Our country

 I am a Canadian. This is my country.

This is my flag.

Free riders

The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg describes a sketch on Israeli television: Israeli Defence Force representatives knock on the door of the wrong apartment. They expect to find a family of one of their soldiers, and to tell them, with deep regret, of the death or grave wounding of their relative. Instead, a Haredi Jewish man answers the door, and before they can speak, he tells them he will never, under any circumstances,enlist in the army. His work of prayer and study matters far too much: for him, for his community, and ultimately for the Jewish community and the State of Israel.

The sketch touched a nerve: the war in Gaza, with its mounting casualties and economic disruption has touched most Jewish Israelis, with a notable exception: the Haredim, or the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community enjoys an exemption from military service. The religious parties in the ruling political coalition fiercely guard this exemption, but the in the parts of Israeli society that bear the financial and human costs of the war, resentment of the Haredim as free riders could bring down Prime Minister Netanyahu's government.

I have a mental image of representatives of the Jewish community knocking on a door, and a different person, representative of a very different free-riding community opening the door: US. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. 

The genocide convention

Words is what we do here, Miss Kincaid. - Law & Order, Censure

Imagine for a moment a legal system with only one defined crime: intentional murder. It's not difficult to see the problems such a system would create. Many crimes aside from intentional murder seriously affect people's lives; this would create pressure to extend the definition of murder. Victims of crashes caused by drunk drivers could argue those who victimized them intended to kill and had simply selected their target at random. 

 

The natural human tendency to demand precise definitions for the offences we commit, while pursuing expanded definitions of the offences others commit against us, would make this problem impossible for a legal system to manage. Worse, a vague and broad criminal law would intersect with the difficulties of determining what really happened in a crime or tragedy. Because of this, almost every legal code defines a large number of offences with explicit definitions and punishments varying according to the severity of the offence.

Oppression and atrocity

This post deals with the accounts of sexual violence in the Hamas-led assault on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It thus necessarily includes references to rape, homicide, and crimes of extreme violence.

A United Nations investigative team has now submitted a report, finding credible evidence the Hamas fighters committed acts of sexual violence, both during the initial assault on southern Israel on October 7, and also against those they held hostage.

In all the things people can say, and have an obligation to say about this report, a number of things stand out. Start with the obvious: "credible evidence" does not mean certainty. If subsequent investigation should disprove these allegations unfounded, we should all celebrate: any woman  not suffering rape, not violated in life or death, is good news. But that is also to say there is no excuse, whatever, for this kind of violence. Nor, now, do we have any excuse for ignoring or dismissing the possibility Hamas fighters, or people associated with them, did commit these atrocities. 

We can't justify the violation of Israeli women by Hamas by pointing to claims, also under investigation, that Israeli soldiers have assaulted and violated Palestinians. Nor do we have to justify, or ignore, claims about brutality by Hamas to uphold Palestinian rights. The children of Gaza are innocent, and their suffering is unjust. No actions of Hamas cancel or reduce the rights of Palestinians who had no hand and no say in them.

We've been here before: A personal view of the Israel-Hamas conflict

 

Flag of Kach/Kahane Chai

Over the last five months, the dialogue between Israel and the international community, including some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the international community, has begun more and more to resemble the conversation at an intervention. The participants all express support, sympathy, solidarity with Israel, emphasize their friendship, and slowly work around to the lengthening list of symptoms suggesting their friend has gone off the rails. The sense of dismay at the behaviour of the Israeli government grows steadily more apparent. Increasingly, we see calls for moderation, expressed willingness to broker and support a settlement leading to peace and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and behind those words of encouragement the seldom bluntly stated but increasingly solid consensus that the behaviour of  the current government of Israel will lead to catastrophe.

Perhaps a memory of my own can help explain why this is happening. 

Tomoyuki Yamashita would like a word...

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

 Recently, Jonathan Cook published a substack essay, in which he questioned the evidence for widespread sexual violence associated with the Hamas breakout from Gaza on October 7. In his essay, he makes the following extraordinary statement:

The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarised situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviours towards women in western societies in general.

First, it should go without saying: nothing justifies genocide. Those who believe the Israeli government, or apologists for Israel, have alleged sexual violence against Hamas to justify genocide or even ethnic cleansing in Gaza need to respond on principle: nothing justifies crimes against humanity. Nothing Hamas fighters did on October 7 justifies intentionally harming or killing the children of Gaza. 

Second: allegations of war crimes matter. They matter because of what Sr. Helen Prejean called the basic human solidarity against suffering and death. They matter because without investigation and accountability they will happen more often.They matter especially when people we might otherwise sympathize with stand accused, because if our solidarity depends on a political test it means nothing.

Finally: if you let loose armed fighters on a civilian population, you own what they do. The American government hanged the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita on exactly that basis, and his fate has haunted more than one military commander since, with good reason. Our rules and standards for warfare exist to make resort to violence harder and less appealing, and to offer the maximum protection to uninvolved and unarmed persons caught up in a conflict.

We do not need to accept allegations of rape and sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 without scrutiny, but neither should we dismiss them. Standards of human rights and human decency must apply to all of us, or they will come to apply to none of us.

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

White is a privilege, not a people

Ballycastle Church, Ireland, photo by John Spragge

People from many cultures and origins, including  Picts, Celts, Franks, Angles, Saxons, and Slavs, have somewhat lower melanin levels than the average for the human species. That physiological peculiarity does not define a common culture or identity. People with low melanin levels speak different languages, derived from different language groups, follow very different religious and cultural practices. Where cultures meet, as in the "melting pot" or "mosaic" of mainstream North American culture, African cultures have as much influence as their European counterparts.

The word "white" defines a cloud of privilege, not a people. Like most clouds, it is white with unclear and contested borders, opaque but insubstantial, and often roiled by unseen but real violence, both within and without.

Indignation and punishment

By Takkk
 via Wikimedia Commons

Audre Lorde's well known quote, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," derives much of its power and appeal from its flexibility. Interpreted one way, it rebukes those with too great a focus on practical politics, since the dominant parties of the existing order have by definition mastered its practice. Looked at another way, it calls us to leave behind the specific tools of domination, the tools shaped by the needs of a house of bondage and designed to create and maintain it. Genuine liberation, opposed to changing the hand that holds the whip, requires us to reject the habits of thought and action developed to wield power.

When I attempt to identify the "master's tools" in my own habits and in ways of thinking I take for granted, experience tells me to look for contradictions. I look out for contradictions between the ways I think, the way I imagine the world, and the way I live in it. If a way of thinking doesn't serve its intended purpose, that doesn't mean it has no purpose. It makes sense to ask what purpose such a way of thinking does serve. Sometimes, the ways of thinking that serve no useful function turn out to serve the desire for power, the wish to dominate. Once I see them clearly, I can eliminate them, because I know them as the master's tools: the tool of the ones who hold the whip, and the part of me that wants not justice but power.

Reasons to Worry, Reasons Not To

 By Gage Skidmore
via Wikimedia Commons

Right after the election in which a minority of American voters put Donald Trump in the White House, I began to see online articles suggesting Mr. Trump and his supporters have a brilliant agenda for working the end of American democracy. Some articles I have read suggest Mr. Trump's intellectual incoherence actually has a brilliant covert purpose, and his operatives have a plan of such speed and subtlety that Americans standing up for tolerance and freedom can only hope to watch helplessly as Mr. Trump and his minions construct a fascist state.

I wish I knew these articles grossly overestimated Mr. Trump's native abilities.

Homeland Security photo

I wish even more that the best outcome of Mr. Trump's coming administration looked less chaotic and miserable. Donald Trump and his friends on the right wing of the Republican party may not have a brilliant plan. They still can, and probably will, inflict four years of absolute misery on the poor and dispossessed in the United States. We have already seen an appalling increase in bullying and harassment throughout the United States and even in other countries. The Republican Congress looks set to dismantle even the minimal social safety net in place in the United States. The next four years look set for more catering to the wealthy few at the expense of children going to school hungry. Unless the course of the incoming administration changes, the leadership they provide will reward the worst behaviour by police and public officials at every level.

At best, a man who has paraded his ignorance and prejudices will soon have the ability to give orders to the most powerful and destructive military on the planet. He will also control the world's most sophisticated surveillance apparatus. This frightens me. It frightens a great many people. It should.

Giving us back the horrors...

In the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon", the crew of the Enterprise approach  Eminiar VII, planet that has grown comfortable living in an extended state of  inter-planetary war with a former colony, Vendikar. The inhabitants of Eminiar VII and Vedikar have made their war bearable by waging it with computers, launching their attacks mathematically. The war resembles a video game in all but one aspect: the casualties really die. As part of the agreement between the warring world, those declared dead in an attack must report to disintegration chambers that neatly annihilate them.

With Captain Kirk and the enterprise caught up in this conflict, They perceive only one choice: force the governments of Vendikar and Eminiar VIII to make peace (this episode predates the Prime Directive). He makes his way to the center of government in the capital of Eminiar VII, and  after a cat and mouse dialog with the planet's ruler, Anan 7, Kirk manages to destroy the connected computers that manage the lethal video game. As usually happens in science fiction of the 1960s, the computers explode spectacularly, and Anan 7 stumbles out of the smoke and storms at Captain Kirk: "Do you realize what you've done?"

"Yes," replies Kirk, "I've given you back the horrors of war."

The small band of neo-Nazis who tainted Donald Trump's campaign have given us back the horrors of racism and "white" supremacy.

Hands in all colours

A couple of days ago on Patheos, Connor Wood wrote about the role the urban versus rural, working class versus managerial or creative class divides had in elevating Donald Trump to the White House. He wrote:

There are tens of millions of people in this country who are not symbol-manipulators for a living. They work with tangible things: gears, spark plugs, two-by-fours, PVC pipes. They can’t just talk their ways out of mistakes and errors in judgment, the way finance professionals or academic prognosticators can. If you screw up cutting drywall, there is no hiding it.

Another comment on Black Lives Matter

By Fibonacci Blue (Wikimedia Commons)

Six months ago, Chris Lollie settled a lawsuit against the City of St. Paul Minnesota and the police department of that city. In response to a complaint by a private security guard that Mr. Lollie had sat in the wrong chair in an area open to the public, the police shocked him using an electric discharge device and arrested him.The courts first dismissed all the charges the police laid against Mr. Lollie, and subsequently cleared the way for his suit to go forward. At that point, to avoid the possibility of a larger damage award the city settled, although to the credit of the councilors who made the decision, they also considered the police had done wrong. As a member of council said: "I want to see our city make national news for many things. And this is not one of them."

Mr. Lollie took a cell phone video of his arrest, and the release of the video, as well as the subsequent discussion, took place just as the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO came to international attention. Seeing the way the police treated Mr. Lollie, and discussing his arrest, led me to see the phrase Black Lives Matter as not simply the self-evident truth that the police should not shoot people with black skin, but that Black people have a right to live a full and whole life, lived in dignity, freedom, with a sense of possibility. I do not see Black Lives matter simply as a not shooting, but as upholding the dignity of the person.

To my American friends..

photo Lorie Shaull (Wikimedia)

From social media, I get a strong sense that some of you feel a deep and abiding disappointment about Democrat primary voters going for the "establishment" candidate, Hillary Clinton.

I don't normally like to tell voters in another country whom they should elect, but one thing makes the United States a special case: the largest thermonuclear arsenal on the planet. All voters, everywhere, vote for the people they think will do the best job for themselves, their children, and the unborn generations to come. When Americans vote to decide whom they will hand the keys of a 6,000+ megaton nuclear arsenal, they also vote on behalf of the 95% of people on Earth who do not get a vote in American elections, but can still die in a nuclear war.

Politics through the window (please, just not Windows 10...)

Politics, as an art, a practice, and discipline and a commitment has one real purpose: to make good policies for the peace, welfare, and just ordering of the polity. Politics aims to find solutions that allow us, as disparate, imperfect people, to live good lives together in a functioning community.

It also makes for terrific theatre.

Cultural appropriation and the millennial environment

The recent protest at Yale University over issues of cultural appropriation and Halloween have received support, analysis and condemnation. Responses opposing the protestors run the gamut from thoughtful concern about free speech to indignant clucking.

Much of the thoughtful criticism focuses on the supposed "intolerance" of the protesters, asking what happened to the legendary free speech protests of the 1960s. Some of the writers objecting to these protests seem to think objections to racial caricature, at Halloween or any other time, represent a new low in public support for free speech. That would probably come as a shock to the Nuremberg tribunal, who found the vicious anti-semitic caricatures of Der Sturmer had helped fuel the hatred that drove the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jewish population. The court sentenced the publisher of Der Sturmer to death for crimes against humanity. Free speech has always had limits, and most Western countries acknowledge that in a society that aims at tolerance and diversity, incitement to hate lie falls outside these limits.

To understand why student complaints about the use of cultures in Halloween often seem to focus on practices that do not seem hateful, it helps to understand the environment the millenial generation has grown up in. The Internet has shifted the context in which today's students experience restrictions on speech. The power of the Internet has made the actual repression of information and opinion very difficult, except for extremely authoritarian governments willing to endure considerable self-inflicted harm. Students today have never lived in a world where censorship of ideas can plausibly come from an American civil servant or a judge. Instead, they have spent their lives in the world of the DMCA, where expressions get blocked not by laws but by licenses, not by bureaucrats but by lawyers, not by state power but by private claims of ownership over ideas. The controversy over cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes involves not free expression but property.

Connor Friedersdrorf quotes the offending email by Erika Christakis: "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" That looks to me like a naive and nostalgic view. In Halloween celebrations of the 1960s and 1970s, parents whipped up costumes for their children, Halloween decorations were made at home, and students pulled sheets of their beds for toga parties. Some parents still make costumes for their children, but Halloween today is a multi-million dollar business. Stores pop up in major cities in September and October, selling multitudes of ready to wear costumes. These costumes come with design copyrights, trademarks, even business method patents. The only people who do not get to make claim on this revenue stream are the people who created and maintain the living culture that gives many of these costumes their meaning. Cultural appropriation is not kids being transgressive; it is yet another an example of big business using the powerless as raw material to make a buck. Moreover, it is one means of turning that many things appropriated from the powerless into cash that individual students can choose not to participate in.  The email from Erika Christakis advised students offended by a costume "...if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other." That misses part of the point. Costumes are big business. By the time a student puts on an offensive costume, the exploiters have rung up another sale.

Pray...

for the people of France mourning loved ones. And the people of Lebanon. And Syria, Iraq and Russia. Pray for everywhere terrorism leaves its ugly imprint.

On solidarity

Forget Charlie Hebdo for a moment. Start somewhere else. Consider a little community in Colombia, Las Pavas. The people of Las Pavas have a small cooperative agrarian community. Their lifestyle apparently suits them. Unfortunately, their land has attracted the attention of an international company that wants to extract palm oil. The people of Las Pavas are trying to say no to the exploitation of their land, and to the corrupt and violent processes by which an international company has attempted to take it from them.

If bullets can answer words, the people of Las Pavas, and with them a hundred other communities: indigenous people, the poor, or even simply people who choose peace, have no chance whatever.  The greed of the neoliberal order and the obsessions of the consumer culture will answer words with bullets without a single thought if they can get away with it.In fact, none of us have any realistic possibility of resisting the violence of our culture with violence. We organize, we protest, we speak, we persuade, and we cannot do any of these things effectively if a bullets can answer words.

That explains why je suis Charlie, and why je suis Charlie matters so much.

Not everyone agrees: some of the most quoted pushback has come from Jacob Canfield of the Hooded Utilitarian. Mr. Canfield makes the point that free speech does not free Charlie Hebdo from criticism. His criticism focuses on the way he considers the editors Charlie Hebdo failed to navigate the distinctions between the places in the world, such as Europe, where some Muslims suffer oppression, and the places some Muslims oppress others. Whatever the merits of that argument, it does not change the reality that two men with Kalashnikovs attacked a satirical magazine and killed eight journalists and cartoonists, as well as police officers protecting the offices. In a wholesale and brutal fashion, the gunmen answered words with bullets. A brief look at the firepower available to those governments committed to the neo-liberal politics and economics makes it extremely clear that the poor and powerless in the world will suffer most if the murders at Charlie Hebdo go unanswered.

Ride Line 9

UPDATED BELOW

A high pressure petroleum pipeline known as "line 9" runs through Toronto, roughly parallel to Finch Avenue for most of its length. Historically, the pipeline has carried crude oil from terminals on the East coast to the refineries in Sarnia. Enbridge, the owner of the pipeline, proposes to reverse the flow and have the pipeline carry diluted bitumen, tar sand, from Alberta to refine on the East Coast.

We know that the Earth's mineral resources will not sustain the kind of high energy, high consumption culture and lifestyle symbolized and enabled by the private automobile for much longer. Trying to keep on with business as usual, squeezing the last oil out of our planet, will come at a high cost to the world, to the living things on it, and to us and our cities. Line 9 goes right through some of the most ecologically sensitive and the most heavily settled part of Ontario. As the energy industry wrings the last drops of fossil energy from this planet, pipes such as line 9 carry more and more dangerous and corrosive substances.

Cycling culture offers an alternative to this ugly escalation of extraction, consumption, and waste. To demonstrate this alternative visually, I propose a bike not bitumen ride along the line 9 route, through some of the beautiful and diverse parts of Toronto. I tentatively propose it for the first Saturday of October: early enough to be warm for the ride. A Saturday one week after critical mass, should provide an opportunity for the greatest participation. An afternoon ride, starting at 3:00 pm, should take place in the light; the ride should take about two and a half hours at an easy pace.

The route I propose for this ride follows the route of line 9 closely, from Islington Avenue near the Humber to Leslie Street in the East.



For reasons of safety I am changing the ride start point to Jane and Finch, specifically Jane at the recreational trail crossing, just north of York Gate Mall (about a block North of Finch on Jane). Also, the ride will stop at Dufferin until 4:30pm, to give anyone who wants to join us after the Ice Ride a chance to do so there and then. 

All things are lawful for the pure

In one of several comments on the death of Andrew Breitbart, Rod Dreher writes:

Breitbart was an exceptionally effective practitioner of a poisonous form of polemics that are as widespread on the left as on the right. Of course one of the defining characteristics of this dark art is the genuine conviction that when They do it, they’re evil, but when We do it, we are justified because We Are Good And They Are Evil, And Anyway, They Started It.

As an observer of internet controversy, I know too many examples of the double standard Dreher talks about here. I recently criticized the personal denunciation pages set up to attack the blogger Hugo Schwyzer, and got the same response:

The fact that detestable people can and do employ them does not make them into a priori “abuses” which are supposedly off limits for legitimate protest.

This would work as long as we could agree on the identity of the "detertable" and the "legitimate", but, of course, if we agree on that, we would not disagree on anything else.

From the personal to the global, these distinctions have infested political rhetoric for some time, as Rational Wiki notes:

U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s which drew a distinction between "authoritarian" dictatorships and "totalitarian" dictatorships, saying one was less bad than the other and the U.S. could morally work with "authoritarian" dictatorships as allies (such as the military dictatorships in Latin America) but had a moral obligation to oppose "totalitarian" dictatorships (such as the Soviet Union).

This naturally raises the question: why do people accept these distinctions? Where do they come from? I suspect that the conviction that "our" goodness justifies "our" worst acts, while "their" evil makes even "their" best acts suspect has two origins: the legal doctrine of intent, and the religious emotions connected to the idea of purity. Our legal traditions allow us to hold people responsible for the things they intend to do. This doctrine underlies the legal defence of insanity, on the grounds that someone in the grip of a delusion did not intend to commit a crime. It also gets used to excuse dubious behaviour: driving drunk, even when it results in a death, almost always draws a lighter sentence than other forms of homicide, on the assumption that drunks do not intend to kill.

Our habit of looking at the things people do in light of our assumptions about why they do them collides with another habit of mind many of us have, or at least carry traces of: the sense that rightness, in a factual or moral sense, carries a sense of purity, of heightened ethics, with it. When we embrace an idea with emotional excitement and believe ourselves in the right with the Creator, or with History, or Reason, or with any force we regard as transcendent, we can easily feel in ourselves an emotional satisfaction, a comfort, a complete sense of rightness. Combine that sense of rightness with the belief that the ethics of an act depend the motives for it, and you have ripe conditions for the emergence of the dangerous conviction that all things are lawful for the pure. In the context of a political or personal conflict, this creates the profoundly perverse implication: because the pure may achieve their results by impure means, the questionable morality of a "pure" person's actions can actually confirm them in their belief in their own personal purity. The logic goes that they could not do what they have done, or get away with it, without pure hearts. And, of course, the less ethical our behaviour, the more we want to find an excuse for it.

Ultimately, the argument that we did the right thing because we did it for what we consider a good end is a dud, and a harmful dud argument at that.