Fanon the Universalist / The New York Review / Susan Neiman

"Fanon came to believe that colonialism was a system of pathological relations masquerading as normality." Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism. June 6, 2024 issue

Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite - Opinion Guest Essay By Mr. Rhodes is a former deputy national security adviser.

Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake. Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not. From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Kissinger established himself as one of the most powerful functionaries in history. For a portion of that time, he was the only person ever to serve concurrently as national security adviser and secretary of state, two very different jobs that simultaneously made him responsible for shaping and carrying out American foreign policy. If his German Jewish origins and accented English set him apart, the ease with which he wielded power made him a natural avatar for an American national security state that grew and gained momentum through the 20th century, like an organism that survives by enlarging itself. Thirty years after Mr. Kissinger retired into the comforts of the private sector, I served in a bigger post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 national security apparatus. As a deputy national security adviser with responsibilities that included speech writing and communications, I often focused more on the story America told than the actions we took. In the White House, you’re atop an establishment that includes the world’s most powerful military and economy while holding the rights to a radical story: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient. Mr. Kissinger was not uncomfortable with that dynamic. For him, credibility was rooted in what you did more than what you stood for, even when those actions rendered American concepts of human rights and international law void. He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing. It is ironic that this brand of realism reached its apex at the height of the Cold War, a conflict that was ostensibly about ideology. From the side of the free world, Mr. Kissinger backed genocidal campaigns — by Pakistan against Bengalis and by Indonesia against the East Timorese. In Chile he has been accused of helping to lay the groundwork for a military coup that led to the death of Salvador Allende, the elected leftist president, while ushering in a terrible period of autocratic rule. The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them. Shortly before Mr. Allende’s victory, Mr. Kissinger said, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Was it all worth it? Mr. Kissinger was fixated on credibility, the idea that America must impose a price on those who ignore our demands to shape the decisions of others in the future. It’s hard to see how the bombing of Laos, the coup in Chile or the killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) contributed to the outcome of the Cold War. But Mr. Kissinger’s unsentimental view of global affairs allowed him to achieve consequential breakthroughs with autocratic countries closer to America’s weight class — a détente with the Soviet Union that reduced the escalatory momentum of the arms race and an opening to China that deepened the Sino-Soviet split, integrated the People’s Republic of China into the global order and prefaced Chinese reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The fact that those reforms were initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the same Chinese leader who ordered the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, speaks to the ambiguous nature of Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. On the one hand, the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement contributed to the outcome of the Cold War and improved standards of living for the Chinese people. On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the principal geopolitical adversary of the United States and the vanguard of the authoritarian trend in global politics, putting a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and threatening to invade Taiwan, whose status was left unresolved by Mr. Kissinger’s diplomacy. Mr. Kissinger lived half of his life after he left government. He blazed what has become a bipartisan trail of ex-officials building lucrative consulting businesses while trading on global contacts. For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power. He wrote a shelf of books, many of which polished his own reputation as an oracle of global affairs; after all, history is written by men like Henry Kissinger, not by the victims of superpower bombing campaigns, including children in Laos, who continue to be killed by the unexploded bombs that litter their country. You can choose to see those unexploded bombs as the inevitable tragedy of the conduct of global affairs. From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history. Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter. Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it. But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — for wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West. Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story. Ironically, part of Mr. Kissinger’s allure stemmed from the fact that his story was uniquely American. His family narrowly escaped the wheel of history, fleeing Nazi Germany just as Hitler was putting his diabolical design into effect. Mr. Kissinger returned to Germany in the U.S. Army and liberated a concentration camp. The experience imbued him with a wariness of messianic ideology wedded to state power. But it didn’t leave him with much sympathy for the underdog. Nor did it motivate him to bind the postwar American superpower within the very web of norms, laws and fidelity to certain values that was written into the American-led postwar order to prevent another world war. Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings. But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests. Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own. Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine. In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms. Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party. This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right. All of this cannot be laid on Henry Kissinger’s shoulders. In many ways, he was as much a creation of the American national security state as its author. But his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad. That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril. More on Henry Kissinger Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped the Nation’s Cold War History Nov. 29, 2023 Kissinger spoke to The Times in 2011 about the perils of diplomacy. Nov. 29, 2023 To Many Chinese, Kissinger’s Death Ends an Era in U.S.-China Relations Nov. 30, 2023 Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser, is the author of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”

James Baldwin’s 1985 Thoughts on Policing Shared Widely Following The Murder of Tyre Nichols By Alyssa Shotwell Jan 31st, 2023

The New Yorker: Trump and Celebrity Approval: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Voters return Ford to mayor’s office By GUY RHODES and JACQUELYN CARLISLE Updated Aug 30, 2012 - 06:08:32 EDT

In 1972 Johnny Ford was the youngest and first black man elected mayor of Tuskegee. Tuesday, Aug. 28 he became the oldest, or as he says, the wisest to be elected at age 70.

Ford resurrected his political career for at least four more years by defeating incumbent Omar Neal who had upended Ford in 2008 when Ford was seeking reelection.

In 2010 Ford unsuccessfully ran for the Alabama Senate, losing to Billy Beasley of Clayton. A year ago Ford announced he was going to run for the District 2 seat on the Tuskegee Council because incumbent Louise Fields decided not to run for reelection. Several months Ford changed his mind and decided to run for an eighth term as mayor.

Ford served as mayor consecutively from 1972-96 before losing his bid for a seventh straight term to Ron Williams.

Ford pulled 1,362 (57 percent) votes to 912 for Neal (38 percent). Pearl Riley-Franklin was a distant third with 115 votes (5 percent).

“What’s important is to work with what’s in place. A lot of that has happened the past four years is a carryover from what we started,” Ford said in reference to his most previous term as mayor from 2008. “I’m willing to work and compromise with those on the council.”
Georgette White-Moon, District 3, is the only member of the current council reelected Tuesday. Mae Doris Williams lost out in her effort to retain her at-large seat where Shirley Curry and Tony Haygood will be in a runoff. Chris Lee won the District 1 seat over four opponents and Ala Whitehead took the District 2 position.

“I am so appreciative for the time I have served the citizens of Tuskegee” Neal said from his headquarters. “The Creator has something else for me at this time and I will accept His will. I will continue to serve the community and my love for Tuskegee is unconditional and unwearied. I want to thank my supporters and congratulate Johnny Ford.”

. At his campaign headquarters on the Square in downtown Tuskegee Ford received congratulations from supporters, many of whom have been in camp for numerous election victory nights.

Neal visited Ford’s headquarters to offer congratulations.

“I told him I remembered doing the same thing four years ago when he was successful in being elected and offered to make it a smooth transition. He promised to do the same,” the mayor-elect commented.

Ford said one of his concerns going into the election was how Tuskegee University students would vote. Many observers believe the student vote helped put Neal in office in 2008.

“There’s an uncertainty with how many students will vote and how they will vote,” Ford explained. “I really worked hard on campus the past few weeks.”

The turnout Tuesday of 2,077 was slightly less than the number of voters in the first vote in 2008 when 2,389 voted when there were five mayoral candidates. A total of 2,733 participated in the runoff between Ford and Neal.

The mayor-elect plans to address issues such as lowering utilities rates, getting the Tuskegee VA Hospital recognized as a National Historic Site, securing a Critical Access Hospital (CAH), reopening of VictoryLand, securing other business and industry and developing Exit 38 on I-85.

Ill Doctrine on Mitt and blacks

Ill Doctrine on Mitt and blacks

Artur Davis considers GOP for future in Virginia

Church And State In America Roger Williams, and the history that set the table.

Roger Williams (National Park Service)

Soul freedom sounds like a pop song, but it was hot philosophy 400 years ago, in the pre-dawn of the American republic. Today, we struggle over church and state in marriage, reproduction, education. We cite Thomas Jefferson and separation of church and state.
But long before Jefferson there was Roger Williams, fighting for Soul Libertie. Warning that when church and state entwine, it is the soul that suffers. The church that should be wary. In our time of Romney, Santorum and Obama, this history resonates.
This hour, On Point: Roger Williams and the creation of the American soul.

-Tom Ashbrook

Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

"The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites."

 

That's right, that Shelby Steele.

Obama: Republicans show signs of 'madness'

Putin 'wins' Russia's presidential election - Europe - Al Jazeera English

Putin 'wins' Russia's presidential election - Europe - Al Jazeera English

What’s the matter with white people?

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Lawyer: Lesbians’ assault on gay man can’t be hate crime

Lawyer: Lesbians’ assault on gay man can’t be hate crime

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He will not be moved - News Features

He will not be moved - News Features

Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses By CHARLES M. BLOW - NYT

"Gingrich is a virtual supernova of megalomaniacal madness..."

Scotland talks independence – but can it afford it? CSM

Scotland talks independence – but can it afford it?

Racism 'happens': Inexplicable events haunt GOP primary - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

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Representative calls for lawmakers to take drug tests

Representative calls for lawmakers to take drug tests

Retiring AEA leader Joe Reed looks back at achievements

the way it is