Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/15/)
Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com we share with you some reflections on the way the U.S. has been conducting warfare for the past 17 years without most people even noticing. It starts with an introduction by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.
Cat Zavis reflects on what healing and reconciliation can look like when anti-Semitism (or any other -ism) rears its ugly head.
Barbara Artson writes about the plight of the Rohingya people, “a Muslim minority forced to leave their homes in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Burma), whose government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and therefore they deprive them of their rights as citizens.”
In this article Ronald Aronson reports that, contrary to what many may have expected, there has been an increase in social hope––what he defines as “the disposition to act collectively to improve our situation”––since Trump took office.
Victor Grossman observes: “Only one force is genuinely suited to exposing the lies and redirecting emotions away from attacks on the poorest victims and towards solidarity with them against the truly guilty forces on high. It is the Left.”
Shootings are the Symptoms, Violence is the Diseas
By Simon Mont
A gun problem, a shooter problem, a racism problem, a mental health problem, a human problem.
A violence problem.
Violence. It’s not just a bullet or a knife. It’s an infection
That permeates through people, relationships and society.
Editor’s Note: In a society which has never acknowledged its violent foundation from the genocide of Native peoples, to slavery, to the violent overthrow of governments around the world in order to impose regimes that favor U.S. corporate interests, its brutal war against the Vietnamese people, its recruitment of young people into a pre-army ROTC, and its romanticization in movies and t.v. of super weapons and violence, it is no surprise that it is easy to convince men that “real men” use weapons and violence to get their way in the world. Even Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, spent every Tuesday morning approving targets for drone attacks that killed far more innocent people than school shootings in the same period have. Patriarchal and class-based societies have always used violence to establish and maintain their rule, and the advent and mass availability of super-powered weapons makes the violence that used to be the special privilege of the powerful elites is now also available to the masses. Of course, these weapons should be banned, though the powerful interests of the gun lobby and the military-industrial complex is going to make that very difficult. Nonetheless, applaud the students who refuse to listen to the voices that tell them to be realistic and that they cannot change the world. Yet the pervasive fear generated by a competitive marketplace, with its message that everyone is against you and you have to protect yourself from others who would dominate you or take advantage of you if they could, provides the fodder that the NRA and its supporters need to valorize unlimited access to guns.
You can read this online at :https://www.tikkun.org/newsite/a-pentagon-style-trip-down-memory-lane
The Light at the End of the Corner
A Trip Down Memory Lane, Pentagon-Style
By Tom Engelhardt We thank Engelhardt and his TomDispatch.com, our media ally, for sharing this article with Tikkun readers. If you’re in the mood, would you consider taking a walk with me and, while we’re at it, thinking a little about America’s wars? Nothing particularly ambitious, mind you, just — if you’re up for it — a stroll to the corner. Now, admittedly, there’s a small catch here. Where exactly is that corner? I think the first time I heard about it might have been back in January 2004 and it was located somewhere in Iraq.
Rabbi . Rachel Barenblat a.k.a. The Velveteen Rabbi . This appeared first at the website of the Velveteen Rabbi and is reprinted here with her permission
God in exile, school shootings, and building the mishkan together
February 17, 2018 . In this week’s Torah portion, Terumah, we read וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם / “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell within them.” (Or “among them.”) The word “I might dwell” is שכנתי / shachanti — the same as the root of the name Shechinah, our mystics’ name for the Divine Presence that dwells with us, within us, among us. Jewish tradition teaches that God is both transcendent (far away and inconceivable) and immanent (indwelling and accessible).
In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the “mobilizing passions” of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence.
[Editor’s Note: We are grateful to our media ally Tom Englehardt and his TomDispatch.com for sharing this and other writings with Tikkun. In this article, he has begun to unravel the seemingly impossible to understand fascination with Trump that perplexes many liberals and progressives: his revealing the horrendous aspect of American power that is normally kept out of sight. What I want to add here is that many people have unconsciously felt that they were being lied to by the media and the dominant mythology of American society. But they couldn’t put their finger on exactly how or why. For some of them, the appeal of Trump was the flip side of Bernie Sanders: both began to challenge the lies, Sanders in a polite way, Trump in a more vicious and hateful way.
The Destructive Power of Nationalism
Eric D. Weitz
A review of:
Anatomy of a Genocide:
The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
by Omer Bartov
Simon & Schuster, 2018
“Human life is cheap” in Casablanca, says Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) to Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the renowned film. In Buczacz, human life was cheap, and then some — expendable, worthless, targeted for obliteration. As Omer Bartov shows in his extraordinary new book, Buczacz, an isolated, backwater town in what is today western Ukraine, was crisscrossed by all the pathologies of twentieth-century political movements. The consequences were devastating for the inhabitants, Jews especially, but Ukrainians and Poles as well. Not that they were the passive victims of abstract political forces or of the actions of the major powers, Habsburg Austria, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, that variously dominated the town and region.
Being Edged Toward War With North Korea
by David McReynolds
One feels a bit helpless trying to deal with Trump and his push toward war – who is listening? If you think the points I’m making should be shared, by all means share them widely.
There are three essential points, and many secondary ones.
First, Trump has made a major issue of the fact that North Korean missiles could carry nuclear weapons that could strike the continental US. That is true, but somehow missing from this effort at panic, is the fact that both China and Russia have long had nuclear tipped missiles that can hit any point in the US with great accuracy.
On Relinquishing Hope for a Palestinian State Alongside Israel
By Jeff Warner and Eric A. Gordon
Donald Trump’s December 6, 2017, decision on Jerusalem—to establish the United States Embassy there against our own past policy and world consensus—and his following tweets, supported by Congress, have implications for U.S. Middle East policy that have finally convinced us that the two-state solution, a Palestinian state alongside Israel, is indeed a fantasy. What Happened
Achieving a sovereign, economically viable Palestinian state had always been a long shot, arguably ever since 1948, and more so after 1967. The disparity between rich, politically connected, militarily strong Israel and poor and weak Palestine, allowed Israel’s leaders to block any possibility of a Palestinian state. It has been clear for decades that Israeli leaders turned away from peace initiatives to fulfill their openly expressed goal to control all the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. There is no political will in Israel among either the leadership or the people to allow a Palestinian state, nevertheless, two-state advocates worked tirelessly to change that situation by promoting significant pressure from the U.S. and Western democracies.
[Editor’s note: I was there at MLKjr.’s speech in D.C. in the summer of 1963 and that March on Washington changed my life. When I met personally with MLKjr. in 1968, a month before he was murdered, as a representative of the Peace and Freedom Party, I tried to convince him to run for President that year. There is a chance that had he accepted he might have had Secret Service protection, though others believe that there were elements of our government that would not have wanted that protection to be too effective. We at Tikkun continue our commitment to the nonviolence that King preached, and to the goal of ending poverty and inequality and racism in all its forms. So it an honor for us to print this piece from another great fighter for peace and justice, Ariel Dorfman.–Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com ]
MARTIN LUTHER KING MARCHES ON
by Ariel Dorfman
Faraway, I was faraway from Washington D.C. that hot day in August of 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was faraway in Chile. Twenty-one years old at the time and entangled, like so many of my generation, in the struggle to liberate Latin America, the speech by King that was to influence my life so deeply did not even register with me, I cannot even recall having noticed its existence. What I can remember with ferocious precision, however, is the place and the date, and even the hour, when many years later I had occasion to listen for the first time to those “I have a dream” words, heard that melodious baritone, those incantations, that emotional certainty of victory.