz. 2011. “Spain Protests Rock Nation, Tens of Thousands Fill the Cities Over Joblessness.” The World Post, May 21. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/21/spain-protests-joblessness_n_865058.html.

    Sánchez, Raúl. 2015. “La brecha generacional sostiene gran parte de los resultados electorales del PP.” El Diario, December 24. http://www.eldiario.es/politica/generacional-mantiene-resultados-electorales-PP_0_465803541.html.

    Tortosa, María Dolores. 2015. “Susana Díaz se opone tanto a un pacto con el PP como con Podemos.” Ideal, December 22. http://www.ideal.es/andalucia/201512/22/susana-diaz-opone-tanto-20151222005459-v.html.

    Unidad Popular’s homepage. http://www.unidadpopular.es/ (accessed March 24, 2016).

    University of Groningen. 2012. “William Jennings Bryan Cross of Gold Speech July 8, 1896.” American History: From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1876-1900/william-jennings-bryan-cross-of-gold-speech-july-8-1896.php.

    Varoufakis, Yanis. 2015. “Greece, Germany and the Eurozone.” Paper presented at the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, Berlin, June 8. https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/06/09/greeces-future-in-the-eurozone-keynote-at-the-hans-bockler-stiftung-berlin-8th-june-2015/.

    Varoufakis, Yanis. 2013. “Modest Proposal. Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World. https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/euro-crisis/modest-proposal/.

    Wikipedia. 2016. “Greenback Party.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika (accessed April 19, 2016)

    Wikipedia. 2015. “European Troika.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika (accessed March 20, 2016).

    Wray, Randall L., and Dimitri B. Papadimitriou. 2012. “Euroland’s Original Sin.” Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Policy Note 8: 1-5. http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn_12_08.pdf.

    Wray, L. Randall. 2014. “Modern Money Theory: The Basics.” New Economic Perspectives, June 24. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/06/modern-money-theory-basics.html.

    Wray, L. Randall. 2014. “What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach.” New Economic Perspectives, May 15. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/taxes-mmt-approach.html.

    i. Bill Mitchell, “Democracy in Europe requires Eurozone Breakup,” Billy Blog (blog), January 6, 2016, http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=32730.

    ii. Randall L. Wray and Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, “Euroland’s Original Sin,” Policy Note 8, July 2012, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/pn_12_08.pdf.

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • Henry A. Giroux — The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Shadow of the Atomic Plague

    Henry A. Giroux — The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Shadow of the Atomic Plague

    by Henry A. Giroux

    Seventy years after the horror of Hiroshima, intellectuals negotiate a vastly changed cultural, political and moral geography. Pondering what Hiroshima means for American history and consciousness proves as fraught an intellectual exercise as taking up this critical issue in the years and the decades that followed this staggering inhumanity, albeit for vastly different reasons. Now that we are living in a 24/7 screen culture hawking incessant apocalypse, how we understand Foucault’s pregnant observation that history is always a history of the present takes on a greater significance, especially in light of the fact that historical memory is not simply being rewritten but is disappearing.1 Once an emancipatory pedagogical and political project predicated on the right to study, and engage the past critically, history has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the greatest generation. Inscribed in insipid patriotic platitudes and decontextualized isolated facts, history under the reign of neoliberalism has been either cleansed of its most critical impulses and dangerous memories, or it has been reduced to a contrived narrative that sustains the fictions and ideologies of the rich and powerful. History has not only become a site of collective amnesia but has also been appropriated so as to transform “the past into a container full of colorful or colorless, appetizing or insipid bits, all floating with the same specific gravity.”2 Consequently, what intellectuals now have to say about Hiroshima and history in general is not of the slightest interest to nine tenths of the American population. While writers of fiction might find such a generalized, public indifference to their craft, freeing, even “inebriating” as Philip Roth has recently written, for the chroniclers of history it is a cry in the wilderness.3

    At same time the legacy of Hiroshima is present but grasped, as the existential anxieties and dread of nuclear annihilation that racked the early 1950s to a contemporary fundamentalist fatalism embodied in collective uncertainty, a predilection for apocalyptic violence, a political economy of disposability, and an expanding culture of cruelty that has fused with the entertainment industry. We’ve not produced a generation of war protestors or government agitators to be sure, but rather a generation of youth who no longer believe they have a future that will be any different from the present.4 That such connections tying the past to the present are lost signal not merely the emergence of a disimagination machine that wages an assault on historical memory, civic literacy, and civic agency. It also points to a historical shift in which the perpetual disappearance of that atomic moment signals a further deepening in our own national psychosis.

    If, as Edward Glover once observed, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rendered actual the most extreme fantasies of world destruction encountered in the insane or in the nightmares of ordinary people,” the neoliberal disimagination machine has rendered such horrific reality a collective fantasy driven by the spectacle of violence, nourished by sensationalism, and reinforced by scourge of commodified and trivialized entertainment.5 The disimagination machine threatens democratic public life by devaluing social agency, historical memory, and critical consciousness and in doing so it creates the conditions for people to be ethically compromised and politically infantilized. Returning to Hiroshima is not only necessary to break out of the moral cocoon that puts reason and memory to sleep but also to rediscover both our imaginative capacities for civic literacy on behalf of the public good, especially if such action demands that we remember as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell remark “Every small act of violence, then, has some connection with, if not sanction from, the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”6

    On Monday August 6, 1945 the United States unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima killing 70,000 people instantly and another 70,000 within five years—an opening volley in a nuclear campaign visited on Nagasaki in the days that followed.7 In the immediate aftermath, the incineration of mostly innocent civilians was buried in official government pronouncements about the victory of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was celebrated by those who argued that its use was responsible for concluding the war with Japan. Also applauded was the power of the bomb and the wonder of science in creating it, especially “the atmosphere of technological fanaticism” in which scientists worked to create the most powerful weapon of destruction then known to the world.8 Conventional justification for dropping the atomic bombs held that “it was the most expedient measure to securing Japan’s surrender [and] that the bomb was used to shorten the agony of war and to save American lives.”9 Left out of that succinct legitimating narrative were the growing objections to the use of atomic weaponry put forth by a number of top military leaders and politicians, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who was then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, former President Herbert Hoover, and General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom argued it was not necessary to end the war.10 A position later proven to be correct.

    For a brief time, the Atom Bomb was celebrated as a kind of magic talisman entwining salvation and scientific inventiveness and in doing so functioned to “simultaneously domesticate the unimaginable while charging the mundane surroundings of our everyday lives with a weight and sense of importance unmatched in modern times.”11 In spite of the initial celebration of the effects of the bomb and the orthodox defense that accompanied it, whatever positive value the bomb may have had among the American public, intellectuals, and popular media began to dissipate as more and more people became aware of the massive deaths along with suffering and misery it caused.12

    Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that in spite of attempts to justify the bombing “from the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it [soon] became the symbol of human evil, [embodying] the absolute evil of war.”13 What particularly troubled Oe was the scientific and intellectual complicity in the creation of and in the lobbying for its use, with acute awareness that it would turn Hiroshima into a “vast ugly death chamber.”14 More pointedly, it revealed a new stage in the merging of military actions and scientific methods, indeed a new era in which the technology of destruction could destroy the earth in roughly the time it takes to boil an egg. The bombing of Hiroshima extended a new industrially enabled kind of violence and warfare in which the distinction between soldiers and civilians disappeared and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was normalized. But more than this, the American government exhibited a ‘total embrace of the atom bomb,” that signalled support for the first time of a “notion of unbounded annihilation [and] “the totality of destruction.”15

    Hiroshima designated the beginning of the nuclear era in which as Oh Jung points out “Combatants were engaged on a path toward total war in which technological advances, coupled with the increasing effectiveness of an air strategy, began to undermine the ethical view that civilians should not be targeted… This pattern of wholesale destruction blurred the distinction between military and civilian casualties.”16 The destructive power of the bomb and its use on civilians also marked a turning point in American self-identity in which the United States began to think of itself as a superpower, which as Robert Jay. Lifton points out refers to “a national mindset–put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group–that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations.”17 The power of the scientific imagination and its murderous deployment gave birth simultaneously to the American disimagination machine with its capacity to rewrite history in order to render it an irrelevant relic best forgotten.

    What remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name of saving lives and winning the war.18 This was a humanism under siege, transformed into its terrifying opposite and placed on the side of what Edmund Wilson called the Faustian possibility of a grotesque “plague and annihilation.”19 In part, Hiroshima represented the achieved transcendence of military metaphysics now a defining feature of national identity, its more poisonous and powerful investment in the cult of scientism, instrumental rationality, and technological fanaticism—and the simultaneous marginalization of scientific evidence and intellectual rigour, even reason itself. That Hiroshima was used to redefine America’s “national mission and its utopian possibilities”20 was nothing short of what the late historian Howard Zinn called a “devastating commentary on our moral culture.”21 More pointedly it serves as a grim commentary on our national sanity. In most of these cases, matters of morality and justice were dissolved into technical questions and reductive chauvinism relating matters of governmentally massaged efficiency, scientific “expertise”, and American exceptionalism. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell stated, the atom bomb was symbolic of the power of post-war America rather than a “ruthless weapon of indiscriminate destruction” which conveniently put to rest painful questions concerning justice, morality, and ethical responsibility. They write:

    Our official narrative precluded anything suggesting atonement. Rather the bomb itself had to be “redeemed”: As “a frightening manifestation of technological evil … it needed to be reformed, transformed, managed, or turned into the vehicle of a promising future,” [as historian M. Susan] Lindee argued. “It was necessary, somehow, to redeem the bomb.” In other words, to avoid historical and moral responsibility, we acted immorally and claimed virtue. We sank deeper, that is, into moral inversion.22

    This narrative of redemption was soon challenged by a number of historians who argued that the dropping of the atom bomb had less to do with winning the war than with an attempt to put pressure on the Soviet Union to not expand their empire into territory deemed essential to American interests.23 Protecting America’s superiority in a potential Soviet-American conflict was a decisive factor in dropping the bomb. In addition, the Truman administration needed to provide legitimation to Congress for the staggering sums of money spent on the Manhattan Project in developing the atomic weapons program and for procuring future funding necessary to continue military appropriations for ongoing research long after the war ended.24 Howard Zinn goes even further asserting that the government’s weak defense for the bombing of Hiroshima was not only false but was complicitous with an act of terrorism. Refusing to relinquish his role as a public intellectual willing to hold power accountable, he writes “Can we … comprehend the killing of 200,000 people to make a point about American power?”25 A number of historians, including Gar Alperowitz and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, also attempted to deflate this official defense of Hiroshima by providing counter-evidence that the Japanese were ready to surrender as a result of a number of factors including the nonstop bombing of 26 cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the success of the naval and military blockade of Japan, and the Soviet’s entrance into the war on August 9th.26

    The narrative of redemption and the criticism it provoked are important for understanding the role that intellectuals assumed at this historical moment to address what would be the beginning of the nuclear weapons era and how that role for critics of the nuclear arms race has faded somewhat at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Historical reflection on this tragic foray into the nuclear age reveals the decades long dismantling of a culture’s infrastructure of ideas, its growing intolerance for critical thought in light of the pressures placed on media, on universities and increasingly isolated intellectuals to support comforting mythologies and official narratives and thus cede the responsibility to give effective voice to unpopular realities.

    Within a short time after the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, John Hersey wrote a devastating description of the misery and suffering caused by the bomb. Removing the bomb from abstract arguments endorsing matters of technique, efficiency, and national honor, Hersey first published in The New Yorker and later in a widely read book an exhausting and terrifying description of the bombs effects on the people of Hiroshima, portraying in detail the horror of the suffering caused by the bomb. There is one haunting passage that not only illustrates the horror of the pain and suffering, but also offers a powerful metaphor for the blindness that overtook both the victims and the perpetrators. He writes:

    On his way back with the water, [Father Kleinsorge] got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, ‘Have you anything to drink?’ He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.27

    The nightmarish image of fallen soldiers staring with hollow sockets, eyes liquidated on cheeks and mouths swollen and pus-filled stands as a warning to those who would refuse blindly the moral witnessing necessary to keep alive for future generations the memory of the horror of nuclear weapons and the need to eliminate them. Hersey’s literal depiction of mass violence against civilians serves as a kind of mirrored doubling, referring at one level to nations blindly driven by militarism and hyper-nationalism. At another level, perpetrators become victims who soon mimic their perpetrators, seizing upon their own victimization as a rationale to become blind to their own injustices.

    Pearl Harbor enabled Americans to view themselves as the victims but then assumed the identity of the perpetrators and became willfully blind to the United States’ own escalation of violence and injustice. Employing both a poisonous racism and a weapon of mad violence against the Japanese people, the US government imagined Japan as the ultimate enemy, and then pursued tactics that blinded the American public to its own humanity and in doing so became its own worst enemy by turning against its most cherished democratic principles. In a sense, this self-imposed sightlessness functioned as part of what Jacques Derrida once called a societal autoimmune response, one in which the body’s immune system attacked its own bodily defenses.28 Fortunately, this state of political and moral blindness did not extend to a number of critics for the next fifty years who railed aggressively against the dropping of the atomic bombs and the beginning of the nuclear age.

    Responding to Hersey’s article on the bombing of Hiroshima published in The New Yorker, Mary McCarthy argued that he had reduced the bombing to the same level of journalism used to report natural catastrophes such as “fires, floods, and earthquakes” and in doing so had reduced a grotesque act of barbarism to “a human interest story” that had failed to grasp the bomb’s nihilism, and the role that “bombers, the scientists, the government” and others played in producing this monstrous act.29 McCarthy was alarmed that Hersey had “failed to consider why it was used, who was responsible, and whether it had been necessary.”30 McCarthy was only partly right. While it was true that Hersey didn’t tackle the larger political, cultural and social conditions of the event’s unfolding, his article provided one of the few detailed reports at the time of the horrors the bomb inflicted, stoking a sense of trepidation about nuclear weapons along with a modicum of moral outrage over the decision to drop the bomb—dispositions that most Americans had not considered at the time. Hersey was not alone. Wilfred Burchett, writing for the London Daily Express, was the first journalist to provide an independent account of the suffering, misery, and death that engulfed Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped on the city. For Burchett, the cataclysm and horror he witnessed first-hand resembled a vision of hell that he aptly termed “the Atomic Plague.” He writes:

    Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.31

    In the end in spite of such accounts, fear and moral outrage did little to put an end to the nuclear arms race, but it did prompt a number of intellectuals to enter into the public realm to denounce the bombing and the ongoing advance of a nuclear weapons program and the ever-present threat of annihilation it posed. In the end, fear and moral outrage did little to put an end to the nuclear arms race, but it did prompt a number of intellectuals to enter into the public realm to denounce the bombing and the ongoing advance of a nuclear weapons program and the ever-present threat of annihilation it posed.

    A number of important questions emerge from the above analysis, but two issues in particular stand out for me in light of the role that academics and public intellectuals have played in addressing the bombing of Hiroshima and the emergence of a nuclear weapons on a global scale, and the imminent threat of human annihilation posed by the continuing existence and danger posed by the potential use of such weapons. The first question focuses on what has been learned from the bombing of Hiroshima and the second question concerns the disturbing issue of how violence and hence Hiroshima itself have become normalized in the collective American psyche.

    In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, there was a major debate not just about how the emergence of the atomic age and the moral, economic, scientific, military, and political forced that gave rise to it. There was also a heated debate about the ways in which the embrace of the atomic age altered the emerging nature of state power, gave rise to new forms of militarism, put American lives at risk, created environmental hazards, produced an emergent surveillance state, furthered the politics of state secrecy, and put into play a series of deadly diplomatic crisis, reinforced by the logic of brinkmanship and a belief in the totality of war.32

    Hiroshima not only unleashed immense misery, unimaginable suffering, and wanton death on Japanese civilians, it also gave rise to anti-democratic tendencies in the United States government that put the health, safety, and liberty of the American people at risk. Shrouded in secrecy, the government machinery of death that produced the bomb did everything possible to cover up the most grotesque effects of the bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the dangerous hazards it posed to the American people. Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that if the development of the bomb and its immediate effects were shrouded in concealment by the government that before long concealment developed into a cover up marked by government lies and the falsification of information.33 With respect to the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, films taken by Japanese and American photographers were hidden for years from the American public for fear that they would create both a moral panic and a backlash against the funding for nuclear weapons.34 For example, the Atomic Energy Commission lied about the extent and danger of radiation fallout going so far as to mount a campaign claiming that “fallout does not constitute a serious hazard to any living thing outside the test site.”35 This act of falsification took place in spite of the fact that thousands of military personal were exposed to high levels of radiation within and outside of the test sites.

    In addition, the Atomic Energy Commission in conjunction with the Departments of Defense, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other government departments engaged in a series of medical experiments designed to test the effects of different levels radiation exposure on military personal, medical patients, prisoners, and others in various sites. According to Lifton and Mitchell, these experiments took the shape of exposing people intentionally to “radiation releases or by placing military personnel at or near ground zero of bomb tests.”36 It gets worse. They also note that “from 1945 through 1947, bomb-grade plutonium injections were given to thirty-one patients [in a variety of hospitals and medical centers] and that all of these “experiments were shrouded in secrecy and, when deemed necessary, in lies….the experiments were intended to show what type or amount of exposure would cause damage to normal, healthy people in a nuclear war.”37 Some of the long lasting legacies of the birth of the atomic bomb also included the rise of plutonium dumps, environmental and health risks, the cult of expertise, and the subordination of the peaceful development technology to a large scale interest in using technology for the organized production of violence. Another notable development raised by many critics in the years following the launch of the atomic age was the rise of a government mired in secrecy, the repression of dissent, and the legitimation for a type of civic illiteracy in which Americans were told to leave “the gravest problems, military and social, completely in the hands of experts and political leaders who claimed to have them under control.”38

    All of these anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by the atomic age came under scrutiny during the latter half of the twentieth century. The terror of a nuclear holocaust, an intense sense of alienation from the commanding institutions of power, and deep anxiety about the demise of the future spawned growing unrest, ideological dissent, and massive outbursts of resistance among students and intellectuals all over the globe from the sixties until the beginning of the twenty-first century calling for the outlawing of militarism, nuclear production and stockpiling, and the nuclear propaganda machine. Literary writers extending from James Agee to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. condemned the death-saturated machinery launched by the atomic age. Moreover, public intellectuals from Dwight Macdonald and Bertrand Russell to Helen Caldicott, Ronald Takaki, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, fanned the flames of resistance to both the nuclear arms race and weapons as well as the development of nuclear technologies. Others such as George Monbiot, an environmental activist, have supported the nuclear industry but denounced the nuclear arms race. In doing so, he has argued that “The anti-nuclear movement … has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health [producing] claims … ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong [and] have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.”39

    In addition, in light of the nuclear crises that extend from the Three Mile accident in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the more recent Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, a myriad of social movements along with a number of mass demonstrations against nuclear power have developed and taken place all over the world.40 While deep moral and political concerns over the legacy of Hiroshima seemed to be fading in the United States, the tragedy of 9/11 and the endlessly replayed images of the two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center resurrected once again the frightening image of what Colonel Paul Tibbetts, Jr., the Enola Gay’s pilot, referred to as “that awful cloud… boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall” after “Little Boy,” a 700-pound uranium bomb was released over Hiroshima. Though this time, collective anxieties were focused not on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its implications for a nuclear Armageddon but on the fear of terrorists using a nuclear weapon to wreak havoc on Americans. But a decade later even that fear, however parochially framed, seems to have been diminished if not entirely, erased even though it has produced an aggressive attack on civil liberties and given even more power to an egregious and dangerous surveillance state.

    Atomic anxiety confronts a world in which 9 states have nuclear weapons and a number of them such as North Korea, Pakistan, and India have threatened to use them. James McCluskey points out that “there are over 20,0000 nuclear weapons in existence, sufficient destructive power to incinerate every human being on the planet three times over [and] there are more than 2000 held on hair trigger alert, already mounted on board their missiles and ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.”41 These weapons are far more powerful and deadly than the atomic bomb and the possibility that they might be used, even inadvertently, is high. This threat becomes all the more real in light of the fact that the world has seen a history of miscommunications and technological malfunctions, suggesting both the fragility of such weapons and the dire stupidity of positions defending their safety and value as a nuclear deterrent.42 The 2014 report, To Close for Comfort—Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy not only outlines a history of such near misses in great detail, it also makes terrifyingly clear that “the risk associated with nuclear weapons is high.”43 It is also worth noting that an enormous amount of money is wasted to maintain these weapons and missiles, develop more sophisticated nuclear weaponries, and invest in ever more weapons laboratories. McCluskey estimates world funding for such weapons at $1trillion per decade while Arms Control Today reported in 2012 that yearly funding for U.S. nuclear weapons activity was $31 billion.44

    In the United States, the mushroom cloud connected to Hiroshima is now connected to much larger forces of destruction, including a turn to instrumental reason over moral considerations, the normalization of violence in America, the militarization of local police forces, an attack on civil liberties, the rise of the surveillance state, a dangerous turn towards state secrecy under President Obama, the rise of the carceral state, and the elevation of war as a central organizing principle of society. Rather than stand in opposition to preventing a nuclear mishap or the expansion of the arms industry, the United States places high up on the list of those nations that could trigger what Amy Goodman calls that “horrible moment when hubris, accident or inhumanity triggers the next nuclear attack.”45 Given the history of lies, deceptions, falsifications, and retreat into secrecy that characterizes the American government’s strangulating hold by the military-industrial-surveillance complex, it would be naïve to assume that the U.S. government can be trusted to act with good intentions when it comes to matters of domestic and foreign policy. State terrorism has increasingly become the DNA of American governance and politics and is evident in government cover ups, corruption, and numerous acts of bad faith. Secrecy, lies, and deception have a long history in the United States and the issue is not merely to uncover such instances of state deception but to connect the dots over time and to map the connections, for instance, between the actions of the NSA in the early aftermath of the attempts to cover up the inhumane destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the role the NSA and other intelligence agencies play today in distorting the truth about government policies while embracing an all-compassing notion of surveillance and squelching of civil liberties, privacy, and freedom.

    Hiroshima symbolizes the fact that the United States commits unspeakable acts making it easier to refuse to rely on politicians, academics, and alleged experts who refuse to support a politics of transparency and serve mostly to legitimate anti-democratic, if not totalitarian policies. Questioning a monstrous war machine whose roots lie in Hiroshima is the first step in declaring nuclear weapons unacceptable ethically and politically. This suggests a further mode of inquiry that focuses on how the rise of the military-industrial complex contributes to the escalation of nuclear weapons and what can we learn by tracing it roots to the development and use of the atom bomb. Moreover, it raises questions about the role played by intellectuals both in an out of the academy in conspiring to build the bomb and hide its effects from the American people? These are only some of the questions that need to be made visible, interrogated, and pursued in a variety of sites and public forums.

    One crucial issue today is what role might intellectuals and matters of civic courage, engaged citizenship, and the educative nature of politics play as part of a sustained effort to resurrect the memory of Hiroshima as both a warning and a signpost for rethinking the nature of collective struggle, reclaiming the radical imagination, and producing a sustained politics aimed at abolishing nuclear weapons forever? One issue would be to revisit the conditions that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible, to explore how militarism and a kind of technological fanaticism merged under the star of scientific rationality. Another step forward would be to make clear what the effects of such weapons are, to disclose the manufactured lie that such weapons make us safe. Indeed, this suggests the need for intellectuals, artists, and other cultural workers to use their skills, resources, and connections to develop massive educational campaigns.

    Such campaigns not only make education, consciousness, and collective struggle the center of politics, but also systemically work to both inform the public about the history of such weapons, the misery and suffering they have caused, and how they benefit the financial, government, and corporate elite who make huge amounts of money off the arms race and the promotion of nuclear deterrence and the need for a permanent warfare state. Intellectuals today appear numbed by ever developing disasters, statistics of suffering and death, the Hollywood disimagination machine with its investment in the celluloid Apocalypse for which only superheroes can respond, and a consumer culture that thrives on self-interests and deplores collective political and ethical responsibility.

    There are no rationales or escapes from the responsibility of preventing mass destruction due to nuclear annihilation; the appeal to military necessity is no excuse for the indiscriminate bombing of civilians whether in Hiroshima or Afghanistan. The sense of horror, fear, doubt, anxiety, and powerless that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki up until the beginning of the 21st century seems to have faded in light of both the Hollywood apocalypse machine, the mindlessness of celebrity and consumer cultures, the growing spectacles of violence, and a militarism that is now celebrated as one of the highest ideals of American life. In a society governed by militarism, consumerism, and neoliberal savagery, it has become more difficult to assume a position of moral, social, and political responsibility, to believe that politics matters, to imagine a future in which responding to the suffering of others is a central element of democratic life. When historical memory fades and people turn inward, remove themselves from politics, and embrace cynicism over educated hope, a culture of evil, suffering, and existential despair. Americans now life amid a culture of indifference sustained by an endless series of manufactured catastrophes that offer a source of entertainment, sensation, and instant pleasure.

    We live in a neoliberal culture that subordinates human needs to the demand for unchecked profits, trumps exchange values over the public good, and embraces commerce as the only viable model of social relations to shape the entirety of social life. Under such circumstances, violence becomes a form of entertainment rather than a source of alarm, individuals no longer question society and become incapable of translating private troubles into larger public considerations. In the age following the use of the atom bomb on civilians, talk about evil, militarism, and the end of the world once stirred public debate and diverse resistance movements, now it promotes a culture of fear, moral panics, and a retreat into the black hole of the disimagination machine. The good news is that neoliberalism now makes clear that it cannot provide a vision to sustain society and works largely to destroy it. It is a metaphor for the atom bomb, a social, political, and moral embodiment of global destruction that needs to be stopped before it is too late. The future will look much brighter without the glow of atomic energy and the recognition that the legacy of death and destruction that extends from Hiroshima to Fukushima makes clear that no one can be a bystander if democracy is to survive.

    notes:
    1. This reference refers to a collection of interviews with Michel Foucault originally published by Semiotext(e). Michel Foucault, “What our present is?” Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston,(New York: Semiotext(e), 1989 and 1996), 407–415.
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    2. Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 33.
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    3. Daniel Sandstrom Interviews Philip Roth, “My Life as a Writer,” New York Times (March 2, 2014). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/my-life-as-a-writer.html
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    4. Of course, the Occupy Movement in the United States and the Quebec student movement are exceptions to this trend. See, for instance, David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement, (New York, NY,: The Random House Publishing Group, 2013) and Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War Against Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014).
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    5. Of course, the Occupy Movement in the United States and the Quebec student movement are exceptions to this trend. See, for instance, David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement, (New York, NY,: The Random House Publishing Group, 2013) and Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War Against Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014).
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    6. Ibid., Lifton and Mitchell, p. 345.
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    7. Jennifer Rosenberg, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Part 2),” About.com –20th Century History (March 28, 201). Online: http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldwarii/a/hiroshima_2.htm. A more powerful atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and by the end of the year an estimated 70,000 had been killed. For the history of the making of the bomb, see the monumental: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Anv Rep edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
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    8. The term “technological fanaticism” comes from Michael Sherry who suggested that it produced an increased form of brutality. Cited in Howard Zinn, The Bomb. (New York. N.Y.: City Lights, 2010), pp. 54-55.
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    9. Oh Jung, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Decision to Drop the Bomb,” Michigan Journal of History Vol 1. No. 2 (Winter 2002). Online:
    http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/oh_jung.pdf.
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    10. See, in particular, Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996). http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/oh_jung.pdf.
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    11. Peter Bacon Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream Of America From Hiroshima To Now. (Chicago. IL.: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 17.
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    12. Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
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    13. Kensaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 114.
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    14. Ibid., Oe, Hiroshima Notes, p. 117.
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    15. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, (New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, 1995). p. 314-315. 328.
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    16. Ibid., Oh Jung, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Decision to Drop the Bomb.”
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    17. Robert Jay Lifton, “American Apocalypse,” The Nation (December 22, 2003), p. 12.
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    18. For an interesting analysis of how the bomb was defended by the New York Times and a number of high ranking politicians, especially after John Hersey’s Hiroshima appeared in The New Yorker, see Steve Rothman, “The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker,” Herseyheroshima.com, (January 8, 1997). Online: http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php
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    19. Wilson cited in Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 309.
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    20. Ibid., Peter Bacon Hales, Outside The Gates of Eden: The Dream Of America From Hiroshima To Now, p. 8.
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    21. Ibid., Zinn, The Bomb, p. 26.
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    22. Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America.
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    23. For a more recent articulation of this argument, see Ward Wilson, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (new York: Mariner Books, 2013).
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    24. Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), p. 39
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    25. Ibid, Zinn, The Bomb, p. 45.
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    26. See, for example, Ibid., Haseqawa; Gar Alperowitz’s, Atomic Diplomacy Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (London: Pluto Press, 1994) and also Gar Alperowitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996). Ibid., Ham.
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    27. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 68.
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    28. Giovanna Borradori, ed, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides–a dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 85-136.
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    29. Mary McCarthy, “The Hiroshima “New Yorker”,” The New Yorker (November, 1946).
    http://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mccarthy_onhiroshima.pdf
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    30. Ibid., Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki, p. 469.
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    31. George Burchett & Nick Shimmin, eds. Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005), p.229.
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    32. For an informative analysis of the deep state and a politics driven by corporate power, see Bill Blunden, “The Zero-Sum Game of Perpetual War,” Counterpunch (September 2, 2014). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/02/the-zero-sum-game-of-perpetual-war/
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    33. The following section relies on the work of both Lifton and Mitchell, Howard Zinn, and M. Susan Lindee.
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    34. Greg Mitchell, “The Great Hiroshima Cover-up,” The Nation, (August 3, 2011). Online:
    http://www.thenation.com/blog/162543/great-hiroshima-cover#. Also see, Greg Mitchell, “Part 1: Atomic Devastation Hidden For Decades,” WhoWhatWhy (March 26, 2014). Online: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/26/atomic-devastation-hidden-decades; Greg Mitchell, “Part 2: How They Hid the Worst Horrors of Hiroshima,” WhoWhatWhy, (March 28, 2014). Online:
    http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/28/part-2-how-they-hid-the-worst-horrors-of-hiroshima/; Greg Mitchell, “Part 3: Death and Suffering, in Living Color,” WhoWhatWhy (March 31, 2014). Online: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/31/death-suffering-living-color/
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    35. Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 321.
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    36. Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 322.
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    37. Ibid. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 322-323.
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    38. Ibid. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 336.
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    39. George Monbiot, “Evidence Meltdown,” The Guardian (April 5, 2011). Online: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/
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    40. Patrick Allitt, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (New York: Penguin, 2015); Horace Herring, From Energy Dreams to Nuclear Nightmares: Lessons from the Anti-nuclear Power Movement in the 1970s (Chipping Norton, UK: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2006; Alain Touraine, Anti-Nuclear Protest: The Opposition to Nuclear Energy in France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Stephen Croall, The Anti-Nuclear Handbook New York: Random House, 1979). On the decade that enveloped the anti-nuclear moment with a series of crisis, see Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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    41. James McCluskey, “Nuclear Crisis: Can the Sane Prevail in Time?” Truthout (June 10, 2014). Online: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24273
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    42. See, for example, the list of crisis, near misses, and nuclear war mongering that characterizes United States foreign policy in the last few decades, see, Noam Chomsky, “How Many Minutes to Midnight? Hiroshima Day 2014.” Truthout (August 5, 2014). Online: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/25388-how-many-minutes-to-midnight-hiroshima-day-2014
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    43. Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas and Sasan Aghlani, To Close for Comfort —Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy (London: Chatham House, 2014). Online: http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/home/chatham/public_html/sites/default/files/20140428TooCloseforComfortNuclearUseLewisWilliamsPelopidasAghlani.pdf
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    44. Jim McCluskey, “Nuclear Deterrence: The Lie to End All Lies,” Truthout (Oct 29, 2012). Online: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/12381
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    45. Amy Goodman, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 69 Year Later,” TruthDig (August 6, 2014). Online: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_69_years_later_20140806
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  • Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism

    Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism

    imageThe Case of Italy,

    an intervention by John Champagne

    ~

    In several recent essays and articles on the relationship between Italian Jews in the diaspora and contemporary Israeli political and military actions toward the Palestinians, an interesting series of contradictions emerge. In some instances, critique of the military policies of the state of Israel is equated with antisemitism, even when that critique is proffered by Italian Jews. The argument, presented, for example, by Ugo Volli in his “Zionism: a Word that not Everyone Understands,” is that there is a connection between military and political attacks on Israel and what he terms a worldwide and constant economic and cultural campaign of de-legitimation and demonization of that state.1 Volli further contends that these two are directed not simply at Israelis, but at all Jews. “For this reason,” writes Volli, “there is no fundamental distinction between antizionism and antisemitism, between hate for Israel and for the Jews. All of this is well noted and not worth explaining here in greater detail.”2 This position dates from at least July of 1982, when, in response to critiques of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon voiced by Italian Jews in the diaspora, Jewish journalist Rosellina Balbi published in La Repubblica “Davide, discolpati!” an article defending Israel’s actions as defensive rather than offensive.3 In this article, Balbi equated antizionism with antisemitism by noting that any critique of the state of Israel has punctually provoked across Europe “tremors of anti-semitism.” Just a few months later, Italian war correspondent Oriana Fallaci suggested to an audience at Harvard that no one in the US will speak out against Israel because of “the contemporary fear of being blackmailed with the accusation of hating the Jews.”4

    A professor of Semiotics at the Università degli Studi di Torino and self-described political activist, Volli is also a journalist who has written for major Italian dailies as well as informazionecoretta.com, an Italian website whose stated goal is to guarantee that the public receives correct information on Israel.5 Antisemitism is a frequent theme in Volli’s work. Most recently, for example, he has argued that “history shows that antisemitism generates hatred of Israel, and not the inverse.”6 Such a position leads Volli to conclude that “the European Left” is antisemitic, as is “almost a third of the population” in Croatia, Belgium, and Spain.7

    Volli’s “Zionism” appeared in Shalom, the official monthly magazine of information and culture of the Comunità Ebraica di Roma.8 But who is the audience to which his article is directed? The word Comunità (with a capital C) is perhaps best translated as “Congregation.” It has a structure and a constitution.9 As the statutes of the Union of the Jewish Italian Communities (of which the Roman Comunità is a member) explain, in order to fully avail one’s-self of the resources of the Comunità, one must be an official member.10 The process is formalized via a declaration of one’s Jewishness.11 This declaration can be challenged, in which case, one can file an appeal.12 Under the advice of the rabbi, the consiglio or parliament – a body of twenty eight representatives elected directly by the members of the Comunità every four years – has the final say.13 Specific processes are also outlined for formally leaving the Comunità.14

    The history of the structure of the Italian Jewish Communities is a complex one. It encompasses a great span of time, including both Renaissance ghetto life, wherein Jews practicing different “rites” – not only the familiar Sephardic and Ashkenazi, but also the Italian, Sicilian, Levantine, and Catalan rites– were required to worship in a single synagogue. Another significant moment was Fascism, when all forms of religious worship were legally organized and regulated as part of the overall fascicization of Italian society.15 Royal Decree n.1731 of October 30, 1930, created the Union of Italian-Jewish Communities (Unione delle Comunità Israelitiche Italiane,) which represented Italian Judaism in its relations with the state.16

    The term “comunità,” however, can also refer to the English “community.” When one speaks of the Jewish “comunità,” therefore, one might be using the term in this looser sense. This might include, for example, non-religious Italian Jews, or out of town Jews attending the synagogue or other events presented by the Comunità’s museum and archive, or someone like Natalia Ginzburg – who, although ultimately converting to Catholicism, understood her Judaism as what one writer has called a “moral identity” – or even atheist Jews like the scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini.17 And while the Comunità is officially Orthodox, not all of its members keep kosher, for example, or wear the yarmulke outside of Temple.

    Writing in Shalom, Volli would appear to be addressing an audience composed of both the Comunità and the community, as well as non Jews. Many of the latter have contact with the Comunità via its museum in particular, which anticipates audiences from all over the world. Wall text and brochures, for example, are in Italian, Hebrew, and English, and both English and Italian tours of the two synagogues housed in the museum are provided daily. The tour guides inform the museum goers about the existence of Shalom, and copies of the magazine are available free.

    Noting in passing that, on the left, there are “numerous noted intellectuals of Jewish origin actively marshaled against the existence of Israel, from [Noam] Chomski to [Ilan] Pappé to Judith Butler,” as well as less aggressive (and, according to the author, therefore more insidious) organizations like J Street and its European counterpart, J Call, Volli ends his article by calling for a continuing defense of Zionism. He particularly cites for approbation critiques of Israel appearing recently in the official organs of the Italian Jewish press. In Volli’s eyes, to be Jewish is – or should be – to support the state of Israel. (While Volli claims only to be speaking against those who seek the dismantling of the state, in attacking J Street, an organization that explicitly calls for a two-state solution, he tips his hand.)

    However, the assumption that all Italian Jews are somehow representative of the state of Israel – a conclusion that would seem to follow logically from Volli’s argument – is also labeled antisemitism by other Jewish intellectuals working in the Italian academy today. For example, Marianna Scherini, doctor of research in Anthropology, History and Theory of Culture at the Università di Siena, begins her argument that, in their coverage of the 1982 war, both the Italian leftist press and the Italian daily newspapers offered converging, critical analyses of Israel, with a discussion of a new (post-war) antisemitism that is specifically anti-Israeli in its content.18 Due to the aforementioned war in Lebanon and the accompanying massacre of Palestinians in the refuge camps of Sabra and Shatila, 1982 was a particularly painful moment for the Italian Jewish community. Perpetrated by Christian Phalangists assisted by the Israel military, the massacre was publicly critiqued by some Italian Jewish intellectuals – most notably, Primo Levi – and followed in Rome by the bombing by terrorists of the Great Synagogue. (In fact, even prior to the massacre, the invasion had been condemned by Levi and several other intellectuals, including Franco Belgrado, Edith Bruck, Ugo Caffaz, Miriam Cohen, Natalia Ginzburg, David Meghnagi, and Luca Levi.)19

    The synagogue bombing resulted in the death of a child, Stefano Gay Tache. The killing took place on the holiday of of Shemini (also spelled Shmini) Atzeret (also spelled Azzeret), which the English version of the catalog of the Jewish Museum of Rome states is “a day when children receiving [sic] a public blessing.”20 Since the bombing, the Great Synagogue can only be visited via guided tours led by volunteers, who typically reference the attack. A B’nai B’rith Europe webpage repeats the claim that the attack took place when “a service of blessing for children was being held,” though it suggests that this attack “was perpetrated opposite the Grand Synagogue in Rome.”21 In fact, the blessing referenced occurs not on Shemini Atzeret but rather on the next day, Simchat Torah. In Israel, however, these holidays are celebrated on the same day. Regardless of this discrepancy, 1982 is sometimes cited as marking a definitive split between Italian Jews and the Italian left.22

    Scherini concludes her essay by arguing that both the Italian leftist press and the dailies tended to isolate Israeli actions from their political and historical context23 and to show no interest in the specific politics of the Palestinians,24 as well as to equate Israeli actions in Lebanon with the Shoah and suggest a transformation of Israeli Jews from victims to perpetrators of a contemporary persecution of the Palestinian people (196).25 She then explicitly links contemporary, post-war antisemitism with her contention that, “in the period under examination [1982] Israel constitutes a virtual ‘Jewish collective’ in the imagination of the Italian daily press.”26 According to the author, the treating of Israel as “the mirror through which to observe Italian Jews, and vice versa” and corollary homogenizing of all Jews is an instance of antisemitism.27

    A third position: some Italian Jewish intellectuals draw a relationship between contemporary antisemitism and the position, espoused by some Western intellectuals, that Israel represents the logical outcome, taken to its furthest point, of Western imperial expansion. This connection is suggested briefly by historian Guri Schwarz, who was a 2013-2014 Viterbi Visiting Professor at UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies. Schwarz’s contention is that, in labeling Israel a kind of “worst case scenario,” Western antisemitism arises from a fear of the proximity of the self to the Other, a rejection of the Other in the self.28 That is, antisemitism arises from the fear that Jews are too similar to “the rest of us.” Schwarz’s argument unfortunately de-historicizes the trope, which appears to have arisen in the wake of the ’67 war . It found its condition of possibility in the linking of this war to then contemporary US imperial expansion in southeast Asia, as noted in Andrea Becherucci’s analysis of the coverage of the ’67 war in three left-wing Italian journals (119).29

    Beyond the fact that all three of these positions seem to foreclose, to varying degrees, any critique whatsoever of the military policies of the state of Israel, they also circumvent any discussion of the historical contradictions of a secular religious state. Clearly, the idea of a Jewish state is a product of the nineteenth century. It is historically linked to the “importation” to Europe, from the US and Latin America, of the model of the Enlightenment (secular) nation-state and overdetermined by (post-war) Cold War Western interests. This refusal to historicize Israel results in the particular double-bind that Israel on the one has the right to act as all other states – that is, to take both defensive and offensive action against perceived threats; this was the very argument debated in the diasporic community in 1982, with the invasion of Lebanon, perceived by some as Israel’s first offensive war30 – and that Israel is a “special case” – i.e., a state that, owing to the historical circumstances of its founding, is not subject to international law and the dictates of the UN, for example.

    As for the tension between the religious and the secular, an emblematic example is the insistence by some Italian Jews that the Jewish presence in Italy dates from 161BCE because the first book of Maccabees says so. (It may in fact date from earlier, as the Tunisian Jewish community dates itself, at least anecdotally, to the first diaspora, for example.) This in turn raises the question of how one writes the history of what is understood to be eternal – a problem that leads some scholars to argue that Jewish historiography finds its conditions of possibility in the Haskalah, nineteenth century Jewish Enlightenment (Yerushalmi). In Italy, the problem of how to write Jewish history is further complicated by the fact that the reform movement only recently came to Italy, and so the Roman Comunità is “officially” Orthodox.image31 This means that, in the Jewish Museum of Rome’s presentation of the history of the Jews, Biblical events for which there is little archaeological evidence are intermixed with such historically verifiable events as the destruction of the second Temple, commemorated in the Roman forum’s Arch of Titus.

    In drawing attention to the irresolvable tensions between the religious and the secular that necessarily inform the idea of a Jewish state, I am not suggesting, as Schwarz fears its antisemitic critics do, that Israel is “any worse” than the US in regard to ignoring the UN, for example. In fact, we know well that by virtue of its (declining) world hegemony, the US often chastises other states for breaking international law while itself flouting that law. I am suggesting, however, that, while no one would in all likelihood accuse US intellectuals who critique US foreign policy of being, say “racist,” the creation of a Jewish state has historically insured that any critique of that state will be equated in some quarters with antisemitism, even a critique produced by Jews, and that there seems to be a kind of willed refusal of some Italian Jewish intellectuals to work through this contradiction – a contradiction that finds one of its conditions of possibility in the modern “racialization” of Judaism that occurs via Nazi and Fascist antisemitism and its links to eugenics. Both Italian Fascism and Nazism deployed this antisemitism in an effort to invent national subjects, the Jew being the Other against which both Italian and German identities hoped to consolidate themselves and ward off their precarious histories.

    As its corollary, scholars who maintain that antizionism equals antisemitism must treat the latter itself as ahistorical – that is, as if there is no significant difference between pre-modern and modern forms of antisemitism. Rather than understand Italian Zionism as a kind of Foucauldian counter-discourse made possible by nineteenth century antisemitism and the antisemitic policies of Mussolini’s regime so well documented by Michele Sarfatti, Italian Jews who support unwaveringly the military policies of Israel today must construct their Comunità as always already Zionist.32 This, despite the fact that it is well known that many Jews who participated in the early years of post-Unification Italy were critical of Zionism and that, “before the Racial Laws of 1938, Italian Zionism was essentially the fruit of actions by a group of rabbis.”33

    A further corollary is that the term anti-zionism can refer both to a critique of the policies of the state of Israel and calls for its dismantling or even destruction. Volli himself argues that even at least one of those Italian Jewish authors he chastises admit (Volli’s word) that “for the great majority of Italian Jews, Israel remains an ideal and a patrimony to defend.” Interestingly, Volli uses patrimonio and not, for example stato,the former having connotations of both monetary and, more typically in Italian cultural discourse, connotations related to artistry, history, and heritage.

    Meanwhile, according to its own discourse about itself, at least as presented by its institutions such as the Jewish Museum of Rome, the cause of the shrinking of the Italian Jewish community is attributed not to any discontent with the Comunità’s refusal to critique Israeli military policies (and its insistent presentation of itself to the larger public as always having been supportive of Zionism) nor the lack in Rome of a thriving Italian Jewish reform movement but rather to mixed marriages. What the events of 1982 have produced is apparently an unhealable rift between the Italian left and the official representatives of the Italian Jewish Comunità.

    The problem of who exactly is an Italian Jew is further exacerbated by the fact that Italian Jews have lived their identities in ways far more complex than either of the crude terms “assimilation” or its opposite – autonomy? non-incorporation? – can signify. As long ago as 1985, Primo Levi “defended” himself from the charge, made in the US magazine Commentary, that he was assimilated, with the simple rejoinder, “I am. There does not exist in the Diaspora Jews who are not, to greater or lesser degrees: if only for the fact of speaking the language in which they live. I claim, for myself and for everyone, the right to choose the level of assimilation that is best suited to their culture and their surroundings.”34

    So, while, clearly, Italian Jews – both those who are official members of the Comunità and those who live their Judaism in a variety of different ways – hold varying opinions on the current military policies of the state of Israel, it is next to impossible to produce a critique of the state of Israel as a state without calling up the specter of antisemitism. That is, once a state is defined by Judaism, antisemitism is the necessary and irreducible outcome of any critique of Israel. As long as a critique of the very idea of the nation-state is part and parcel of leftist politics, and Israel continues to define itself as the (and not even a) Jewish state, critique of Israel will equal antisemitism, as least as it is defined by the aforementioned Italian Jewish intellectuals. These historical conditions create a particularly painful situation for those Italian Jews on the left, as they may feel as if they have no place in any Italian Jewish Comunità.

    Furthermore, once a Jewish state has been created in the lands formerly also inhabited by Palestinians, the only possible logical corollary is the formation of a Palestinian state. This, again, is irreducible; the logical outcome of the Palestinian diaspora is a Palestinian state. Thus the contradictory position of a global left that on the one hand engages in a critique of statehood and on the other argues for a Palestinian state. This is not hypocrisy or bad faith; it is a position overdetermined by history.

    These historical contradictions make it extremely difficult even to write of the relationship between Italian Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, and the historiographical problems of locating a post-war Jewish resistance to Zionism are substantial, since the keeper of the official records is the Comunità (which has an archive). Yet another problem bequeathed by Italian history: prior to the Shoah, Zionism was understood by many Italian Jews to be equivalent not to a call for Jewish statehood but rather philanthropic support for poor Jews in the Levant; even in the post-war years, the number of Italian Jews who immigrated to Israel was relatively minimal. Volli’s argument that Zionism is a word that not everyone understands is exactly (and not just figuratively) correct; for history has rendered it undecidable. The only way “out,” even provisionally, of this impasse, is further work on the history of Italian Judaism, and by parties who work scrupulously to make their interests as visible as they can. Unfortunately, an initial review of the debates in Italian Judaism around the events of 1982 reveals how little progress has been made on the issue of the rights of the Palestinian to self-determination – a phrase used by Levi and his co-signers in their response to the invasion of Lebanon.

    As Robert Esposito suggests, part of the problem with the term “community” is that it is almost always imagined as something that is possessed in common, something that can therefore be “lost” and re-found.35 Using an etymological approach, Esposito instead argues for a focus on the munus in community:

    the munus is the obligation that is contracted with respect to the other and that invites a suitable release from the obligation. The gratitude that demands new donations [italics in the original]. . . . It doesn’t by any means imply the stability of a possession and even less the acquisitive dynamic of something earned, but loss, subtraction, transfer.36

    Loss, subtraction, transfer – these are terms that have a very specific historical resonance to both Jews and Palestinians in the diaspora.37 While Israel’s current leaders are engaged in an extended grabbing of land – and, without a trace of irony, some members of the diasporic Libyan Jewish community in Rome protest that they have never been compensated for the land they were forced by Gaddafi to leave behind – Jewish memory keeps alive a tradition of hospitality to the stranger. Whether or not that tradition can survive the violence of nationalism is yet to be determined.

    _____

    John Champagne‘s research is in the area of Comparative Cultural Studies, with a focus on the representation of Gender and Sexuality in modernist film and literature. He currently teaches at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, and as a Fulbright recipient, he spent the 2006–07 school year teaching American Studies in Tunisia at the University of La Manouba. He is the author of four books, including Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (London and NY: Routledge, 2013).

    _____

    notes:
    1. Volli, “Sionism: una parola che non tutti capiscono,” Shalom, June 2013: 18. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
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    2. Ibid
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    3. Rosellina Balbi, “Davide, discolpati!” La Repubblica 7.135 (July 6, 1982): 20.
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    4. Oriana Fallaci, “Scuola di politica,” Il mio cuore è più stanco della mia voce (Milano: Rizzoli, 2013), 82. Fallaci’s remarks were made at a conference at the Harvard Institute of Politics entitled “Politics and War” on September 23, 1982 – one week after the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, to which she referred in her talk several times. Earlier that year, Fallaci had traveled to Beirut to interview then Colonel Ariel Sharon. The interview was published in the September 6, 1982 issue of L’Europeo.
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    5. “Chi siamo,” informazionecoretta.com, accessed May 19, 2014, http://www.informazionecorretta.com/main.php?sez=130.
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    6. Ugo Volli, “Il potenziale del genocidio 19/05/2014,” informazionecoretta.com, accessed May 19, 2014, http://www.informazionecorretta.com/main.php?mediaId=&sez=280&id=53466
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    7. Ibid. Volli is drawing his conclusions from the results of a global test of antisemitism developed by the Anti-Defamation League. On this test, see “About the Survey,” ADL Global 100, accessed May 19, 2014, http://global100.adl.org/about
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    8. For the magazine’s website, see Shalom, Mensile Ebraico di Informazione e Cultura, accessed May 20, 2014. http://www.shalom.it
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    9. “Consiglio della Communità Ebraica di Roma,” March 31, 1993, http://www.romaebraica.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Regolamento-CER.pdf
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    10. Art. 2.2, “Iscrizione alla Comunità,” Statuto dell’ Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.romaebraica.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Statuto-UCEI1.pdf
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    11. “formalizzata con esplicita dichiarazione o deriva da atti concludenti.” See Art.2.1, “Iscrizione.”
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    12. Art.2.3, “Iscrizione.”
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    13. On the structure of the Comunità, see “La C.E.R.” Comunità Ebraica di Roma, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.romaebraica.it/cer-comunita-ebraica-roma/
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    14. Art. 2.4, “Iscrizione.”
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    15. “Italian” refers to those Jews who have historically inhabited the Italian peninsula since antiquity; a synagogue has been discovered, for example, at Ostia, Antica, thought to date from the reign of Claudius. On the synagogue, see Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
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    16. Guri Schwarz, After Mussolini, Jewish Life and Jewish Memories in Post-Fascist Italy, trans. Giovanni Noor Mazhar (London Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), 21. The association survived the postwar period, lasting until 1987; ibid., 22. Its name was changed to the present Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane in 1989.
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    17. On Ginzburg, see Nadia Castronuovo, Natalia Ginzburg, Jewishness as Moral Identity (Leicester: Troubador, 2010).
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    18. Marianna Scherini, “L’imagine di Israele nella stampa quotidiana Italiana: la guerra del Libano (septembre 1982), ” “Roma e Gerusalemme,” Israele nella vita politica e culturale italiana, Marcell Simoni e Arutro Marzano, eds, (Genova: ECIG, 2010), 177-99.
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    19. Franco Belgrado, Edith Bruck, Ugo Caffaz, Miriam Cohen, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, David Meghnagi, and Luca Zevi, “Perché Israele si ritiri,” La Repubblica 7.123 (June 16, 1982): 10. The letter argued, “The destiny of the Israelian democracy rests in fact inseparably tied to the prospect of peace with the Palestinian people and reciprocal recognition.” Also, contra Volli, the letter fears that the invasion will in fact give rise to “a new antisemitism.”
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    20. Di Castro, Daniela, Treasures of the Jewish Museum of Rome, (Rome: Araldo De Luca, 2010.), 19.
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    21. B’nai B’rith Europe, “The Stefano Gay Tache Lodge in Rome,” accessed April 20, 2014, .
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    22. Matteo Di Figlia, Israele e la Sinistra (Roma: Donzelli 2012) 121.
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    23. Scherini, “L’imagine,” 195.
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    24. Ibid., 195-96. Contra Scherini, both Levi and Fallaci were critical of Yasar Arafat, for example. See Primo Levi, “Chi ha coraggio a Gerusalemme?” Opere, 1171-72, reprinted from La Stampa, 24 June 1982, and Fallaci, “Scuola,” 78.
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    25. Scherini, “L’imagine,” 196.
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    26. Ibid., 197.
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    27. Ibid.
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    28. See the concluding chapter of Schwarz, After Mussolini.
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    29. Andrea Becherucci, “Vicere la guerra e perdere la pace. Israele e la guerra dei Sei Giorni in tre riviste della sinistra Italiana: “Il Ponte,” “L’Astrolabio,” e “Rinascita,” “Roma e Gerusalemme,” Israele, 119.
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    30. In the wake of years of international protest against the US war in Vietnam, Balbi disingenuously asked, in July of 1982, “Why is it only Israel that is judged by criteria not applied to other States? Why this visceral prejudice?” Balbi, “Davide,” 20. While the war in Vietnam might have been far from Balbi’s memory, this was not the case for some of her fellow Italians who analogized the invasion of Lebanon to Vietnam; see, for example, Fallaci, “Scuola,” 73, in which the writer compared the bombing of Lebanon (which occurred prior to the massacre at Sabra and Shatila) to Vietnam and Hué.
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    31. Associated with The World Union for Progressive Judaism, reform congregations currently exist in Florence and Milan (where there are two). For links to the websites of these communities, see “The World Union for Progressive Judaism, Worldwide Congregations, Europe,” accessed May 19, 2014, http://wupj.org/Congregations/Europe.asp. Lev Chadash of Milan, the first reform congregation, dates from 2001. http://lnx.levchadash.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10&Itemid=13; Volli was for a period of time its president. Rome maintains a Beth Hillel group for Jewish Pluralism.
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    32. Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: from Equality to Persecution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). On Jewish life during the fascist period, see also Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal, Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York, NY: Picador, 2003).
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    33. Dan Segre, “Ebrei Italiani in Israele,” in Identità e Storia degli Ebrei, ed. David Bidussa, Enrica Collettti Pischel, and Rafaella Scardi (Milano: Franco Angelli, 2000): 190.
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    34. Primo Levi, “Gli Ebrei Italiani,” in Opere, Vol 2., ed. Marco Belpoliti (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 1293.
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    35. Roberto Esposito, Comunitas, the Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). For an excellent, brief introduction to Esposito’s ideas, see Alexander D. Barder, review of Roberto Esposito, Communitas, Philosophy in Review 31, no. 1 (2011): 29-32.
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    36. Ibid., 5.
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    37. On the 27th of June, 1982, Levi was interviewed by Alberto Stabile of La Repubblica. While resisting the positing of an analogy between Hitler’s “Final Solution” and “the quite violent and quite terrible things that the Israelis are doing today,” Levi nevertheless argued, “A recent Palestinian diaspora exists that has something in common with the diaspora of two thousand years ago.” Cited in Domenica Scarpa and Irene Soave, “A 25 anni della scomparsa, Le vere parole di Levi,” Il Sole 24 Ore, April 8, 2012, http://80.241.231.25/ucei/PDF/2012/2012-04-08/2012040821380709.pdf. The authors, however, get the date of the interview wrong, writing that it occurred on June 28.
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  • Bruce Robbins reports from MLA debate on Israel

    MLA 2014

    Bruce Robbins covers the recent MLA debate and resolution on Israel’s denials of entry of U.S. academics to the West Bank.

    Read his full article here.