by ROBIN BLACKBURN

The claim that Alexander Cockburn practised a new type of radical journalism is one he would probably have disputed, perhaps pointing as precedent to his father Claud’s remarkable exposés in his thirties newsletter, The Week. The machinations of the English ruling-class admirers of the Nazis who aimed to convert appeasement into alliance were first uncovered in The Week, and it was there that they were dubbed ‘The Cliveden Set’. Claud Cockburn rose to tough challenges in a career that ran from The Times to the Daily Worker, from the Roaring Twenties to the height of the Cold War. Claud—and Patricia, Claud’s wife and Alexander’s mother—were certainly a constant source of inspiration to Alexander, as his readers were often reminded. Nevertheless, in the changed conditions of the sixties and seventies, innovation was required to reinvent the journalism of the franc-tireur, often roving behind enemy lines, alert to the infinite varieties of liberal claptrap, and unveiling the real world of Big Money and the National Security State. The Ages of Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama, were different from those of Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, or the high Cold War; but they bred their own corruptions, poisons and perils. Alexander’s outlaw columns and newsletter, CounterPunch, held the new power elites to account and showed up the conformism of the serious organs of opinion.

Claud Cockburn had had to contend with two decades of fascist advance; but he saw the tide of history turn with organized labour, anti-fascist partisans, the Red Army and colonial independence. Alexander launched into radical journalism in the red sixties but soon had to confront the end of labour’s forward march, Soviet collapse, the rise of the new right and a species of progressivism that embraced the Atlantic establishment’s goals. An extraordinary amnesia developed that allowed supposedly liberal or left-wing writers to become the cheer-leaders for nato expansion and a new version of the West’s civilizing mission. Prior to the crumbling of the ussr Alexander had frequently warned against neo-con ‘threat inflation’; the exaggerations became even more ludicrous following the terrorist attack of 9/11, panicking the public into support for the occupation of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

In these conditions, Alexander had to be the vanguard and the rearguard rolled into one: at the centre of what was going on, but at a great distance from the petty accommodations of many of his profession, too. He saw himself first and foremost as a working journalist. But though he was the author of some remarkable reportage, this was not his true distinction. Alexander took up his post as sentinel and outrider in an age when star columnists and self-important anchor men had eclipsed mere reporters and editors. The Big Feet distracted the audience from the crimes being perpetrated in full view. If the famous columnists were engineers of consent, Alexander was on hand to reveal their evasions and complicities. Together with a tiny band of brothers and sisters he held the armies of reaction at bay, allowing the forces of renewal time to regroup.

Alexander arrived in the United States in 1972, just about the moment that one sort of left peaked and a new left, based in the social movements, was struggling to be born. In the decade before that Alexander had helped in the early re-shaping of New Left Review, joining the editorial committee and becoming managing editor in 1966. At that point the journal was run by a rather intense collective of less than a dozen editors, meeting for several hours every fortnight. Alexander had a day job as assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement and then, by about 1967, at the New Statesman. We at nlr were particularly grateful for Alexander’s extraordinary gift for taking an important article and making it readable and memorable. Whether it was a minimal sub-edit or a wholesale make-over, Alexander knew what needed to be done; and did it with such tact and skill that the contributor was invariably grateful. There was something philosophical as well as technical in his approach as editor that foreshadowed his future as a writer.

Alexander did not invest in any opposition between the New Left and the Old; rather, he was pleased when the two were able to come together, as he explained in Seven Days in Seattle (2000), co-written with Jeffrey St. Clair. Without subscribing to any labour metaphysic, he judged the self-proclaimed agents of change by their real impact on working people. In 1966 Alexander and I edited for Penguin and New Left Review a collection entitled The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, which brought together trade-union organizers, leftwing journalists including Paul Foot, Marxist economists and two liberals—Michael Frayn and Philip Toynbee—who mocked the demonization of union activists by Labour as well as Conservative pundits. Jack Jones, the Transport Workers leader who, like Claud Cockburn, had fought in Spain, also contributed. Claud himself helped us to plan the book as well as contributing to it. After one strenuous debate on the limitations of the strike weapon he urged us to put the disagreement in the book rather than strive for a perfectly correct position. Sales were reasonable, not amazing; but the book did register a syndicalist militancy that was to upset three British governments, those of Wilson, Heath and Callaghan.

We followed up with another jointly edited collection, Student Power, which caught the wave in 1968–69 and sold 75,000 copies. In our own undergraduate days we had despised student politics for its frivolity and careerism, but the wave of student occupations in the late sixties, linked to anti-war and labour struggles, was a quite different matter. Alexander, though himself now unconnected to the academy, wrote up a student revolt at the lse in 1967 for nlr. The May events in Paris the following year saw students taking their place in an international anti-colonial and anti-capitalist revolt. Alexander was happy to give this insurgency a helping hand, but university life had no appeal for him. He was after bigger game than was to be found in the seminar room.

In January 1968 Alexander and I attended the Congress of Intellectuals in Havana and jointly submitted a paper on bureaucracy and workers’ control, which drew on an eclectic range of authorities from Weber and Marcuse to Lenin, Isaac Deutscher and Che Guevara. Our argument was that ill-equipped guerrillas in Vietnam were worsting the world’s most advanced military establishment, falsifying Weber’s claim for the superiority of bureaucratic organization. Unfortunately I had to leave the conference early, before we had had time to straighten out some theoretical passages I had drafted or to clinch our critique of Stalinism. As Alexander subsequently recalled, he was left alone to defend some tricky passages in the ‘Blackburn–Cockburn theses’, in which we assailed Weber’s blindness to the true dynamic of history and urged the need to break the suffocating embrace of Brezhnevite officialdom. With the fraternal delegates from the Soviet Writers’ Union glaring at this challenge, Alexander liked to claim that I had thrown him to the mangy Russian wolves—but friends assured me that he defended our case with his customary panache. Five years earlier, Alexander’s first article in nlr, a review of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, had already offered luminous ideas on bureaucratic militarism and the spirit of capitalism; the issue, nlr 18, also had pieces on both workers’ control and guerrilla warfare. Heller’s book is set in a us airbase during the Second World War, and Alexander highlights the figure of Milo Minderbinder, a quartermaster who, in the spirit of free enterprise, has accepted a lucrative offer from the Germans to bomb his own base, and offers his own account of the ideal relation between capitalism and war: ‘Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we’ll only be encouraging government control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We’ll be eliminating their incentive.’ Sixty years later, this has moved beyond parody.

New worlds

In the early seventies Alexander was pondering his move across the Atlantic to the country where the big decisions were being made and new movements being born. Of course Claud had also made this move in the twenties and, like many European leftists, found the us context refreshing. Alexander was long to appreciate the relative ease of communication across class lines in the United States. Even when based mainly in New York he travelled extensively in search of contemporary America. ‘Press Clips’, Alexander’s column at the Village Voice, charted new territory in the skill and detail with which it engaged with the work of journalists in general and the new breed of opinion formers in particular. Alexander saw journalism as a craft or trade and brooked no excuses for those who out of laziness—or cowardice—endorsed the idées reçues of the age.

New Left Review for more

by ARUNDHATI ROY

(Renowned Indian author, writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. This is an annual award set up by English PEN in the memory of playwright Harold Pinter.)

The speech was delivered on the evening of October 10, 2024, at the British Library.

Full text of the speech:

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

“I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

“The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

“Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.”

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be “the chosen people” – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

Muslim Mirror for more

by YORGOS MITRALIAS

Why has Bibi Netanyahu become the darling and idol of racist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi right-wing scum in Europe and around the world? The answer is not difficult: these scum recognize themselves in him because they consider, quite rightly, that Bibi Netanyahu is flesh of their flesh. And not just because of his warlike and other “exploits”, which have made Netanyahu’s Israel the model state of their dreams (and our nightmares). If all these people celebrate him and identify with him, it’s also because Netanyahu is a pure-blooded fascist by virtue of his origins, his training and his mentors…

In short, the heavyweights of the emerging Brown International, the American Trump, the Russian Putin and the Indian Modi, the Latin Americans Milei and Bolsonaro and the racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, misogynist, fascist and neo-Nazi (and often…anti-Semitic! ) leaders of major far-right parties, some of which govern or are preparing to govern EU member states such as Holland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium or Hungary, understand very well what our (neo)liberal politicians pretend not to: that Netanyahu doesn’t associate with them for opportunistic or tactical reasons, but because the attraction is mutual. Because he recognizes himself in them, in their ideology and in their predilection for physical violence!

And here’s what it’s all about: Bibi Netanyahu was propelled into politics by Yitzhak Shamir, especially when the latter was Prime Minister of Israel (1986-1992) and leader of the Likud, the far-right party in government. The electoral affinity between the two men was evident right from the start, when Shamir made the young Netanyahu, who was already Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (1984), his deputy foreign minister, before handing over the Likud presidency to him in 1993, just three years before Netanyahu became the youngest prime minister in Israel’s history at the age of 47! So it’s no coincidence that Netanyahu has always recognized Yitzhak Shamir not only as his “protector” but also as his ideological mentor…

Since Netanyahu has always claimed to be a follower of Shamir’s ideology, even posing as Shamir’s successor and political heir, the question that naturally arises is what was the ideology that Yitzhak Shamir served throughout his life, without ever renouncing anything? One could say that it all began when the young Shamir took over the leadership of the paramilitary Zionist terrorist organization Lehi, after the execution of its founder and leader Avraham Stern by the British police in 1942. Wikipedia’s opening paragraphs on Lehi read:

• “Under Avraham Stern’s leadership, Lehi was clearly an extreme right-wing group, whose members (though not all) were largely influenced by Italian fascism. Stern’s original political influence was with the Birionim, a group of fascist sympathizers operating on the bangs of the right-wing Zionist Revisionist Party in the early 1930s.”
• “In November 1940, the fledgling organization published its theses in the form of 18 “Principles of Rebirth (Ikarei ha’Tehiya)”. In particular, they state that:
• “The borders of a Jewish state must extend from the Nile to the Euphrates (from Egypt to Iraq). This land will be “conquered from foreigners by the sword”. The claim to a state over a large part of the Middle East is made with reference to the Bible (Genesis 15-18). In practice, however, Lehi’s claim would later focus on Palestine and Transjordan (present-day Jordan).
• “The “Third Kingdom of Israel” would be re-established there (this phrase would be modified in february 1941 ).
• “Jewish exiles would gather in the new state.
• “The Temple of Jersalem will be rebuilt (the Stern was mainly composed of lay people. The temple is more a national symbol than a religious one. The majority of Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are hostile to such reconstruction, considering it to be the Messiah’s prerogative).
• “The Arab population must leave the new state: “the problem of foreigners will be solved by an exchange of population”.

In another of its texts, Lehi states that the world is divided “into fighting and dominating races on the one hand, and weak and degenerate races on the other”. The Hebrews must recover their ‘warrior and colonizer’ virtues of antiquity”.

It’s true that after Stern’s death, Lehi split into several fractions with quite different agendas and ideologies. However, they all agreed on one issue: terrorism as a (preferred) means of action. That’s why all Lehi leaders, and of course Yitzhak Shamir, always advocated large-scale terrorist operations (of which Shamir was the leader), in which their organization was the protagonist, either alone or together with the Irgun. And all this, both in Palestine and abroad (London), resulting in several thousand deaths among the British, Arabs and even Jews. It should be noted that two of the most infamous terrorist actions, the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the assassination of the UN “mediator for Palestine” Count Bernadotte, were conceived and executed by Lehi leaders and militants…

Having said this about Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist, racist and terrorist ideological origins, what about his current association with neo-Nazis, fascists and other overt anti-Semites? How can we explain the paradox of a Prime Minister of the State of Israel who not only consorts with such people, but -even worst- considers and celebrates them as privileged allies of the Jews in their fight against …anti-Semites? No paradox, would reply Lehi leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Abraham Stern, but also their mentor to all, the founder of far-right “revisionist” Zionism Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and even… Bibi Netanyahu’s own father. But why? Well, because what unites all these historic figures of right-wing Zionism is that they had no problem with the conscience of proposing and sometimes concluding alliances with… Hitler and Mussolini themselves!

As we wrote in our articleWhen Einstein called “fascists” those who rule Israel for the last 44 years “do we have to consider then as surprising and “abnormal” these “strategical alliances” and the flirting of Netanyahu and his friends with the international riff-raff of sworn anti-communists and racists, who “by chance” are also sworn anti-semites? Not at all. Their first teacher was none other than the father and theorist of Zionist Revisionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Motivated by his pathological hatred of the Russian Revolution, Jabotinsky even allied himself in 1922 with the Ukranian anti-communist and nationalist war-lord Symon Petliura, whose army carried out between 1917 and 1922… 897 anti-Jewish progroms, in which at least 30,000 Ukrainian Jews were massacred!”. And we went on to point out that “Bibi’s father, who served as Jabotinsky’s secretary, followed Abba Ahimeir when the latter came into conflict with Jabotinsky, who rejected his proposal to become a… Jewish Mussolini at the head of a clearly fascist Zionist party. A close collaborator of this ideologue and fascist theorist, Bibi’s father edited the publications of Ahimeir’s organization, which forged fairly close ties with Mussolini’s fascist Italy, but never achieved the same with Nazi Germany, although he did not hesitate to praise Hitler in 1933!”.

But it gets worse with Netanyahu’s mentor and his terrorist organization, for Lehi founder and leader Avraham Stern had no hesitation, in the middle of the World War, in sending a letter to Hitler via the Third Reich’s embassy in Beirut, proposing an alliance in due form, despite being aware of the Nazi regime’s persecution of the Jews! It’s exactly this cynicism and total lack of scruples that characterize Jabotinsky, Ahimeir, Begin and Shamir – in other words, all Netanyahu’s forerunners and masters of thought – that we find today in the alliances Netanyahu is forging with the crème de la crème of the far right and global fascism, who couldn’t care less whether his arch-reactionary and obscurantist allies are anti-Semites and epigones or nostalgists of the pogromists and other genocidaires of the Jews of yesteryear!

Oakland Socialist for more

by FRANCES DANIELS

Study participants exchanged information while lucid dreaming in a world first

In a world first, a new study conducted by a California-based neurotechnology company has recorded two-way communication between sleeping individuals during lucid dreaming. Using special tracking equipment, the groundbreaking research from REMspace recorded two individuals exchanging a simple message while lucid dreaming. 

The breakthrough recording took place on September 24, which was the result of almost five years of rigorous research. Not only are these findings unprecedented, but REMspace founder and CEO Michel Raduga says they could also unlock the potential of dreams as a platform for human communication.

“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction,” says Raduga. “Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology.”

Key takeaways from study:  

• Study records first ever two-way communication between sleeping individuals during lucid dreaming
• Dreams could serve as a platform for human communication
• Real-time communication in lucid dreams may also be possible 

The landmark study has reached an historic milestone, demonstrating that communication between individuals during lucid dreaming is achievable. It also taps the potential of dreams being used as a platform for human communication, and Raduga believes will pave the way for countless commercial applications. “We believe that REM sleep and related phenomena, like lucid dreams, will become the next big industry after AI,” says Raduga.

What is lucid dreaming?  

According to studies, lucid dreaming refers to exceptional occurrences where we can become aware of the fact that we are dreaming. In a lucid dream, we remain physiologically asleep and immersed within a strikingly realistic dream environment, all while being aware that we are dreaming. In addition to this awareness, we can also willingly control actions within the dream. Lucid dream occurs during the REM sleep stage.

Two-way communication during lucid dreaming  

The REMspace study was carried out on September 24, 2024, taking place at the participants’ respective homes. As they slept, their brain waves and other polysomnographic data were tracked remotely by a specially developed equipment. 

When this equipment picked up that a participant had entered a lucid dream, it sent word in Remmyo (an artificial dream language designed to be detectable through sensitive sensors) to the participant via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in his dream, and this was then stored and sent to another participant as she entered a lucid dream. She confirmed the message upon awakening, marking the first-ever message exchanged in dreams.

Tom’s Guide for more

by BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

The world is moving inexorably towards war. Any imaginary poll of the world’s population would show that nobody wants war. But war will probably break out before the end of the decade. Most countries in the world claim to have democratic regimes, but no party with any electoral significance, from left to right, considers war an imminent danger and takes up the fight for peace as its main banner. Peace doesn’t win votes. War brings dead people and dead people don’t vote. No party can imagine carrying out electoral propaganda in cemeteries or mass graves. Nor does it imagine that without the living there are no parties. All this seems absurd, but absurdity happens when reason sleeps, as Francisco de Goya warned us 225 years ago in his painting El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. We don’t need to go that far back.

The lessons (or illusions) of history

Let’s go back to 1900. England was then the most powerful country in the world. But as every apogee means the beginning of decline, the peaceful competition of the US was beginning to be feared. Economic growth in the US was vertiginous, the latest inventions of the industrial revolution were taking place there and, among the many advantages over Europe, one was particularly precious: the US spent very little money on weapons. According to reports at the time, a country of 75 million inhabitants had an army of 25,000 men and a ridiculous defense budget for a country of that size. On the other hand, the most developed European countries (England, Germany and France) were in increasingly fierce competition with each other over colonial sharing and industrial superiority (Germany was increasingly in the spotlight) and were entering the arms race. In addition, between 1899 and 1902, England was fighting a sordid colonial war against the Boers in South Africa. At stake was the control of gold production and Cecil Rhodes’ imperial dream: from the railroad between Cape Town and Cairo to total control of the world so that “wars would become impossible for the good of mankind”. Imperial capitalist domination demanded war and the arms race, allegedly to make war impossible in the future. Are there any similarities with the current war speeches of the US and the European Union to defeat Russia and China? There are, but there are differences.

In the first decade of the 20th century, two movements were visible: one in public opinion and the other in business. Public opinion was dominated by an apology for peace against the dangers of a war that would be fatally deadly. The 20th century was to be the century of peace, without which the prosperity that was being announced would not be possible. In 1899, the first International Peace Conference was held in The Hague and, the following year, there was the World Peace Congress. From then on, there were many international congresses and meetings on peace. It was deplored that international cooperation was deepening in all areas (postal services, railways, etc.) except politics. Between 1893 and 1912, 25 books were published against the arms race. Who is Who in the Peace Movement was widely published. Recent inventions in war material (smokeless gunpowder, rapid-fire rifles, explosive substances such as lyddite, melinite and nitroglycerine, etc.) were said to make war not only very deadly, but impossible to win for either side in the conflict. War would always end in a stalemate and after much death and devastation. A journalist from the English Echo resigned from the paper so that he wouldn’t have to defend the war against the Boers, and 200 high-profile English intellectuals organized a dinner in his honor. Between 1900 and 1910, more than a thousand pacifist congresses were held: workers, anarchists, socialists, freethinkers, Esperantists, women. The growth of democracy in Europe and the USA was said to be incompatible with war and that the large number of arbitration agreements was the best demonstration of this. The Russian sociologist Jakov Novikov demonstrated that the well-being of the masses had never improved with the wars, quite the opposite. People wrote about “the illusion of war” and the publications sold many thousands of copies.

There was a current of opinion that the real illusion would be the “illusion of peace” if the struggle were not reoriented against capitalism. If this didn’t happen, war would be inevitable. This was the position of socialists, anarchists, and the workers’ movement, which socialists and anarchists sought to control. War was the great obstacle to social revolution. The general strike and the refusal of military service were two of the most frequently mentioned forms of struggle.

But the world of public opinion was one thing and the world of business was another. In the business world, since 1899 the arms race had been advancing at a rapid but discreet pace. At the 1907 International Workers’ Congress in Stuttgart, Karl Liebknecht revealed the extraordinary growth in arms spending, which meant that countries were in fact preparing for war. The profits of the big arms companies reflected this: Krupp in Germany, Vickers-Armstrong in England, Schneider-Creusot in France, Cockerill in Belgium, Skoda in Bohemia and Putilov in Russia. It was clear that the accumulation of weapons would lead to war. In fact, the big companies were beginning to use a new propaganda weapon: paying journalists and newspaper owners to publish fake news about the growing armament of their probable opponents in the coming war in order to justify spending more on weapons. Sounds familiar to today’s ears? Yes, but there are differences and for the worse, much worse.

The socialists were right: the fight is against capitalism

Z Network for more

by EWEN CALLAWAY

Emerging protein-design competitions aim to sift out the functional from the fantastical. But researchers hope that the real prize will be a revolution for the field.

On a Saturday morning in mid-August, Alex Naka embarked on what he describes as “a little hackathon” in his girlfriend’s kitchen. Powered by his laptop, some coffee and, at one point, about 80 cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) processors, he generated scores of computer-engineered proteins designed to block a cell receptor that is mutated in some tumours.

Naka — who on weekdays is a protein engineer at a medical technology company in Alameda, California — entered his ten most promising creations into a newly launched protein-design competition and watched them climb to the top of the leader board.

The contest, run by a biotechnology start-up firm called Adaptyv Bio in Lausanne, Switzerland, is one of at least five to have popped up over the past year or so. Most of the people entering the competitions are wielding AI tools such as AlphaFold and chatbot-inspired ‘protein language models’ that have exploded both in popularity and in power. Three of the researchers behind some of these tools were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their efforts. The accolades come, in part, from the hope that newly created proteins could serve as more-effective drugs, industrial enzymes or laboratory reagents.

But the boom in designer proteins has mostly sown confusion, say scientists. People are churning them out faster than they can be made and tested in labs, making it hard to tell which approaches are truly effective.

Contests have driven key scientific advances in the past, particularly for the field of protein-structure prediction. This latest crop of competitions is drawing people from around the world into the related field of protein design by lowering the barrier to entry. It could also quicken the pace of validation and standards development and perhaps help to foster community. “It will push the field forward and test methods more quickly,” says Noelia Ferruz Capapey, a computational biologist at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.

But the competitions will have to overcome some hurdles, say scientists, such as identifying which problems to tackle and working out how to select winners objectively. Getting the formula right is important. “These competitions can do damage” to a field if they are not executed properly, says Burkhard Rost, a computational biologist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

Competitive by design

The protein-design contests are partly inspired by a 30-year-old competition that helped to kick off the revolution in biological AI. Since 1994, the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) has been challenging scientists to predict the 3D shape of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. Winners of the competition — founded by computational biologist John Moult at the University of Maryland in Rockville and Krzysztof Fidelis, a computational biologist at the University of California, Davis — are determined by comparing the computational predictions with unpublished structural models.

In 2018, London-based DeepMind (now Google DeepMind) won CASP with its first version of the protein-structure-prediction tool AlphaFold . Its next iteration, AlphaFold 2, performed so well in 2020 that Moult declared the problem of predicting simple protein structures largely solved. The competition has since shifted its focus to other emerging challenges, such as predicting the structure of multiple interacting proteins in a complex.

Now, many hope that these competitions can push the protein-design field forwards just as CASP helped to spur a revolution in protein-structure prediction. “There would have not been an AlphaFold had it not been for CASP,” says Rost. “We need these competitions to do the job right and motivate people.”

In June, Rost and several of his colleagues won the Protein Engineering Tournament run by Align to Innovate, an international, open-science non-profit organization. The event included two parts. First, participants tried to predict the properties of different enzyme variants. The best-performing teams in this round then re-engineered an enzyme that breaks down starch, with the best designs determined by lab experiments. A 2025 tournament is now in the works.

Nature for more

by BRETT MURPHY

Reporting Highlights

• More Bombs: Ambassador Jack Lew urged Washington to give thousands more bombs to the Israelis because they have a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians.
• A Thank-You: After State Department officials spent months working through weekends and after hours on arms sales, the Israelis sent cases of wine to them just before Christmas.
• A Lobbying Push: Defense contractors and lobbyists have also helped push along valuable sales by leaning on State Department officials and lawmakers whenever there’s a holdup.

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

ProPublica for more

by VICTOR GROSSMAN

October 7th, for many, was a day of tears. Some were shed for family members who died or were captured during the attack by Hamas a year ago. Others—far, far more I fear—were in mourning for the more than 40,000 people who have since been killed in Gaza. Now, in addition, those killed in Lebanon. And, just as bitter tears at hearing of the many, many children who survived—as orphans, with amputated limbs, with physical and psychic scars which will burden them for a lifetime.

Yet on that same day there were a few less painful tears, simply at recalling an event long, long ago, completely painless, and for some at the time a very joyful event. Seventy-five years ago, in a small, most broken, most backward little corner of a land, the German Democratic Republic was born.

But how many at the time were skeptical! Only four years earlier small groups had combined here, returning from exile, resistance movements or allied armies, surviving concentration camps and prisons or ending years of frightened silence. Uniting them was a burning mission; after twelve years of terror and devastation, physical and mental, they were determined to create something new, cleansed of the poisons of fascism, racism, anti-human hatred, and to erect on that foundation a state which overcame hunger, poverty, constant fears of despair in a week, a month, a year, clear of greedy exploitation, of the oppression of women, of children, and dedicated to achieving friendship and cooperation with its neighbors and other peoples and cultures on all continents.

The little country which resulted—or small corner of a country—faced a broken, torn population, tainted by the poisoning of past years or by a cynical disbelief in any further plans or theories. It was faced, even before its birth, by fierce attacks with words, later with pictures, shaped by masters of twisting truth and unceasing, secretive activity and recruiting. The attacks were motivated and organized by those who had benefited from exploitation, expansion, hostility and conflict with neighbors and used divisiveness with such horrific success, giants like Krupp, Siemens, Bayer, BASF,  Deutsche Bank, Rheinmetall and the landowner nobility, the Junkers, who had supported every Prussian and German war, who built up and joined with Hitler in robbing all Europe and enslaving or killing so many millions. All of them had been thrown out of East Germany—if they had not already fled from an advancing Red Army and that little band of anti-fascist dreamers. They again dominated a much larger portion of Germany, but were obsessed with their plans to return.

And, in the end, they proved stronger and succeeded. In 1990 they were able to resume their exploitation, with more modern tools and weapons but the same old goal, indeed the necessity, of expansion. They, too, marked an anniversary last week, celebrating October 3rd, the date of their triumph in 1990, their glorious “reunification” of Germany—which some Easterners call annexation, or colonization. It was this victory, a triumph for some, but which, even after so many years, caused bitter tears for those of us who were once inspired by our wishful hopes and dreams.

Despite all the many years, those who hated the GDR still hate it today. Indeed, they seem to fear it, and continue almost daily to revile its memories—like kicking an old horse cadaver which might yet bite or strike out with a hoof or two. They are worried; perhaps even those without tears for a long-gone past may yet retain just a few undesirable GDR memories, and even pass them on.

Oh yes, blunders were made, big blunders at times, and blemishes whose demise no-one can really regret. Some were made by people whose twelve years of struggle against fascism, with so much suffering and so many losses, had hardened and narrowed them, even as they aged, in ways which made it difficult to find rapport with generations with no such experience, and no such worries that those hostile to their little republic were often the same men, or their heirs, who were once responsible for German and world misery. Then too, many GDR leaders had spent those years in the USSR, with its great achievements—above all bearing the main burden in defeating the mighty Nazi war machine—but also with so many elements of repression. Far too seldom did they learn to speak and write in a way which infused large majorities with whole-hearted approval or enthusiasm.

And yet, despite blunders and blemishes, how many wonders were achieved! Such basic ones: No joblessness, no shutting down of a department, factory or mine without an equal job for everyone. Equal pay for women and young employees, with half a year paid maternity leave and a paid “household” day every month. Free, undisputed abortions. For a limited monthly tax all medical and dental visits, with hospital stays 100% covered. Hearing aids, glasses, every prescribed test and medicine, four week spa cures, for recuperation or preventative—and never a pfennig required! Plus three-week paid vacations, often in lakeside or seaside trade union resort hotels.

Add on totally free education, from full child care through to apprenticeship, college, graduate studies, with stipendiums making jobbing or money-earning interruptions superfluous and student debt unknown. Apartment rent under ten percent of income, urban and rural carfare twenty pfennigs, bakery, dairy, grocery and butcher prices the same everywhere, affordable and frozen over all the years. Even a word for “food pantry” was unknown; everyone in every job and school was guaranteed, for less than one mark, a good lunch—in Germany the main meal of the day. No-one went hungry. Or was homeless; evictions were legally forbidden. The housing shortage was being met with a giant program to provide a pleasant modern apartment to every city-dweller. About two million had been built—until unification. Today, owing to “regrettable high interest rates and rising costs” this problem is proving insoluble—except when it comes to super-luxury gentrification projects. In GDR days even ex-convicts, after serving their terms, were guaranteed a job and a home!

As for the blemishes, even cruelties, most castigated are always the ”Stasi” snooping and spying, the restriction of the Berlin Wall, censorship in the media and the arts. Their cause was not only the hard  past experience of the men at the top but rather, primarily, to counteract extreme pressures from “the West” bolstered by a society, rich with the money and influence of those old war-lords, again—or still—in power, infused with the lush dollar millions of the Marshall Plan, plus rich resources of iron, good hard coal and other minerals so lacking in the East. The GDR supplied a decent, secure living standard to almost everyone, with more and more household appliances, cars and vacations abroad. Our tourist sites were beautiful Prague, Budapest, Leningrad, Moscow, our “Alps” the High Tatras of Slovakia, our “Caribbean” beaches the Black Sea sands of Bulgaria, Romania, Sochy or, closer, the chilly but beautiful Baltic, with well nigh half the bathers in happy, unselfconscious, full GDR nudity.

But Rome could not be built in a day, nor total Utopia. The commodity assortment in West Germany, perhaps second only to that of the USA, could not be matched by its small sibling. Making it worse in the final years: the billions needed for newly necessary electronics for its machinery exports, to be created by little GDR with no help from Sony, IBM, Silicon Valley or even the hard-pressed USSR. Then the billions spent so as not to lag too far behind in an ever more modern armament race. And finally, that giant home construction program, all to be paid for without raising rents, fares, food staple prices or charging more for health, education and culture, or cutting heavily subsidized children’s and youth clubs, books, records, theater, opera, ballet, even musicals.

Monthly Review Onlinefor more

by EVAN THOMPSON

Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein fundamentally disagreed about the nature of time and how it can be measured. Who was right?

On the evening of 6 April 1922, during a lecture in Paris, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the physicist Albert Einstein clashed over the nature of time in one of the great intellectual debates of the 20th century. Einstein, who was then 43 years old, had been brought from Berlin to speak at the Société française de philosophie about his theory of relativity, which had captivated and shocked the world. For the German physicist, the time measured by clocks was no longer absolute: his work showed that simultaneous events were simultaneous in only one frame of reference. As a result, he had, according to one New York Times editorial, ‘destroyed space and time’ – and become an international celebrity. He was hounded by photographers from the moment he arrived in Paris. The lecture hall was packed that April evening.

Sitting among the gathered crowd was another celebrity. Bergson, then aged 62, was equally renowned internationally, particularly for his bestselling book Creative Evolution (1907), in which he had popularised his philosophy based on a concept of time and consciousness that he called ‘la durée’ (duration). Bergson accepted Einstein’s theory in the realm of physics, but he could not accept that all our judgments about time could be reduced to judgments about events measured by clocks. Time is something we subjectively experience. We intuitively sense it passing. This is ‘duration’.

Their debate began almost by accident. The meeting in April had been convened to bring together physicists and philosophers to discuss relativity theory, but Bergson came intending only to listen. When the discussion flagged, however, he was pressed to intervene. Reluctantly, he rose and presented a few ideas from his forthcoming book, Duration and Simultaneity (1922). As Jimena Canales documented in her book The Physicist and the Philosopher (2015), what Bergson said in the following half an hour would set in motion a debate that reverberated through the 20th century and down into the 21st. It would crystallise controversies still alive today, about the nature of time, the authority of physics versus philosophy, and the relationship between science and human experience.

Bergson began by declaring his admiration for Einstein’s work – he had no objection to most of the physicist’s ideas. Rather, Bergson took issue with the philosophical significance of Einstein’s temporal concepts, and he pressed the physicist on the importance of the lived experience of time, and the ways that this experience had been overlooked in relativity theory.

Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics. Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in. To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’

But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher.

Aeon for more

by JONATHAN ORT

Twenty-one years after Liberia’s political elite acquiesced to “negative peace,” the US now champions the fight against impunity. Except when their own companies are involved.

At a hearing this summer about a war and economic crimes tribunal for Liberia, US Rep. Chris Smith twisted the history of Africa’s first republic. Ignoring that many of the Black emigrants who established Liberia were not born enslaved, Smith claimed, “Liberia was founded by free American slaves.” Ignoring Washington’s perennial imperialism against Monrovia, he extolled “attention by Congress to Liberia” as “helpful and appreciated.” Ignoring Black settler rule under an anti-Black world order, he asserted that Liberia “vigorously rejected” not only slavery but also “all of the evils associated with it.” Ignoring Liberia’s Indigenous populace and sovereignty alike, he touted its “relationship with the better aspects of the ‘old country.’”

It is no coincidence that Smith used the occasion to peddle such falsehoods. The movement to prosecute those who committed atrocities during Liberia’s successive civil wars (1989–2003) is gaining momentum. In May, Liberian President Joseph Boakai signed Executive Order 131, establishing the Office of a War and Economic Crimes Court for Liberia. Fifteen years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia (TRC) urged that an extraordinary criminal court prosecute perpetrators, accountability could finally arrive.

Liberia’s tribunal, however, has already come under attack. It is the latest theater where US policymakers are wrestling for neocolonial control. Smith epitomizes the threat. He has pressed Liberia to give Alan White—a lobbyist registered with the US government—influence over the proceedings.

White’s conflicts of interest are as numerous as they are naked. He and his business partner have lobbied Congress on behalf of Liberian powerbrokers, including a client whom the TRC urged be prosecuted. White’s firm pledged that its lobbying would “take advantage of the US Government’s leadership role in the establishment of the Liberia War and Economic Crimes Court.” While promoting his dubious agenda, White has impugned human rights defenders in Liberia and the US.

The US State Department, meanwhile, is also backing the tribunal. Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, has visited Liberia repeatedly and offered to conditionally fund the tribunal. Though attacks against her by White and his associates are scurrilous, Van Schaack’s support has its own strings attached.

“I want to emphasize,” Van Schaack said in an address to the Liberian public, “that the creation of a war and economic crimes court is not about laying blame or dredging up a painful history.” Her remarks beg the question: What, exactly, is the court about if not blame?

No one trying to steer Liberia’s tribunal from Washington has admitted that the US and its corporate interests fueled the mass violence, which killed as many as 250,000 Liberians. While purporting to champion accountability, Washington has neglected its own complicity.

Africa is a country for more