I Know Who Shot JFK

(The facts cited here come from the Warren Commission  Report, henceforth referred to as “WCR”, and the book History Will Not Absolve Us by E. Martin Schotz, henceforth referred to as “Schotz”)

I was in Dallas recently and used the opportunity to visit the Texas School Book Depository from whose sixth-floor window Lee Harvey Oswald reputedly shot President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. I learned something I hadn’t known before which has enabled me to pin down who actually did the shooting. What I learned was that the building’s two freight elevators were stuck at the fifth and sixth floors at the time of the shooting. That got me to speculating on how the assassin—whoever he might be—descended from the “sniper’s nest” on the sixth floor. 

First, let’s eliminate Oswald as a suspect. The fact that the best marksmen in the world have been unable to duplicate the feat Oswald supposedly accomplished—firing three shots on target in just over 5 seconds using a second-rate rifle with a misaligned telescopic sight (Schotz, p. 110)—proves if Oswald was the shooter, he wasn ‘t the only one (The lone gunman theory can be resurrected if it is assumed a more sophisticated rifle than Oswald’s, an automatic, was used, as the 3-shots-in-5+-seconds feat then becomes more plausible). That Oswald was not even one of the assassins is attested to by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry who, belatedly, came to believe in Oswald’s innocence because the test administered on Oswald’s right cheek showed no presence of gunpowder residue, i.e., Oswald had not fired his Italian carbine, or any rifle, that day (Schotz, p. 232).

Further proof, for me, that Oswald could not have been the shooter is based on what I had learned about the Depository’s elevators. Their being on the fifth and sixth floor at the time of the shooting set me to wondering how Oswald had made it to the second floor in time to be seen by Dallas patrolman Marion Baker less than a minute and a half after his final shot? According to the Commission, that first shooting occurred at 12:30 PM (WCR, pp. 48-49). Baker, accompanied by the building’s superintendent, Roy Truly, was racing up the stairs (since the elevators weren’t available) when he saw Oswald walking toward the lunchroom (The commission estimates this was a minute and 20 seconds after the shots were fired, WCR, p. 152). When Truly identified Oswald as a Depository employee, the two continued the climb to the roof, from where Baker thought the shots had been fired (WCR, p. 151-152). Oswald proceeded to the lunchroom, where, apparently in no hurry, he bought a Coke at a vending machine, and proceeded to exit by the building’s front door.     

Oswald’s Olympian sprint down the stairs (so quiet no one either heard or saw him) was tested by the Commission, which found the time required to go from the sniper’s nest in the southeast corner of the building, down an aisle along the east wall, place a rifle near where Oswald’s rifle was found, walk along the north wall to the stairwell in the northwest corner of the building, go down four flights of stairs, and walk into the second-floor lunchroom was 1 minute and 18 seconds at a normal pace (Baker, in his affidavit, stated Oswald was not out of breath when accosted, WCR, Vol. 4, p. 248). The horizontal distance traversed was about 125 feet along the walls, plus the distance to where the rifle was hidden, the 20 or so feet of the four landings, and the 25 or so feet from the stairwell to the lunchroom, for a total of around 180 feet. The vertical distance was four flights of stairs, each floor having a height over 10 feet.

I challenge the Commission’s timing. Try it yourself and see what you come up with. Note that the Commission’s run included placing a rifle near where Oswald’s was found, not where it was found. This photo of Oswald’s rifle in situ suggests it was more than a momentary pause to place the rifle amongst all those boxes.

Moreover, it’s not clear if the test included being impeded by boxes, as this photo suggests probably was the case:

If the time cited by the Commission is a gross underestimate, particularly for someone who was 5’9” and maybe not in the best shape, Oswald cannot be the shooter. Oswald was just the “patsy”, as he claimed in his one public statement. A retesting of the time it takes to get from the sniper’s nest to the lunchroom is called for.

If Oswald wasn’t the shooter, who was? To frame Oswald as the presicide, there would have had to be a handler. I think this person would necessarily have to be an employee of the Depository, and perhaps live in the same boarding house in South Dallas as Oswald, in order to perform the tasks required of him:

• Obtain the three shell casings found in the “sniper’s nest” (Perhaps by expressing an interest in purchasing Oswald’s rifle and borrowing it to test it);
• Arrange for Oswald to bring the rifle to the Depository on that fateful day by setting that date for the handler to purchase the rifle;
• See that Oswald was in the depository (not outside watching the parade) at the time of the shooting but not in the presence of anyone who knew him (and could be his alibi);
• Get himself up to the sniper’s nest without being seen, having planted Oswald’s rifle and his own more sophisticated gun on the sixth floor beforehand (the only evidence tying Oswald’s rifle to the shots on the motorcade are two bullet fragments, found in the Presidential car after it had been returned to Washington (WCR, p. 76), so damaged the Commission admitted they couldn’t be sure whether they were fragments from two bullets or parts of a single bullet (WCR, p. 85));
• See that the elevator was on the sixth floor with its safety gate down to prevent anyone from coming up to the 6^th floor while the assassination was in progress, as the elevator was inoperable when the safety gate was down (WCR, p. 143);
• Get himself down from the 6^th floor without being seen after disassembling his gun and hiding it in one of the many boxes, which he had plenty of time to accomplish as the sniper’s nest was not found till half an hour after the shooting (WCR, p. 79).

So who was this handler/shooter? He would be the person among the Depository’s employees who

• Was hired only a couple of months before the assassination (Oswald started working at the Depository a month before^.);
• Was not in the presence of any people who knew him (e.g., other employees) at the time of the shooting;
• Used an assumed name;
• Had a connection with anti-Castro Cubans.

Find the employee who fits that description and you have your assassin.      

Why is it important to learn the full story behind Kennedy’s assassination? By failing to provide air support for the anti-Castro Cubans who tried to invaded their homeland in 1961, by negotiating a reciprocal agreement with the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Criss under which the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba and we removed ours from Turkey instead of just issuing an ultimatum to the Soviets, for daring to enlighten Americans to the fact the Soviet Union had experienced a loss in the Second World War “equivalent to the devastation of this country, east of Chicago” (Schotz, p. 44),  for committing his administration “to build a world at peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just” (Schotz, p. 49) Kennedy had incurred the animosity of the deeply entrenched, bellicose, “If you want peace, prepare for war” faction of our power elite—the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned us about. Whoever was behind it, Kennedy’s assassination was a victory for these hegemony-pursuing world-beaters, restoring them to dominance in the determination of our foreign policy, a dominance they enjoy to this day.

What a different world it might have been had Kennedy lived! Our relations with Cuba might have been normalized decades ago, our incipient intervention in Vietnam might not have led to all-out  war, and a 40-year Cold War which saw resources wasted on both sides building an arsenal of 30,000 nuclear bombs might have been avoided. We might now live in a world at peace instead of the perilous world of today, which threatens our very existence. By discrediting the hawks of his day and, by extension, their successors in our own time, the truth of the tragedy that occurred on November 22, 1963 might save us from World War Final.            

How to Read a Holocaust Memoir

The Washington Post’s not quite du jour but reliably de la semaine Holocaust-related article for this week is a book review of a little-known, recently republished memoir by a Hungarian Jew who spent the last year of World War II in Auschwitz. The book is Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni; the reviewer is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at Harvard (where else?) with the intriguing name “Susan Rubin Suleiman”.

Ms. Suleiman begins her piece by lauding others who penned autobiographical memoirs of their time in German camps, including the Patron Saint of Holocaust Horrors, Elie Weisel (appropriately pronounced “weasel”). I wonder if she is aware that Weisel, in his seminal contribution to Holocaust hysteriography, Night, makes no mention of gas chambers at Auschwitz (Nor does Debreczenci apparently, as Suleiman does not mention it and she surely would). She goes on to laud Claude Lanzman for his nine-hour, unintentionally comedic documentary, Shoah (another name for the Holocaust), which features Abraham Bomba, “The Barber of Treblinka”, who recounts how he and other hairstylists gave the condemned a last haircut in the gas chamber (!) without mentioning to them (even close relatives) that they were about to become a statistic. On a tight schedule there being so many customers in line, the whole process of cutting the hair, barbers withdrawing, victims gassed, bodies removed, barbers returning, next batch let in was repeated every 15 minutes, according to Bomba. You might think I’m grasping at straws, literally, offering up an outlandish straw man who is obviously either delusional or a liar, but Bomba is featured on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Our dual-Abrahamic reviewer encourages us to read Debreczeni’s reminiscences despite the plethora of similar tomes already out there, as it still has “the power to shock as well as enlighten”. True enough, if read properly, but in this case what is most enlightening is Suzy Jewzy Muezzly’s review. She relates that Debreczeni spent the last six months of the war in a hospital camp “where sick and dying prisoners were sent”. A hospital for those who were to be exterminated? Not exactly the classic Holocaust narrative. She attributes Debreczeni’s survival to the fact the Nazi’s had earlier dismantled the gas chambers “to hide evidence of their crime”.  Who needs gas chambers to exterminate? A bullet to the head would suffice and be quicker and cheaper.  Speaking of hiding the evidence, Suleiman unsurprisingly hides the evidence the Nazis worried about future prosecution as there is no such evidence. In fact, one purported gas chamber (with wall-to-wall windows!) was still intact when the camp it was in was liberated (as was the gas chamber at Dachau, if you believe that post-liberation construction shown to gullible tourists was actually built by the Nazis).

Suleiman can’t resist tossing in her own horrified aside: “The Nazis dehumanized inmates in their camps by assigning them numbers, obliterating their names.” Oh, the inhumanity! Is our ex-scholar so senile in her twilight years (she’s 84) that she’s unaware of the practice of assigning a number to inmates in our prisons, which becomes their primary form of identification? At least she’s not delusional, just out of touch with the real world.

Despite Suleiman’s horrified asides, the value of Debreczenci’s work peeks through. She pays a probably unintended compliment to his honesty when she admits that, according to him, inmates “died there in great numbers from starvation and illness.”  What with Germany’s young men being slaughtered in their millions, its cities reduced to rubble, and its transportation infrastructure bombed to smithereens, nothing surprising there. This is the true story of the Holocaust, not women and children being sent off to be gassed upon arrival at a camp (a la Sophie’s Choice).

Debreczenci also offers enlightenment when he describes the “brutishly cruel” treatment some Jews, those chosen by the Nazis to be “kapos” responsible for keeping the inmates in line, handed out to their fellow inmates. “The best slave driver,” Debreczenci opines, “is a slave accorded a privileged position.” Not all the dead are to be mourned nor all survivors to be honored. For his perceptive insights into human behavior under the worst circumstances, I am tempted to read Cold Crematorium for myself.  

——————————–

* For those of you who are not familiar with the so-called Holocaust deniers’ argument (which is probably most all of you since they’re banned from speaking in public fora), I’ll introduce you to it. But first let me make my own confession of faith: I believe that during the Second World War masses of Jews were uprooted from their homes and confined in camps where they died in droves. If you think that absolves me of the charge of being a Holocaust denier, you’d be wrong.

There are three key points on which Holocaust believers and skeptics differ: (1) How many Jews died; (2) Was the Final Solution an extermination or deportation plan; and (3) Were there genocidal gas chambers. On the first point, I do not take a position. We all know about the canonical 6 million, but I’ve seen estimates ranging as high as 12 million and as low as several hundred thousand. Whatever the true count, I do think historians should be free to come up with their best estimate without fear of being imprisoned if they come up with too low a number (as happens in Europe). On the second point, I go with the deportation option. The Nazis talked openly about a Final Solution, but always meaning the forced deportation of Jews to make Europe Judenrein. There’s no evidence that that plan ever morphed into an extermination plan. And finally, I adamantly maintain there were no genocidaI gas chambers, but you’d have to read my other postings on the subject (8, 38, 43, 89) to begin to understand why I make that claim.       

Taking Off in the Tailwind of the Enola Gay

For over a hundred years, ever since the United States gained a quasi-empire (Philippines, Guam, et al.) when it defeated Spain in 1898, the dominant naval power in the western Pacific has been the United States. Is the US willing to relinquish that title as things change in that part of the world? A disturbing announcement by the Pentagon, that it is going to restore the airfield on Tinian Island—the field from which the Enola Gay took off on its way to drop the bomb on Hiroshima—suggests we are not. You can bet the Chinese see it that way.   

Our strategic move is motivated by the challenge from the ever expanding, ever more potent Chinese navy, particularly in light of China’s claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea. To judge whether those disputes will be resolved peacefully or not, it is enlightening to review the history of how the US gained possession of some strategic islands in the Pacific. To do so, we have to go back to 1856 when Congress passed the Guano Islands Act.  The act authorized any American captain who stumbled on an uninhabited, unclaimed island covered in guano (bird-droppings) to claim it in the name of the United States (There were still islands being discovered that late). Once an island had been denuded of its deposit of avian-poop fertilizer, we lost interest in it and nobody else showed much interest in claiming it, either.

Then came the Air Age and waystations for planes to refuel on the long flight across the vast Pacific became vital. The competition over any insular terra firma big enough to support a landing strip was on. The older imperial powers–Britain, France, and the imperial upstart Japan—already possessed most of the major islands (The Solomons, Tahiti, Okinawa, etc.) and we had Hawaii, but smaller islands to which no one had clear title were up for grabs. The Europeans competed with us over some of the islands, but the competitor we most feared was a rising Japan (and we all know what that competition led to!).

The tactics used in gaining possession of an island back then mirrors what is taking place in the South China Sea today. For instance, in 1935 we landed some Hawaiian Islanders (in the dead of night and telling no one) on three uninhabited, on three mid-Pacific islands to which both we and the British laid tenuous claim. After a year of surreptitious colonizing, President Roosevelt revealed the sneaky scheme and proclaimed the islands American territory.

A corollary to the military aspect of island acquisition is the economic aspect. A country can claim an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) out to 200 miles off its coast, but the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) makes a distinction between “islands”, which can support human habitation, and “rocks”, which cannot. An EEZ can only be claimed around an island, not a rock.

This distinction has not stopped Japan from claiming an EEZ around Okinotorishima, a rocky outcrop hundreds of miles from its shores.

 China, South Korea, and Taiwan contest Japan’s claim; and, if oil is ever discovered there, you can bet we will, too. It might even move us to sign on to UNCLOS, something we have so far refused to do (while we justify our meddling in disputes in the South China Sea as in support of international law!).    

The distinction between a rock and an island probably explains our refusal to ratify UNCLIOS. Were we to do so, we could be taken to court for claiming EEZs around what are clearly rocks, including many of the guano islands we found useful in World War II but have since abandoned (causing them to revert to their original state: uninhabited). There’s even a reef in the Hawaiian Islands chain we claim an EEZ around which is entirely under water at low tide! Joining UNCLOS would also open us up to the sort of disputes roiling the waters of the South China Sea, as several of our islands are claimed by other countries, including another island of WW II fame, Wake Island (claimed by the Marshall Islands).

Our restoration of Tinian Island’s runway is a worrisome sign of our unwillingness to recognize and accept that the world is a changing place and that, unlike the case of Israel, no divine being has ordained our possession in perpetuity of some part of the earth’s surface, in our case a salty, wet part. The peace-loving people in both China and the USA have no wish to go to war against each other. Yet, our talking heads, both military and civilian, glibly talk about a coming war as if it is inevitable. To put it nicely, this tiny fraction of our population, who have the fate of us all in their hands, have things blown way out of proportion. Can’t they foresee what their loose talk could lead to? Are they unable to picture what such a war would be like? It’s not like the old days where two armies battled in some field and not even nearby villages were harmed. In today’s world, the death and destruction from a war with China—or any nuclear power—would be of such awful magnitude it would be hard to tell the victor from the vanquished.

War with China is not inevitable if the US is willing to relinquish its historic role as the dominant naval power in the western Pacific. Then, level-headed, intelligent men of goodwill could arrive at a compromise, as the European powers did at the Berlin Conference of 1884-45 when they divvied up Africa into “spheres of influence” (perhaps not the most high-minded example, but an example nonetheless). For instance, it might be agreed that China or a consortium of the countries whose shores are lapped by the waters of the Pacific would assume responsibility in the western Pacific for guaranteeing that all countries abide by the Convention on the Law of the Sea, while the United States assumed the same role in the eastern Pacific.

If, on the other hand, our hawkish foreign policy mavens, with their constant prattle about China gaining on the US militarily, prove unbending, implying the cardinal tenet of their strategic thinking is “You have to do it to them before they do it to you”, it will have disastrous consequences. If we do not challenge their fatalism (a double entendre), the last plane ever to depart from Tinian Island, or any island, will carry a payload that makes the one in the bomb bay of the Enola Gay look like a firecracker.

(For further discussion on this topic, see my articles “Why the US Will Not Sign the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea” and “South China Sea Ironies”.)

——————— 

Antisemitism: Fact vs Opinion

The president of the University of Pennsylvania was pilloried last week for her response (“depends on the context”*) to a “gotcha” question posed by a grandstanding congresswoman (“Would calls on campus for the genocide of Jews violate the school’s conduct policy?”**). Had I been asked that question, I would have responded a bit differently. I would have pointed out that one of the most important lessons a student can learn at college is how to distinguish fact from opinion and to teach the distinction requires airing opinions which are iconoclastic, disconcerting, even inciting. If some of the country’s brightest young people cannot master this basic but vital skill, woe unto the nation.***

Let’s see how we do in this regard by positing a hypothetical statement and judging whether it is true based on the evidence supporting it:

Statement: Judaism is a tribal, supremacist ideology which discriminates against Gentiles (the rest of us) in a harmful and dangerous manner.

Evidence: (1) Jews believe the “Twelve Tribes of Israel” are God’s Chosen People, in essence coining the term “chauvinism” long before its eponymous namesake, the rabidly patriotic Frenchman Nicholas Chauvin, lived; (2) Jews celebrate vengeful, genocidal attacks by their god on Gentiles (see my posting “I Generally Don’t Critique Religious Beliefs, But…”); (3) According to Hebraic dogma, the Ten Commandments apply only to Jews, i.e., “Thou shalt not kill” prohibits Jews from killing Jews, but not from killing Gentiles; (4) Jews may not enslave Jews, but the enslavement of Gentiles is alright; (5) Jews cannot engage in usury (the charging of interest) on loans to Jews, but can if the borrower is a Gentile, (6) Jewish slang for a Gentile woman, “shiksa” (derived from the Yiddish word for “impure”), is  “inherently condescending, racist and misogynistic”, according to a rabbi; (7) Jews’ contempt for Gentiles inspires antisemitism.

(I’m sure someone better versed in Judaism than I could come up with many more examples of how the Jews’ obligations to each other differ from their obligations to Gentiles.)

So, does my evidence prove my statement factual? Hardly. Even though each of my points (except the last) is a fact, the statement itself is an opinion. Its validity hinges on your definition of “tribal”, “supremacist”, “discriminate”, “dangerous”—even the word “Judaism”, there being much diversity of opinion on dogma within the religion (Hebraic scholars, for instance, have hotly debated whether throwing out the dishwater constitutes work and therefore cannot be performed on the Sabbath).    

Is my statement on Judaism antisemitic? To answer that question, let’s consider another statement: “At one time, all eight major Hollywood studios were headed by Jews” (a fact). Citing that fact would be considered antisemitic by some because they assume the speaker means to imply Jews control Hollywood and that’s a bad thing (an opinion). On the other hand, the speaker could mean to praise Jews for making Hollywood the movie capital of the world (another opinion).

Should certain unpleasant, disconcerting, provocative facts not be mentioned? Elon Musk, the “free speech absolutist”, thinks facts should not be selectively censored (so why is my X account suspended, Elon?).**** If we are not going to look at the facts—all the facts—on what are we to base our opinions and ultimately our actions? Ignorance? Treating some facts as taboo is as damaging to our understanding as “fake” facts.       

Facts are not dangerous in and of themselves; it’s how we interpret the facts that can be problematic.***** Commitment to the principle of free speech requires us to allow all interpretations to be aired. We can counter, mock, castigate, ostracize those whose views we find hateful, but we must not gag. Recognizing that interpreting human social dynamics is complex and accepting the possibility our own interpretations might be wrong, we should constantly test our opinions against the facts, as many as we can gather. “There is no evil in the world,” I profess (to shocked disbelief in light of so much apparent evil), “only ignorance.”   

——————- 

*  What the Penn president had in mind when she talked about context was probably Supreme Court Justice Olver Wendell Holmes‘ line that free speech does not legitimize shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.  Those who love to cite that dictum to justify curtailing someone’s rights, should note that such is the case only if the shout, or a similar exercise in free speech, constitutes a “clear and present danger”, i.e., the context. (If inciting violence were a prosecutable offense, most of our commentators on foreign policy—from the president on down to inflammatory TV reporters—would face jail time. Should they be held accountable for inciting that man in Vermont to shoot three Palestinian college students? (Remember the 30 decapitated Israeli babies, the scurrilous charges of rape, the “brutal”, “savage”, “horrific” attack by Hamas which saw unarmed young men lead captives back to Gaza while Israel responded with tank fire that killed hostages and hostage-takers alike, etc.)

** As you hear of similar calls posted on social media and college walls, keep in mind that sometimes false-flag, antisemitic acts are committed by the Jews themselves, as was the case with bomb threats telephoned to over a hundred Jewish institutions in 2017 which were traced to an Israeli.

*** For those of you into identity politics, it’s interesting that all three of the university presidents grilled by Congress were women (and one a Jew). Also, interesting is which schools’ presidents were selected to testify. If it had been the presidents of all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, of the nine, seven would have been women (and six, Jews).

**** Believing that the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a genocidal call for killing all Jews (as Musk reportedly does), not for the creation of a non-Zionist state in all of Palestine, i.e., the One State solution, is racist in the extreme, implying as it does that Arabs are “savages”, “subhuman”, “animals”, as racist Israelis are wont to call them (and our racist ancestors called Amerindians).

***** One of the interpretations I encounter frequently as a longtime proponent of the Palestinian cause is the claim that our unbridled support for Israel results from Zionist control of our foreign policy. Given that it’s unclear who determines our foreign policy and open to debate what policy is in the best interest of the country, those who hold this view may be right, but they should keep in mind that implying Zionists who are American citizens—Jew or Gentile—put their loyalty to Israel above that to the United States is tantamount to accusing them of treason. Such a charge should not be made lightly and is not justified merely by the fact Jews occupy a disproportionate number of positions in the upper echelons of our foreign policy bureaucracy.

Israel has The Bomb… or does it?

The Israeli nuclear weapons program is in the news, as one of the country’s military bases related to its nuclear arsenal was hit by rockets during Hamas’s attack on October 7th. This provides me the opportunity to expound on one of my pet theories, a theory which I have never heard any well-informed, or ill-informed, expert agree with me on; namely, that Israel does not have The Bomb. Israel itself has adopted a policy of “nuclear ambiguity”—neither admitting or denying that it has nuclear weapons.

The universally accepted (minus one) story—that Israel built its own atom bombs in the 1960s, rests on the following evidence:

• French collaboration in Israel’s nuclear program in the 1950s, including the construction of a research reactor at Dimona in southern Israel and their providing Israel with “heavy water”, a precursor to creating the plutonium necessary to make a bomb (a process way beyond my pay grade to understand);
• A passel of reputed secret transactions regarding the supplying of bombmaking-related  materials by various countries, including Great Britain, Norway, and Argentina, transactions which were exposed only long after it was widely accepted that Israel had built themselves a bomb;
• An engimatic flash of light in the Indian Ocean in 1979, which supposedly resulted from Israel, in collaboration with apartheid South Africa, conducting a test explosion of a nuclear weapon (the nature of the flash is debated to this day);
• Testimony, including photographic evidence, provided by an Israeli who worked at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu, that Israel was engaged in producing nuclear weapons (this in 1986, 20 years after Israel had supposedly built its first bomb!)

Against this evidence, I offer the following:

• The United States, which supposedly takes seriously its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has had the right to inspect the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona since 1963; it is claimed the Israelis built an innocuous, stage-set lab while concealing the real, weapons-making facility, fooling the American inspectors (if we are that inept, we shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons ourselves!)
• Vanunu was known to have expressed sympathy for the Palestinians before he was hired to work at Israel’s most secret military site, an amazing oversight by those who most consider supermen when it comes to national security; moreover, when Vanunu presented his photographic evidence to the London Sunday Times (owned by News Corp, the media giant which has given the world such exemplars of journalistic excellence as Fox News), the Times nuclear weapons expert scoffed that they might be photos of a sophisticated chicken coop;
• Israel is the only nuclear power which has never tested its weapons so far as is known, that flash in the Indian Ocean, even if nuclear, hardly representing a test program (other nuclear powers are constantly testing their weapons in one way or another)

In a sense, the debate over whether Israel has nuclear weapons can be considered moot (i.e., don’t get yourself all in a dander over it); in that, whatever the truth is, it has little impact on the possibility of nuclear weapons being used by Israel. If Israel has the bomb, it would not dare use it without US approval; and, if the United States wants someone in the Middle East nuked and Israel does not have the bomb, we would just give them one (or two) to do the job.

Note that the military base subject to the Hamas rocket attack is not claimed to house nuclear weapons, just the hardware necessary to deliver such weapons on a target.  Reportedly, Israel has nuclear-capable missiles which can be dropped from a bomber or fired from land or sea (on this I agree with the experts). Why would they have such missiles (apparently, any old missile won’t do) if they don’t have the bomb? Because, as I postulate above, if the US commissions Israel to bomb some enemy, Israel would have to be the one to drop it so the US could have plausible denial that it was us behind the attack, so as not to bring nuclear retaliation down upon us, as well as world opprobrium for being the one to initiate nuclear warfare a second time (Israel is not overly concerned about world opprobrium—equating it to age-old antisemitism—as their merciless bombing of Gaza demonstrates).      

Israel has never signed on to the NPT. With the whole world (again, minus one) believing Israel has the bomb, our failing to force our totally-dependent-on-us ally to get rid of their nuclear weapons brings into question our seriousness about containing nuclear proliferation (as well as expose our hypocrisy in tolerating Israel having the bomb while sanctioning Iran on the supposition they are striving to acquire nuclear weaponry).

We can hope (and pray, for those of you so inclined) that the current turmoil in the Middle East will not lead to the use of nuclear weapons by any party. If it does, the question whether Israel has The Bomb or not will have become not only moot but mute, as there would probably not be many of us left around to debate the question.

————————–  

My friend, Bill Blum, author of Killing Hope and other must-read books on American foreign policy, once forwarded my argument about Israel and the bomb to Seymour Hersh, author of the most popular book on Israel’s nuclear program, The Samson Option. Hersh responded to Bill, “Your friend’s an idiot.”

Food Aid Gone Rancid

Did you know October 16^th is World Food Day? No? Neither did I until I did some research for this posting. The day was celebrated by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with messages from the likes of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Pope Francis, and Cindy McCain (the senator’s wife), who is Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP). The event was supported by a plethora of organizations:

… and many more.

With so many sponsors to thank, if words were digestible, I suspect the speakers would have made a good start on feeding the hungry!

The day evoked a number of news articles, as well as events at the ever loquacious think tanks here in Washington, DC. I attended one of them, a panel discussion at the NATO-affiliated Atlantic Council entitled “Combating food insecurity and malnutrition: A national security imperative”. Panelists included Farrah Barrios, of the National Security Council, General William E. “Kip” Ward, former Commander of United States Africa Command, and Johanna Mendelson Forman, Fellow at the Stimson Center, with Senator Cory Booker participating remotely. After a synopsis of the depressing state of affairs by the moderator—”more than 345 million people experiencing food insecurity with nearly 800 million facing chronic hunger”—the panelists engaged in a group hand-wring, echoing each other in their plea to the audience to do something about the global tragedy (other than talk, the speakers’ prerogative?). The call to action was laced with so many platitudes, the solutions they proposed so vacuous, their insincerity so transparent, it smelled of food gone rancid.

There was no Q & A session, so I approached the panelists individually afterwards. First, I asked General Ward what proportion of our military families are on food stamps. He didn’t know (It’s 1 in 5). I asked if the food stamp program hadn’t been cut recently, he said it had, in a tone suggesting he thought that was a good idea. I mentioned the recent study which found 1 in every 2 families in Prince Georges County (a suburb of DC) faced food insecurity, thinking that would be particularly poignant for the general, as he, like the majority of Prince Georgians, is black. He remained unmoved. I asked how we could engage in—much less lead—a campaign to end world hunger when we can’t even feed our own population. The general mumbled a peptalk about our “need to work harder” as if he was spurring the troops into battle, and on that inspiring display of generalship our conversation ended.

Next, I asked Ms. Forman, whether it wouldn’t help if we diverted some of our corn crop from feeding our cars to feeding people (40% of our crop goes to making ethanol to add to our gasoline). She begged the question by arguing that we should buy more cheap ethanol from Brazil, as if Brazil dedicating more of its sugar cane to making ethanol would enable us to export more of our corn, a trade-off unlikely to increase the amount of food available to the starving. In addition, I speculated the likely result of our buying more ethanol from Brazil would simply be our increasing the percentage of  ethanol in our gas (to wit, Biden—following Trump’s example—lifted the ban on gas containing 15% ethanol, instead of the usual 10%, being sold during the summer). Despite all the handwringing over the plight of the hungry, none of the panelists had called on us to make more of our corn crop available to the world (or even to our gaunt fellow countrymen!). As Russia had been lambasted repeatedly for restricting grain exports from Ukraine, I pointed out that we could easily replace the lost grain supply by increasing our own exports (Exports of grain from Ukraine are down by 4 million tons so far this year, while we exported 30 million tons of corn—less than 10% of our crop—last year). She excused herself to network.

I asked Ms. Barrios whether she was familiar with Public Law 480. She was, to her credit since it was passed before she was born, but not surprising since she was the international food aid expert on the panel. PL 480, passed in 1954, established a program whereby we sold our surplus grain to needy countries at a discount and lent them the money to pay for it. The law was no act of altruism; its stated purpose was “To increase the consumption of United States agricultural commodities in foreign countries, to improve the foreign relations of the United States”. Later given the high-sounding but misleading title “Food for Peace” (most Americans thought we gave away the food), any good intentions the man who came up with the new name, Senator George McGovern, may have had were perverted by the way the program was misused as a tool for the promotion of our foreign policy, i.e., using food as a political tool (just what the Russians were charged with doing!). An illustrative incidence occurred when President Johnson conditioned the aid to India under the program on their toning down criticism of our engagement in Vietnam. Ms. Barrios dismissed my suggestion the program was still being so used, citing the 40 countries receiving food aid from us currently, but the very title of the event made clear our “national security imperative” (“starved populaces a breeding ground for terrorists”, yada-yada-yada) trumps charity when it comes to feeding the world’s hungry.*

The only concrete proposal to come out of the gabbling gaggle was offered by Senator Booker, who called for billions of dollars in emergency food aid, including financial support for the UN’s World Food Program. Booker may be sincere in his passionate plea, but sad experience argues that much of the aid will never reach the people intended. What food does reach the intended destination is likely to be re-exported for sale by the recipient country to support their budget (or line the pockets of middlemen). Much of the cash will end up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt individuals amongst both donors and recipients, not be used to buy food.

There are more direct ways that we Americans could do our part to end world hunger. For one, instead of lending countries money to buy our surplus produce, we could just give it away. For another, ending the practice of adding ethanol to our gasoline would free up massive amounts of grain to be added to the global supply. That neither of these simple fixes were proposed by any of the panelists shows how insincere all the handwringing was. If you asked Americans whether they are willing to sacrifice some of their wellbeing to relieve hunger around the world, I think most would answer “Sure”, but collectively we act niggardly. Imagine the catcalls that would greet a proposal in Congress to enact either of the ameliorations I have suggested. The very title of the event I attended made clear that we would only engage in “Combating food insecurity” if doing so conformed to our “national security imperative”.**

As Senator Booker pointed out, “Enough food is produced each year to feed everyone on the planet. There’s no reason that a child or a family should go hungry.” With so many well-funded organizations and well-fed individuals striving to end world hunger, why has the goal not been achieved? Could it be that the tens of millions who will go to bed hungry tonight attest to the insincerity—if not outright dishonesty—of those pleading with us–heart-in-hand, hand-on-wallet—to end world hunger.

—————————–

* A classic case of food aid gone rancid is Chef Andres’ World Central Kitchen setting up soup kitchens in Ukraine. That he picked a place where the United States is deeply involved, he only feeds people on our side, and he receives gushing coverage for his altruistic work makes clear that—whatever Andres’ intent—it’s all a publicity stunt in support of American foreign policy objectives. (Andres should stick to disaster relief or feeding the equally hungry, albeit less photogenic, unfortunates right here in this country).

** Much of the world, it seems, has become disillusioned by the duplicitous, self-serving, self-aggrandizing policies of the powers who have dominated the world for the last hundred years and are looking for an alternative. Many think they’ve found it in a group called the BRICS: Brazil. Russia, India, China, South Africa. Evolving from informal discussions about the policies of the world’s dominant development and financial institutions into a cohesive organization with a bold plan to overhaul, if not replace, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), et al. At the groups recent annual summit, membership in the group was extended to six countries: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (three of them supposed allies of the United States!), with another 40 countries seeking to join the group. If the group continues to expand and succeeds in replacing the ancien régime (think NATO), it will be interesting to see if they do a better job of ending world hunger.

The Bloody Past and Sanguine Future of ISRASTINE

Israel has never defined what it considers its borders to be. When the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state was sparked by the publication of the book Der Judenstaat by a  nonpracticing Jewish journalist, Thoedore Herzl, in 1896,* there was much talk about Eretz Yisrael (the Hebrew term for the land promised the Jews by God) stretching “from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18-21); but this expansive gift, including as it does the Sinai Peninsula, Palestine, and much of present-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, was more as a rallying aspiration than a geographic delineation. In fact, Herzl himself was open to the Jewish State being located in Argentina!

Presciently, Herzel advised against “a gradual infiltration of Jews” as such would be “bound to end badly”, as there would come “the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened and forces the government to stop a further influx of Jews.” He foresaw, “Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.” Imbued with the imperialistic bravado of the time, Herzl proposed the Zionists could gain their assumptive right by putting themselves “under the protectorate of the European Powers.”

The Zionists got their “sovereign right” when the British announced they were terminating their League of Nations-authorized mandate over Palestine (a province of the Ottoman Empire until its defeat in World War I). The newly-founded United Nations, where veto power was invested in two aging imperialists, two aspiring contenders, and a rump party which claimed to be the government of China, debated throughout 1947 what should be done with the soon-to-be liberated land of Palestine. At that time, the Jewish population of Palestine had grown to 600,000, while the Arab population (including a sprinkling of Armenians, Circassians, Europeans, and others) numbered 1.2 million. The Arabs proposed that a secular, democratic, binational state be created in all of Palestine; the Zionists demanded a state of their own. In the end, the UN opted for the two-state solution, partitioning Palestine more or less equally (acreage-wise) between the Arabs and the Jews.

Even before the mandate had ended the fighting began, with the Zionists—better armed, better led, and better motivated—getting the upper hand. Atrocities abounded, one of the more horrific being when a Zionist terrorist group, Irgun, killed some 200 men, women, and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, stuffing their bodies down the village well.** In May 1948, the British departed, Israel declared its independence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict was on, thanks to the nationalistic priorities that motivated those who led the august body just created “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” (UN Charter). In the end, the new state of Israel held three-quarters of Palestine and 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, fleeing to un-Zionized parts of Palestine or neighboring Arab countries. There wasn’t enough land left to create a viable Arab state, so the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip was put under Egyptian administration.

The violence subsided for a while, but in 1956, ostensibly because of armed incursions by refugees in Gaza attempting to regain their homes, Israel attacked Egypt and marched all the way to the Suez Canal. At that point, Britain and France intervened, ostensibly to separate the combatants, but really to secure their ownership of the canal, which Egypt had announced they would nationalize. The United States, desirous to replace the area’s longstanding but spent imperialists as the dominant power in the Middle East, took the opportunity to flex its muscles and forced the attackers to withdraw. The Israel-British-French collaboration proved the acuteness of a suggestion by a British governor of mandate Palestine that it might prove useful to have “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.

The next dramatic moment in the saga came in 1967 when Israel again invaded Egypt (preemptively, Israel claimed) and in six days gained control of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, all of Arab Palestine, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel’s victory in the Six Day War introduced a new persona dramatica to the stage—the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, colloquially known as “Fatah”. Founded a few years before the war, when the Israelis marched on Fatah’s headquarters in the Karameh refugee camp in 1968 and were turned back, the victory (in the Arabs’ eyes) secured Fatah’s role as the leading faction in the armed struggle to retake Palestine. While the actions of Fatah and other Palestinian resistance groups were no more than pinpricks in Fortress Israel, they at least made the world aware that a people called “Palestinians” existed, as did the infamously famous killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.***       

Tit-for-tat battles between Palestinians and Israelis continued over the years, leading Israel to invade Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982 to put an end to Palestinian resistance once and for all. Israel’s advance to the Litani River, Lebanon’s main source of water, shocked the Lebanese into the realization that they, too, could be turned into refugees. Just as with the post-Six Day War rise of Fatah, the invasion of Lebanon gave birth to a new actor: Hezbollah (The Party of God). Attacks by Hezbollah over the years led the Israelis to invade Lebanon once again in 2006; but just as Fatah’s victory in the 1968 battle of Karameh, enhanced its reputation, Hezbollah’s successful resistance to Israel’s umpteenth invasion was seen as a victory, greatly enhancing the group’s reputation in Lebanon and beyond. 

While all this was going on, Israeli plopped Jewish settlements on any land it could acquire, by hook or by crook—from the earliest kibbutzim built on land purchased from Arab owners to rabidly Zionist settlements on land usurped by force. The ubiquitous settlements, along with the Israelis-only highways linking them, have made it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state on the scraps of land that remain. Any such state would be but a ghetto, a la Gaza, on a larger scale.

A Jewish state was originally conceived as a refuge for endangered Jews, but it has hardly turned out that way. The in-gathering of the Jews has not occurred, with more Jews choosing to live in their real Promised Land (despite its reputed undercurrent of anti-Semitism), the United States, than in Israel.**** As the recurrent violence leading up to the present conflict attests, those who, by choice or lack of alternative, live in Israel face constant insecurity. Is it time to recognize that the Zionist dream has been a nightmare not only for Jews and Palestinians, but—less vividly, but equally frighteningly—for the rest of us?   

Whoever defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results” might well have had in mind those well-meaning but delusional Pollyannas who have been unsuccessfully trying to implement the two-state solution to the Palestine Problem for 75 years. Is it time to institutionalize (or at least de-institutionalize from the halls of power) such persistent maniacs (and megalomaniacs) and seek the alternative: the one-state solution—a secular, democratic, binational (better, multinational) state in all of Palestine, as the saner have been proposing all along?**** Couldn’t an “Israstine”, where people of the three faiths which consider the land of Palestine holy live happily side-by-side, inspire all of us to believe in and strive for a world at peace?  

————————————–

* Despite the title of Herzl’s book translating to “The Jewish State”, Israel has never declared itself to be such, as that would cause their sizable non-Jewish minorities to conclude they are not just de facto but de jure second-class citizens, as well as offend modern sensibilities about diversity and inclusion (Imagine our declaring the United States a Christian state!). 

** The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, wanted to get credit for his contribution to making Israel Arabrein and so boasted in his memoir, The Revolt, “In a state of terror the Arabs fled, crying ‘Deir Yassin’.” Twenty years later Begin got the recognition he sought for his heroic leadership when he was named Prime Minister of Israel (and, even more remarkably, was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize).

*** In 1969 Gold Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, contemptuously opined (in between puffs on her ever-present cigarettes), “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” She also exhaled the grossly unfair and insulting line, “We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us”. As the mother of my children is a Palestinian, I can attest that no one loves their children more than her people (The Israelis I can’t speak for).

**** When the Soviet Union allowed its Jews to emigrate en masse starting in 1989, 90% of them chose to reside in the United States. Ultimately, more of the rest of the Jewish emigres opted to live in Germany (of all places!) than in Israel. I would bet that in the next year or two more Jews will be emigrating from than migrating to Israel.

***** One believer in the one-state solution is Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Speaking at the UN two weeks before Hamas’s rocket attack, Netanyahu displayed a map which showed all of Palestine (ominously including Gaza) as one country, but I suspect the one-state solution he has in mind is not the one I hope for.

Judge not lest you be judged (self-righteous)

There’s a blight in our history which sullies our reputation as sentient, compassionate beings. No, I’m not talking about slavery (though that, too, qualifies). I’m talking about hunger. Just as slavery has been a near constant throughout history, being practiced in one society or another at one time or another, so has hunger. In its most extreme form–mass starvation—hunger can be said to be even more brutal than slavery, in that it kills, not just dehumanizes (What would you choose, if your choice was between starving to death or being enslaved?*).

One thing that distinguishes hunger from slavery is that no one condones hunger (except those hawking diet pills), while slavery has been sanctioned, in the sense of being tolerated, even by religion. When God, through Moses, issues his 10^th Commandment, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave…” – Deuteronomy 20:17), he tacitly condones slavery. While Hebraic law softens the practice to be more like indentured servitude (“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free.” – Exodus 21), as with many of the Chosen People’s precepts, a distinction is made between intra-Jewish practices and Jews’ relations with Gentiles (“Israelites… must not be sold as slaves…. slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.” – Leviticus 25). In the Koran, slavery is a similarly accepted practice. As with the Jews, Muslims have two sets of rules, in their case distinguishing between believers, who must not be enslaved, and non-believers, who could be (including those captured in war, which gives a surprising luster to slavery in that enslavement of POWs seems more benign than killing them).

What with slavery having acquired a bad reputation these days, apologists for equivocating holy writ have excused it on the grounds of practicality. As one Islamic scholar explains, “God did not wish to prohibit slavery with immediate effect as this would have caused grave social problems”, noting that one-third of the population in Arabia in Mohammed’s day were slaves. Thomas Jefferson apologized for his own slaveholding in a similar manner: “Slavery is an abomination and must be loudly proclaimed as such, but I own that I nor any other man has any immediate solution to the problem.”

It’s easy to castigate the much admired, much maligned philanderer for declaring “all men are created equal” while holding his black compeers in bondage or to mock Patrick Henry for boldly vowing “Give me liberty or give me death”, while not daring to repeat his rallying cry in front of his slaves. But before we get too self-righteous, let’s consider that other venerable social ill:  hunger. Like slaves, the hungry have always been with us, but, unlike slavery, hunger has never received religious approbation. As we know from the biblical story of Ruth, it was the custom for the Israelites to leave the gleanings in their fields for the poor to harvest. Jesus praised those who fed the least of their brethren, as they had fed him, and condemned those who did not to “eternal punishment” (Mathew 25). Mohammed, vocalizing the words of God, praised those who feed the poor, despite being hungry themselves (Sura 76).

Yet hunger gnaws at the bellies of our fellow man still today.  Millions starve to death every year and almost a billion suffer from undernourishment. Even In the land of “amber waves of grain” one-tenth of the population goes to bed hungry, while in the very capital of that bounteous land one in every three families experience food insecurity. How is this possible in the modern world when we have acquired such an impressive ability to produce food? When there are so many individuals and organizations dedicated to “ending world hunger”, why do we fail to do so?

Unlike with slavery, where the villains of the piece have names, it’s not so easy to assign blame for this sorry dietary state of affairs, even though it is manmade, not an act of God or Nature. You might blame it on greedy capitalists, hypocritical politicians, the complacent well-fed, but individual guilt is hard to pin down. Should we tear down statues of the corpulent as being guilty, by appearance alone, of stealing food out of the mouths of babes (starting with the statue of the hero of the Mexican-American War, General Winfield Scott, whose obese persona has been immortalized in bronze in the circle named after him in Washington, DC).

But, in the end, doesn’t the fault lie “not in our stars but in ourselves”? Aren’t we all in much the same situation as Jefferson, recognizing an injustice but feeling helpless to remedy it? We are all, are we not, subject to the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist, which constrains our capability—individually and collectively—to right an obvious wrong.  

Last week I attended the launch of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies at Georgetown University, an event emblematic of the attention being given the subject these days in academia.** Wouldn’t it be appropriate that hunger be given the same attention? As we chow down on the cornucopia before us this Thanksgiving, we all should feel a tinge of guilt and reflect, “with malice toward none, with charity for all”, that those who came before us were similarly guilty and equally constrained?

==========

* For the Irish, during the Potato Famine of the 1840s the choice was between starving to death or emigrating, with about a million suffering the first and another million choosing the second. Conditions on the cramped, unhealthy ships that transported the emigres across the Atlantic were so bad the Irish called them “coffin ships”. It’s estimated the mortality rate was around 30%, twice what it was on slave ships in the same period (first half of the 19^th century), which is not surprising if the captains of the emigrant ships were paid up front and so had no interest in whether his passengers lived or died, while the captains of the slave ships were paid according to how many live bodies disembarked in the New World.  

 ** The centerpiece of the launch was the performance of a music/spoken word piece, Requiem for the Enslaved, composed by a black professor at the school. I thought the musical portion gave new meaning to the word “cacophony”, while the spoken word portion—delivered in a subdued rap style—was so pedestrian as to be trite. Yet, the audience (a couple hundred, majority white of all ages), gave the performers a five-minute standing ovation. I remained seated and sat there wondering whether I was such a boor I couldn’t appreciate refined artistry or had I intruded on the conclave of a cult of wokeness.  

On Heroism

Two weeks ago I attended an event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC honoring Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon consultant who released what are called the Pentagon Papers. The classified documents revealed the government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War for years. Ellsberg was feted as a heroic whistleblower whose courageous act had hastened the end of the war.

I was out of the country, dodging the draft, at the time Ellsberg was in the news and so did not follow the story much (by that time—1971—anyone who didn’t already know the government was lying about Vietnam wasn’t paying much attention), but the event sparked an interest, so I did some research. I was immediately struck by the fact the Papers were first reported on by the New York Times. That seemed odd to me, as the Times represents the very pinnacle of the Establishment’s public opinion-shaping pyramid and is ever ready to keep from a trusting public any  disturbing revelations about their leaders’ conduct. To me, the publication of the Papers reflected a fundamental division within what would be called the Deep State today  between the Hawks, who were determined  to continue the war until victory, and the Doves – too laudatory a term; let’s call them, as some of them were called back then, the Chicken-Hawks, who recognized the war was a futile, costly, morale-sapping misadventure.

If this be the case, then might it have been that Ellsberg was not simply following his conscience but collaborating with the more realistic mandarins of the power elite to bolster their side in the debate? Because he had the backing of the high and mighty, did Ellsberg consider his purloining of the secret documents not a career-ender but a career-advancer, an act which might land him a cushy job as a Times Senior Foreign Correspondent? Any fear he might have had about being prosecuted would have been assuaged by the Times’ stable of top defense attorneys (In fact, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1918, but the charges were dismissed in 1973).   

What happened to Ellsberg after 1973 might shed some light on whether my speculation is reasonable or not, but his entry in Wikipedia jumps from his exoneration to his reappearing in the news as a critic of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What was he doing in the intervening 30 years (during which the US intervened in, attacked, invaded, and/or occupied Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chad, Iran, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, The Philippines, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia)? Similarly, Ellsberg’s obituary on NPR (he died last June) glosses over the intervening years, saying simply he devoted his time to teaching and writing. His career may have been curtailed by his action, but he may not have expected that, and maybe it wasn’t—monetarily, at least.   

Ellsberg’s story got me to ruminating on heroes and heroism. Must a person suffer, perhaps making the ultimate sacrifice, to be considered a hero? Must the cause for which a hero suffers be noble? Does the motive behind a seemingly heroic deed matter? Does the concept of heroism play a vital role in the survivalistic fitness of a society? Let’s examine these questions in turn.      

If being declared a hero demands suffering, Ellsberg hardly qualifies compared to the man who didn’t just blow a whistle but ignited a bonfire under the vanities of the bemedaled class: Julian Assange. The purloined video of a brutal, misguided attack by US forces on Iraqi civilians Assange aired on his brainchild, Wikileaks, is so gruesome  as to turn the most hardened warrior into a pacifist. For his journalistic diligence, Assange earned the enmity of the warrior caste, causing him to take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years to avoid extradition to the United States, where he would face trial for doing the same thing which wins better-connected reporters a Pulitzer Prize (e.g., The Times won a Pulitzer for publishing the Papers). Assange is currently incarcerated in England facing extradition.

Another who paid dearly for her heroics is Ana Montes, an American intelligence operative who was released last January after spending 20 years in prison for spying for Cuba, a hero of mine (till proven otherwise) for countering our ignoble—nay, contemptible—opposition to the Cuban revolution, which is as much a betrayal of the values we claim to hold dear as our hostility to the Vietnamese revolution. (I await a lavish gathering in a prestigious venue hosted by the café revolutionaries who presided over the Ellsberg tribute honoring Ms. Montes, or even Assange!)

Ms. Montes’ case raises the question, “Must the cause for which a person acts courageously be righteous for the act to be considered heroic?” For instance, were the German and Japanese soldiers who died in the service of leaders unworthy of their sacrifice not heroes but misled dupes? If so, were my contemporaries who risked their lives slogging through the enemy-infested jungles of Vietnam while I was galivanting unheroically around the world similarly duped, as the Pentagon Papers suggest? Does it matter in terms of assessing their acts as heroic?

Similarly, must the motive behind a heroic act be pure? Take, for instance, a young man who robs a 7-11, risking a long prison term. If his motive was to gain cash to score some fentanyl, most would say he’s just a criminal deserving incarceration? But what if he stole the money to buy food for his hungry children? From Robin Hood to Jesse James, history is replete with outlaws who “stole from the rich and gave  to the poor” and so acquired hero status, so why not a robber from the ’Hood? I’m sure his family would consider him such. To adapt that line about Beauty, could it be “Heroism is in the mind of the beholden”?

Recently I was asked why I blog. I’d never thought much about that and so did not give a very cogent answer. Now that I’ve reflected on it a bit, I could give a better answer, but I’m not sure I would put much faith in it. I’m afraid the motives I’ve come up with are more self-serving than honest. If I can’t judge my own motives, how can I judge that of others? Perhaps the outcome of a heroic act reveals the motive of the actor, but not necessarily. A hero might benefit financially from his heroism, but that does not mean it was pecuniary gain that motivated him. We best leave the question of motive to whatever god or goddess there may be out there.

Finally, is a belief in heroism as important a concept in the functioning of society as such concepts as Justice or the belief in a Divine Being? If so, it’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the acceptance of the heliocentric nature of the solar system was hastened by the medieval martyrs who were burnt at the stake for espousing the theory. Without their heroism, might we still be forced to believe the sun revolves around the earth? The wheels of progress are greased with the blood of martyrs.

On the other hand, the unscrupulous use the concept of heroism to promote their own, not necessarily noble, ends; for instance, the militarists who cheapened the concept of heroism by awarding Congressional Gold Medals to the 13 soldiers who died when a bomb went off at the Kabul airport during our evacuation from Afghanistan, the solders’ heroism consisting, in essence, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Warmongers would have us believe that a recruit automatically achieves hero status just by enlisting! If they convince us of this, many more “heroes” will die (along with all the rest of us?).

May we have the wisdom and insight to recognize and honor true heroism.

—————

Note: I just published a book, 112 Ways To Alienate Most Everybody (available wherever fine books are sold–Amazon, too), which is a collection of all my postings to this blog, except this one (Posting 113).

---

---

Selling (Us) Short

There’s a practice on Wall Street which has become extremely popular with many and wildly profitable for a few. It’s called “short selling”, a transaction in which a speculator borrows shares in a company from another speculator with the promise to return an equal number of shares to the lender at some later date. The first speculator immediately sells the shares he has borrowed at the current price, then buys the shares he needs to return to the lender sometime before the end date. If the price of the shares has dropped, the speculator “going short” has made a profit; if it has risen, the speculator “going long” makes the profit.

For example, speculator A borrows 200 shares of company XYZ’s stock from speculator B when the stock is selling for $100 a share and he immediately sells the shares at that price. On the day speculator A must return the shares to speculator B, the stock is selling for $60 a share. Speculator A buys 200 shares at that price and returns them to speculator B, making a profit of $8000 ([200 x $100 = $20,000] – [200 x $60 = 12,000] = $8000). Such gambling doesn’t even necessarily involve the buying and selling of any stock. In what’s called “naked selling”, the price of a stock on a certain day and its price some day in the future can be used to calculate who won and who lost and by how much.  

Here’s a real-life example between speculators who think any amount expressed in less than 7 digits (sometimes 10!) is just chump change. Investors who shorted First Republic Bank, the bank that went under a week ago, made a profit of $848 million as the bank’s stock dropped from $16 to 33 cents a share in the course of a week. Imagine that! The already redundantly wealthy made enough to pay the salaries of 10,000 teachers while they idled the time away doing the backstroke in their money vaults a la Scrooge McDuck:

Those going long can profit, too, as did those who made $700 million betting on a company called Game Stop in 2021. Did these high-stakes gamblers make a contribution to American society equal to that of 10,000 teachers? I’d say they didn’t contribute so much as ONE teacher does! Why do we tolerate this in a country which boasts of its egalitarianism, especially as such unearned income may be gained through immoral, if not illegal, price manipulation?

One reason is because Wall Street is a sacred cow (or calf?). The United States has achieved tremendous economic success and the New York Stock Exchange is considered a key component in this success, so we are hesitant to question the ideologues who assure us the stock market is a brilliant way to see that capital is allocated rationally.  Any tampering with it, we fear, will kill the golden goose.

Reference to a sacred calf brings to mind a second reason we are hesitant to question the gambling going on at 11 Wall Street; namely, that Jews are disproportionately represented there (with estimates short-sellers have made 7 billion dollars off bets on failing banks just in the last month or so, expect to see a lot of buildings bearing Jewish-sounding names popping up on college campuses across the country). Hence, criticism of short sellers could easily be interpreted as anti-Semitic, no matter how justified and ethnicity-blind the criticism may be.

Despite the unfair opprobrium that may be flung at those calling for an investigation, such calls are being made. If, as a result, among the manipulative short-sellers exposed, marginalized, jailed, a disproportionate number of the most egregious malefactors have names like Weinberg, Goldstein, Kratz, we should remind ourselves that most Jews do not work on Wall Street, nor do they profit directly from the shenanigans of their coreligionists.** Though taught cliquishness from an early age and proud to be associated with the astounding accomplishments of their ethnicity, many Jews wear their tribal robes very loosely. Let’s not confound the guilt of some with the innocence of the many.

Unfortunately, that’s not how human society works. Instances of collective punishment go all the way back to the time decent Sodomites and Gomorrahans perished right alongside their debauched fellow townspeople. To take a more contemporary example, there are those of us adamantly opposed to what we believe is the central tenet of American foreign policy, a striving for global hegemony; but if our leaders’ ambitious goal causes some  unsympathetic  foe to rain bombs down upon us, they will fall on our heads just as they do on those plotting away in the bowels of the Pentagon, State Department, NSA, as well as those in think tanks and in the street egging them on. Caveat judaei.

——————————————-

* The world’s first stock market, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, had barely been founded before a shrewd trader introduced the practice of short-selling. He and his cabal of associates were so successful in bringing down the price of shares in the Dutch East India Company by casting doubt on the solvency of the company that the authorities quickly banned short sales (at least in its “naked” form).

** It doesn’t help the reputation of Jews that the man who invented short-selling, Isaac Le Maire, was apparently a Jew, based on his name, his brother’s name (Solomon), and his son’s name (Jacob). Nor does it help that the person responsible for seeing that the casino on Wall Street does not have a rigged roulette wheel and whose term in office has seen short-selling burgeon, the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is a Jew.