Tariq Ali: Nuclear Options

By Tariq Ali

The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks. After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’  

The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.  

Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.  

Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.  

Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisers (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad. 

Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.

Most of these forces were under the indirect command of Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true: 

He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.  

Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.  

Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.  

In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the run-up to that year’s election.  

At the time, I argued in the Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:  

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of ‘ratcheting up the pressure’. Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that ‘Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing.’ Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of ‘downplaying the Iranian threat’ and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a ‘rogue state’. Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the West then embark on a new war?  

US foreign policy was aptly summarised by Bush’s laconic avowal in 2003, ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’. Britain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Australia needed no convincing. To this day, Iraq has not returned to the social and economic stability that it had before ‘regime-change’. A million plus casualties and five million orphans was the price it was forced to pay after its government was mendaciously accused of harbouring WMDs. Western companies now siphon off the bulk of Iraqi oil.  

Many who waged the Iraq war have since regretted it, but that has not stopped imperial strategists from carrying on in similar fashion elsewhere. In Gaza, the horror continues. Bombs, deaths, starvation and a callousness that evokes how the Wehrmacht treated the Slav Untermensch. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an editorial, tougher than anything that has appeared in liberal dailies in the Euro-Atlantic zone, which attacks European leaders’ pathetic decision to sanction only the two outright fascists in Netanyahu’s government and instead demands total sanctions against Israel itself. This is what real friends of Israel should be demanding, rather than encouraging its kamikaze politics and genocidal campaigns.  

After Israel’s near-complete success in levelling the Strip and exterminating tens of thousands of its people, the Netanyahu government clearly felt it was time to expand the war to other targets. First there was the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah, which killed much of its leadership and left the organisation greatly weakened, bringing Lebanon to heel. (It is no surprise that young Lebanese have since climbed onto their roof terraces to cheer on the Iranian drones.) Then came Syria, where Israel launched multiple attacks without even pretending it was self-defence. In collaboration with NATO-member Turkey and remnants of the Ba’athist apparatus, Israel helped to install a puppet government under a well-trained US stooge, the former al-Qaida operative Jolani.  

The stage was now set for the assault on Iran. As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation . . . This is what a rogue state looks like.  

The two countries are currently communicating via drones, F35s and missiles. Both Tehran and Tel Aviv have suffered hits. The declared Israeli aim of destroying the nuclear reactors has not been accomplished and Netanyahu’s boast that he will bring about regime change has produced the opposite effect. Hijabless women have been demonstrating in the streets, chanting ‘Get an atom bomb’. One of them told a reporter: ‘In parliament, they’re discussing closing down the Hormuz Straits. No need to discuss. Just close them down.’ Trump is insisting that the war can only end once Tehran surrenders completely. Many Iranians now believe that the recent nuclear negotiations were always a feint. In 2020, Trump used similar tactics to carry out the assassination of Soleimani, persuading the Iraqi Prime Minister to act as a mediator in US–Iran talks so as to lure the General to Baghdad. So far, the Iranians have withstood the assault. The country that urgently needs regime change is Israel. 

Please go here for the original article: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/nuclear-options

https://isreview.org/person/tariq-ali/index.html

Tariq Ali Offers a Devastating Analysis of Imperialism Unchained

Henry Giroux writes: "Tariq Ali [below] on the U.S. attack on Iran and its far-reaching consequences offers a devastating analysis of imperialism unchained. This is colonialism on steroids, an open display of the military-industrial complex, now in full bloom, energized by a new era in which fascism fuels its imperial delusions and apocalyptic fantasies. Once again, the insidious racial politics of disposability converge with the rapacious drive for economic resources, as if the very earth itself were to be plundered to satisfy an insatiable hunger. In this world, international law, once a bulwark against tyranny, has become little more than a forgotten relic, trampled beneath the boots of those who dare to rule the globe by force and greed.

"Once Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz,--a vital maritime artery responsible for 20% of the world’s oil and gas transport, the U.S. and Israel will be drawn into a ground war that could stretch on for years, possibly a decade. Should Russia, China, and other global powers align with Iran, the specter of a world war looms ever larger. This cataclysmic course of events will unfold because Trump, guided not by reason but by instinct (his gut), decided that bombing Iran and forging an alliance with Netanyahu, whose actions have been condemned by human rights organizations and the United Nations as war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, was the path forward. The fact that Trump was elected in spite of his cruelty, embrace of violence, endless lying, greed, criminal convictions, sexual assaults, and corruption raise fundamental questions about the collapse of politics, civic consciousness and embodies what Chris Hedges calls "the pathologies of a diseased society." More specifically and more accurately, the pornography of gangster capitalism hat has morphed into a militarized fascism."

Iran is not Iraq on many levels. Baathist Baghdad collapsed and Saddam Hussain disbanded the army went underground, but with limited support and US success in splitting the country along religious lines, it could not resist.

The Iranian clerics still retain support as evidenced in anti-Israel/anti-US demonstrations inside the country. Regime change will not be easy unless they send in the Marines. If the US does that the MAGA gangs will split and Trump will get a shock in the mid-terms. The Dems are shifting. Clinton (Bill) and Obama have both come out against the attack on Iran.

China and Russia and Pakistan have said they will help Teheran. Medvedev announced that Moscow might now help Iran develop nuclear weapons. This could all be talk but the US/EU/Israeli genocide in Gaza, the abandonment of international law and the total collapse of the UN, have led many states to shift away from the Western axis. Iran put its trust in the US. That has been bombed away.

If the Iranian government carries on targeting installations and strategic buildings in Israel and the US bombs again and again, the situation could spiral out of control. Without supporting the clerical repression in the past and its foreign policy opportunism we have to defend Iran against the Wild West and its mercenaries. We did so in the case of Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. The same goes for Iran.

— Tariq Ali

https://isreview.org/person/tariq-ali/index.html

June 13th, 2025: Celebrating a 50 Year Anniversary

Jim, Brook (our 1st golden retriever), and myself in our first little apartment in Gresham, Oregon

On the road heading west to destination unknown

Our last days with old friends before departing Michigan

For many years we had the map of the United States hanging on our wall which traced our journey westward.

Many old friends from Michigan came to visit us, and some stayed for 1-2 years, but Jim and I were the only ones who made the Pacific Northwest our permanent home.

Celebrating a 50 Year Anniversary

In the weeks leading up to our journey West, I would squint my eyes at looming cumulus clouds that were so prevalent in Michigan and imagine the clouds to be mountains. I yearned to live somewhere near mountains...

Sitting in our last Michigan home in the late spring of 1975, Jim and I would talk about different places we might want to settle. Would it be Colorado, or Idaho, or Montana, or Utah, or...? We didn't know anyone who we would seek to live near. We had no jobs. The only thing that we knew was to head West.

Then on Friday, June 13th, 1975 my first husband and our golden Brook and I departed the home of my childhood and ancestors. The night before I cried hard. I was scared. I did not know where we would end up. And I did not know if I would ever see my twin brother again. We were heading into a complete unknown. But the pull to leave was stronger than my fear. 

Gratefully, and shortly before our journey began, Jim's parents generously gifted us with the small popup trailer that he and his sisters had grown up camping in. This was to be our "covered wagon." And for weeks Jim and our 11 month old golden retriever and I traveled to different states where we'd once thought maybe we'd want to live there. Only it is extremely difficult to think of someplace as "home" when driving through a foreign town or city. So we just kept going. And going.

Back in Michigan, we hadn't considered Oregon or Washington someplace where we'd want to land. It rained too much, we told ourselves. But then our money was nearly gone when we were in Seattle. So we briefly but unsuccessfully searched for a home there. And Jim said, "Let's go to Portland." By that time, I was so tired of camping and being on the road, but I agreed to heading south into Oregon.

As Jim and I passed through Portland and headed east on July 12th, I wept at first sight of the Columbia River Gorge. OH! It was so beautiful! Along the way there were spectacular waterfalls with names I did not know how to pronounce. And there was Mt. Hood and Mount St. Helens and other mountains I did not know. And the mighty Columbia River and endless forests and Wild Places. I was blown away with all of the extraordinary beauty.

We camped three nights out in the gorge while we searched for our first home. Once we landed the little apartment in Gresham, I drove the next day to Sandy, Oregon, which was a few miles east, to apply for my first job. And the tiny tavern, then called Ron's No Place and now called the No Place Saloon, hired me on the spot. The apartment managers also hired Jim — and ultimately also our old Michigan friend, Ron Zilli, who ended up living with us for our first year — to paint the apartment complex. And that was our beginning.

Jim and myself with Dillon and our 3 sons, 1990.

There was much that I did not imagine would unfold over time. My dad died suddenly that November of 1975. He was the one who I never saw again. And my twin, who suffered from deep untreated generational trauma, ended his life just over two years later. Although my mother's mental illness made me incredibly scared to become a mother, Jim and I went on to give birth to our sons Brian and Kevin in 1979 and 1982. Jim got sober in 1983 and I followed in 1984. Then we had Matthew, our "sobriety baby," in 1987. I cherished our beautiful children. And, gradually, over many years, everything changed. 

Ultimately Jim and I divorced in 2002. And in 2010 I met my beloved Ron. I also continued to be rooted into a path of awakening and unburdening and transforming ancestral and cultural trauma. As my journey unfolded, I became a wounded healer and engaged in work in different capacities with children and families for 30 years. Then came the extraordinary miracle with my mother who experienced a partial awakening at age 87 and a channel into her heart opened for the first time. We were able to experience a closeness over the last seven years of her life that had not been possible before. And over all these years, rich and enduring friendships evolved and grew, as did our beloved family. And today there are six grandchildren who we adore and love being Grandpa Ron and Grammie Molly to. So many gifts. So many...

And through it all, the Wild Places — the mountains, Mother Ocean, the gorge, the endless forests and wilderness, the high desert and fossil bed areas, the rivers and lakes and waterfalls, all this and more — were my sanctuaries, our family's cathedrals, our grounding for healing and nourishment through hard times and times of great blessing.

This was the last picture taken with my brother, June 1975, just before leaving Michigan

Although I did not realize it at the time, I know today that there was a strong spiritual pull to embark on the sacred journey that brought me home to the Pacific Northwest, the home to my soul. The aspect that I did not grasp 50 years ago was that I was choosing to save myself. I knew in some deep place within me that my birth family was going down and that I had to choose to get off the suicide ship my parents and brother were on. I needed to get 2,500 miles between us. And for years I struggled with survivor's guilt. But not today.

I weep in this moment with this profound gratitude for my journey, a journey that began 50 years ago when Jim and I courageously headed into the unknown. That physical journey was followed by a journey of the heart and soul which has evolved beyond my wildest dreams. I have found not just the outward peace and beauty that I yearned for here in the Pacific Northwest, but also the deepening into the beauty and peace and strength of my own heart and soul that I now also recognize as something sacred within us all.

Life can be so hard. Being human is not easy! And it can take so much courage and Grace to embark on the journeys that beckon us all and in so many different forms and ways. For much of my young life, I felt so alone and was overwhelmed by shame and fear and addictions and an ocean of grief that I tried so hard to numb and deny. And then doorway after doorway appeared and I entered. Again and again and again. I bow in the deepest gratitude. And my ancestors smile...

May we all find our pathways, our journeys of the heart and soul into our deeper wholeness and the sacred beauty of who we truly are. This, in its essence, is what I believe Life asks of us. At least this had certainly been true for me. There are many doorways. May we continue to seek them and enter. Again and again and again.

With deep gratitude and heartfelt blessings,

Molly

With Ron and Shira, June 2025

Mt. Hood, Photo by Molly

Grace Lee Boggs: We Are At One of the Great Turning Points In History Where Our Survival Requires a Great Sea Change In Our Ecological, Economic, Political, and Spiritual Values

Grace Lee Boggs joins the other extraordinary human beings who have informed and deeply inspired me and countless others over many years. She was an amazing visionary activist and author whose courage and truth-telling, deep wisdom and integrity, and compassion and fierce love over the course of her 100 years here on Earth lives on to inform and inspire us all. Deepest bow of gratitude and respect and love for Grace Lee Boggs. May her rich, heartfelt, and soulful legacy live on in each of us. — Molly

Love Is About What We Do Today and 

Tomorrow and the Day After and 

Other Wisdom Quotes 

by Grace Lee Boggs

I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy. I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet. I think there's a great human desire for solutions, for profound solutions — and that nothing simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our souls.

We need to discern who we are and expand on our humanness and sacredness. That's how we change the world, which happens because WE will be the change.

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions. 

In the middle of catastrophe, in the middle of disaster, people — particularly people who have already suffered — see an opportunity to evolve to another stage of humanity. 

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.

Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists — as starting revolutions — does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. 

Nonviolence is based on recognizing that all of us are human beings. And at a certain point we begin to learn that you don't gather very much by making enemies out of people and not recognizing their humanity. Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one of us.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories — triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally — has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. 

You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.

We need to undergo a very radical revolution in values. And we need to think about what it's like to have become so materialistic that we think having a good job, and consuming like crazy to compensate for the dehumanization of the job, is living like a human being. 

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values. 

Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas. 

To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/ spiritual leap and become more 'human' human beings. In order to change/ transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves. 

A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind. 

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be "solutionaries" rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution.

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present. 

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses. 

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future... A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future... It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have — creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility. 

Why is nonviolence such an important philosophy? Because it respects the capacity of human beings to grow, and we owe that to each other. 

I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” Because “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many — not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for. 

We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize that in every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future.

I think we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments. 

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another. 

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings. 

So many institutions in our society need reinventing. The time has come for a new dream. That's what being a revolutionary is. 

Our challenge, as we enter the new millennium, is to deepen the commonalities and the bonds between these tens of millions, while at the same time continuing to address the issues within our local communities by two-sided struggles that not only say "No" to the existing power structure but also empower our constituencies to embrace the power within each of us to crease the world anew.

Civil and voting rights for blacks didn’t come from the White House or from masses demonstrating in front of the White House. They came after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools in 1964, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. In other words, they came only after hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their white supporters had accepted the challenge and risks of ourselves making or becoming the changes we want to see in the world. Women’s leadership in the public sphere didn’t come from the White House or from CEOs. It came only after millions of women came together in small consciousness-raising groups to share stories of our “second sex” lives. Today’s good news is that Americans in all walks of life have begun to create another America from the ground up in many unforeseen ways. In our bones we sense that this is no ordinary time. It is a time of deep change, not just of social structure and economy but also of ourselves. 

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: "I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.” 

We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. "I love this country," he used to say, "not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become." Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.

https://www.civilandhumanrights.org/fw-grace-lee-boggs/

https://www.boggscenter.org/

Hannah Arendt: A People That Can No Longer Distinguish Between Truth and Lies Cannot Distinguish Between Right and Wrong

Powerful wisdom that is essential for our times! The manipulation of the American people has been going on for a long time. Noam Chomsky was tragically spot on when he said that “Americans are a profoundly propagandized people.” And now the intentional and toxic manipulation is on severe overdrive. And the neoliberal era with Biden, Obama, and the Clintons has certainly played a major role of ushering in the fascist era that we now find ourselves in. The extreme right wing Christian fascists have also been planning this for a long time. Chris Hedges has certainly also warned us for decades about what was coming in his brilliant and chilling book American Fascists. — Molly

Hannah Arendt discusses in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism the manipulation of truth and the impact on people’s ability to think independently:

"I’ve been pondering about the effects of pervasive lying and the undermining of the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood for quite a while now... The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists... The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

Arendt’s extensive body of work includes many nuanced discussions on truth, lies, and the nature of totalitarianism, and this quote reflects themes from her writing on totalitarianism and the nature of truth:

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.“

— Hannah Arendt,

(14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German historian and philosopher.

The Origins of Totalitarianism Book: https://amzn.to/3DwGXtv

Copied from English Literature info

I Crisscrossed America To Talk To People Whose Views I Disagreed With. I Now Have One Certainty

This is an excellent piece. I am aware that I experience so many layers of ancestral and cultural traumas stretching way back — but remaining unacknowledged, unattended, unhealed, and not transformed — which have led us to this place where we find ourselves at today. bell hooks describes what has plagued us as "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy." Tragically spot on. And so I appreciate this article and all invitations to do the hard work of not excluding anyone from our circle of compassion. And to do that we have to be willing and wanting to do the inner work of dismantling the walls we have built around our own hearts -- something which empowers us to turn the outer walls we've sadly erected sideways to become bridges. And as we come to better know and understand ourselves and each other, we can catch ourselves and intervene before we engage in calling anyone idiots or assholes or douches or illegals or anything that at its root dehumanizes. And we can remember the wisdom of James Baldwin who said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." — Molly

I’ve spoken to white nationalists in Tennessee and Black activists in Texas – and learned about what it takes to connect across difference

By Anand Pandian

The residential community was lodged near a national forest on the outskirts of Scottsdale, Arizona. Forbidding gates and sentry posts restricted access to the exclusive development and its elegant homes. But security here went much further.

Each cul-de-sac in the colony had its own individual railway gate, and many of the homeowners had installed gates across their own driveways as well. Anyone coming in or out of those houses would have to clear three checkpoints that set them apart from the wider world beyond.

I was astonished. But the security director at the gated community saw nothing unusual in such arrangements. “People shouldn’t be able to just walk into where you live. You should be able to defend yourself against the rest of the world.” Immigration officers were doing exactly the same thing along the country’s border, he added: defending us.

I couldn’t help but think about what I had seen in the company of migrant aid volunteers earlier that week in southern Arizona, all the tattered clothes and humble belongings caught in the brush of a desert trail, attesting to the desperation of those who had fled through that harsh terrain.

How could people be indifferent to such suffering, I asked one of the volunteers. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he replied.

Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep. I have talked with homebuilders in North Dakota and activists for housing justice in north Texas, with diesel truck enthusiasts in Iowa and pedestrian safety planners in Florida, with white nationalist demonstrators in Tennessee and environmental justice organizers in the Hudson River valley. I have logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls.

I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity.

In the many conversations and encounters that led to this book, I tried to approach people on their own terms, paying heed to their everyday commitments and concerns, often very different from mine. I have come away with a much better understanding of why things are as stuck as they are, and what it would take to truly change them.

The challenges are real, as I saw one October in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

__________

“How are you feeling?” I asked the Nepali woman behind the counter of a gas station. She replied with a single word and a tight-lipped smile. “Scared.”

Scheduled that Saturday morning in Shelbyville was a “White Lives Matter” political rally. Businesses downtown were shuttered. Police had cordoned off roads heading into the town. A pervasive thrum was in the air, from helicopters circling overhead. Dozens of officers in riot gear massed on the roofs of low buildings.

The October 2017 rally followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters left dozens injured and one young woman, Heather Heyer, dead. The Shelbyville rally was organized by a southern separatist group called the League of the South, working with a larger umbrella of white nationalist groups called the Nationalist Front.

“Which side are you on?” an officer asked as I approached the site. Long metal barricades divided the white nationalists from the counter-protesters who were also gathering that morning. I followed a handful of journalists into the security clearance area for the white nationalist demonstrators. I was hoping to talk with some of them, to try to understand why they had come to think of their own wellbeing in such starkly racist terms.

Everyone was forced to mill around the checkpoint and submit to a pat-down in the name of safety. The process was long and arduous, so much so that it helped break the ice between a brown ethnographer and the white nationalists in his midst. Here was something we could complain about together, as if this was a painfully slow line at an airport terminal.

White nationalists attend a ‘White Lives Matter’ rally on 28 October 2017 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

I struck up a conversation with a bearded man who worked at a uniform factory in northern Alabama. He was wearing a red Maga cap, with an American flag draped around his shoulders – flagpoles had been banned. He admitted feeling stupid with a flag on his back. “What would look cool is a Swat vest and a gun,” he suggested, eyeing the officers nearby.

Some of the demonstrators came down to the checkpoint in quasi-military formation, with helmeted young men in rows marching behind plastic shields as a ruddy-faced man with a thick white beard led them in a chant: “Closed borders! White nation! Now we start the deportation!” When they halted, I could see that some of them had swastikas and the letters “KKK” tattooed on their arms.

Styled as foot soldiers, many startlingly young in age, these men were a deliberately provocative spectacle of fascist unity. They were also a minority among those who gathered for the white nationalist rally in Shelbyville. That left me curious about the other demonstrators who had joined in plain clothes. How did these ideas speak to them?

I fell into conversation with a tall white man in a black Carhartt jacket. He didn’t want to divulge who he was, and nor, frankly, did I, but it turned out that he was raised in Brooklyn, not far from the Bronx borough where I was born. In his late 40s, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he had gone to the rally in Charlottesville and had come to Shelbyville for this event.

“I have an affinity for this side,” he admitted. I introduced myself as a writer, and we wound up getting into a long discussion.

“What do you think of this idea of an ethnostate?” I asked the man, bringing up the vision of a Balkanized white nation floated by rally organizers. “What would you do with people like me?”

“What’s your heritage?” he asked.

“My family is from India,” I said. “I was born and raised in this country, but my parents immigrated here.”

“Aren’t you guys Aryans?” Both of us laughed uneasily.

He asked when my family had come to the United States, adding that he had ancestors who came here during the revolutionary war era. “Our ancestors built this country for their posterity. We feel this is our inheritance.”

“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I told him. “In the 1970s, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States. The government put out a call, and a whole bunch of them came from India. My dad’s a cardiologist. Over the years, he’s taken care of thousands of patients, saved a lot of lives. Does that give us a place here, or not?”

“Yeah, that’s a part of our history,” he replied. “We can accept that. We can absorb a certain amount of other cultures.” The way he spoke, he seemed to be thinking of a national organism, its ability to tolerate some degree of foreign bodies in its midst.

Still, the man from Brooklyn insisted, “there’s no living with the other.” What seemed to have gone missing here was the faith that one could live alongside others unlike oneself, sharing a collective life with them rather than living at the other’s expense.

“You gotta put your own air mask on first,” he said. “You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. You can’t help people if you cut your own throat.”

____________

Places of belonging can be conceived in defensive and xenophobic ways, as that white nationalist rally had in Shelbyville. But they can also be imagined and sustained in a more hopeful manner, as shared spaces of cultural resistance and transformation.

I think, for example, of the members of the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship in north Texas, who led the effort to desegregate their town in the 1960s. I was privileged to meet some of these courageous women during my research.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Black community of Denton was anchored in a prosperous enclave at the heart of the town, known as Quakertown. Like many other Black townships at time, Quakertown had thrived, with a school and many churches and businesses. Then, in the early 1920s, white civic leaders in Denton led a campaign to appropriate the Black township’s land, raze its buildings and place a public park for white families there instead.

Many Black families were forced to leave Denton altogether, for other towns and states or farther afield. Those who remained rebuilt their community once again on a tract of land south-east of the town, past flour mills and two sets of railway tracks, a distant periphery that remains the nucleus of Denton’s Black population to this day.

I met Alma Clark for the first time at the American Legion Senior Center in south-east Denton in 2017, when she was 89 years old. She scoffed at the ideas of health and sanitation used as rationale for Quakertown’s removal. “We went into the homes of white folk and cooked their food and cleaned their houses. We took care of their children. We were good enough for that,” she told me with a tart smile.

However much labor the Black women and men of Denton contributed to the wellbeing of the town’s white residents, they had been cast into a space of public neglect. Under these circumstances, families in the community turned to strategies of collective support and caretaking.

Women relied on one another to help with their children, as they juggled work and other responsibilities. Families added rooms to their own homes to house Black students admitted to Denton’s universities but denied a place in their dormitories.

In the 1960s, Clark and other Black women in Denton came together with some white women in the town to create what came to be known as the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship. They began by opening their homes to each other, sharing meals for the first time. Eventually, their conversations led to public campaigns that drew dozens of active women in the town. The organization ensured that its membership remained Black and white in equal measure at any given time, and alternated its meetings regularly between Black and white homes.

A 1994 photograph from the Denton Record-Chronicle documenting a 30th-anniversary Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship meeting. Photograph: Denton County Office of History and Culture

Women in the fellowship made visible the harsh realities of racial segregation. They led a successful campaign to pave south-east Denton’s streets and equip them with streetlights. They organized voting drives to register new Black voters, and took to visiting local restaurants in interracial pairs to support their desegregation. They distributed cards that encouraged Denton city residents to sign a “good neighbor pledge” that affirmed the right of every person to rent, buy or build a home anywhere they wished, even as social and economic forces conspired to keep people mostly where they were.

The legacy of the Women’s Interracial Fellowship remains widely visible in Denton today. A vivid mural depicting Clark and several other Black women activists with the organization spans both sides of the railway underpass leading into south-east Denton. An art installation commemorating their work for racial justice adorns a small downtown park, close to the central courthouse square from which a Confederate monument was finally removed in 2020. Contemporary antiracist organizing in the Black Lives Matter era has drawn from historical struggles in the town, on the more inclusive vision of home and community that activists have long summoned.

“We had to help each other to survive,” Clark recollected to me in 2022, when I returned to Denton for the Juneteenth celebration that year.

She went on to add a striking analogy. “It’s like making cornbread. You need meal, you need flour, you need baking powder, you need eggs. You need to put all those ingredients together to make that cornbread. You can’t do anything if you keep them separate.”

____________

All of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.

In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time, neighborliness has also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement.

One afternoon a few years ago, passing through a small town in southern Michigan, I went out to a park to catch up on some notes and phone calls. After some time, a white man in his 60s sat down on the bench beside me, and we fell into conversation. He was slightly drunk, a little red in the eye, and keen to talk. He had recently retired from work as a mechanic at a nearby plant. His wife was ailing, mostly bedridden at home, and he was worried about her medical care.

I can’t remember how the subject of politics came up, but he told me that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He also wanted me to understand that this didn’t change what he owed me as a newcomer to his town. No, he didn’t know me from Adam, but our meeting was the Lord’s blessing, he told me, and I ought to have someone around there to call on in case of trouble.

He scribbled down his number and address on a scrap of paper and insisted that I take it. “I don’t care if you’re brown or red or whatever,” he told me, and I believed him.

I was heading out the next morning, but I kept thinking about that unexpected gesture of kindness. It was like a flash of some other solidarity that still remained possible. I picked up a pie at a market nearby, meaning to drop it off for that man and his family. When I pulled up at the address he had shared, the shades were drawn, and no one seemed to be home. I left the pie and a note on the concrete landing of that small tract house clad in blue vinyl siding.

I felt a bit nervous and exposed, walking back to my car. I was, after all, a stranger. But it felt like the right thing to do. He had treated me like a neighbor, and I wanted to reciprocate.

Such aspirations will face serious tests in the years to come. How will people respond to the deportation of families who have lived beside them for decades, or the gutting of hard-won protections for clean water and air, or the removal of books meaningful to the most marginal members of their communities from local school curricula, or the deepening of media foxholes that celebrate masculine aggression and disdain for the struggles of others elsewhere?

Xenophobic and authoritarian politics draw their power from a fear of foreigners and strangers, an idea that the dangers they pose are already around us, needing to be identified and rooted out. But as Toni Morrison observed, such ideas often reflect “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging”. The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within, the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.

In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?

It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled Earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.

We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.

__________

Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Parts of this essay were adapted from his book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, out now.

Spot illustrations by Peter Gamlen.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/01/united-states-polarization