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  • Letters From the Apocalypse | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/apocalypse-letters-palestine-george-abraham-sarah-aziza

    In September 2023, poet George Abraham and journalist Sarah Aziza began writing letters to each other about their experience as Palestinians, writers, artists, and intellectuals. A month into their correspondence, everything changed.

    • I fear, and expect, that our slow genocide will be replaced by a rapid one. Every rhetorical and tactical piece has been arranged for this. The world has long prepared for our death—they have practiced it every day for years. We are the ungrievable, the barbarians, the terrorist “animals.” Our suffering is expected, and excused. Welcomed, even. I fear no number of our dead that will satisfy a regime which has always intended our annihilation, and now anoints itself with the blood of its slain. And I dread watching our slaughter while my grief is rendered illegible by a consensus which has always sentenced us to death.

  • What Does It Mean to Be Palestinian Now?
    January 25, 2024 | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/what-does-it-mean-to-be-palestinian-now

    For generations, the voices of Palestinians have been routinely overlooked. When we do turn to them, it is usually to ask them to justify their despair or prove their worthiness as humans—and to teach us the very basics of a generations-long crisis of forced exile and violent displacement.

    Instead of making Palestinians play out that endless cycle one more time, we wanted to get to the heart of a question that feels more vital, more essential, in our moment.

    The contributors to this section are Palestinians living in the US, where the war reverberates with terrifying intimacy even though the bloodshed is thousands of miles away. It is also where the need to hear from Palestinians—and to listen to what they have to say—has never been as critical, or as fraught.

    So what does it mean to be Palestinian now? It’s a question whose answer we know will keep changing in the months and years ahead. But we have to keep asking it. (...)

    • It may sound daft to suggest that a group of armed irregulars, numbering in the low tens of thousands, besieged and with little access to advanced weaponry, is a match for one of the world’s most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the United States. And yet, an increasing number of establishment strategic analysts warn that Israel could lose this war on Palestinians despite the cataclysmic violence it unleashed since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7. And in provoking the Israeli assault, Hamas may be realizing many of its own political objectives.

      Both #Israel and #Hamas appear to be resetting the terms of their political contest not to the pre–October 7 status quo, but to the 1948 one. It’s not clear what comes next, but there will be no going back to the previous state of affairs.

      The surprise attack neutralized Israeli military installations, breaking open the gates of the world’s largest open-air prison and leading a gruesome rampage in which some 1,200 Israelis, at least 845 of them civilians, were killed. The shocking ease with which Hamas breached Israeli lines around the Gaza Strip reminded many of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Not literally—there are vast differences between a US expeditionary war in a distant land and Israel’s war to defend an occupation at home, waged by a citizen army motivated by a sense of existential peril. Instead, the usefulness of the analogy lies in the political logic shaping an insurgent offensive.

      In 1968, the Vietnamese revolutionaries lost the battle and sacrificed much of the underground political and military infrastructure they had patiently built over years. Yet the Tet Offensive was a key moment in their defeat of the United States—albeit at a massive cost in Vietnamese lives. By simultaneously staging dramatic, high-profile attacks on more than 100 targets across the country on a single day, lightly armed Vietnamese guerrillas shattered the illusion of success that was being peddled to the US public by the Johnson administration. It signaled to Americans that the war for which they were being asked to sacrifice tens of thousands of their sons was unwinnable.

      The Vietnamese leadership measured the impact of its military actions by their political effects rather than by conventional military measures such as men and materiel lost or territory gained. Thus Henry Kissinger’s 1969 lament: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

      That logic has Jon Alterman of the not-exactly-dovish Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., to see Israel as being at considerable risk of losing to Hamas:

      Hamas’s concept of military victory…is all about driving long-term political outcomes. Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but from engaging with decades of struggle that increase Palestinian solidarity and increase Israel’s isolation. In this scenario, Hamas rallies a besieged population in Gaza around it in anger and helps collapse the Palestinian Authority government by ensuring Palestinians see it even more as a feckless adjunct to Israeli military authority. Meanwhile, Arab states move strongly away from normalization, the Global South aligns strongly with the Palestinian cause, Europe recoils at the Israeli army’s excesses, and an American debate erupts over Israel, destroying the bipartisan support Israel has enjoyed here since the early 1970s.

      Hamas, Alterman writes, seeks “to use Israel’s far greater strength to defeat Israel. Israel’s strength allows the country to kill Palestinian civilians, destroy Palestinian infrastructure, and defy global calls for restraint. All those things advance Hamas’s war aims.”

      Such warnings have been ignored by the Biden administration and Western leaders, whose unconditional embrace of Israel’s war is rooted in the delusion that Israel was just another Western nation peacefully going about its business before it suffered an unprovoked attack on October 7—it’s a comforting fantasy to those who prefer to avoid recognizing a reality they’ve been complicit in creating.

      Forget “intelligence failures”; Israel’s failure to anticipate October 7 was a political failure to understand the consequences of a violent system of oppression that leading international and Israeli human rights organizations have branded as apartheid.

      Twenty years ago, former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg warned of the inevitability of violent backlash. “It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive,” he wrote in The International Herald Tribune.

      Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself.… Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism.

      Israel could kill 1,000 Hamas men a day and solve nothing, Burg warned, because Israel’s own violent actions would be the source of a replenishing of their ranks. His warnings have been ignored, even as they’ve been vindicated many times over. That same logic is now playing out on steroids in the destruction being visited on Gaza. The grinding structural violence Israel expected Palestinians to suffer in silence meant that Israeli security was always illusory.

      The weeks since October 7 have affirmed that there can be no return to the status quo ante. This was likely Hamas’s goal in staging its deadly attacks. And even prior to this, many in Israel’s leadership were openly calling for the completion of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; now those voices have been amplified.

      Late November’s mutually agreed humanitarian pause saw Hamas release some hostages in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails and an increase in humanitarian supplies entering #Gaza. When Israel resumed its military onslaught and Hamas returned to launching rockets, it was clear that Hamas has not been militarily defeated. The mass slaughter and destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza suggests an intention to make the territory uninhabitable for the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there—and to push for expulsion via a militarily engineered humanitarian catastrophe. Indeed, the IDF’s own estimate is that it has so far eliminated less than 15 percent of Hamas’s fighting force. This in a campaign that has killed more than 21,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, 8,600 of them children.

      October 7 and Palestinian politics

      Israel’s military will almost certainly oust Hamas from governing Gaza. But analysts such as Tareq Baconi, who has studied the movement and its thinking over the past two decades, argue that it has sought for quite some time to break out of the shackles of governing a territory sectioned off from the rest of Palestine, on terms set by the occupying power.

      Hamas has long shown a desire to break out of its Gaza governance role, from the mass unarmed March of Return protests in 2018 violently suppressed by Israeli sniper fire to efforts thwarted by the United States and Israel to transfer governance of Gaza to either a reformed Palestinian Authority, agreed-upon technocrats, or an elected government, while it focused on refocusing Palestinian politics in both Gaza and the West Bank on resistance to, rather than custodianship of, the occupation status quo. If a consequence of its attack were losing the responsibility for governing Gaza, Hamas might see that as advantageous.

      Hamas has tried to nudge Fatah onto a similar path, urging the ruling party in the West Bank to end Palestinian Authority (PA) security collaboration with Israel and more directly confront the occupation. Losing municipal control of Gaza is therefore far from a decisive defeat for Hamas’s war effort: For a movement dedicated to liberating Palestinian lands, governing Gaza had begun to look like a dead end, much as permanent limited self-governance in discontiguous islands of the West Bank has been for Fatah.

      Hamas, Baconi says, likely felt compelled to take a high-stakes gamble to shatter a status quo it deemed a slow death for Palestine. “All this still does not mean that Hamas’s strategic shift will be deemed successful in the long run,” he wrote in Foreign Policy.

      Hamas’s violent disruption of the status quo might well have provided Israel with an opportunity to carry out another Nakba. This might result in a regional conflagration or deal Palestinians a blow that could take a generation to recover from. What is certain, however, is that there is no return to what existed before.

      Hamas’s gambit, then, may have been to sacrifice municipal governance of a besieged Gaza to cement its status as a national resistance organization. Hamas is not trying to bury Fatah: The various unity agreements between Hamas and Fatah, particularly those led by prisoners of both factions, demonstrate that Hamas seeks a united front. The PA is unable to protect West Bank Palestinians from the increasing violence of Israeli settlements and entrenched control, let alone to meaningfully respond to the bloodshed in Gaza. Under the cover of Western backing on Gaza, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians, arrested thousands, and displaced entire villages on the West Bank, all the while escalating its state-sponsored settler attacks. In so doing, Israel has further undermined Fatah among the population and pushed it in the direction of Hamas.

      For years, settlers protected by the IDF have attacked Palestinian villages with the aim of forcing their residents to leave and tightening Israel’s illegal grip on the occupied territory—but the expansion of this since October 7 is causing even Israel’s US accomplices to blanche. Biden’s threat of visa bans against settlers involved in violence against West Bank Palestinians is an evasion: Those settlers are far from individual rogue actors; they are armed by the state and aggressively protected by the IDF and the Israeli legal system, because they are implementing a state policy. But even Biden’s miscast threat makes clear that Israel is at odds with his administration.

      Hamas has a pan-Palestinian perspective, not a Gaza-specific one, and so it intended October 7 to have transformative effects across Palestine. During the 2021 “Unity Intifada” that sought to connect the struggles of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza with those inside Israel, Hamas took actions in support of that goal. Now, the Israeli state is accelerating that connection with a paranoid campaign of repression against any expression of dissent from among its Palestinian citizens. Hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank have been detained, including activists and teens posting on Facebook. Israel is all too aware of the potential for escalation in the West Bank. In that sense, the Israeli response has only brought the people of the West Bank and Gaza closer.

      It’s clear Israel never intended to accept a sovereign Palestinian state anywhere west of the Jordan River. Instead, Israel is intensifying long-standing plans for securing its control of the territory. That and growing Israeli encroachment into the Al Aqsa Mosque are a reminder that Israel is actively fueling whatever uprising follows in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and even within the ’67 lines.

      Ironically, then, the US insistence on the Palestinian Authority’s being put in control of Gaza after Israel’s war of devastation—and its belated, feeble warnings over settler violence—reinforces the idea of the West Bank and Gaza being a single entity. Israel’s 17-year policy of cleaving a pliant West Bank run by a co-opted PA from a “terrorist-run Gaza” has failed.

      Israel after October 7

      The Hamas-led raid punctured myths of Israeli invincibility and its citizens’ expectation of tranquility even as the state chokes the life out of Palestinians. Just weeks earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was boasting that Israel had successfully “managed” the conflict to the point that Palestine no longer featured on his map of a “new Middle East.” With the Abraham Accords and other alliances, some Arab leaders were embracing Israel. The US was promoting the plan, with Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden both focused on “normalization” with Arab regimes that were willing to leave the Palestinians subject to ever-tightening Israeli apartheid. October 7 served up a brutal reminder that this was untenable, and that Palestinians’ resistance constitutes a form of veto power over the efforts of others to determine their fate.

      It’s too soon to measure the impact of October 7 on Israeli domestic politics. It has made Israelis more hawkish, but at the same time more distrustful of their national leadership after the colossal failure of intelligence and response. It took significant mass mobilization against the government by the families of Israelis held captive in Gaza to achieve a pause in military action and secure a hostage-release deal. Dramatic, high-profile internal dissent over the hostages and what’s required of Israel to secure their return could raise pressure for further release deals and even a full-blown cease-fire, despite a determination to continue the war among much of the political and military leadership. Israeli public opinion remains confused, angry, and unpredictable.

      Then there’s the war’s impact on Israel’s economy, whose growth model is based on attracting high levels of foreign direct investment to its tech sector and other export industries. Last year’s social protest and uncertainty over the constitutional fracas was already being cited as a reason for the 68 percent year-on-year drop in FDI reported over the summer. Israel’s war, for which 360,000 reservists have been mobilized, adds a new level of shock. Economist Adam Tooze wrote in his Substack:

      The tech lobby in Israel estimates that a tenth of its workforce has been mobilized. Construction is paralyzed by the quarantining of the Palestinian workforce in the West Bank. Consumption of services has collapsed as people stay away from restaurants and public gatherings are limited. Credit card records suggest that private consumption in Israel fell by nearly a third in the days after the war broke out. Spending on leisure and entertainment crashed by 70%. Tourism, a mainstay of the Israeli economy, has come to an abrupt halt. Flights are canceled and shipping cargo diverted. Offshore the Israeli government ordered Chevron to halt production at the Tamar natural gas field, costing Israel $200 million a month in lost revenue.

      Israel is a wealthy country with the resources to weather some of this storm, but with its wealth comes fragility—and it has much to lose.

      Israeli forces have poured into Gaza with a battle plan, but no clear war plan for Gaza after their invasion. Some Israeli military leaders aim to maintain “security control” of the sort they enjoy in the PA’s West Bank domain. In Gaza, this would pit it against a better-drilled insurgency supported by most of the population. Many in Israeli government circles advocate forcibly displacing much of Gaza’s civilian population into Egypt, by engineering a humanitarian crisis that makes Gaza unlivable. The US has said it has ruled that out, but no smart gambler would discount the possibility of the Israelis’ seeking forgiveness rather than permission for more mass-scale ethnic cleansing in line with Israel’s long-term demographic goals of reducing the Palestinian population between the river and the sea.

      US officials have reached for the prayer books of yore, speaking hopefully of putting 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, the head of PA, back in charge of Gaza, with the promise of some renewed pursuit of the chimeric “two-state solution.” But the PA has no credibility even in the West Bank because of its acquiescence to Israel’s ever-expanding occupation. Then, there’s the reality that preventing genuine Palestinian sovereignty in any part of historic Palestine has long been a point of consensus in the Israeli leadership across most of the Zionist political spectrum. And Israel’s leaders have no need to abide by the expectations of a US administration that may well be voted out next year. And they have a proven ability to wag the dog even if Biden were reelected. The US has chosen to ride shotgun in Israel’s war machine, whose destination may not be clear, but it’s certainly not any kind of Palestinian state.

      The global impact of October 7

      Israel and the United States may have convinced themselves that the world has “moved on” from the Palestinian plight, but the energies unleashed by the events since October 7 suggest that the opposite is true. Calls for solidarity with Palestine have echoed along the streets of the Arab world, serving in some countries as a coded language of dissent against decrepit authoritarianism. Across the Global South and in the cities of the West, Palestine now occupies a symbolic place as an avatar of rebellion against Western hypocrisy and an unjust postcolonial order. Not since the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq have so many millions around the world taken to the streets to protest. Organized labor has flexed its internationalist muscles to challenge arms deliveries to Israel and reminded itself of its power to change history, and legal mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and even US and European courts are being used to challenge government policies that enable Israel’s war crimes.

      Panicked by a world aghast at its actions in Gaza, Israel and its advocates have reverted to charges of antisemitism against those who would challenge Israel’s brutality—but everything from the mass marches to the vocal Jewish opposition to the opinion surveys on Biden’s handling of the crisis indicate that equating solidarity with antisemitism is not only factually wrong; it is unconvincing.

      Several countries in Latin America and Africa have symbolically cut ties, and the deliberate bombing of a civilian population and preventing access to shelter, food, water, and medical care has left even many of Israel’s allies aghast. The extent of violence the West is willing to countenance against a captive people in Gaza offers the Global South a stark reminder of accounts unsettled with the imperial West. And when French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly implore Israel to stop “bombing babies,” Israel is in danger of losing even parts of the West. It has become difficult in the short term for Arab and Muslim countries to maintain, much less expand public ties.

      Yoking itself to Israel’s response to October 7 has also burst the bubble on US fantasies of reclaiming hegemony in the Global South under a “we’re the good guys” rubric. The contrast between its response to Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestinian crises respectively has produced a consensus that there is hypocrisy at the very heart of US foreign policy, producing such extraordinary spectacles as Biden being castigated, face-to-face at an APEC Summit, by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim for his failure to stand up against Israel’s atrocities

      Ibrahim specifically warned that Biden’s response to Gaza had raised a serious trust deficit with those the United States hopes to court as allies in its competition with Russia and China. Having demonstrated to Arab allies that their Washington patron will side with Israel, even when it is bombing Arab civilians, will likely reinforce the trend of Global South states diversifying their geopolitical portfolios.

      The political question

      By shattering a status quo that Palestinians find intolerable, Hamas has put politics back on the agenda. Israel has significant military power, but it is politically weak. Much of the US establishment supporting Israel’s war assumes that violence emanating from an oppressed community can be stamped out by applying overwhelming military force against that community. But even Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signaled skepticism over that premise, warning that Israel’s attacks killing thousands of civilians risked driving “them into the arms of the enemy [and replacing] a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

      Western politicians and media like to fantasize that Hamas is an ISIS-style nihilistic cadre holding Palestinian society hostage; Hamas is, in fact, a multifaceted political movement rooted in the fabric and national aspirations of Palestinian society. It embodies a belief, grimly affirmed by decades of Palestinian experience, that armed resistance is central to the Palestinian liberation project because of the failures of the Oslo process and the intractable hostility of its adversary. And its influence and popularity have grown as Israel and its allies keep thwarting a peace process and other nonviolent strategies for pursuing Palestinian liberation.

      Israel’s campaign will leave Hamas’s military capacity diminished. But even if it were to kill the organization’s top leaders (as it has done previously), Israel’s response to October 7 is affirming Hamas’s message and its standing among Palestinians across the region and beyond. Large protests in Jordan with pro-Hamas chants, for instance, are unprecedented. It requires no approval or support of the Hamas actions of October 7 to acknowledge the enduring appeal of a movement that seems capable of making Israel pay some kind of a price for the violence it visits upon Palestinians every day, every year, generation after generation.

      History also suggests a pattern in which representatives of movements dismissed as “terrorist” by their adversaries—in South Africa, say, or Ireland—nonetheless appear at the negotiating table when the time comes to seek political solutions. It would be ahistorical to bet against Hamas, or at least some version of the political-ideological current it represents, doing the same if and when a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians is revisited with seriousness.

      What comes after the horrific violence is far from clear, but Hamas’s October 7 attack has forced a reset of a political contest to which Israel appears unwilling to respond beyond devastating military force against Palestinian civilians. And as things stand eight weeks into the vengeance, Israel can’t be said to be winning.

      #Palestine

    • Tony Karon
      Tony Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+, a former senior editor at Time magazine, and was an activist in the anti-apartheid liberation movement in his native South Africa.

      Daniel Levy
      Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians at Taba under prime minister Ehud Barak and at Oslo B under prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Karon

      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Levy_(diplomate)

  • The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hunt-hamas-narrative-gaza-israel-palestine

    America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War.

    Israel is engaging in massive population transfers and attempting to depopulate Gaza, and everything it does must be understood through this lens. The Israeli government has explicitly said this from the beginning, starting with an evacuation order for North Gaza on October 13. No exceptions.

    Everything Israel has done since then is pursuant to carrying out this evacuation order to remove over 1 million people form North Gaza into refugee camps in South Gaza. This is what they said they would do, and it’s what they are doing.

    • « depopulate Gaza » : superbe et très juste - sans chercher à relativiser. En particulier, ça "évite" les braquages autour du terme génocide.

      Le plan serait donc une saisie de 100% de la surface de Gaza et une éjection de 90% de la population vers un ailleurs à définir ?

    • The government is doing forcible population transfers, and this means everyone. It’s the simplest way to explain Israel’s actions, yet American media—tied to “counterterror” narratives—can’t, or won’t, get their minds around the obvious fact that Israel is attempting to depopulate Gaza in stages.

      (ma graisse)

    • Les médias américains ont de gros moyens et ne sont pas peuplés que de crétins.

      Il y a probablement, comme en France, un pourcentage significatif de juifs parmi les journalistes et parmi les propriétaires de ces médias.
      Et un considérable pourcentage de sionistes parmi eux.

      Plus les moyens financiers importants du Lobby sioniste pour les pressions et la corruption.

      On a compris pourquoi les civils et les enfants palestiniens sont réduits en bouillie.

      Je pense qu’en France c’est pareil.

      Lutter en occident contre ce Lobby sioniste et tous ces relais, c’est touchy (sensible et risqué) car « antisémitisme accusation Joker qui autorise les carnages ».

      Mais ne pas le faire, c’est laisser nos compatriotes musulmans se faire insulter sur toutes les chaines.

  • The “Harvard Law Review” Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide


    Je poste cela ici, ne l’ayant pas déjà trouvée sur @seenthis
    Le texte est accessible à la suite de cette mise en contexte sur le site de The Nation

    On Saturday, the board of the Harvard Law Review voted not to publish “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” a piece by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. The vote followed what an editor at the law review described in an e-mail to Eghbariah as “an unprecedented decision” by the leadership of the Harvard Law Review to prevent the piece’s publication.

    Eghbariah told The Nation that the piece, which was intended for the HLR Blog, had been solicited by two of the journal’s online editors. It would have been the first piece written by a Palestinian scholar for the law review. The piece went through several rounds of edits, but before it was set to be published, the president stepped in. “The discussion did not involve any substantive or technical aspects of your piece,” online editor Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, wrote Eghbariah in an e-mail shared with The Nation. “Rather, the discussion revolved around concerns about editors who might oppose or be offended by the piece, as well as concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox, or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff, and HLR leadership.”

    On Saturday, following several days of debate and a nearly six-hour meeting, the Harvard Law Review’s full editorial body came together to vote on whether to publish the article. Sixty-three percent voted against publication. In an e-mail to Egbariah, HLR President Apsara Iyer wrote, “While this decision may reflect several factors specific to individual editors, it was not based on your identity or viewpoint.”

    In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “

    When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.”

    #censure #génocide #palestine #gaza

    • To keep the lights on in Gaza City’s largest hospital, Wissam AbuJarad, an anesthetist, said staff were collecting gas from dwindling stocks in the area to maintain a steady supply to their generators.

      “If we run out of fuel, then we will lose all of the patients in the ICU, the babies in the incubators, and the patients who need surgery,” AbuJarad said.

      He said that some staff had been reduced to drinking from IV solution bags because Israel had cut off water supplies to the enclave.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/16/israel-gaza-hamas-border-ceasefire

    • The shutoff of clean water is of particularly grave concern. When people no longer have access to clean, treated water, they will drink water from whatever source there is, including seawater. These sources may be contaminated with sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants, which can lead to water-borne illnesses like cholera and dysentery; outbreaks of such diseases would strain the medical system in Gaza. These diseases also require rapid rehydration, and without a source of water, they can quickly become deadly. Clean water is also necessary for providing proper medical care to people—for one thing, you can’t wash your hands without it. Water is a key component in many medical procedures, such as dialysis for kidney patients. When clean water is no longer available, medical practitioners have to spend crucial moments looking for water in a time when time can barely be spared. Meanwhile, the blockade prevents medical supplies from entering Gaza, and Médecins Sans Frontières has reported that hospitals have run out of painkillers. As people are gravely injured and arrive at the hospital with open wounds, if hospitals are lacking proper medical equipment to stabilize them and prevent infection, many people will die preventable deaths.

      https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-public-health-ceasefire
      #eau #water

  • The Coronavirus Still Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/society/covid-pandemic-panic-calm-advice

    But at a deeper level, this emphasis on public sentiment has contributed to confusion about the meaning of the term “pandemic.” A pandemic is an epidemiological term, and the meaning is quite specific—pandemics are global and unpredictable in their trajectory; endemic diseases are local and predictable. Despite the end of the Public Health Emergency in May, Covid-19 remains a pandemic, by definition. Yet some experts and public figures have uncritically advanced the idea that if the public appears to be tired, bored, or noncompliant with public health measures, then the pandemic must be over.

    But pandemics are impervious to ratings; they cannot be canceled or publicly shamed. History is replete with examples of pandemics that blazed for decades, sometimes smoldering for years before flaring up again into catastrophe. The Black Death (1346–1353 AD), the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD), and the Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD), pandemics all, lacked the quick resolution of the 1918 influenza pandemic. A pandemic cannot tell when the news cycle has moved on.

    #covid

  • The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/azov-battalion-neo-nazi

    Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.

    This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.

    #sans_vergogne

  • À Marseille, le RAID tire à vue - POLITIS
    https://www.politis.fr/articles/2023/07/nahel-mort-a-marseille-le-raid-tire-a-vue

    La cité phocéenne, secouée par des affrontements après la mort de Nahel, a vu le RAID déployé dans ses rues. Plusieurs vidéos montrent cette unité d’élite réaliser des tirs à des distances potentiellement létales. Un homme y est mort après un « probable » tir « de type flash-ball ».

    Des coups de feu, parfois très proches. Dans une rue marseillaise, peu après minuit, dans la nuit du 30 juin au 1er juillet, des gens courent, visés par des tirs à moins de quatre mètres. Certains s’effondrent avant de se relever et de fuir. Les munitions sont en réalité des « bean bags », des petits sacs de toiles remplis de billes de plomb. En face d’eux, des hommes en noir, casqués et armés de #fusils de #calibre_12, le même pour les fusils de chasse. Il s’agit du #RAID, une unité d’élite de la #police qui intervient en cas d’attaques terroristes, de prises d’otages et dans la lutte contre le grand banditisme. Ce soir-là, pas de terroristes ni de criminels de grandes envergures, mais de simples jeunes révoltés.

    Le lendemain de cette scène de traque, dans la nuit du 1er au 2 juillet, Mohammed décède d’un arrêt cardiaque dans le même quartier. Le parquet estime que le décès de ce livreur Uber Eats et jeune père de famille de 27 ans a probablement été causé « par un choc violent au niveau du thorax provoqué par le tir d’un projectile de type flash-ball ». Présent lors des affrontements, il n’était là que pour prendre des photos, d’après sa femme contactée par RTL. Le parquet de Marseille a annoncé ouvrir une enquête pour « coups mortels avec usage ou menace d’une arme ».

    Flash-Ball, #LBD ou #bean_bag, le type de blessure engendrée par ces armes est relativement équivalent, la munition étant sphérique et relativement molle. Mais, comme le montre la scène du 1er juillet au soir, des tirs à moins de trois mètres sont effectués par le RAID. Encadré, le LBD est prévu pour un usage optimal entre 25 et 30 mètres. « En deçà des intervalles de distances opérationnels, propres à chaque munition, cette arme de force intermédiaire peut générer des risques lésionnels plus importants », rappelle une circulaire de 2017 de la police nationale.

    Pourtant, des vidéos des dernières émeutes montrent des policiers tirer à moins d’un mètre, comme à Montfermeil le 30 juin. Pour l’utilisation des bean bags, alors qu’une autre victime est dans le coma à Mont-Saint-Martin après un tir du RAID (article de La Voix du Nord), les consignes de tirs sont inconnues. Contacté pour obtenir plus d’informations sur les règles d’emploi, le ministère de l’Intérieur n’a pas répondu à nos sollicitations.

    #militarisation #maintien_de_l'ordre

    • After the Riots, the Police Terrorize Marseille
      https://www.thenation.com/article/world/france-marseille-police-nahel

      Marseille, France—Many of the faces in the crowd were young and brown. It was June 29 in #Marseille. Two days prior in Nanterre, a cop fatally shot Nahel Merzouk, 17, in the head during a routine traffic stop. The police had claimed self-defense, but a video released by a witness showed an officer pointing and firing a gun directly into the youth’s car.

      That first night, there were arrests and fires in cities around Nanterre, but the anger quickly spread across France. Police responded by sending helicopters, armored vehicles, tactical units, and the French equivalent of SWAT teams. Over six days, police arrested between 3,600 and 4,000 people. About a third of them were minors—some as young as 11. Many of the detained protesters were men and boys of color like Nahel, who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent. While the government promises “swift, tough, and systematic” sanctions for those arrested, the confrontations have left French cities reeling. Marseille, in particular, has become a flashpoint in the media coverage of riots and looting.

      The scale and swiftness of police repression that descended upon French cities has been shocking. French media and politicians across the spectrum have turned police officers and a mayor and his family who escaped “attempted assassination”—an event that may not be connected to the riots—into the main victims of the unrest. But several people have died, including a 27-year-old in Marseille whose death is seen as “probably” due to the impact of a “Flash-Ball type projectile” (a rubber or foam pellet), a 50-year-old shot by a stray bullet in French Guyana, and a young man who fell from the roof of a grocery store during a looting near Rouen.

    • Pour le RAID, les consignes de tirs sont inconnues. Contacté pour obtenir plus d’informations sur les règles d’emploi, le ministère de l’Intérieur n’a pas répondu à nos sollicitations.

      Politis compte attaquer le RAID au tribunal administratif pour non respect de la procédure de tir ? #LOL #MDR (et accessoirement d’un arrêt cardiaque dû au tir du RAID à l’insu de son plein gré #le_coup_est_parti_tout_seul)

      Le mieux est d’attendre la dissolution de l’ONU. Et superbe article de The Nation.

  • The Protests in #France Are About to Collide With the 2024 Paris Olympics | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/paris-france-olympics-protests

    The question facing France is going to be who benefits politically from this collision of an anti-Olympics movement with working-class anger. The left needs to be a home for French discontent. If it does not become one, the right, as it did in Brazil, can swoop in, fasten itself on the issue of Olympic corruption—linked, of course, to racist scapegoating—and find a path to power. Polls show support for left-wing initiatives like protecting pensions, but it’s Le Pen who is leading in the polls. The mere thought of Le Pen in power should be enough to make sure that anti-Olympics rage is used to organize movements for hope—and not divisive despair.

  • The Long #Covid Revolution | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/society/long-covid-disability-policy

    #MillionsMissing demonstrations like this one began in 2016 to raise awareness about myalgic encephalomyelitis, an infection-associated complex chronic illness (often abbreviated as ME/CFS). The hashtag alludes to the millions of dollars missing from research into ME/CFS and the millions of patients who are so marginalized from society that they sometimes seem to have disappeared. In the past three years, there has been an explosion of ME/CFS cases. According to #MEAction, the group that organizes #MillionsMissing, nearly half the current cases of long Covid meet the criteria for ME/CFS, and the majority of people with ME/CFS today are Covid-19 long-haulers.

    Long Covid symptoms, which commonly include persistent headaches, cognitive-functioning issues, fatigue, neuropathies, dizziness and fainting, significant sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal issues, and post-exertional symptom exacerbation (the worsening of symptoms after physical, mental, or emotional exertion), can affect every system of the body and, like those of ME/CFS, can range from mild to very severe. It’s common for Covid-19 long-haulers to receive additional diagnoses for related chronic illnesses. Because scientists also believe Covid may reactivate dormant viruses such as Epstein-Barr, some people with long Covid have been diagnosed with Lyme disease, shingles, and herpes, among other viruses. Many Covid long-haulers share symptom clusters and illness experiences, but “long Covid” also serves as a political term: It is a way for Covid patients who never fully recovered to advocate for research, public education, and economic support, no matter where they fall on the severity spectrum.

  • We Still Don’t Know Why Russia Invaded Ukraine
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/russia-invade-ukraine-war
    Pourquoi la Russie a-t-elle décidé de mener une guerre contre l’#Ukraine en février 2022 précisément ? #Rajan_Menon critique les 2 explications monocausales dominantes.
    1/ C’est l’OTAN.

    Between then [2008] and the invasion moment, NATO never followed through on its pledge to take the next step and provide Kyiv with a “membership action plan.” By February 2022, it had, in fact, kept Ukraine waiting for 14 years without the slightest sign that its candidacy might be advancing (though Ukraine’s security ties and military training with some NATO states—the United States, Britain, and Canada, in particular—had increased).

    So, the NATO-was-responsible theory, suggesting that Putin invaded in 2022 in the face of an “existential threat,” isn’t convincing (even if one believes, as I do, that NATO’s enlargement was a bad idea and Russian apprehensions reasonable).

    2/ C’est la démocratie (qui de l’Ukraine pourrait s’insinuer en Russie).

    None of this explains why the war broke out when it did. Russia wasn’t then being roiled by protests; Putin’s position was rock-solid; and his party, United Russia, had no true rivals. Indeed, the only others with significant followings, relatively speaking, the Communist Party and the Liberal Democracy Party (neither liberal nor democratic), were aligned with the state.

    2’/ C’est une ambition impérialiste.

    But why then did a Russian ruler seized by imperial dreams and a neo-fascist ideology wait more than two decades to attack Ukraine? And remember, though now commonly portrayed as a wild-eyed expansionist, Putin, though hardly a peacemaker, had never previously committed Russian forces to anything like that invasion.

    Alors quoi ?

    Do I have a better explanation? No, but that’s my point. To this day, perhaps the most important question of all about this war, the biggest surprise—why did it happen when it did?—remains deeply mysterious, as do Putin’s motives (or perhaps impulses).

    • L’auteur s’amuse des noms qu’on donne aux guerres, en particulier quand il contient la raison de son déclenchement, et nomme son préféré :
      La guerre de l’oreille de Jenkins
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerre_de_l%27oreille_de_Jenkins

      Jenkins raconte son histoire, demande justice et montre le bocal contenant son oreille. Les parlementaires unanimes poussent un cri d’indignation, invoquent le casus belli, rappellent que l’armada espagnole avait été défaite par la Royal Navy en 1718 au Cap Passaro, exigent que l’honneur britannique soit lavé de l’insupportable affront. Le premier ministre Walpole, qui est partisan de la paix, est forcé de déclarer la guerre à l’Espagne, le 30 octobre 1739

      Perso j’aime assez La guerre des petits gâteaux.
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerre_des_P%C3%A2tisseries

  • The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion

    Conclusion d’un très très long article publié dans The Nation « hebdomadaire classé à gauche et progressiste » (Wikipedia)

    The evidence, however, suggests that throughout the summer and into the fall of 2016, Israel illegally interfered in the US presidential election. A top agent of Netanyahu was secretly offering intelligence and other covert assistance to Trump to get him elected—all with virtually no oversight or scrutiny by the FBI or the US media, though both had numerous personnel in Israel at the time. Now Netanyahu is back in office as prime minister, and Trump is once again running for president. All the ingredients are there for history to repeat itself, unless the Justice Department and Congress conduct long-overdue investigations into the real source of secret foreign collaboration and interference in the 2016 election, and both the FBI and the media remove their self-imposed blinders when it comes to Israel.

    James BamfordJames Bam

  • I’m Not the Man I Used to Be | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/im-not-man-i-used-be

    The reasons for Günter Grass’s silence about his membership in the Waffen SS remain safely hidden in his new memoir.

    July 26, 2007 by Andreas Huyssen

    The onion is not a refined vegetable. It is a cheap, humble staple used in cooking the world over. As a representative of German literature, Günter Grass has always been the onion to Thomas Mann’s artichoke–down-to-earth, exuberantly realistic, picaresque rather than sophisticated or Olympian. Peeling the Onion fulfills such expectations and more. In Grass’s literary memoir the onion is a metaphor for the complex and slippery layers of human memory: “The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth.”

    In The Tin Drum, the 1959 novel that made his reputation and won him the 1999 Nobel Prize, the onion brought both tears and truth, but there Grass was sending up the clammed-up world of early postwar Germany, which lacked the words–the conscience–to come to terms with its recent past. “In the Onion Cellar,” the title of a famous chapter in the novel, refers to a popular nightclub in Düsseldorf’s Altstadt (Old Town) run by a man whose hobby is shooting sparrows on the banks of the Rhine. At the club, he ceremoniously serves onions with cutting boards and knives to his guests–businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, government officials and their wives, mistresses or secretaries–who sit at scrubbed plank tables slicing the vegetable. The ritual produces a flood of bottled-up tears accompanied by confessions, revelations and self-accusations. The onion juice overcomes the post-Nazi inability to mourn, diagnosed by psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich some ten years later as the social pathology of the West German “economic miracle.” But there is something fundamentally suspect about this kind of “overcoming.” Grass’s satire laid bare the ambiguity of such self-serving confessions.

    Düsseldorfers always knew that the model for the Onion Cellar was the artists’ hangout Czikos in the Altstadt. When The Tin Drum was published, the Czikos was still famous for its piping hot, generously peppered goulash, which indeed brought people to tears, if not to confessions and revelations. In Grass’s memoir, the Onion Cellar acquires another dimension. It was at the Czikos in the 1950s that Grass and two friends performed their own version of jazz–a flute, a banjo and Grass’s washboard in lieu of Oskar Matzerath’s tin drum. Czikos, Grass informs us, was also the site of an encounter so typical of the mingling of things German with things American at the time. One evening, after a jam session in Düsseldorf, Louis Armstrong dropped in. Intrigued by the flute’s transformation of German folk songs into jazz rhythms and blues, Armstrong had someone pick up his horn at his hotel, and then sat in with Grass and his friends on a few tunes. Blues in the Onion Cellar: The scene richly suggests how American culture could nurture rebellious–though still apolitical–energies during the postwar restoration under West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

    The Tin Drum, by contrast, was explicitly political, satirizing everyday life under Fascism and the postwar emotional hardening of the collective German mind (evoked by the Onion Cellar’s theater of repression and self-indulgent release). A landmark in postwar German literature, the novel confronted Germans with the legacies of the Third Reich in the ambiguous tale of Oskar Matzerath, the tin drummer. Matzerath’s story spans the war and immediate postwar years–roughly the same period of many of the events retold and transformed in Grass’s memoir. But where the novel creatively transformed life into literature, the reader now witnesses the process in reverse. Here, however, almost fifty years after the publication of The Tin Drum, it is Grass’s legacy as truth-teller that is in question.

    The “revelation” that caused such an uproar late last summer–that for a few months at the end of the war the author served as a drafted member of the Waffen SS–has not been dampened by the crocodile tears shed by the nouveaux riches and bohemian intellectuals gathered in the Onion Cellar. Contrition and self-accusation have never characterized Grass’s work or self-image, and the memoir is no exception. The onion’s “truth” is rather, perhaps, a final footnote to the all too well-known story of the last Hitler Youth generation, the 16- and 17-year-old boys drafted in the closing months of the war to stave off Germany’s inevitable military defeat; those who returned alive successfully established themselves as the first generation of a postwar democratic West Germany after the alleged Stunde Null–Zero Hour, the fall of the Reich, which was experienced as both defeat and liberation. Unlike some of his peers, Grass had never made a secret of the fact that as a member of the Hitler Youth he had believed in the Führer and volunteered for the submarines at 16. But he never made public his service in the Waffen SS, an elite Nazi fighting unit declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials.

    The chorus of denunciations in Germany came from all sides–from those on the right who had always hated Grass’s social democratic politics and “immoral” writing, from those on the radical left who considered him a captive to reformist Social Democrats and from a younger German generation resentful that old-timers like Grass, Martin Walser and Hans Magnus Enzensberger are still stealing the limelight.

    I, too, felt betrayed by a literary idol of my youth when I first heard about Grass’s membership in the Waffen SS. I, too, was tempted to ride the moral high horse: How could Grass, famous since the 1960s for accusing high officials in the West German government of hiding their Nazi past and insisting on public penance, keep this secret for so long? How could he have left even his biographers with the assumption that, like so many other teenagers in 1944-45, he served only as a Flakhelfer, a youth conscript, rather than as a member of the Waffen SS? And why reveal it now, just as his memoir was hitting the market? Was it the need of a writer approaching his 80th birthday to come clean, or was it a clever marketing strategy? Or was it simply his wish, as he claims unapologetically in the memoir, to have the last word, denying his many opponents the pleasure of finding out first? For discovery was inevitable. The POW papers documenting his Waffen SS membership are unambiguous. It was just that nobody, not even his biographers, had bothered to check the details.

    The reasons for Grass’s silence lie safely hidden in the memoir. And in his public statements since Peeling the Onion was published in Germany late last summer, he has been no more forthcoming about his decision to remain silent about this aspect of his past, further fueling the outrage of his critics (not a few of them disappointed admirers). To many, his legacy not just as a public intellectual but as a writer has been seriously damaged. After my initial reaction, however, I felt increasingly reluctant to point the finger at someone whose self-righteous moralizing about German politics had annoyed me time and again over the past few decades–particularly his stubborn insistence on the division of Germany as permanent penance for the crimes of Nazism and his often shrill anti-Americanism. To moralize about Grass’s lack of candor just seemed too easy.

    And when I began to peel the onion by reading the memoir, I was further convinced that my sense of betrayal had overshot its mark. Grass comes down hard and unsentimentally on his inability as a young man to read the signs of the times–the nonconformist fellow student who one day disappeared from the classroom; the Catholic teacher who ended up in a nearby concentration camp; his mother’s hints about the persecution of the Jews. Indoctrinated as he was, he saw and looked away. Günter Grass’s éducation politique was slow in taking shape, and his memoir acknowledges it.

    Reading the skins of the onion, Grass provides a vivid account of his adolescence in the cramped, petit-bourgeois Danzig milieu that made the Nazi promises of heroism and adventure on the seas look like such an appealing escape. The reality was decidedly less romantic: Grass survived by the skin of his teeth and sheer luck in the chaos of the war’s last months, escaping through the woods after his tank unit was decimated in a surprise attack by the advancing Soviet army. Quite plausibly, he claims never to have fired a single shot. The new division of the Waffen SS into which he was drafted fell apart under the Soviet onslaught almost as soon as it was formed.

    This is not the story of an exceptional youth but of a 17-year-old German everyman, viewed unsparingly by the same man six decades later. Of course, there are lapses of memory, uncertainties about details. Grass acknowledges them head-on, if sometimes a bit too coyly. Not everything is written securely in the peels of the onion. But the fact that he describes his youthful self alternately in the first and third person is not evidence of evasion, or of some mendacious effort to blur the line between memoir and fiction, as some have charged. Rather, this oscillation in perspective marks the distance between the memoirist and his teenage self.

    As the narrative moves to the late 1940s and into the following decade, Grass remains true to his earlier self in his descriptions of young Günter’s three desires: real hunger, especially in the “hunger years” immediately following the end of the war; adolescent hunger for sex; and a budding hunger for art. Everything Grass writes about life in Düsseldorf and Berlin at the time resonates vividly, evoked in his signature picaresque tone and with his typical focus on the absurd in everyday life. Of public culture and political history, however, he has strikingly little to say: Neither his later vocal hostility toward the Adenauer restoration nor his engagement with the Social Democrats is evident yet. Like many Germans after the war, Grass shunned politics and found consolation (and, in his case, a vocation) in art, mostly in poetry, drawing and sculpture.

    The chapters on the late 1940s and ’50s revolve around personal reminiscences–his reunion with his parents, who were dislocated to the Rhineland; his apprenticeship as a stonemason, making tombstones; and his study at the Düsseldorf art academy, where Joseph Beuys was also a student. Later there is the Berlin art scene, with its cold war battles over abstraction; his courtship of Swiss dancer Anna Schwarz; and his first success as a literary upstart reading his poems at a meeting of the soon-to-be-famous Group 47. Particularly arresting, and notable for their lack of sentimentality, are his memories of the rather taciturn railroad station goodbye to his unloved father when he left for the war; the great tribute paid to his beloved mother, who died of cancer too early to witness her son’s success; and the account of rescuing his sister from an authoritarian Mother Superior and helping her become a midwife instead of a nun. By contrast, Grass’s tales of his sexual exploits are rather adolescent, without much detail about his sexual partners. The only relationship treated with the delicacy of long-term intimacy and love is the one with Anna, his first wife.

    Interesting though not revelatory are the brief accounts of his literary formation, his love for Cervantes, seventeenth-century novelist Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the 1950s conflict between figuration in painting and Modernist abstraction, Grass sided with figuration, a position that reflected his own practice as a graphic artist. In the existentialist controversy of those years he sided with Camus and the absurd against Sartre’s Marxist politics, but otherwise he remained wary of fashionable existentialist posing. The few pages describing the years spent in Paris in the late 1950s are remarkably pale. Probably because of his limited French and an even more limited budget, he had minimal connections with the Parisian intellectual scene, and his work on The Tin Drum consumed ever more of his time. Even now, it seems that the novel drains energy from the memoir. We hear but don’t learn much about his Paris friendship with poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. The Algerian war rumbles on in the background. In 1958 Grass wins first prize with the Group 47, and in 1959 The Tin Drum appears, to enthusiastic acclaim and public controversy. A year later he and Anna and their children are back in Berlin, and then, all of a sudden, Grass runs out of onions and concludes his memoir.

    Ending his account with the publication of The Tin Drum is, of course, rather convenient, for it allows Grass to evade the lingering and legitimate question of why he never discussed his membership in the Waffen SS until now. Had he done so during the controversy over Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to the Bitburg cemetery, with its SS graves, or during the Historikerstreit, the German historians’ quarrel over the uniqueness of Nazi crimes, his voice could have added substantially to the debate. There is no little irony in the fact that the vociferous and inquisitional demand for contrition and breast-beating should now confront an author who never hesitated to make such demands of others. Still, the Grass affair doesn’t tell us much about the quality of his memoir. And his politics always had more bite in his literary writings than in his political pronouncements.

    Peeling the onion, slippery skin after slippery skin, is a surprisingly apt metaphor for delving into one’s memories. It captures the unreliability of all human memory, its layering and restructuring by partial forgetfulness and corrupted recollections. The other recurrent metaphor in the book is amber, evoking another kind of memory. Amber, tree sap hardened into a yellow-brown mineral, often encasing an insect and found plentifully on the Baltic beaches of Grass’s lost Heimat, stands for the unchanging, petrified memory image. To give but one example: Looking at a honey-colored translucent piece of amber later in life, Grass sees not the proverbial encased insect but himself in full-length outline at 14 and naked. The amber serves here as a projection screen of an image of the pubescent boy ingrained in the narrator’s mind, whereas the onion’s skins need to be read one after another. Reading and seeing, writing and projecting the past are the two modes governing Grass’s writing. The play between onion and amber thus brings a new literary dimension to that inevitable weaving together of Dichtung und Wahrheit, as Goethe had it–the mix of fiction and truth in all autobiography and memoir. The power of any memoir hinges on the right mix, and readers will part ways in assessing it. Critics who chide Grass for couching his Nazi past in literary metaphors, for questioning the reliability of his own memories, for admitting forgetfulness and for hiding behind some of the same complex narrative techniques we know from his novels may score political points, but they betray a simplistic understanding of the genre.

    Perhaps the most fascinating thing we learn from Grass’s memoir is how slowly he arrived at the character of Oskar Matzerath, and how hesitantly he moved from an apolitical understanding of art to writing perhaps the most powerful political novel of the postwar period. This section of the memoir reproduces in microcosm the history of the Federal Republic in those years–the initial confrontation with the political and cultural fallout from the Third Reich, culminating in the commemorative obsessions of more recent decades, when the politics of memory became a worldwide phenomenon. When Grass, who was living in Berlin at the time, witnessed the East German workers’ revolt on June 17, 1953, near Potsdamer Platz, he had no hunger for politics or memory, nor any desire to write the great postwar German novel. He kept working as an artist and poet. He first won recognition as a writer almost by default, when he read his poems with the Group 47 in 1955. Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn–himself burdened by his initial support for Hitler but still a major literary figure in the early ’50s–read Grass’s poetry at the time and predicted that he would one day write prose.

    Although Grass never gave up on poetry, he achieved fame for his novels, especially the Danzig trilogy. It is fascinating to read how the novel that ultimately won him the Nobel Prize emerged inchoately, indeed almost by accident. Toward the end of the memoir, Grass explains his shift from poetry to prose as a compulsion to abandon his earlier apolitical and aestheticist stance and to face the German past: “I could easily have engaged in productive time-wasting and made myself look interesting at Group 47 meetings with new artistic devices if the massive weight of the German past and hence my own could have somehow been ignored. But it stood in the way. It tripped me up. There was no getting around it. As if prescribed for me, it remained impenetrable: here was a lava flow that had barely cooled down, there a stretch of solid basalt, itself sitting on even older deposits. And layer upon layer had to be carried away, sorted, named. Words were needed. And a first sentence was still missing.”

    But then the compulsion to write, as he once put it in typically blunt fashion, hit him like diarrhea. The old Grass gave a political twist to the same idea when he wrote in his recent novel Crabwalk: “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” Indeed, this does sum up more than just the origins of The Tin Drum.

    The critic Hans Mayer once divided German artists into martyrs and representatives. If Mann was a representative of German culture in the traditional sense, Grass, who likes to claim persecution by the media, never was a martyr but always a representative of the democratic postwar Western republic, warts and all. Like his Danzig trilogy, the author nearing the age of 80, with his mustache, his pipe and his political pronouncements, stands like a block of lava in the midst of a cultural formation that has become history. In that sense, for better or worse, Grass remains who he was before: a major representative of German post-World War II literature. And he remains so in a perhaps even deeper sense than before the late revelation and continuing evasion in his memoir.

    Andreas HuyssenAndreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is a founding editor of New German Critique and the author, most recently, of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.

    #Allemagne #lettres #histoire #le_tambour #guerre #nazis

  • Alaa Abd el-Fattah and the Hope of a Generation | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alaa-abd-el-fattah-essays

    As I write this, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who is often known in Egypt just as Alaa, is on his 67th day of a hunger strike. In solitary confinement at Egypt’s maximum security Tora Prison, he has been deprived of sunlight, reading materials, or the right to walk outside his cell for exercise, and forbidden from writing or receiving letters. So he has resorted to the only means of protest that remains to him. There is so much to be said about Alaa—his transformation from blogger to “voice of a generation,” from activist to revolutionary icon, from tech whiz kid to symbol of Egypt’s hundreds of thousands of nameless disappeared. But that his life now hovers at the edge of the bardo, sustained by water and rehydration salts, is the fact that must appear first. “I’m the ghost of spring past,” he wrote in 2019, as if to prophesy his fate.
    BOOKS IN REVIEW
    You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021

    By Alaa Abd El-Fattah

    Buy this book

    Only 40 years old, Alaa has spent most of the last decade in captivity as Egypt’s most prolific prisoner of consciousness, jailed by each of his country’s successive dictators. In 2006, he was first detained for protesting in support of judges calling for an independent judiciary. He was released 45 days later, only to then be incarcerated in 2011 and 2013 for relatively brief periods. But it was in in 2015 that he would be sentenced to five years for allegedly organizing a political protest without a permit; and then, only months after his release in 2019, he was arrested again for the crime of sharing a Facebook post. Alaa had spent his few months of relative freedom forced to sleep at the Doqqi police station in Cairo each night; upon his return to prison, he was brutally tortured. “I become an object, something to be eliminated, destroyed, disappeared, negated, excluded,” Alaa has written. “I become a symbol or a bogeyman, with no physical presence.”

    With You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, we are fortunate to have Alaa’s remarkable, collected writings now in a physical form, translated and edited by a collective that remains anonymous for their own security. With the book, we follow Alaa’s political trajectory and the evolution of his political thinking. Above all we see him ask: “What am I to do with a political self torn from its ordinary physical and human context? How do I live as a symbol however iconic it may be?” If what makes Alaa’s, or any person, “political” is their capacity to speak for, and represent, the aspirations of others, then can one ever really remain oneself? “Like a ghost,” he explains in “On Probation,” “I move in your time but I’m suspended in the past.” Imprisonment didn’t just aim to sideline him from history; it sought to deprive him of the rituals that punctuate the passage of time: He was permitted neither to be with his dying father nor to witness the birth of his son. And yet, as he reflects on his metamorphosis into an atemporal, spectral symbol, he cannot help but wonder, “When did it become OK for adults to communicate mostly in emojis and gifs?!”

    I, like many others, first heard Alaa’s name around 2006 when, shortly after the execution of Saddam Hussein, and taking heed of labor strikes and a quest for judicial independence, Egypt’s longest-ruling dictator, Husni Mubarak, had permitted mild-mannered, middle-class public criticisms of his regime. Alaa was one of a handful of activists to take advantage of relatively fast dial-up Internet access in those years and the optimism that flowed from it, but the latter was short-lived: Alaa was among many blogger-activists to end up on jail. But it wasn’t until I flew back to Egypt in January 2011, to participate in the demonstrations that would turn into the revolution, that I became better acquainted with his ideas. It was soon after that night in February, which in the mythology of Tahrir was referred to as “the Battle of the Camel.” Like Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, the 17 days of revolution all had their holy monikers: Rage Tuesday, Departure Friday, Martyrs’ Sunday. And in those days I discovered the powerful constitutional ruminations of Alaa, whose name I had vaguely known but not associated with the kind of intricate political ideas on display in these collected essays.

    At the time that I first became aware of his thinking, there was much talk of Constitutions. Everyone knew that Mubarak’s monstrous text, despite having undergone a few cosmetic and meaningless reforms around 2006, needed to be discarded. But what would the template of Egypt’s new constitution be? Would it be “the Turkish model,” or “the American”? Amid these fierce debates, it stood out in my memory that Alaa was alone to ask why we needed somebody else’s template at all. Why couldn’t we collectively imagine (or given his training in tech, crowdsource) our own? As I remember it, Alaa said this before a gathered crowd in the square. The ideas were soon developed into an essay published in July of 2011; in the same month, Alaa’s dream of a crowdsourced Constitution was launched, as the “Let’s Write Our Constitution” movement.

    In “Who Will Write the Constitution?,” Alaa drew inspiration from South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which he considered particularly radical less for its content than for the process by which it was assembled. Mandela and his comrades didn’t presume that it was their role to “educate the public” but rather to receive instruction from them, disrupting the directional and elitist metaphors for how and why ideas travel. “Mandela and his comrades needed the public to educate them politically,” Alaa wrote. “Why assume that we’re any better?” A lack of humility, Alaa prophesied, would be our downfall. In a suburb outside Johannesburg, “in a space much like our Tahrir squares,” Alaa wrote, intentionally using the plural, “for two days, Kliptown lived the most important democratic experiment in history.” Yet democratic experiments, Alaa cautioned, are ephemeral, and necessarily tragic: Like cruel dreams that can only be experienced, felt, and seen, they disappear at the moment when we try to institutionalize them, or even translate them into words. Democracy flourishes at the interstices, the in-between spaces, at the place where politics pours into poetry. Whenever we try to render it eternal, it dies.

    Many of Alaa’s words in the collection read like prophecies or seem clairvoyant in hindsight. Yet he refuses any praise: “To every Cassandra, there is no prize for being first to make predictions, and there’s no use in saying I told you so,” he writes. “Cassandra’s tragedy isn’t that she was unable to convince others. Her tragedy, as in all Greek drama, was the failure to accept the limits of her condition.” It is precisely in our collective refusal to accept our limitations that Alaa insists the defeat of the Arab Spring is found. Defeat, he shows us, cannot be located in the actions of others but in our own, sometimes necessary, delusions. For this reason, his essays resist enumerating painful litanies of state violence, largely because Alaa insists that focusing on the missteps of the enemy is a distraction from the incoherencies, the oversights, and the divisions within each one of us. If the political is born at the moment when we distinguish between friend and enemy, the insistence that the enemy is external to us may be a comforting if also dangerous fantasy. Revolutions succeed when revolutionaries are willing to also confront their own inconsistencies and the sparring forces at the heart of their very beings. Revolutionary slogans such as despair is treason are troubling, Alaa writes: “The denial of a natural feeling scares me.”

    #Alaa_Abd_el_Fattah

  • Un nouvel article rappelant à quel point pour de nombreux Ukrainiens l’agression russe doit être considérée comme une occupation coloniale et une guerre impérialiste.

    https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-russia-european-left

    ❝“F*ck Leftist Westsplaining!”
    Listening to voices of the Central and East European left.
    By Linda MannheimTwitter
    April 4, 2022

    Berlin—This was once the fault line between East and West in Europe. Almost 35 years after the momentous change brought about by the fall of the Wall, Germany still feels tied to two regions, two histories. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is viewed and spoken about in a very different way here than it is in the United States.

    This part of Europe has already changed in a fundamental way. Nearly 2 million refugees from Ukraine reached Poland by March 18. Ten thousand refugees are arriving in Berlin every day. At the Romanian border, children fleeing Ukraine cross a footbridge lined with toys volunteers have left to welcome them.

    To understand how each of these places is connected to the other, you need to know that the distance between Berlin and the Polish border is shorter than distance between New York and New Haven, that there are no hard borders between most countries in the EU, that both university instructors and house cleaners sometimes commute to work from one country to another. And to understand how close the war feels, you need to know that, when rockets struck Volodymyr Ukraine, windows shook in Poland.
    The Smearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson Will Haunt Democrats

    Approximately 80 years after the Second World War and 30 years after the end of the Cold War, in Central and Eastern Europe the memory of both remain very present. Stories of life during invasions, said Zosia Brom, are “passed from generation to generation.” Brom, editor of the anarchist journal Freedom, grew up in Poland.

    “Like most Eastern Europeans, I have spent the past week or so living in some kind of haze, where news cycles really last 24hrs, there is no sleep, and your phone rings constantly,” Brom wrote in a recent essay titled “Fuck leftist westplaining.” Written like an angry letter to a friend, the piece calls out Western leftists for their lack of knowledge about Eastern Europe and their disregard for the perspectives of people who grew up in countries that were colonised by Russia.

    Brom’s missive is one of the “Many vital texts…on the problems with #westsplaining, coloniality and the denial of a voice, agency & self-determination in debates on Ukraine, Central & Eastern Europe,” identified by political philosopher Tereza Hendl, who grew up in Prague. Hendl created a much-referenced Twitter thread linking to work by writers from the East European left.

    When we spoke recently on Zoom, Hendl, like many of those writers, expressed her appreciation for the anti-imperialist and anti-racist work produced by the US left, but noted: “It’s really remarkable that when the Western left discusses Russian imperialism, it so often does not engage and build on the voices of those who have survived those imperial acts of aggression…and the long history of colonial violence in Central and in North Asia and of course Syria as well.”
    (...)
    #Ukraine #Russie #impérialisme #occupation #colonialisme