by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS

Money on the Left speaks with Pavlina Tcherneva, Professor of Economics at Bard College and leading scholar of–-and advocate for—Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Many of our listeners will be familiar with Dr. Tcherneva’s contributions to MMT, especially her book, The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity Press, 2020). She is also Director of Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, instrumental to the publication of a United Nations report on the job guarantee, titled “The Employment Guarantee as a Tool in the Fight Against Poverty.” We speak with Pavlina about her work, and also get her perspective on the causes and conditions of MMT’s movement from the margins of economic discourse toward the mainstream of political economic thought.

Transcript

The following was transcribed by Mike Lewis and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Billy Saas:  Pavlina Tcherneva, welcome to Money on the Left.

Pavlina Tcherneva:  Thank you for having me.

Billy Saas:  We’re very excited to have you, of course, a very accomplished author and researcher, and respected MMT principle theorist. How did you get here, where you are today? And how did you come to MMT?

Pavlina Tcherneva:  Oh, how long do you have? It is true that perhaps your audience knows me most with my work on the job guarantee and the recent book that came out in 2020 The Case for a Job Guarantee, but I didn’t actually quite start there. I would say that probably like most MMTers, certainly the initial group. I, too, was caught up by what Keynes called “Babylonian madness”. We all were provoked to look at the history of money because we realized early on that there was one research project that was not fully developed even in heterodox theory. That was the project of understanding money as fundamentally a public institution and as you well know, heterodox theory has long talked about money as a core analytical category in understanding a monetary production economy, a capitalist economy, a market economy. Orthodox approaches had no finance, had no money beyond some very simple kind of assumptions about it being a numeraire. But Post-Keynesian Institutionalists, too, didn’t really have a rigorous program, looking at money as a public institution. We had a lot on endogenous money, on financial instability, on how unemployment is a monetary phenomenon, on all of the important things of capitalism, except I would say the state. This work did exist out there, but I would say that with our work and our introduction to Warren Mosler, getting together with Randy Wray, Matt Forstater, Stephanie Kelton, the familiar names, this is when we all started thinking: well, what’s missing here in the analysis? And there’s one very basic, fundamental, stylized fact that every student knows. Every student knows that the currency is a public monopoly. It’s probably the purest form of monopoly, and yet the profession didn’t have much to say about this. So when I did my internship with Warren Mosler in ’96, that was really the first question: what are the implications of a currency being a public monopoly? In economics, you might find something in mainstream theory, mainstream literature about competing currencies, the efficiency of the chosen numeraire, these kinds of frameworks. Then you will find something about the state usurping power over the monetary unit because it comes from gold and market exchange, all of this really unfounded in history and anthropology and sociology. Nobody tells the stories except economists. But that’s the extent of what we would find in Orthodox theory, that the currency monopoly is somehow the state taking over some innovation that the private market came to. The other thing you would find in mainstream theory is to say, Well, if the government decided to then print its own currency, then of course, it naturally will inflate it, it will abuse it, and can’t do anything good with it. That is just a very thin analysis. But there are deeper, I think, questions to be answered. Some of the very first things that I did, and almost in a playful way, when I was working for Warren was to say: okay, well, can we model this? What could be some of these implications that if the state is the monopoly currency issuer, what are some implications from that basic stylized fact? The very first one is the one that everybody associates with MMT: the government can’t run out and that’s obvious. I think we got to go deeper than just the very obvious that we can’t run out of money. That’s clear. Well, if you’re a monopolist, then you have some unique powers. Pricing power is an important one. I think that is still under-researched, in terms of the MMT project. We have statements, we have made certain claims, but I feel like the literature needs to develop on that front. One of the pricing powers is that you can set the price of money itself. That is, of course, the interest rate. We know very well that the government can do that. The central bank is the one that can set the price of money. The other one is that you can also set the price of how the currency exchanges for other things. You can set a conversion rate. So, if the state is the one that imposes some kind of tax liability, and people need to earn the currency, then what do they need to deliver in exchange and what price would be paid for whatever they deliver? So, those were kind of macro, they were modeling questions, they were as theoretical questions to me, they were very interesting questions because one of the things that I showed with the math model is that if the more you pay as a currency monopolist, the fewer resources you’re going to attract, given a certain tax liability. That was kind of counterintuitive. The more the public sector injects it to the private sector, the fewer resources it might be able to attract given the tax obligation. So that was the first question, but then the second was: Well, how could the state inject currency into the economy? Could the state do it in a way to just always employ unemployed labor? Again, the job guarantee initially was, for me, this very much of a macro question, is there a way for the government to spend in a better way, in a way that it can secure full employment? Very quickly it was clear that full employment and price stability were not competing goals. That, in fact, they were very much part of these inherent powers of the state. So the job guarantee emerged as this alternative to the NAIRU. Heterodoxy, for a very long time, had criticized the NAIRU. It had very thorough, rigorous critique, but I would say, probably not an alternative policy proposal. I think, for me, that very quickly was quite obvious that certainly you can use your pricing powers to anchor prices of a very fundamental, most essential input of production. You can do it to create full employment, and then, of course, you have other tools to deal with inflation and price stability. So as I said, for me, the MMT project was about identifying some kind of essential principles behind the currency rather than some accidental, if you will, aspects to the monetary system, and how we can utilize the monetary system to create more economic stability and full employment. Over time, this project became quite personal. It became personal when I did my dissertation because I was able to observe how a job guarantee or program inspired by the job guarantee proposal was implemented in Argentina. When I was able to visit and see how the program was run, the impact on women, on poor mothers, on communities, I mean, that’s when everything changed. It became just as important that we have a framework for thinking of how macro policy can be implemented, but also to understand the on the ground effects of macro policy. If there is one theme that I think runs through my work, is the question of how can we do things better? That ranges from how to do fiscal policy better, how we can improve on what we’re doing currently, how we can do monetary policy better, and the like. So I would say that that is really the overarching theme. Not so much “Can we pay for it?” Yes, of course we can. But now that we can, what shall we do with these fundamental powers?

Monthly Review Online for more & to listen

by KATHERINE GUINNESS, GRANT BOLLMER & TOM DOIG

In December 2023, WIRED reported that Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of Meta and one of the foremost architects of today’s social-media-dominated world, has been buying up large swathes of the Hawaiian island Kauai.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are constructing a gigantic compound – known as Ko’olau Ranch – on this land, which will most likely cost over A$400 million to complete.

This estate stretches over 5,500,000 square metres, is surrounded by a two-metre wall and is patrolled by numerous security guards driving quad bikes on nearby beaches. Hundreds of local Hawaiians work on Zuckerberg’s property. But precisely how many, and what they actually do, is concealed by a binding nondisclosure agreement.

WIRED’s subheading hones in on the fact that Zuckerberg’s Ko’olau Ranch includes plans for a “massive underground bunker”. This seems to be the detail that piques the interest of reporters and conspiracy theorists alike.

People are asking not only “Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?”, but also “What do the [billionaires] know?” and “What is going to happen in 2024 that they are not telling us?”.

Beyond the bunker fixation

Doomsday bunkers are becoming a common sight in contemporary apocalypse-themed US pop culture, from The Last of Us and Tales from the Walking Dead to the recent Netflix film, Leave the World Behind.

At the same time, public interest in the (increasingly lucrative) bunker industry is fanned by lurid headlines such as “Billionaires’ Survivalist Bunkers Go Absolutely Bonkers With Fiery Moats and Water Cannons”.

But other pieces of infrastructure on Kauai are arguably more deserving of our attention: several oversized mansions, with the combined footprint of a football field; at least 11 treehouses connected by rope bridges; machinery dedicated to water purification, desalination and storage.

Meanwhile, the Facebook billionaire posts “relatable” content on Instagram from his humble ranch, such as a pic of “Zuck” about to tuck into a massive side of grilled beef.

Zuck informs his followers he’s now ranching his own cattle, feeding them with macadamia nuts grown on the ranch and beer brewed there as well. “Each cow eats 5,000-10,000 pounds of food each year, so that’s a lot of acres of macadamia trees,” he (or one of his assistants) writes.

The Conversation for more

by MARIA PAEZ VICTOR

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

– Albert Einstein

The USA is stuck in the recurring folly of trying to dictate the political life of Venezuela, including by trying to discredit their elections. They cannot grasp the fact that Venezuela is a sovereign nation, that it has frequent, free, and fair elections, and that it will not bow to political blackmail, even in the face of crippling illegal sanctions.

For 22 years the foreign policy of the USA has aimed to destabilize and openly overthrow (under the euphemism of “regime change”) the legitimate government of Venezuela.  It has not been enough for the USA that Venezuela has always been willing to sell them oil, and to give USA oil companies a participating share in its production. No, Washington wants to utterly control and own the vast Venezuelan oil reserve. They have backed, financially and otherwise, coups d’etat, mercenary invasions, horrific street violence, assassination attempts, drone attacks, cyber-attacks, bribery, sabotage, and lethal economic sanctions – all have failed to bring down the ever-popular governments led by Hugo Chávez and now Nicolás Maduro. What a slow learning curve for Washington!

To undermine Maduro’s presidency, in 2019, Washington conjured up a scheme of promoting an obscure politician as an alternative president for Venezuela, one Juan Guaido. It failed miserably. Now they have come up with a plot to create an alternative leader of the opposition for Venezuela. This time they chose a very well-known woman politician, Maria Corina Machado: infamous for her involvement in attempted coups d’etat, and acts of public violence, for asking for more illegal sanctions for Venezuela and even – gasp!- for advocating USA military intervention in Venezuela.

The most outrageous folly was the posturing of an insignificant stooge,  Guaido, as the supposed “real” president of the country, without a presidential election or popular backing. He was the emperor without any clothes, a president without power, following or nation, yet was kowtowed to by those who wanted to deny the legitimacy of the government of Venezuela and its real president, Nicolás Maduro. The imaginary presidency would have been funny if it had not been tragic, because millions of dollars – Venezuelan assets- were given by the USA and its allies to this individual and his gang who advocated the economic sanctions against their own country.  They turned out to be no more than criminals as the funds ended up in their pockets, wasted on ill-conceived, even wacky “invasions”, and on drugs, orgies, and protection money to narcotraffic gangs. They can be accurately described as international thieves that pulled the wool over Uncle Sam’s eyes. But the Emperor cannot admit he has no clothes on.

Counterpunch for more

by ASHWIN MURTHY

The political ideologies embraced by Indian Americans in the U.S. often diverge from their opinions on similar issues in the Indian political scenario

The Indian American paradox

As India and the United States gear up for pivotal elections this year, the role of Indian Americans in shaping the political landscape of both nations has never been more pronounced.

Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Modi have transcended national boundaries in their election campaign by visiting the U.S. to court the diaspora. American landmarks from the Golden Gate Bridge to Times Square often serve as rallying points for impassioned discussions on Indian issues, such as witnessed during the recent inauguration of the Ayodhya temple.

In the mosaic of American politics, Indian Americans are leaving an undeniable imprint. From a solitary representative in 2013, the community has experienced a seismic shift, culminating in the historic election of Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020 and the tantalizing prospect of an Indian American Vice President in 2024 too.

Yet, beneath this narrative of progress lies a disconcerting paradox: the political ideologies embraced by Indian Americans in the United States often sharply diverge from their opinions on similar issues in the Indian political scenario, revealing a troubling hypocrisy that merits examination.

Leaning left in America

Like most other minority ethnicities, Indian Americans in the U.S. consistently lean left. The 2020 elections showcased this trend vividly, with a staggering 72% of Indian American voters supporting the Biden-Harris ticket. Analysis such as those by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the BBC suggests that this preference is largely driven by concerns over xenophobia, majoritarianism, and the perceived entrenchment of Christian and White fundamentalism within the Republican Party.

The exuberant reception that Prime Minister Narendra Modi received from the diaspora during his 2023 visit to the U.S. underscores his popularity among Indian Americans. Prime Minister Modi undoubtedly deserves credit for his growth-oriented vision for India. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that his popularity among the diaspora is ironically also fuelled by the same ethno-nationalist politics that the diaspora shies away from in the US political landscape.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P) and its allies have openly espoused a vision of India as a Hindu nation, a stance that goes even beyond Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric.

India Currents for more

by EJAZ HAIDER

Last July’s attack in Bajaur, January’s attack in Iran and the recent one in Moscow show that ability of the group’s franchises to stage spectacular acts of destruction worldwide remains.

“‘Listen up — there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.’“ — Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

PROLOGUE

On April 23, 2015, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, head of Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry’s elite special forces unit (a counter-terrorism unit), failed to show up for a meeting with the interior minister.

No one had seen him for three days. His phone was switched off. His wife was contacted. She claimed that, for some time, Khalimov had been living with his second wife. When his second wife was contacted, she said that Khalimov had told her he was going off on a mission for a few days. She told the officials that was all she knew.

The news quickly spread. The head of the special forces, a high-ranking officer, a man close to President Emomali Rahmon’s family, had disappeared. Rumours abounded. Had Khalimov joined the political opposition and taken refuge in the mountains? Had he fallen out with Rahmon’s son and been eliminated. Yes, that’s possible in Tajikistan, a family autocracy that is highly repressive.

Independent journalists began to investigate. Abdusalim Khalimov, the father of Gulmurod, living in their village in the Varzob district, said he had no idea where his son was, saying, “It’s been a month. I don’t know what happened. A soldier came and asked me questions. I don’t know anything about it.” Weeks went by without any news. Finally, the news broke.

On May 28, Central Asia TV network revealed that Khalimov had been found. He was in Syria, with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The channel ran a video clip by Khalimov. The message was recorded in Russian and addressed all Muslims in Russia and the former Soviet republics. “Brothers are waiting to enter Tajikistan and Russia and establish shariah,” the message said.

Later reports indicated that Khalimov had fled with 10 others to Turkey via Russia and then entered Syria from Turkey. Tajik authorities refused to comment on Khalimov’s desertion. Arkady Dubnov, a Russian expert on Central Asia with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Khalimov’s video was authentic.

Dawn for more

by GAVIN WALKER

I

To summarise the reception history of Marx in Japan is no small task.1 In fact, it is essentially impossible to give an adequate overview of one of the deepest, most prolific, and most variegated linguistic repositories of the Marxist tradition. Although it remains remarkably little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism was the dominant strand of theoretical inquiry in Japan for most of the 20th century; more pointedly, we might say, Japanese has remained perhaps the most important language for Marxist-theoretical scholarship beyond English, German, and French, yet its theoretical history remains relatively isolated within its own linguistic boundaries. From its initial entry into the Japanese intellectual world in the late 1800s, Marxist analysis quickly came to constitute a vast and osmotic field that permeated all aspects of academic life, historical thought, forms of political organisation, and ways of analysing the social condition. Numerous examples testify to this, including the striking fact that the first Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the world was not published in German, Russian, French or English, but in Japanese, by Kaiz?sha publishing house in 1932 in 35 volumes, overseen by Sakisaka Itsur?.

There are few other places in the world where the distinction between the history of Marx’s reception and the history of Marxism is as important. Why? In the first place, while Japan constitutes one of the earliest and most influential receptions of Marx (especially for the ‘non-Western’ world), and in the twentieth century one of the advanced capitalist countries most intellectually and socially marked by Marxist thought, the path of development of this reception is quite different from its main comparable societies, mostly in Europe and North America.

While the English, French, German, Italian, American and numerous other receptions of Marx saw his work as immediately linked to and embedded in the history of the workers’ movement, it would be hard to say that this holds true in the case of Japan. Although a strong and powerful labour movement had existed since the intense industrialisation of the 1870s-1890s, this movement was principally conditioned in intellectual terms by a certain socialist-nativist orientation that provided the political ground for numerous social movements of the 19th century, stretching back to the late years of the Tokugawa feudal system, with its millenarian peasant contestations and formations of mass social consciousness. In this sense, Marx’s work entered Japan not simply as the political vanguard of the labour and socialist movements, but also (or even principally) as the theoretical vanguard of the cutting-edge of social-scientific inquiry into the character of modern society, with its two central poles: the social relation of capital, and the formation of the modern national state.

Marx’s Capital was first published in German one year before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which would place Japan thereafter on its pathway towards rapid capitalist development, industrialisation, and the turn to imperialism on the Asian continent. The first known introduction to Marx, well before the publication of Capital as a translated text, was a text titled simply “Karl Marx,” written by Kusaka Ch?jir?, who had studied in Germany in 1889-90, in the Kokka gakkai zasshi (vol. 6, no. 72-74) in 1893 (the 26^th year of the Meiji Era) (Suzuki 1956: 1), although as Suzuki points out, it is perhaps doubtful that Kusaka’s text was based on a real reading of Capital. For that, we ought to rather point to one of the most dominant and important thinkers of the early reception of Marx in Japan, Yamakawa Hitoshi, whose text “Marx’s Capital” was serialised in his radical newspaper, the Osaka heimin shinbun, in 4 issues in 1908 (Suzuki 1956: 6). Yamakawa would later go on to be one of the key figures in the early historiographical battles that would deeply mark the reception of Marx in Japan, which we will touch on shortly.

A tradition of socialism, linked to the workers’ and peasants’ movements, already existed, whose prominent intellectuals included K?toku Shusui and Katayama Sen. K?toku’s Shakaishugi shinzui (The Essence of Socialism) emerged in print in the same year as Katayama Sen’s Waga shakaishugi (My Socialism), 1903, a pivotal turning point in the development of Marxist thought in Japan (Sugihara 1998: 47). K?toku, who would soon be executed in the ‘High Treason Incident’ of 1911 on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate the emperor, was the translator of The Communist Manifesto, and a committed early socialist. Soon moving towards an anarcho-syndicalist position in subsequent years, K?toku’s early linking of the emperor system to the development of capitalism in Japan would remain a key point of contention in later debates in Marxist thought. In the following year, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, it would be Katayama’s handshake with his Russian counterpart Georgy Plekhanov at the 6^th Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam that introduced the socialist world to the existence and prominence of the Japanese socialist movement. Katayama would, in the subsequent decades, go on to an extraordinary internationalist life: as a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, he was a founding member of three communist parties: the Japan Communist Party, the US Communist Party, and the Mexican Communist Party, which he helped found alongside his internationalist Indian comrade M.N. Roy in their unlikely years of struggle in Mexico City together. His story is all the more remarkable considering Katayama was born a destitute peasant in rural Okayama in the last days of the feudal system (see Katayama’s early English text in Katayama 1918).

But, aside from these early developments of Marxist thought at the turn of the century, the specificity of Marx’s theoretical work – and its essence in Capital – remained to be developed. In a sense, it is impossible to dissociate Marx’s reception in Japan from its centrality to the university system. From the 1910s into the 1920s, during the Taisho era, Marx’s Capital came more and more to the fore, to the extent that it became even a public figure of discourse to refer to the young men obsessed with Capital by the name “Marx boys” [Marukusu b?i]. This new culture of the study of Marx produced an extraordinary generation of thinkers, many of whom would go on to become important theorists of Marx, and of Marxism in a broad sense: Yamakawa Hitoshi, Fukumoto Kazuo, Inomata Tsunao, Noro Eitaro, Yamada Moritaro, Hani Goro, Uno Kozo, Kuruma Samezo, and many others, alongside those in the realm of philosophy proper, such as Tosaka Jun or Kakehashi Akihide. Perhaps the catalyst or turning point of the entire period was the appearance of Kawakami Hajime’s Binb? monogatari (A Tale of Poverty), essentially a kind of popular introduction of socialist thought, which was serialised over three months in 1916 in the Osaka Asahi newspaper. The articles were shortly after compiled in book form, and proved so powerful in the intellectual climate at the time, that it was reprinted thirty times already by 1919 (Bernstein 1976: 87). This text in turn led Kawakami towards Marx’s own work, and in 1919, he published the influential Introduction to Marx’s Capital (Shihonron ny?mon). Many later Marxist thinkers cited this text and its appearance as the main catalyst for the popularisation of Marxist theoretical work. Uno Kozo for instance, later referred to the importance of Kawakami’s work as some of the first value-theoretical writing in Japanese (See Uno 1970, vol. 1: 214, 305). By the late 1910s, especially in the two years following the success of the October Revolution, the theoretical vitality of Marx in Japan had been firmly established, and a new era of polemics opened (On this period in general, see Wakabayashi 1998: 147-206).

II

Historical Materialism for more

by JOELLE ROLLO-KOSTER

In medieval Europe, views of women could often be summed up in two words: sinner or saint.

As a historian of the Middle Ages, I teach a course entitled Between Eve and Mary: the two biblical figures who sum up this binary view of half of humanity. In the Bible’s telling, Eve got humans expelled from the Garden of Eden, unable to resist biting into the forbidden fruit. Mary, meanwhile, conceived the Son of God without human intercourse.

Either way, they’re daunting models – and either way, patriarchy considered women in need of protection and control. But how can we know what medieval women thought? Did they really accept this vision of themselves?

I do not believe that we can totally understand someone who lived and died hundreds of years ago. However, we can try to somewhat reconstruct their frame of mind with the resources we have available.

Analysis of the world, from experts

Few documents that survive from medieval Europe were written by women or even dictated by women. Those that do are often formulaic, full of legal and religious language. Yet the wills and censuses that survive, and which I study, open a window into their lives and minds, even if not produced by women’s hands. These documents suggest that medieval women had at least some form of empowerment to define their lives – and deaths.

A centuries-old census

In 1371, the city of Avignon, in present-day France, organized a census. The resulting document is ripe with the names of more than 3,820 heads of household. Of these, 563 were female – women who were in charge of their own household and did not shy away from declaring it publicly.

These were not women of high social status but individuals scarcely remembered by history, who left only traces in these administrative documents. One-fifth of them declared an occupation, including both single and married women: from unskilled laborer or handmaid to innkeeper, bookseller or stonecutter.

Nearly 50% of the women declared a place of origin. The majority came from around Avignon and other parts of southern France, but some 30% came from what is now northern France, southwest Germany and Italy.

The Conversation for more

by MUHAMMAD ALI EHSAN

Pakistan clearly needs to decide how it wants to manage its relationship with both the US and China

Having correct notions and making correct assumptions are the essential gifts of a truly great strategist. Without them strategising no more remains an art, in fact it becomes a burden that the ungifted leader must carry. Notion is considered as a particular belief or understanding about something that a leader must carry whereas assumption is something that a leader assumes to be the case even without any proof. ‘The US is weak’ and ‘Europe is divided and dependent on Russian energy’ were the notions that guided President Vladimir Putin to strategise his special military operations in Ukraine. On the other hand, ‘Putin wants to conquer the entire Ukraine’ and ‘later move into Europe’ have remained the Western assumptions that have guided them to militarily support Ukraine. Putin’s notions have stood the test of time whereas the Western assumptions are falling flat in the face of current circumstances and conditions in the war zone.

Western Poland was invaded by Hitler and Nazi German with a ground force of 1.5 million in World War II. The other half, Eastern Poland, was taken over by Stalin’s Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Considering that Poland is half the size of Ukraine and it took Hitler 1.5 million ground troops to conquer it, how on earth will Putin conquer the entire Ukraine with 200,000 ground troops and later move into Eastern Europe and overrun other eastern European countries too? Judging from the lesson of history, Russia would require a ground force structure of no less than 3 million to not only conquer Ukraine but also hold and retain it. In view of this, the entire set of Western assumptions is based on a wrong premise and is a Western propaganda that is leading its grand strategy astray in case of war in Ukraine.

Two ongoing and two potential conflicts dominate the global agenda: in eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine; in Middle East, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; in Eastern Pacific, the China-Taiwan conflict and in Gulf, the most recent attempts being made to draw Iran into a wider Middle Eastern conflict. All these conflicts are creating turbulences in an international system that is already anarchic. With every passing day these actual and potential conflicts create panic and fear as the surrounding states and the world in general gets busy and absorbed in whataboutism if these conflicts escalate.

Currently China is the main rival of the US; and just as what it did to the Soviet Union in cold war, the US strategy is to strangle the economic growth of China and contain it. In Cold War, we had two orders: a Western order and a Soviet order. After the end of the Soviet order, the Western order survived and that is not acceptable to China and Russia. In fact, China is in the process of creating its own order and the unfolding of BRI and China’s actions in South China Sea and Western Pacific are indications of emergence of this Chinese order. Therefore, there is an intense economic and security competition between these great powers; and given Pakistan’s history of close economic and military collaboration with China, we stand in the middle of this security and economic competition. Under the current conflictual regional and global environment, Pakistan clearly needs to decide how it wants to manage its relationship with both the US and China. Without deeply committing ourselves to take any side, we must carefully view our relationship with both the great powers, utilising the correct notions to button up, thread and zip our relationship under assumptions based on correct premises. We must weigh our relationship with these great powers after viewing it from all three dimensions: security (military), economic and ideological.

From the military or security point of view, the US is a distant power but it has a deep stated interest in not allowing Pakistan to harbour and develop common strategic interests with China. From the US perspective the attack on the Chinese engineers and the consequent Chinese rollback of its dam construction activities in Pakistan serve the larger US agenda of forcing Chinese to roll back their strategic interests in our country. Despite the US promises of economic and military aid and continuity of the IMF programme which Pakistan so desperately seeks, our military and economic intercourse with China is deeply embedded in our long historic friendly relations which are time tested and which can easily be termed as Pakistan’s lifeline given the threats we face on both our eastern and western frontiers.

Economically our biggest problem is the shortage of energy and it is up to our leadership to urgently decide from where to seek the solution to this problem. Both China and Russia have developed deep strategic engagements with Iran. Today the Iranian drones and other military equipment help Russia fight in Ukraine and China is pushing to develop deep security and economic relations with Iran with a promised investment of over $400 billion in the next 25 years. Can we afford to antagonise the US and can our foreign policy Iranianise?

Considering our geopolitical threats, ideologically we need to decide which side is good to develop relations with for the next 25 to 30 years. We must consider the degree of anti-Americanism versus the degree of anti-Chinianism in our country and allow our people and our parliament to decide which side that may be. Not necessarily take an absolute side but if we finally make our foreign policy basing on the true wishes of the people we may as a byproduct get rid of some of the other ambiguities that dominate our politics — ambiguities like how we view liberty and how much we want to liberalise and in which timeframe; how we want to proceed with our relationship with the third great power in the world i.e. Russia; and what should be our standing on our relationship with the state of Israel — especially after what it has done in Gaza.

The Express Tribune for more

by B. R. GOWANI

When to mourn & when to celebrate

Muslims (and non-Muslim victims) should follow some strict rules — always applicable when the US or Israel is teaching you a lesson by bombing the hell out of you: when to mourn and when to celebrate (or when not to mourn and not to celebrate).

• When the US (or Israel) kill Muslims, they are not to be mourned; they were “terrorists.” If you mourn, then you are one of them — a “terrorist.” (For non-Muslim victims, the labels vary: “communists” or “commies,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” and so on.)
• When the US or Israel is celebrating the elimination of “terrorists” then you should join them because that’s the only time you are allowed to celebrate.
• When some underdog Muslims retaliate, sometimes in an equally gruesome manner, join the US or Israel in their mourning rituals and in condemning them.

The 1991 US war against Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It was followed by US sanctions which led to more deaths, including a half million children. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl whether the “price was worth it?” Albright nonchalantly replied:

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

Not to forget Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the central characters in Obama administration who joined Britain and France in overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and pushing Libya into chaos. Hillary felt exhilarated at Gaddafi’s death and rephrased Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.

“We came, we saw, he died.”

When Secretary Albright says killing of 500,000 children through sanctions is worth it, you nod your head in agreement. When Secretary Clinton gleefully announces Gaddafi’s death, you too put a smiling face.

If you don’t, then you know what you’ll be called. The US, Israel, and India’s Hindu communalist government of Narendra Modi hold joint copyrights to the word “terrorist(s)”.

What to forget and what to remember

The mourning and celebration rules also apply to what to forget and what not to.

• When the US and Israel bomb and kill your people and destroy your infrastructure, you are supposed to forget — and most probably, they’ll help you in dis-remembering by bombing you again on some or other pretext. Forget 9/11, i.e., September 11, 1973, when the US supported Chile’s military headed by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. Salvadore Allende. Pinochet’s horrific rule lasted till 1990.
• But you are obliged to remember 9/11, i.e., September 11, 2001, when the hijackers crashed two airplanes into Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York killing about 3,000 people, third plane hit the US Defense Department building, the Pentagon, and the fourth one crashed without hitting its target.

The United States only remembers the 9/11 attacks but has dementia when it comes to dozens of its own criminal and violent overt and covert wars with casualties numbering in millions. (See William Blum’s website.) Just the US “war on terror” killed about 1 million people with a cost of $8 trillion.

Nor could you remind Israel and her supporters that Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion accepted the fact when he told Nahum Goldmann

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their [Palestinians’] country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God [Yahweh] is not theirs [Allah]. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country [Palestine]. Why would they accept that?”

Goldmann, a leading Zionist and the founder of World Jewish Congress, lamented the Israeli intransigence when he wrote:

“In 30 years, Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other object than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”

Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has brought out hatred Jews and their supporters have for the Palestinians and it also displays their willful negation of historical events such as establishing Israel on Palestinian land, Nakba or catastrophe which resulted in forceful eviction and deportation of 700,000 Palestinians, not letting Palestinians to live in peace on the remaining 22% land but either creating settlements on West Bank or turning Gaza into an open air prison, and so on.

Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, and US-Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv arranged a showing of a video (a compilation of raw footage by Israeli Defense Force of Hamas attacks) in Los Angeles and New York on November 8, a month and a day after the Hamas attack. By that time Israel had killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,000 children. People like Gadot only remember 1,139 Israeli deaths but not Israel’s genocidal spree which had resulted in over eight fold Palestinian deaths, in one month! (The figure reached 33,301 on April 1, 2024, i.e., 30 times. On April 1, Israel killed 7 charity workers of the World Central Kitchen of Jose Andres who were delivering food supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. Andres has suspended the program.)

Bill Maher, an anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian, criticized Obama for “moral equivalency,” that is, Obama not only condemned Hamas but also blamed Israel (here, here, and here 19:42-25:47). In the US, most people are scared of the Israel Lobby and so reminding people of Israel’s crimes is a big no-no. Maher is one of those characters who willingly accepts ignorance because they can’t face reality of constant Israeli bombardment for weeks.

FOX (Farts of Xenophobes) TV had a hypocrite “plagiarist” (see Alexander Cockburn’s scathing letter) Alan Dershowitz on its show where the latter, out of contempt, accused Obama of hating Israel and inciting antisemitism. (Antisemitism has become a handy tool for people like Dershowitz to cover up all of Israel’s heinous crimes.)

Dershowitz assumes too much and blames Obama. He should instead be grateful to Obama, for at least two things, raising free US taxpayers money for Israel from $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion every year for 10 years before leaving office and Obama government’s stoppage of an annual military aid portion of $1.3 billion when Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected (30 June 2012 – 3 July 2013) as Egypt’s president. A year later, Egyptian military assisted protests removed him from power. Morsi died during a trial in 2019. By the way, the US government is supportive of the Egyptian military.

Imagine if Morsi was alive and in power today, there are chances he would have come to Gaza’s rescue — either through pressuring Israel for a ceasefire or opening another front and thus forcing Israel to halt the genocidal war.

Chris Cuomo and some of his team members felt December 14, was a “heavy day” because on that day they watched, in an Israeli consulate, a video of Hamas attack which took him “immediately and deeply into a past trauma” similar to the one he had when he “learned why 9/11 happened.” Cuomo felt more than 22 year old trauma but didn’t feel anything for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The day Cuomo relived the decades old trauma, 19,000 Palestinian lives lost had been lost on the 69th day of Israel’s atrocious war.

Shai Davidai, assistant professor at Columbia University, wrote about 1,300 words article on CNN site on November 3, 2023, about how he feels insecure for himself and his family due to protests in favor of the Palestinian people. The only mention in his article about Palestinians is the following:

“I feared not only for the future of innocent Israeli and Palestinian children, but for the future of my family here, in New York City.”

The day, the above article of Davidai was published, 9,000 Palestinians had been murdered, 41% or 3,700 of them were children.

In his article, he writes about the beheading of 40 Israeli babies, without any corroboration. It was not true. Israel and its friends doesn’t miss a chance to falsely malign Hamas or Palestinians.*

Atrocities by US and Israel are regularly given a false facade in the media yet the brutal reality continues to exist that sees the massacre of millions across the globe.

*(Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a lawyer and political science lecturer at the Hebrew University, the woman behind the false charges of rape against Hamas fighters has been exposed as a liar. In the US, some Republican politicians are being trained to portray Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while claiming Israel is fighting “a war for humanity.” Israel is also employing music to show Palestinians as less than human.)

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com