Author: badru

by SHELLY FAN

Brain aging occurs in distinctive phases. Its trajectory could be hidden in our blood—paving the way for early diagnosis and intervention.

A new study published in Nature Aging analyzed brain imaging data from nearly 11,000 healthy adults, middle-aged and older, using AI to gauge their “brain age.” Roughly half of participants had their blood proteins analyzed to fish out those related to aging.

Scientists have long looked for the markers of brain aging in blood proteins, but this study had a unique twist. Rather than mapping protein profiles to a person’s chronological age—the number of years on your birthday card—they used biological brain age, which better reflects the actual working state of the brain as the clock ticks on.

Thirteen proteins popped up—eight associated with faster brain aging and five that slowed down the clock. Most alter the brain’s ability to handle inflammation or are involved in cells’ ability to form connections.

From these, three unique “signatures” emerged at 57, 70, and 78 years of age. Each showed a combination of proteins in the blood marking a distinct phase of brain aging. Those related to neuron metabolism peaked early, while others spurring inflammation were more dominate in the twilight years.

These spikes signal a change in the way the brain functions with age. They may be points of intervention, wrote the authors. Rather than relying on brain scans, which aren’t often available to many people, the study suggests that a blood test for these proteins could one day be an easy way to track brain health as we age.

The protein markers could also help us learn to prevent age-related brain disorders, such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, or problems with movement. Early diagnosis is key. Although the protein “hallmarks” don’t test for the disorders directly, they offer insight into the brain’s biological age, which often—but not always—correlates with signs of aging.

The study helps bridge gaps in our understanding of how brains age, the team wrote.

Treasure Trove

Many people know folks who are far sharper than expected at their age. A dear relative of mine, now in their mid-80s, eagerly adopted ChatGPT, AI-assisted hearing aids, and “Ok Google.” Their eyes light up anytime they get to try a new technology. Meanwhile, I watched another relative—roughly the same age—rapidly lose their wit, sharp memory, and eventually, the ability to realize they were no longer logical.

My experiences are hardly unique. With the world rapidly aging, many of us will bear witness to, and experience, the brain aging process. Projections suggest that by 2050, over 1.5 billion people will be 65 or older, with many potentially experiencing age-related memory or cognitive problems.

But chronological age doesn’t reflect the brain’s actual functions. For years, scientists studying longevity have focused on “biological age” to gauge bodily functions, rather than the year on your birth certificate. This has led to the development of multiple aging clocks, with each measuring a slightly different aspect of cell aging. Hundreds of these clocks are now being tested, as clinical trials use them to gauge the efficacy of potential anti-aging treatments.

Many of the clocks were built by taking tiny samples from the body and analyzing certain gene expression patterns linked to the aging process. It’s tough to do that with the brain. Instead, scientists have largely relied on brain scans, showing structure and connectivity across regions, to build “brain clocks.” These networks gradually erode as we age.

Singularity Hub for more

by VIJAY PRASHAD

In November, Álvaro Noboa, the father of Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa, had a heart attack. He was hastily taken to a clinic in Guayaquil, his hometown, and then after he was stabilized, flown to a hospital in New York. Álvaro Noboa unsuccessfully ran for president five times (1998, 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2013), but it was his son who prevailed in 2023 at the age of 35. What defines the Noboa family is not political office, but the wealth of the Noboa Corporation. Grupo Noboa was formed out of Bananera Noboa S.A. set up in 1947 by Luis Noboa Naranjo, the grandfather of the current president. Bananera Noboa expanded, thanks to Álvaro, into the Exportadora Bananera Noboa, which is the heart of the Group’s billion-dollar empire in Ecuador (population 18 million, a third of whom live below an abysmally low poverty line). The name of the expanded firm has two words in it that describe the hold of the Noboa family on the Ecuadorian economy and on its political life: the export (exportadora) of bananas (bananera).

Banana Trade
Countries other than Ecuador produce a very large share of the world’s banana product. India produces more than a quarter of bananas, while China produces a tenth. But these are not banana-exporting countries because they have enormous domestic markets for bananas. More than 90 percent of the world’s exported bananas come from Central and South America as well as the Philippines. Ecuador, which only produces a little over 5 percent of the world’s banana produce, exports 95 percent of its production, making up 36 percent of the world’s exported bananas (Costa Rica is next at 15 percent). Grupo Noboa is Ecuador’s largest banana firm, and therefore one of the most important companies in the export of bananas globally. The largest importers of bananas are the European Union (5.1 million tons), the United States (4.1 million tons), and China (1.8 million tons). Europe and the United States have established suppliers in Central and South America (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic), and neither experience major supply shortages.

China has faced problems from its major suppliers Cambodia and the Philippines (from which it procured 50 percent of its imported bananas). For instance, Cambodia has been wracked by El Niño, resulting in less precipitation, greater depletion of soil moisture, and an increase in pesticide resistance pests. Such a climate change phenomenon has damaged banana production in both Cambodia and the Philippines. This is the reason why Chinese importers have invested in expanding banana plantations in India and Vietnam, two emerging suppliers for the Chinese market. But there is no substitute for Ecuadorian bananas.

Rozenberg Quarterly for more

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

This is an edited version of Alexander Cockburn’s 2010 Xmas essay for CounterPunch.

Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month.

Sometimes, on the edge of a new decade, things look dismal but one has the feeling that something good just might be around the corner. The 70s for example: at their onset, Nixon was in the high noon of his first term, drenching Vietnam in blood, while his attorney general John Mitchell pored over plans to lock up the left at home. It looked as though darkest night was falling.

And yet there was a certain edgy, desperate hope in the air – and four short years into the 70s the hopers, no longer desperate but exultant,  saw Nixon clamber into a helicopter and take off from the White House lawn towards his version of St Helena, in San Clemente; and nine months later on April 30, 1975, Gunnery Sgt. Bob Schlager and 10 other Marines finally caught the last helicopter off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Ah, those raucous, wonderful 70s! Those who missed them will never know the sweetness of life, as Talleyrand said of the Ancien Regime. Sweet and sharp.  I spent them in New York and there was no better place to be.

With the Eighties you could feel the air beginning to seep out of the tires. For one thing, Death kept missing his appointments in Samarra, after years of rigorous punctuality with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers. He’d already fumbled two dates with Gerald Ford, when his chosen messengers, Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, messed up. On March 30, 1981, another of death’s chosen messengers, John Hinckley, tried to shoot Reagan and failed to get his man.

That would have been a game changer!  We’d have had three months of Ron instead of eight weird years when America plunged into fantasy, where it still resides. We wouldn’t have heard Ron give the Star Wars speech, or Nancy just saying No. Or Ron saying he expected Armageddon to come in his lifetime. Or Nancy running the country with the help of Mrs Quigley, her astrologer. We’d have had George Bush Sr…  surely a one-termer. It would have all been different…

But would it really? Clinton and the Nineties suited each other fine, and Bill gave us our last known dose of politics as fun, with the Lewinsky affair, but the decade would have had the same general contour – though a Republican president would have had much bigger problems getting the poor tossed off welfare.

And then in 2000 we had Bush and Gore, and the American people very reasonably couldn’t figure out which one to go for. The folks who knew Al best – the voters of Tennessee, went for George. And then in September of Bush’s first term we had a game changer here in America. Death finally rounded up a gang of messengers with a real commitment to getting the job done.

But game changer isn’t quite the word for the event that launched the Noughts. 9/11 just speeded up basic tendencies which were already in train. Invasion of Iraq? The onslaught had been in full spate through most of Clinton-time via a lethal embargo and almost daily bombings – and the course of Iraqi politics had been set back in 1963 with the Kennedy administration okayed CIA complicity in the overthrow and murder of the Iraqi nationalist, General Kassim, setting the stage for the CIA’s man, Saddam Hussein.

The Afghan mess, now about to get messier, was set up in the late 1970s, when the Carter administration supervised the overthrow of Afghanistan’s one shining moment of hope, the left reformist governments that took power in 1978. That’s when Osama was ushered onto the stage of history, as one of the CIA’s men. Israel, the Palestinians? Rewind the decades back to Truman and beyond.

What made the American 70s exciting was that the left – in its broadest antinomian contours – had life in it, still pumped up by radical successive radical generations all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The last time we saw that left in action was in the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and the solidarity movement during Reagan’s wars in Central America.

In 1992 the left went hook, line and sinker for Bill Clinton and lost all independent traction. By 1996 fealty to the Democratic Party had become a habit. There was the brief flare up in Seattle during the WTO confab, but that turned out to be more of a final flicker than a new ignition point. Same story in 2000. Same again in 2004 (all in behind the Democrat Kerry, in case you forget) and finally, most deliriously, there was the left’s love affair with the salesman of hope in 2008, Barack Obama.

Counterpunch for more

by SIMONE CHUN

For more than 44 hours Koreans have braved freezing snowstorms to demand the arrest of the elusive Yoon Seok Yoel, who has barricaded himself inside his official residence in defiance of constitutional and legal authority.  Yoon, extolled by Washington as a “champion of democracy,” has vanished from public view behind hastily erected barricades manned by security and military personnel while ignoring repeated summons from both the anti-corruption and prosecution services. Capping a monthlong standoff with the National Assembly, and the Korean public over his brazen attempted coup, Washington’s “perfect partner” has spent the past week deploying the armed military and security services at his disposal to physically prevent police from serving him with an arrest warrant for insurrectionism and abuse of authority. Investigators from the Corruption Investigation Office attempting to execute the warrant–the first against a sitting president–were forced to withdraw from the presidential compound after a five-hour standoff with the over 200 armed men deployed by Yoon.

This unprecedented drama began unfolding on the night of December 3, 2024. Amid 250+ days of intentionally destabilizing US-led war games and months of massive citizen protests demanding his resignation, the deeply unpopular president put his nation under martial law for the first time since 1979, dispatching armed troops with the orders to “shoot to kill” if necessary to surround the National Assembly and prevent lawmakers from convening to rescind the order.

By the following night, some 2 million Koreans bearing light sticks, candles, and beacons formed a luminous sea around the National Assembly to demand the impeachment of Yoon Suk-yeol, while lawmakers clambered over fences and security barriers to gain access to the chambers. With a vote of 204 to 85, which included 12 lawmakers from the ruling People’s Power Party (PPP), the National Assembly impeached Yoon, with Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung declaring, “the people have proved that they are the owners of this country.”

While the Constitutional Court has 180 days to render a judgment on whether the impeachment motion is constitutional, Yoon’s rogue insurrectionism and contemptuous defiance of the rule of law is continuing, escalating tensions and instability.

Yoon’s motivation for his failed insurrection lies in the ongoing crisis of legitimacy facing his puppet government, which has eagerly acquiesced to every demand made by its American and Japanese “allies” while making a hollow mockery of Korean self-determination and ignoring the interests of the nation he swore to defend. Since assuming power in 2022 after winning the presidency by a razor-thin margin of 0.7%, Yoon has actively worked to undermine the very basis of Korean independence and democracy back to its roots during the brutal period of Japanese colonization in WWII.

Moreover, Washington’s unquenchable geopolitical ambitions, couched behind its so-called “ironclad commitment to Korea,” mandates the continuation of its policy of preferring right-wing governments at the expense of Korea’s sovereignty. This has overtly empowered and legitimized Yoon’s autocratic pursuit of power against the interests of the Korean people.

Dissident Voice for more

by TUNDE ODESOLA

The good, the bad and the ugly incidents that fetishised the ‘Ember’ months, notwithstanding, the year 2024 rolled off Earth’s cliff two days ago, plunging into the domain of history.

For most Nigerians, 2024 was a plummet down the valley of penury, like the restless Jabulani ball, scissors-kicked over the bar by a striker in a team of wanton boys playing soccer on a hill. F-r-e-e-z-e: Players and spectators watch, mouths agape, as the ball bounces– gba, gba, gba, gba, gbos – into the abyss of no return.

Leaving T-Pain’s tonnes of pain in the memory of multidimensionally poor Nigerians, 2024 melts away like a candle in the wind as 2025 unveils its almanac of hope and promise at January’s doorstep: hope and promise– fodders for the poor.

But I often hear Generation Z say, ‘Nigeria is a cruise’; whatever that means is not a compliment. Dis Gen Z no send. They also describe Nigeria as an ‘active crime scene’. I strongly do not disagree

“Proverbs, prophets, profits, politics and pains” is the other headline I considered for this piece. The white man is wise; He pronounces prophet and profit the same way—probably because He knows one is a mirror, the other is a reflection. Playing politics, He brought us the Books of the Prophets to enslave and make profits from our pains. The white man: He deserves a capital H because He is very wise. His H, however, could also mean Heaven or Hell. What does His H mean?

In their wisdom, the Igbo say proverb is the palm oil with which words are eaten. I concur. According to the Yoruba, a proverb is the horse deployed in search of speech when words go AWOL. I daresay that for Africans, in general, a proverb is the thread the needle threads to hold together the verbal embroidery in everyday conversation.

Charity should not end at home, though it begins there. To this intent and purpose, I intend, in this article, to use proverbs to contextualise Nigeria’s political and religious leadership on the canvas of hypocrisy, starting with Igbo proverbs.

But wait oh, do you know why footballers bore holes in their socks? It is because they want their legs to breathe. Do you remember the squished black American, George Floyd, and his neck, grunting under the knee of breakneck brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020?

Well, soccer players cut holes in their socks to reduce tightness and pressure on the calves, thereby preventing cramps and spasms. Holes in socks also allow better air flow and blood circulation in the feet.

Ex-House of Representatives member from Edo State, Patrick Obahiagbon, is both a jokesmith and a wordsmith. From him, I learnt Isi-ewu-lysing and peppersouping.

In the years of the military, the phrase ‘Fellow Nigerians’ sent khaki-chill down the spine of the citizenry when potbellied isi-ewu-lysing and peppersouping coup plotters seized the air to announce the death of a reigning government and the birth of a new one.

But a serving Lagos Police Public Relations Officer, Superintendent Alozie Ogugbuaja, dared the military by telling Nigerians that the country’s soldiers were more adept at isi-ewu-lysing and peppersouping than cocking a gun. I still do not know how Ogugbuaja never stopped a bullet!

“Fellow Nigerians” and “With immediate effect” are military phrases invented by the late General Murtala Mohammed, who seized power from General Yakubu Gowon at 36, with Gowon himself being 31 when he shot to power. Those were the years when youths were truly the leaders of tomorrow. But ancestors are in power today.

Punch Nigeria for more

by JAWED NAQVI

“Everyone acts every day of their lives,” said Marlon Brando. Think about it. The air hostess acts with her plastic smile. The politician acts with his double-faced lies. The shopkeeper. The banker. Spouses, siblings, offspring, junior clerks and executives.

They all act according to Brando’s definition of acting. Opposition parties in India claim Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also an actor, albeit a bad one. Bear that in mind, as we look at his meeting last week in Delhi with a bunch of Raj Kapoor’s grandchildren and their partners, nearly all involved in moviemaking.

It was an odd assembly since Modi patronises communal movies and Raj Kapoor’s films were secular at the very least. It was the high point, the visitors told Modi of the celebrations they were holding for the late actor-director’s 100th birthday. Kapoor was born in Peshawar on Dec 14, 1924, to India’s pioneering theatre and movie actor Prithviraj Kapoor.

To mark the occasion, two of Raj Kapoor’s great-grandsons were making a documentary on the legend who they had otherwise never met. Modi, not known to miss an opportunity to play the teacher, applauded their zeal for sifting fact from fiction, which he told them was always rewarding. He also confided to the lump-in-their-throats, starry-eyed visitors how he heard Raj Kapoor songs in China. Their jaws dropped but with apparently feigned surprise.

Most of those in the meeting with Modi were not born when Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor’s father, played Emperor Akbar in a fabled movie depicting Hindu-Muslim bonhomie under the Muslims from Ferghana. The 1961 movie Mughal-i-Azam was a remarkable feat of conjuring a script about a love story linked to the Mughal era while underscoring in no small way the Gandhian-Nehruvian idea of Hindu-Muslim unity. It is rather tricky to imagine the idea of India without Hindu Rajputs supporting Mughal rule, but dare the visitors mention their grandfather’s memorable performance to Modi?

Raj Kapoor’s movies were often plied with maudlin mush but they never wavered from secular values.

Raj Kapoor’s movies were often plied with maudlin mush but they never wavered from deeply held secular values on which Nehruvian India was founded. Often enough, his stories etched on the silver screen India’s egalitarian dreams for the masses, which they applauded. There were, of course, other dedicated men and women working in front of the camera and behind it. Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand together with Raj Kapoor were the ruling trinity of actors for decades. One could add Moti Lal, Balraj Sahni and A.K. Hangal among the older lot with a social perspective.

With other hallmarks of their work, they scrupulously shunned movies that insulted communities, be they Pakistanis or Indian minorities. In Bengal, for example, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray created a genre of socially critical films whose aesthetics and craft rivalled the best in the field, globally. Ghatak, in particular, took bold and sensitive themes, which in another director’s hands could easily fall into the communal claptrap. The three heartbreaking melodramas built around the partitioning of Bengal — The Cloud-Capped Star, The Golden Line and E-Flat — are together sometimes referred to as Ghatak’s “partition trilogy”.

Dawn for more

by B. R. GOWANI

In 2021, David Beasley, the UN World Food Program’s Director said

2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could assist in solving world hunger

Musk countered with aking how his $6 billion could help

World Food Programme (WFP) prepared a detailed plan in response

in Nov 2021, Musk donated Tesla stocks worth $5.7 billion to a charity

which charity it was given to, no one knows …

in February 2022, WFP made it clear that it was not the recipient

as of Jan 1, 2025, Musk’s wealth is $421.2B; Bill Gates’ worth is $160B

Dec 29, 2019. Bill Gates wrote on Gates Notes about taxes & inequality

“… It was nearly two decades ago that my dad and I started calling for an increase in the federal estate tax and for an estate tax in our home state of Washington, which has the most regressive tax system in the country. In 2010, he and I also backed a voter initiative that—had it passed—would’ve created a state income tax.”

in 1951, the tax rate was about 50%

in 2011, major corporations paid an average of 12.1% tax

Gates further says:

“Meanwhile, the wealth gap … is much greater than it was 50 years ago. A few people end up with a great deal—I’ve been disproportionately rewarded for the work I’ve done—while many others who work just as hard struggle to get by.”

“Today the U.S. government depends overwhelmingly on taxing labor—about three quarters of its revenue comes from taxes on wages and salaries. Most people get almost all of their income from salary and hourly work, which is taxed at a maximum of 37 percent. But the wealthiest generally get only a tiny percentage of their income from a salary; most of it comes from profits on investments, such as stock or real estate, taxed at 20 percent if they’re held for more than a year.”

“When I say the government needs to raise more money, some people ask why Melinda and I don’t voluntarily pay more in taxes than the law requires. The answer is that simply leaving it up to people to give more than the government asks for is not a scalable solution. People pay taxes as an obligation of law and citizenship, not out of charity. Additional voluntary giving will never raise enough money for everything the government needs to do.”

many a times, Gates talks about the rich not being taxed enough

he is right about tax not being a charity

likewise, his friend Warren Buffet thinks along the same line

We don’t mind paying taxes at Berkshire, and we are paying a 21% federal rate on the gains we’re taking in Apple. And that rate was 35% not that long ago, and it’s been 52% in the past, when I’ve been operating. And the federal government owns a part of the earnings of the business we make. They don’t own the assets, but they own a percentage of the earnings, and they can change that percentage any year. And the percentage that they’ve decreed currently is 21%.

And I would say with the present fiscal policies, I think that something has to give, and I think that higher taxes are quite likely, and if the government wants to take a greater share of your income, or mine, or Berkshire’s, they can do it. And they may decide that someday they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences, and they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn and we’ll pay it. We always hope, at Berkshire, to pay substantial federal income taxes.

We think it’s appropriate that a company, a country that’s been as been as generous to our owners, it’s been the place… . I was lucky. Berkshire was lucky, was here. If we send in a check like we did last year, we sent in over $5 billion to the US federal government. And if 800 other companies had done the same thing, no other person in the United States would have had to pay a dime of federal taxes, whether income taxes, no Social Security taxes, no estate taxes, no… . It’s open down the line.

Now… That’s… I would like to… I hope things develop well enough with Berkshire that we say we’re in the 800 club and maybe even move up a few notches. It doesn’t bother me in the least to write that check. I would really hope, with all America has done for all of you, it shouldn’t bother you that we do it. And if I’m doing it at 21% this year and we’re doing it at a higher percentage later on, I don’t think you’ll actually mind the fact that we sold a little Apple this year.

Buffet and Gates could give the underpaid tax to any UN agency

their charity could make life easier for many or alleviate them from poverty

but so far, no action on that has been forthcoming from either of them …

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

by YIREN REN

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

The Conversation for more

by ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

“Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as ‘a nation of immigrants,’ Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.”

While attending the University of Oklahoma in 1956 – 57, I met a Palestinian petroleum engineering student named Said Abu-Lughod. Said, whose older brother Ibrahim Abu-Lughod would become a renowned professor at Northwestern University, told me how Israeli settlers had violently forced his family out of their ancestral home in Jaffa during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This had happened only eight years earlier, when Said was 12 years old. His family fled as refugees to Jordan. ‘

Said also gave me a book—What Price Israel? by Alfred M. Lilienthal?—?that truly changed my thinking. Now there are many excellent studies by Palestinian and other historians, but in the 1950s there was nothing else like it. (Later, I met the author while attending the 1983 United Nations’ Conference on Palestine— also attended by Yasser Arafat and a large Palestine Liberation Organization delegation?—?and was able to thank him.) 

This experience as a teenager was my introduction to the concept of settler colonialism and made me a supporter of Palestinian self-determination and right of return. It’s also what led me to study history and eventually to write my doctoral dissertation on Spanish settler colonialism in New Mexico, still a major issue there today. 

When I left Oklahoma in 1960 to attend San Francisco State College, I had expected?—?without basis?—?the city to be a hotbed of anti-colonial fervor. This was long before the famous strikes of 1968, but there was a very visible group on campus of mostly white activists attached to the U.S. Communist Party. I was attracted to the zeal with which they supported the burgeoning Black civil rights movement in the South, and, though I was married and working part-time, I attended their rallies on campus as often as I could. What puzzled me about them, however, was their vocal celebration of the state of Israel. Many had visited and lived and worked for a time in the socialist kibbutzim there. Most of these students were not themselves Jewish; the one who became my best friend was from a working-class Greek immigrant family in Indiana.

Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as “a nation of immigrants,” Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.

Their support for Israel was emblematic, I came to understand later, of the seductive mythology that settler-colonial states cultivate and depend on. These young people were drawn to the story about a state created to protect Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Also, the mystic chords of American settlement resonated strongly then, largely due to the ?“new frontier” rhetoric of John F. Kennedy. The grandson of immigrants was elected president and inspired young people. In accepting his nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy intoned: ?“I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” In the young students’ minds, the state of Israel was duplicating that promise. They had little knowledge of the Indigenous peoples who were driven out of their villages and homelands here in North America and even less about the existence of Palestinians.

Although there are stark differences and time frames for the establishment of settler colonialism, there is a common thread that defines the process. To understand this, it’s helpful to distinguish, as historian Lorenzo Veracini does, between ?“settlers” and ?“immigrants”: While migrants enter existing political orders, ?“settlers are founders of political orders” and carry their sovereignty with them.

Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of South Asian origin who grew up in Uganda, puts it this way in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: ?“If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.”

In These Times for more