Kanye gets the finger …

by B. R. GOWANI

IMAGE/Wikimedia Commons

for antisemitism, Kanye West, now Ye, lost contract with Gap

business ended with Balenciaga and others for similar crap

Ye’s worth was $1.8 billion before Adidas with him broke

after losing 78% of wealth, $400 million worth was this bloke

recently, T-shirts with a Nazi symbol of swastika on it he sold

Ye could have lied; it was a logo of many religions — new and old

in an AI-generated video, Jewish celebrities are full of glee

they are wearing T-shirts with raised middle finger for ye

Bar says: “Your antisemitism and incitement to violence” is rough

it has really “crossed every possible line. Enough is enough.”

a video of Israel’s genocidal war Guy Bar should now make.

Palestinians should be allowed to express their anger, real not fake

instead of middle finger, Palestinians should show an Imperial Dick

the ID is made of marble, granite, and other material but no brick

who should ID be exhibited to, i.e., whose names on t-shirts to appear?

of course, the perpetrators and their hardcore supporters, is it clear?

Biden, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant, Schumer, Ben-Gvir, and others

who extinguished lives of over 100.000 Palestinians, including mothers

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

Canada, Who Will Stand On Guard For Thee?

by MARIS PAEZ VICTOR

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland (middle) stands with her Peruvian counterpart Nestor Francisco Popolizio Bardales (front left) Argentina’s Jorge Marcelo Faurie (front right), British Minister Responsible for the Americas and Europe Alan Duncan (middle back left) and United States Ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft (middle back right) during the 10th ministerial meeting of the Lima Group in Ottawa on Monday, Feb. 4, 2019. IMAGE/ Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press/file photo.

The melodic Canadian national anthem proclaims that its sons and daughters “stand on guard for thee.” Well, now is the time as Canada faces insults, lies and threats from Trump. The idea that the US would annex Canada and make it one of its states, has provoked palpable indignation among Canadian people, Indigenous and non-indigenous. Ironically, Canada, which celebrates its “special relationship” with the USA, has been thrust into the category of nations vilified by the US: the long-standing animosity towards Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua remains, but now Trump has added US allies Canada, Panama, Denmark (EU), and Colombia. One can only wonder who will be next.

Canadian spokespersons deny these outrages but at the same time add with a bit of a whine: “but, but, we are your best friends!” To its detriment, Canada has long ignored Henry Kissinger, well-known former US Secretary of State, who declared that the US has no friends, only interests.  

It has been a rude awakening for all Canadians, especially its elites. Suddenly, they are mentioning “Canadian sovereignty,” a concept that it seemed only the Quebecois and indigenous peoples understood. Certainly, sovereignty is a concept that Canadian governments have often willfully ignored or belittled with respect to other countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, among others.

Unlike his father Pierre who was a Canadian nationalist, in 2017 Trudeau the younger astonishingly expressed the view that Canada is a “post-national” country and that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

This would not have been acceptable to the working classes in towns, cities, farms, factories, logging camps, fishing towns, throughout the country where the Maple Leaf flag flies proudly, had Trudeau’s concept been actually discussed in participation with the people of Canada.  It was a sheer urban elitist commentary. An example of how far the Canadian political elites especially, have problems listening to their own people. In fact, the real defense of Canada will lie as it always has done, in the hands of its working and middle classes, and ironically, with the indigenous peoples, and their pressure and votes upon the political elites. Unlike in the US, there is in Canada a working Parliament where, despite lobbyists, votes do count, and not vast fortunes of the billionaires. 

Trudeau is an ideological product of the financial and commercial elites that embraced globalization and the US empire, wanting to “play with the big boys.” After World War II, Canadian political and cultural elites basically decided to join US imperial capitalism.  In the 1960s the Canadian intellectual, George Grant, railed against this situation, mourning what he felt was the end of Canada as an independent state as the ruling class looked to the US for its final authority in politics and culture (George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, 1965). Through the years, the US has repeatedly attempted to dominate Canada over lumber, water, fishing rights, and other trade issues.

Although there have been almost constant US/Canada trade disagreements that federal and provincial officials have had to contend with, at another level, Canadian elites threw their hat and their county into the hands of the US empire that was consolidating south of their borders. So, they send their children to Ivy League universities, approve of mergers with US corporations, and take vacations in Florida. Canadian media increasingly relies on US outlets such as Associated Press for much of its news, and most significantly, Canada backs the US in almost every vote at the UN and backs US foreign policy, whether it be a sensible one or an irresponsible regime change adventure. There were exceptions with two Liberal Prime Ministers who withstood tremendous US pressure:  Pierre Trudeau who refused to break relations with China or Cuba during the Cold War and Jean Chretien who refused to join the US invasion of Iraq.

The US has, to a certain extent, already “invaded” Canada in a back-handed, quiet, sort of way. The symbol of US “takeover” is plainly visible in Ottawa, where the enormous, ugly, US fortress-like embassy was planted in the middle of the nation’s capital, like a giant carbuncle proclaiming: “we are a permanent feature of your nation.” 

It is surprising especially to many of us in Canada of Latin American origin, how unconcerned most Canadians have been about the encroaching US influence in its political and cultural life. A great scandal was whipped up when there were accusations of China influencing Canadian politics, but when US ambassadors publicly weighed in with their opinions, nobody bats an eye. 

Orinoco Tribune for more

What is the speed of light? Here’s the history, discovery of the cosmic speed limit

by PAUL SUTTER

Time gets a little strange as you approach the speed of light. IMAGE/FlashMovie/Shutterstock

The speed of light is important because it’s about way more than, well, the speed of light.

On one hand, the speed of light is just a number: 299,792,458 meters per second. And on the other, it’s one of the most important constants that appears in nature and defines the relationship of causality itself.

As far as we can measure, it is a constant. It is the same speed for every observer in the entire universe. This constancy was first established in the late 1800’s with the experiments of Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at Case Western Reserve University. They attempted to measure changes in the speed of light as the Earth orbited around the Sun. They found no such variation, and no experiment ever since then has either.

Observations of the cosmic microwave background, the light released when the universe was 380,000 years old, show that the speed of light hasn’t measurably changed in over 13.8 billion years.

In fact, we now define the speed of light to be a constant, with a precise speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. While it remains a remote possibility in deeply theoretical physics that light may not be a constant, for all known purposes it is a constant, so it’s better to just define it and move on with life.

How was the speed of light first measured?

In 1676 the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Romer made the first quantitative measurement of how fast light travels. He carefully observed the orbit of Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter. As the Earth circles the Sun in its own orbit, sometimes it approaches Jupiter and sometimes it recedes away from it. When the Earth is approaching Jupiter, the path that light has to travel from Io is shorter than when the Earth is receding away from Jupiter. By carefully measuring the changes to Io’s orbital period, Romer calculated a speed of light of around 220,000 kilometers per second.

Observations continued to improve until by the 19th century astronomers and physicists had developed the sophistication to get very close to the modern value. In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell made a remarkable discovery. He was investigating the properties of electricity and magnetism, which for decades had remained mysterious in unconnected laboratory experiments around the world. Maxwell found that electricity and magnetism were really two sides of the same coin, both manifestations of a single electromagnetic force.

Astronomy for more

Elon Musk has ‘split apart’ British politics

by JAMES O’BRIEN, LBC

James O’Brien has excoriated the state of British politics, following Elon Musk’s inflammatory attacks on Labour ministers regarding historic child sexual abuse cases.

“What matters is that British politics has now been split apart in a way I can’t remember seeing, by this far right foreign conspiracy theorist who happens to be the richest man in the world,” O’Brien said.

“It has been split apart in a way I can’t quite conceive of.”

In a series of posts on Twitter in recent days, Musk has attacked Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Sir Keir Starmer over what he alleges — without evidence — they were “complicit” in failing to combat mass rapes of young women and girls.

Musk’s intervention has resurfaced the findings of a series of inquiries into child sexual abuse across England and Wales involving at least 1,400 victims.

Musk has also come under significant criticism for his attacks on Labour’s Jess Philipps, Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, claiming she was a “rape genocide apologist”.

While Musk’s comments have been roundly criticised in the UK and abroad, O’Brien told listeners that he expected more from the British opposition.

“I don’t understand what’s happened to the Conservative Party, when now is the time for national unity,” O’Brien said.

“British parliamentary sovereignty… demands that an attack by a foreign conspiracy theorist upon our politicians be condemned… And it hasn’t been.”

Youtube for more

Odious Debt with Edward Jones Corredera

by WILLIAM SAAS & SCOTT FERGUSON

Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024).

What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.

With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.

Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at Spain’s National Distance Education University.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott: Edward Jones Corredera, welcome to Money on the Left.

Edward Jones Corredera: Thanks, Scott. Big fan of the show. Thanks for having me.

Scott: We invited you to talk to us today about your recent book titled Odious Debt, Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America. To start us off, we usually like to ask our guests to tell our audience a little bit about themselves, whether personally or professionally, about their background. In this case, how did your life history lead you to start thinking about the history and politics of debt in Latin America?

Edward Jones Corredera: I was born and raised in Madrid, Spain. I’m half Spanish and half English, and when the 2008 financial crisis hit and really started to bite in 2010, I found myself studying politics at the London School of Economics in London. I had always grown up with seeing cultural misunderstandings about Britain and in Spain and in Spain and Britain.

2008 really showed me that cultural ideas around economics really did matter—it wasn’t just sort of day-to-day anecdotal stuff where people from different countries travel and they don’t fully understand each other’s cultures. In this case, I just watched stereotypes about the country I’d grown up in turn into the basis for economic forecasting. It might be useful to remember the use of the term “PIGS” to describe Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain during this period. That feels like a long time ago, but it happened. I also remember seeing weekly assessments of Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio. In Spain, this turned into a sort of ritualistic health check on the nation’s future – it was studied religiously, and it was a strange way of assessing the economic health of a nation. My sense was that the history of economic ideas in the Spanish speaking world was not well understood, and it was particularly misunderstood in the anglophone world. I did a couple of jobs—I worked in Shanghai for a year—but I went back to academia to do a Ph.D. at Cambridge. The morning after I landed, I was jetlagged and woke up around 6am right as the Brexit referendum results were being announced. I was worried that Spain—which is to this day one of the most Europhile countries in Europe—would lose faith in in the EU. If it happened in Britain, could it happen in Spain? What if this support that you saw in Spain for the EU was just superficial? What if that right-wing sentiment redolent of Franco’s Spain could recover lost ground? So, this background certainly informed my doctoral thesis. I set out to write a history of the pursuit of a European federation in Spanish political thought. It was through that that I got into ideas of how credit was originally seen as a way to deliver peace in the Enlightenment.

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You’ve Got a Lot of Nerve to Say You are My Friend: Deborah Lipstadt, the ADL and the Defense of the Indefensible

by JORDY CUMMINGS

IMAGE/ Clay Hensley – CC BY-SA 2.0

The re-coronation of the lumpen-capitalist Donald Trump as US president is a no-doubt consequential moment. Yet Trump has increasingly been second banana to one of his many Rasputins, the far-right techie Elon Musk. In an objective sense, however, the richest man in the world giving what is inarguably a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the president of the United States is an event of historical and international significance. This gesture from Musk was a crystallization of all that Trump is doing, and in particular, a prime form of the new far right’s aestheticization of politics. The politics of the gesture, the image, that crystalizes what in many ways is a redefinition and narrowing of what constitutes what the American state sees as human. So of course, the international benefactor of the far right is going to give a Nazi salute. This is the same guy who within days of the salute, gave a Nazi-esque speech to the Post-Nazi AFD in Germany, calling on Germans to reject globalism and embrace their historic warrior-like ways, as pointed out by Julius Caesar!

The question here is how its significance is being downplayed, deliberately or not, in an official and unofficial sense, from the pillars of American society, after being given the go ahead by some figures in the Jewish establishment. Musk did not give a Nazi salute, he made an “awkward gesture”. Broadcast journalists like Erin Burnett are exemplars of this pattern. This has been echoed even by Jewish conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro, not to mention some reasonable-doubt-mongers at The Forward. Their raised eyebrows and seemingly verbal scare-quotes when using this phrase reveal them not to be dissenting in an aestheticized sense but rather showing their resignation to the moment and their opportunism, their desire to reproduce themselves and their socially and materially beneficial existence. This goes of course, most shamefully to the Anti-Defamation League which did not condemn Musk, indeed explicitly denied that his gesture was a Nazi salute. The ADL are increasingly echoed in media reports that at first simply didn’t report on it or just referred to it elliptically.

Counterpunch for more

The Purpose of Religion

by MARKANDEY KATJU

Religion has profoundly influenced human society, providing both solace and controversy

Bill Tammeus (wtammeus@gmail.com), an American friend of mine, lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He visited India with his father, an agricultural expert, around 1957 and was my classmate at Boys High School, Allahabad. After returning to the U.S., Bill became a journalist.

Now retired, he engages in social work and serves as a preacher in his Presbyterian Church.

Bill also writes a blog called Bill’s Faith Matters Blog, where he regularly shares his thoughts. His latest post, titled “A Foundational Question: What the Heck Is the Purpose of Religion?”, explores his understanding of religion’s role.

As a believer in God, Bill has a perspective on religion that differs from mine. I am an atheist and regard all religions as superstitions, holding that truth lies in science—an ever-evolving discipline. While we differ in our beliefs, we both seek to understand the purpose of religion in human life.

Why Do People Believe in Religion?

For instance, a businessman launching a new venture cannot be entirely confident of its success. Economic downturns or unforeseen events may cause losses, despite meticulous planning. Faced with such uncertainties, even the affluent may turn to religion, hoping for divine intervention.

As Shakespeare observed in King Lear:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

However, I believe that as science advances, humanity will increasingly gain control over its destiny. Also, exploitation of man by man will by then end. A century from now, science may evolve to such an extent that religion will become obsolete, fading into irrelevance.

Despite being unscientific, religion remains integral to the lives of the vast majority of people worldwide. Why is this so?

The majority of the world’s population lives in poverty. Their lives are so harsh and uncertain that they turn to religion for psychological support. Without this emotional crutch, many might fall into despair, even to the point of madness or suicide. For the poor, religion serves as a mechanism to endure suffering and find meaning amidst chaos.

But why do relatively well-off individuals also cling to religion?

That is because we are still at a low level of development of science (compared to what it will be, say, after 100 years hence ). In other words, the chance factor is still very powerful in our lives.

We plan something, but something else happens. In other words, we cannot control our lives. So we believe there are some supernatural powers like God which control our lives, and which must be propitiated to keep them benevolent and not turn malevolent.

Punjab Today for more

Rise of Hindutva in the American Extreme Right

by USHA KUMAR

Pause to survey the composition of Trump 2.0 cabinet, and a striking pattern emerges. Alongside the regular staple of anti-immigrant hawks, Wall Street libertarians and Christian nationalists, we find what seems like a surprising degree of ethnic diversity. Until one takes a second, closer look, to find that it is in fact a specific type of brown person highly represented. From Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy to Usha Vance, Jay Bhattacharya and Sriram Krishnan, the new “multiracial” MAGA appears significantly dominated by the presence of so many Indian – and Hindu – Americans.

This detail is no mere statistical oddity. The presence of so many Hindu Americans on the far-right is not a coincidence; neither is it a familiar story of a few elite pro-business conservatives that all non-white communities contain. Rather, they are a mirror – a mirror into a broader attempt to reposition where Hindu Americans fit into US society. To understand this phenomenon, we must understand the role played by the Hindu supremacist, or Hindutva movement, whose influence threads together the trajectories of many of these nominees, and whose Americanization – and Trumpification – is a critical part of this puzzle.

Hindutva, which is distinct from the Hindu faith, is a century-old political movement inspired by Nazism and Italian fascism, that aims to reshape India’s secular democracy into a Hindu ethno-state. Like white Christian nationalism, Hindutva has a history of targeting religious minorities, including through lynching. Over fifty years ago, the movement established its first U.S.-based organization: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP-A). Across these five decades, the movement erected a vast network of organizations on the backs of the financial success of the Indian American community, building large charitable, cultural, religious, and advocacy fronts, as well as a network of PACs.

One of these PACs, in fact, helped launch Gabbard’s political career with extensive donations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for her first Congressional races. The movement’s other champions were also Democrats, and its path initially steered clear from the older stream of Indian American Republicanism, exemplified by figures like Dinesh D’Souza or Bobby Jindal, who had to eschew a public identification with Hinduism to advance their political careers.

It is in fact in contrasting the new figures in the cabinet with this older strain of Indian American conservatism that revealing details emerge. Consider the profile of Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s pick to co-lead a government spending department with Elon Musk. Ramaswamy, who has consistently consorted with Hindutva groups as well, headlining two separate VHP-A galas, where he credited a VHP-A leader with teaching him Hinduism, has not hid his Hinduism; rather, he has sought to ground his very support for “Judeo-Christian values” in his Hinduism, grounding it in caste pride and positioning it as proximate to whiteness. His colleague, Kash Patel, who is slated to run the FBI under Trump, has similarly defended the Hindutva movement’s leadership and agenda in India, speaking conspiratorially of their being targeted by the media and the “Washington establishment.”

While these figures are the most visible signs of a convergence between Hindu supremacy and MAGA, they are but outcomes of broader changes within the far-right, and within the Indian American community.

The story, as Gabbard’s own trajectory points to, begins with a note of devastating Democratic misjudgement and complacency. After all, for decades, Hindu supremacist organizations were primarily welcomed, like other immigrant communities, by liberal institutions and a Democratic Party that largely failed to recognize their racist underpinnings and that uncritically accepted its claims to represent a minority group. In this phase, organizations like Hindu American Foundation sought to present themselves as interfaith champions and civil rights advocates, the group even joining the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. It was in her earlier avatar as a progressive Democrat, after all, that Gabbard became the movement’s first high-profile champion, for which she received at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations, what was a full quarter of her 2014 war-chest.

But the rise of Trump altered Hindutva strategy, helping the movement shed its liberal mask. Hindutva’s alignment with white supremacy is less paradoxical than it seems, given that its leaders have, across their history, openly sought to emulate white supremacist movements, from Jim Crow racism and Nazism’s treatment of Jews. Hindutva’s view that Hindus are a majority oppressed in their own country closely matches MAGA’s view that whites and Christians are oppressed in the United States, and the two movements have a shared hatred for Muslims, with VHP-A members having longstanding ties to prominent anti-Muslim figures in the MAGA movement, including Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Laura Loomer.

But the large-scale reorientation of the movement still took years, and its final direction was perhaps only set in place when Steve Bannon joined the Republican Hindu Coalition as honorary chairman in 2019, a moment that signaled MAGA’s openness to non-white far-right movements.

Alterinter for more

Neofascism in the White House

by JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

Parody of the gleichschaltung process by Walter Wesinger.

There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.

Jack London, The Iron Heel1

Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2 From a broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been accompanied by a sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology and political reality.

Who forms the social base of the neofascist phenomenon? As a Gallup analysis and CNN exit polls have demonstrated, Trump’s electoral support came mainly from the intermediate strata of the population, i.e., from the lower middle class and privileged sections of the working class, primarily those with annual household incomes above the median level of around $56,000. Trump received a plurality of votes among those with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, especially in the $50,000 to $99,999 range, and among those without college degrees. Of those who reported that their financial situation was worse than four years earlier, Trump won fully 77 percent of the vote.3 An analysis by Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of Gallup, updated just days before the election, indicated that in contrast to standard Republican voters, much of Trump’s strongest support came from relatively privileged white male workers within “skilled blue collar industries”—including “production, construction, installation, maintenance, and repair, and transportation”—earning more than the median income, and over the age of forty.4 In the so-called Rust Belt 5 states (Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) that swung the election to Trump, the Republican vote increased by over 300,000 among voters earning $50,000 or less, as compared with 2012. Meanwhile, among the same demographic group, Democrats lost more than three times as many voters as the number Republicans gained.5 None of this was enough to win Trump the national popular vote, which he lost by almost 3 million, but it gave him the edge he needed in the electoral college.

Nationally, Trump won the white vote and the male vote by decisive margins, and had his strongest support among rural voters. Both religious Protestants and Catholics favored the Republican presidential candidate, but his greatest support of all (80 percent) came from white evangelical Christians. Veterans also went disproportionately for Trump. Among those who considered immigration the nation’s most pressing issue, Trump, according to CNN exit polls, received 64 percent of the vote; among those who ranked terrorism as the number-one issue, 57 percent.6 Much of the election was dominated by both overt and indirect expressions of racism, emanating not only from the Republican nominee but also from his close associates and family (and hardly nonexistent among the Democrats themselves). Donald Trump, Jr., in what was clearly a political ploy, repeatedly tweeted Nazi-style white supremacist slogans aimed at the far right. Trump’s only slightly more veiled statements against Muslims and Mexicans, and his alliance with Breitbart, pointed in the same direction.7

As the Gallup report pointedly observed:

In a study [Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler?] of perhaps the most infamous [nationalist] party, the geography of voting patterns reveal that the political supporters of Hitler’s National Socialist party were disproportionately Protestants, if living in a rural area, and those in lower-middle administrative occupations and owners of small businesses, if living in an urban area. Thus, neither the rich nor poor were especially inclined to support the Nazi Party, and even among Christians, religious identity mattered greatly.8

The clear implication was that Trump’s supporters conformed to the same general pattern. According to the Hamilton study, it is generally believed that “the lower middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) provided the decisive support for Hitler and his party.”9 Hitler also drew on a minority of the working class, disproportionately represented by more privileged blue-collar workers. But the great bulk of his support came from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie, representing a staunchly anti-working class, racist, and anti-establishment outlook—which nevertheless aligned itself with capital. Hitler also received backing from devout Protestants, rural voters, disabled veterans, and older voters or pensioners.10

Monthly Review Online for more

A Gaza genocide sideshow: Watching ‘Lolita’ in Tel Aviv

by HAMID DABASHI

Iranian-French actress Golshifteh Farahani stars in the 2024 Israeli-produced film adaptation of Azar Naifisi’s 2003 novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran IMAGE/Eran Riklis

At a time when the entire world is aghast at Israel’s savagery in Gaza, the Zionist regime has decided to adapt an Iranian novel once promoted by American neoconservatives into a film

These days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes time from his busy schedule slaughtering Palestinian women, their children, and the rest of their families to send messages of love and solidarity to Iranian women.

The beleaguered war criminal kindly assures them how much he and his entire settler colony support their struggles for liberation. 

The messages sound surreal. But they are real.  

The international fugitive charged with the crime of genocide – wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity – has even learnt a few words in Persian.

He sports the slogan of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) to assure Iranian women he wishes for nothing more than to see them liberated from the yokes of their mandatory hijabs, wearing their jeans and t-shirts and waving the Israeli flag in Azadi square.

But why, at a time when, according to Oxfam, “more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year”, should Israel suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women?

As I write these words, outgoing US President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are cockfighting over credit for an alleged “ceasefire” they say they brokered between Israel and Hamas, even as Israeli forces continue to slaughter more Palestinians without pause.

Netanyahu, once again, appears to be collaborating with his American allies to stage a false disagreement, using it as a cover for further mass atrocities against innocent Palestinians. What “ceasefire” are they talking about exactly?

And amid this ongoing carnage, Israelis are expressing concern about women’s rights in Iran?

The mere assumption is beyond absurd.

Why would a garrison state, a settler colony, a proxy military base advancing the American and European imperial designs and war machine suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women and whether or not they like to wear their headscarves?

Bizarre – or is it?  

‘Hasbara-modelled propaganda’

In his broadcast messages to Iranian women, the mass murdering Israeli chieftain is now actively aided and abetted by the one and only Azar Nafisi, the author of the fake and fictitious memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In 2003, the book became a global sensation thanks to the concerted efforts of her friend Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence under President George W Bush and to whom the book was dedicated, and other infamous neoconservative operatives.

Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, which helped instigate the US invasion of Iraq

It was promoted as part of an active Iranophobic and Islamophobic propaganda campaign to demonise Iran and Iranians to justify all military operations against them.  

This was the singular achievement of Nafisi: vilifying her own country at a time that would have aided and abetted US and Israeli plots against an entire nation.

She did against Iran what the Iraqi Kanan Makiya and the Lebanese Fouad Ajami did against Iraq and the entire Arab world put together.  

Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, the infamous case of Nayirah al-Sabah, the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who in October 1990 gave false testimony in US Congress to instigate the US war against Iraq.

Middle East Eye for more