Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/page/35/)
Why the Rich Love Burning Man
Burning Man became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core.
by Keith A. Spencer
Trey Ratcliff / Flickr
46.1k
1.62k
In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society.
Editor’s note: The poem below presents the most authentic understanding of the situation of the world’s refugees in the contemporary world. They are momentarily in the consciousness of the world’s humanity, but will too soon fade. People have momentarily been moved by the great suffering of these refugees, and particularly their children, but politely ignore the role that the US and other “advanced” industrial societies have played in creating the economic and political conditions which have led to the vast increase of refugees in the past twenty years. For the U.S., that responsibility includes both the economic devastation wrought in South and Central America, Africa and Asia by the trade agreements (championed by the Clintons and more recently by Obama) that destroyed subsistence farming and forced millions of people into the barrios and slums of the big cities where they were often forced to choose between armed opposition to ruling elites or selling their children into slavery or sexual exploitation rather than see them starve to death; and also the devastation created by the U.S. wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and drone strikes in Yemen all of which gave rise to the Islamic State of Iraq & Syris (ISIS) with its brutality now spreading through populations driven crazy by the violence that the US and its allies intensified in the Middle East. So while Americans sit around looking in shock at this situation, deploring the growing xenophobia that not only is growing in Europe but which is being played to by the Trump candidacy and other candidates for the Republic Presidential nomination, many wilfully ignore the role of our own country in creating the preconditions for this growing horror show.
Editor’s note: Henry Giroux is one of the most brilliant analysts of the humanly destructive impatct of global capitalism as it plays itself out not only in the economic sphere, but in every aspect of daily life. It is an honor for us that he writes for Tikkun and gives us permission to post on our website articles that he has published elsewhere. Whatever he addresses he manages to pull together a coherent and deeply insightful overview that illuminates and deepens our understanding of the world. So even if the ostensible topic of any given article may not interest you, as you read through his articles you will learn so much about the way to think about our world that it’s almost like being back in the very best college course you ever had!–Rabbi Michael Lerner
SEPTEMBER 2, 2015
Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence
by HENRY GIROUX
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: The concept of “disposability” frequently returns in your writing, whether speaking of youth, politics, the future, etc. Why do you insist on this theme?
Uri Avnery
August 29, 2015
The Molten Three
I MUST admit that Moshe “”Bogie” Ya’alon did not top the list of my favorite politicians. The former army Chief of Staff and present Minister of Defense looked to me like a mere lackey of Netanyahu and a one-dimensional militarist. Many people call him a “bock”, a non-complimentary German-Yiddish term for billy goat. Yuval Steinitz, the present minister for I-don’t-know-what, was also not at the top of the list of politicians I admire. He, too, seemed to me one of the servants of Netanyahu, without a recognizable personality of his own.
Even the former army Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, was not one of my ultimate heroes.
Editor’s note: There have been frequent communications to us at Tikkun claiming that ISIS reveals “the truth about Islam.” This is as big a slander as saying that Netanyahu and the racist remarks of some of the people in his cabinet reveals “the truth about Judaism.” We have seen many many public statements from Muslim leaders condemning ISIS. Obviously those that come from Saudi or Iranian leaders are a bit hard to take seriously, given their own repression of human rights. But there are many other wonderful Muslims speaking out, and the one below is quite typical of many that we’ve received over the course of the past two years.
Editor’s note: In reporting on Israel’s latest outrages I do not mean to suggest that Israel is worse than many many other countries in regard to its abuses of human rights, but only that as a rabbi and champion of Jewish values it is particularly painful to me to witness Judaism being associated with such unjust and outrageous behavior. I feel the same way about the attempts by Donald Trump and many others to send back 12 million “undocumented” refugees in America to the countries from which they fled –mostly because of oppressive conditions created by American trade agreements that impoverished much of their countries or the police and army abuses (that American-trained at Ft. Benning Georgia’s School of the America ) officers organized against their own people. It is precisely because I care so much about the U.S. and about Israel that I feel the need to focus on behavior that so violates what most Americans and most Jews believe to be the realities of American and Israeli life. I have met those who hate the US or hate Israel, and they joyfully expose abuses.
Editor’s note: Noam Chomsky’s analysis (read below after reading this) is an important counter to the endless drum of US propaganda from both parties about the threat from Iran. So much self-deception is thrown at Americans that we are not to blame when even the best among us begins to repeat analyses that forget or obscure the actual role that the US plays in the world today, as Chomsky begins to outline (though he doesn’t really explore the more powerful distorting role of global capitalism, which is not to be blamed solely on the US). Unfortunately, Chomsky underplays the anti-Semitism that the Iranian mullahs have fanned in Iran. They may never have explicitly called for Israel’s physical destruction, but they had plenty of time to clarify what they’ve meant by what seems like code language with such destruction in mind – all they needed to do to eliminate what Chomsky considers an unfair charge would be to publicly affirm that they don’t intend or seek to eliminate the state that was created as a refuge for Jews. We atTikkunhave sent that request to Iranian leaders, but they haven’t responded.
Where are the missing mystics of the revolution? ERIKA SUMMERS-EFFLER and HYUNJIN DEBORAH KWAK 11 August 2015
Mysticism can undermine the social and political order in fundamental ways. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa at the Maryhouse office in New York City on June 17, 1979. Credit: Bill Barrett/ http://www.onbeing.org. Hermits in caves or yogis on mountaintops: that’s how mystics are usually depicted.
Editor’s note: this strategy does not capture the strategic ideas we’ve develop in Tikkun and in The Left Hand of God book, in the NSP strategy paper “Yearing for a World of Love and Justice, we’ve developed at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant and in our trainings for spiritual progressives. Nevertheless, it is a strategy that has some serious thinking behind it, and that is very rare these days among secular progressive activists, so it deserves our attention.–Rabbi Michael Lerner
The Sum Strategem
by Zevin V. Cruz
“Zevin X. Cruz” <zevinxcruz@gmail.com>
“We’re not going to change the world one person at a time. We’re not going to clean up our ghettos one block at a time or save our national debt one dollar and one balanced budget at a time, or solve the crime problem in America one criminal at a time. It’s a nice fantasy, but that’s about all it is—a fantasy. “Economies of scale make a difference.
WHY I’M NOT GOING TO BURNING MAN THIS YEAR
by Daniel Pinchbeck (from Reality Sandwich)
I have gone to Burning Man 15 years in a row. When I went the first time, back in 2000, I was a journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone. That was an amazing introduction to the event, as I was able to go “back stage” and meet the organizers, artists, and geniuses behind the sculptures, lasers, and camps. I was immediately hooked. I couldn’t believe such a place existed – that tens of thousands of people shared the same ideals, and worked together to realize their visions.
Throw the [Good] Book at Them: Changing the Conversation about Justice
by Rabbi Rachel Mikva
Romain Dukes says President Obama has given him his life back. Expecting to spend the rest of his years in prison after being convicted in 1997 of distribution and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, Dukes is among the forty-six individuals who recently had their sentences commuted. Jason Hernandez says the same thing; sentenced at age fifteen to life without parole for his part in a drug conspiracy, he’s been out since 2013 after the president commuted his sentence. Hernandez works as a welder (a trade he learned in prison), and mentors juvenile offenders at Café Momentum in Texas, eager to make a difference in the lives of these teens:
I hope one of these days when they ask the president, “What were some of your greatest decisions?” And when he names the Affordable Care Act and the other accomplishments that he has done, that he also says, “You know what? There’s also the Clemency Initiative and that one Mexican kid, named Jason Hernandez. I’m glad I let him out because he has done so much for the community.” That’s kind of how I live my life.
I Worked at AIPAC 6 Years…But Now It Shames Me As an American Jew
by M.J. Rosenberg
August 6, 2015 mjayrosenberg
President Obama’s speech at American University defending the Iran agreement against charges made by the Israeli government and its lobby in the United States (along with the lobby’s wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress) was, for me, the worst moment yet in my long history with the lobby in general and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular. I saw something I never expected to see, something that appalled and offended me more than anything the lobby has done before. I saw the President of the United States brought to the point where he felt it necessary to give a major foreign policy address defending his foreign policy against Netanyahu and AIPAC. Every charge Obama felt the need to rebut was a charge made by Netanyahu or the lobby. Obama himself conceded that when he noted that Israel is the only country in the world that opposes the Iran agreement.
Two apologies from Rabbi Lerner a minor one and a major one
1) The minor apology is that the mailing of the Summer issue of Tikkun was delayed by something going wrong at the printers. That issue should have been mailed in mid-July and instead is coming sometime in mid-August. So sorry. As you probably know, the print issue of the magazine is only available to subscribers and members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and is not the same as the articles you find on line at tikkun.org or the Tikkun Daily blog. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so now at that website.
Editor’s Note:
Faced with the horrendous crimes of an ultra-orthodox Jew stabbing participants in a gay pride demonstration in Israel, and the firebombing of Palestinian homes and resulting burning to death of an 18 month old Palestinian baby while others in the family are in critical condition and may not survive, many Israelis and American Jews denounced these horrendous acts. Netanyahu and his government ordered a few Israeli settlers arrested in “administrative detention,” the polite word to describe the practice which till now has been used against thousands of Palestinian civilians–arrest without formal charges, often held in detention for months or more without trial, and in the case of Palestinians often tortured. The Israeli settlers arrested did not face what most Palestinians “suspected” of terrorist acts usually suffer: the homes of the family of the suspect are immediately blown up by the occupying Israeli Army in the West Bank. That no such punishment was immediately meted out to the Israeli settler suspects was not surprising, but just another manifestation of the racist treatment Palestinians in the Occupied territory face (though of course we don’t support this tactic against settlers or Palestinians). As many Israeli human rights and peace advocates point out, the firebombing of Palestinian homes is just one of many variants of violence visited upon Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, the goal being to make life so difficult that Palestinians will eventually be “ethnically cleansed” and Israel can make the West Bank a fully Jewish-majority part of Israel.
Uri Avnery
August 8, 2015
Divide et Impera
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU is not known as a classical scholar, but even so he has adopted the Roman maxim Divide et Impera, divide and rule.
The main (and perhaps only) goal of his policy is to extend the rule of Israel, as the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, over all of Eretz Israel, the historical land of Palestine. This means ruling all of the West Bank and covering it with Jewish settlements, while denying any civil rights to its 2.5 million plus Arab inhabitants.
East Jerusalem, with its 300,000 Arab inhabitants, has already been formally annexed to Israel, without granting them Israeli citizenship or the right to take part in Knesset elections.
That leaves the Gaza Strip, a tiny enclave with 1.8 million plus Arab inhabitants, most of them descendents of refugees from Israel.