What's up at Counterpunch?

Counterpunch is having it's annual fund-raiser at the moment. One of their generous benefactors will match your contribution dollar for dollar for the duration.

Here's my question. If the "generous benefactor" moneybags can pay half the freight, he/she/they can probably underwrite the whole shebang.

So why don't they?

Counterpunch has been on my must read list for a long time. Recently, though, I'm finding that a lot of the folks I used to read there have migrated.

Avnery went to heaven. If he's still writing up there, I hope to read him eventually, God willing.

A few have moved to other sites. CJ Hopkins, for example, can now be found on Unz. I'd never even heard of Unz till I followed some of those Counterpunch writers there. I was, and remain, a little leery of the folks writing there who seem to think the white race is threatened, but free speech is free speech, I guess.

I also guess that Mr. Unz has deep enough pockets that he doesn't need generous benefactors, or fifteen dollars from me.

Meanwhile, there's still a guy whose travelogues appear at Counterpunch on a regular basis. He's a distant relative of Adlai Stevenson, whose clan came to America on the Mayflower, and one of his forebears actually held the back-up axe as George Washington was chopping down that cherry tree.

And get this; according to the Internet, this distant relative of Adlai then goes to work for Marc Rich! For like twenty years or something?!

Could this be the mysterious "generous benefactor?"

I love Israel

I love Israel even though the almost fifty years since the onset of the occupation has for all practical purposes rendered it a fascist state. As long as voices like that of Uri Avnery can be heard there is hope for redemption. Scant hope, perhaps, but hope nonetheless. After all, Germany was a fascist state at one time too.

The road to fascism has been paved by opportunistic politicians like the current PM. He's built a career out of doing the unthinkable and rendering it palatable. A few more (Palestinian) home demolitions here and a few more (Jewish) settlements there and the world can go fuck itself, because the Americans will always always have my back.

Any state of oppression can only persist over time with the complicity of the oppressed, of course, which is why Israel keeps Mahmoud Abbas in power and Marwan Barghouti in jail. God forbid that the kaffirs choose their own leaders... look what happened in Gaza!

Back in the hippy era a stop at a kibbutz for a few weeks or months was near mandatory. It was part of the hippy-dippy Kashmir trail. Today? Not so much.

Which is why stories like this matter more than ever.

As long as you can still find humour in the dead-end you're on, you might be able to find a way out.

Canada sliding eyes-wide-open towards fascism

Definitions of "fascism" could easily fill a library. The great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci alone spilt tanker-loads of ink on the project of defining fascism.

In the interest of defining our terms we'll jury-rig an abridged definition right here and now; Fascism is what you're left with when the military-industrial complex of a nation-state dominates the levers of policy-making. There you go; short and sweet.

There is no more a perfect example of a fascist state in today's world than the state of Israel. But wait, is that not the "only democracy in the Middle East?" Sure, but that's got nothing to do with anything. Hitler was democratically elected too.

In Israel, the "security" of the state trumps all other considerations. Never more so than with the new more-rightist-than-ever Likud coalition government.

The security of the state is paramount. Anyone who questions Likud policies is a traitor. All criticism of the government is anti-Semitism. All government policy is designed to further marginalize the Palestinians, thereby guaranteeing instability in perpetuity. Instability equals insecurity, therefore we need a massively over-funded military machine, which is massively profitable for the usual war-profiteers, who are then able to fund their war-mongering Knesset pets to create more insecurity and more military spending ad infinitum.

Under the Harper gang Canada has been jockeying to become the single most slavishly devoted cheer-leader of the fascist Likud regime. And with considerable success!

What occupation?

What illegal settlements?

What apartheid?

What war crimes in Gaza?

The Alliance Church crowd around Big Steve is wilfully blind to everything that is so obvious to most of the world, and was obvious even to previous Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative.

Instead, we get FM Baird's embarrassing Toady Tour of Israel.

Big Steve's speech to the half-empty Knesset.

Our prime minister accepting a "World Statesman of the Year" award from an extremist Israeli lobby.

And on it goes, and now it has come to this.

Canada intends to use its hate-crime laws and the odious police-state Bill C-51 to criminalize criticism of Likud policy, no matter how racist and genocidal.

If you criticize the policies of the fascist mob that holds the reins in the Knesset, you are guilty of hate speech.

You are an anti-Semite.

Nevermind that the most cogent critics of that fascist mob have always been Jews. Chomsky. Finkelstein. Uri Avnery. Canada's own Michael Neumann.

Within hours of the CBC story appearing, the Washington Post, hardly an anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli platform, had an opinion piece up slamming the Harperite position and labelling it "very troubling."

And while I don't like to toot my own horn, we had the same story right here months ago.

How does this rabid cheer-leading for the most overtly fascist state in the Western world impact the popularity of the Harper gang?

Harper is leading in the polls a mere five months before the next federal election.

Eyes wide open...

The "victim" trap

There's a great story on view at Counterpunch today by one of my favorite Israeli writers, Uri Avnery.

In The Moral Right of the Refugees to Return Avnery outlines his relationship with Palestinian hard-liner Salman Abu Sitta. Sitta is a "hard-liner" because he advocates for the unfettered right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their former homes in what is now the state of Israel.

As any sensible person who lives in the real world should know by now, that is what's known in diplomatic circles as a "non-starter."

As in, it ain't gonna happen.

Nevertheless, Abu Sitta sticks to the moral high ground and insists that this must happen.

Avery politely acknowledges that moral high ground, but takes a more pragmatic approach.

As in, it ain't gonna happen.

Ironically, Salman Abu Sitta is himself a very pragmatic person. After the Nakba he did not spend the next 65 years sitting around in a refugee camp nursing his very legitimate grievances.

He got out into the world and made something of himself. He is today a millionaire many times over on the strength of his international construction conglomerate.

That doesn't happen when you're sitting around in a refugee camp feeling sorry for yourself.

There is a lesson in that for every member of every group that has ever been abused, disenfranchised, marginalized, and otherwise shit upon by the winds of history.

That includes not just Jews and Palestinians, but Armenians, Kurds, Germans from the Prussian territories, Canadian Indians, natives the length and breadth of the Americas, Russians in Ukraine, Ukrainians in Russia, and many many others.

Which proves that you can buy into the victimhood of the refugee camp or the reservation...

Or you can do something else.