Lord Rothschild held court at another dinner, in Vienna. He didn’t issue sinister capitalist marching orders. His main concern was to debunk persistent uncharitable gossip about the family patriarch’s bets on Waterloo in 1815. Lots of spooks, too, behind every tree. Somewhere in their dusty archives is a photo of a military aircraft, the West’s first sighting ever. That’s me there, putting on an imbecilic grin of tourist innocence. That’s my crotch blocking your view of a crucial detail of the engine nacelle. Oops. I was just doing a favor for a pal. I did good turns for them all, American or not, they’re all alike. Lots of backscratching, poop for you and me. State secrets got traded like baseball cards. That’s what happens when discredited hegemons expire and decompose: everyone can smell the stink.

The stink can gag a maggot now again but it is not polite to say so. Everyone in power is resolutely breathing through their mouth. Nothing I care about comes up in public discourse, except as grotesque funhouse-mirror distortions. No party represents me. Nobody cares what I think in the cabals that run the world. It’s not just me. Unless you’re actively engaged in influence peddling, abuse of function, or looting, you don’t count.

Our state rots and blackens inside with some deep gangrene. Our disgust is now a crime against the state.  The only option is to euthanize this state, induce collapse. The Constitution’s gone. It’s not coming back. US institutions and protections bear no relation to the document that spawned them long ago.

The Congressional power of the purse is gone, washed away by trillions in government obligations unlawfully imposed by the bankers’ factotums at the Fed.  The war powers of Congress? Our Commander in Chief holds them in contempt. He sentences Libya to war in backroom deals at the Security Council, then breaches the authorizing authority, toppling rulers and propping them up, destroying vital public services, and dismembering the country.  The sole remaining power of the House is trading in influence, with leadership positions based on annual monetary goals for taking corporate graft.  The Senate now serves only to avert public consideration of questions forbidden by the state.  The Supreme Court is a cesspool of corruption and repressive caprice, with justices on the take debasing law to a tissue of absurdities.

If the Constitution is a dead letter, your Bill of Rights is a joke. The President has the power to kill citizens without charge or trial; to detain them arbitrarily for life; to torture them with impunity; to criminalize association, speech, and assembly; and to search persons or seize personal records and effects wholesale, on secret grounds. Torturer Brett Kavanagh preens in judicial robes, revoking the rule of law to hide his crimes. With corporate crime off limits, Federal law enforcement has degenerated into Israeli firms Narus and Verint conducting NKVD-style mass surveillance to blackmail and recruit informers.

Your vote gives this parasitic state a fishy sheen of popular consent but changes nothing. Aggression, repression and exaction proceed as privately agreed by agents of America’s proprietors. Two and only two parties coact to silence unauthorized expressions of the popular will. Electoral politics is pointless, sustained only by threats to vestigial state protections. Voters are driven down the party cattle chutes by attacks on their security in sickness or old age, or by fabricated threats to their livelihood or means – immigrants, socialists, unions, deficits, tax. Scripted competition for your futile vote chops up your rights and makes you fight the other faction for scraps.

But what’s the alternative? Reform proposals cluster at opposite poles of loony philosophy or scatter-shot technical adjustments. Corruption and repression outrun proposed reforms, but stronger responses are limited to wistful daydreams of resolute marches. A nation of dissidents gropes for overarching principles to focus its discontent.

A broader view shows that we are not alone in this. Our state is not the first state to go bad. States go off the rails all the time, and the world knows what to do. The international community has built and tested scaffolding to shore up rotten states and replace the ones that fail. The crucial principles needed to renew a state, painstakingly constructed by a line of thinkers from Rousseau to Kant and Mill and Rawls, have been codified and written into law. Our state bears duties. It is bound by obligations and commitments.

By international consensus, any sovereign state must meet world standards for governance. Our state is enmeshed in these standards abroad, and the international community continually confronts our government with its duties and derelictions. The US government defies the outside world with its armaments and wealth and populous heft. Advanced by weak and peaceful states, the standards are no threat. But if the US population took them up, these standards could demolish our criminal state. The American people would gain independent authority and institutional support for freedom, security, and peace.

Revolutions in the Moslem world coalesced around peoples’ demand for dignity, a term with objective legal meaning and accumulating case law under human rights compacts and the Convention Against Torture. Latin American democracy movements invoked self-determination, another fundamental principle of human rights treaty law. The words unfold to objective standards and concrete requirements. What Rousseau did for the French revolution, treaty law did for modern popular democracy movements: giving parallel government a clear source of legitimacy, uniting disparate groups with overarching principles, and mobilizing peoples in other oppressive states.

US government policy revolves around efforts to avoid the contagion of world standards. The state keeps Americans in the dark about its duties by a last-ditch campaign of suppression. Officials at home ward off legally binding instruments with glittering generalities stripped of content, such as liberty and freedom and justice. At the same time state officials fight to keep specific standards out of reach of the American people. Statist propaganda tars human rights law by association with foreign enemies such as demonized ‘dictators’ or ‘communist’ oppressors. Meticulously-nurtured folklore attacks the state’s obligations as an alien, despotic New World Order. Americans who apply universal standards for criminal aggression or willful killing “should have their head examined,” so our current President says. And what of Americans who cite evidence that our forces shot bin Laden when he had been rendered hors de combat by detention, at the President’s direction? What of Americans who question the legality of our classified assassination force? Let’s all examine their heads.

State indoctrination aims to keep us clinging to the toothless boilerplate of the Constitution. For all the good it does us in this sty of rancid institutions, we might as well be citing The Code of Hammurabi. Our Constitution, as interpreted by an out-of-control autocrat and nine sneering clowns, permits state terror and torture, enshrines corruption, and negates human rights.

So what’s our grievance, then, in fifty words or less? Our State is derelict in its duties. It has failed to meet its obligations and commitments. Our government doesn’t measure up. These are grounds for recourse to rebellion.

Duties, obligations and commitments: the world knows what that means. If Americans ever learn, the jig is up. The standards are written to be clear to everybody everywhere. They strip a failing state of its authority.

It’s not like waving signs in a tricorn hat. In this mode of discourse, claims of right must reference the authority by article and paragraph. Treaty law chapter and verse cuts the crap. Human rights bodies examine America’s state with a rigor never seen at home. Humanitarian law cuts through patriotic barbarity with X-Ray acuity. Just to know your rights is subversive. Citing state duties? That’s the next best thing to treason.

State secrets though they seem to be at home, the basic instruments are not hard to find:

- The UN Charter.  Supreme law of the land by Article VI of the US Constitution. The Charter defines peace. Invoked by citizens, the Charter would subject our war machine to independent legal authority.

- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Adopted by international consensus and binding on the US government as customary international law. The most-translated document on earth, the UDHR sets the standard of achievement for all states. It entitles Americans to know their rights through education. It specifies the duties of the state, including our right to the means of life. Invoked by citizens, it would loosen state controls that put our subsistence and our peace in the power of corporations.

- The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). Supreme law of the land. It provides objective standards for freedom from state repression. As binding treaty law it subjects our government to international review by independent experts. It defines democracy in terms that lay our corrupt elections bare. It expands our freedoms well beyond the Bill of Rights. Invoked by citizens, it requires compensation for government abuses.

- The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR). The US is a signatory and must not act to defeat the object and purpose of the treaty. As binding treaty law it would hold government accountable for deficiencies in our living standards. The covenant defines self-determination to include environmental health; cultural integrity; and economic security including health, housing, livelihood, and education. Invoked by citizens, the covenant would hold our state to account for corporate predation such as mass illegal evictions, predatory denial of health care, adulteration and tainting of food, or usury and fraud in education.

- The Convention Against Torture (CAT).  Supreme Law of the Land. Enforces the right to dignity with criminal penalties for inhuman or degrading treatment. Invoked by citizens, the Convention grants universal-jurisdiction legal redress for US government brutality.

- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. [16] In force, with jurisdiction over US officials subject to Security Council referral. The US was briefly a signatory, but withdrew its signature and has failed to ratify the treaty. Invoked by citizens, the Rome Statute challenges the impunity of US officials for unlawful brutality and war.

Everything everyone wants is there. There’s an article for every public good bad states withhold. Democracy, that’s CCPR Article 25. Environmental stewardship, that’s CESCR Article 12(2b). Labor rights, that’s CESCR Article 8. Food security, that’s CESCR Article 11(2). Privacy – not just freedom from search and seizure but broader protection from personal attacks by the state – that’s CCPR Article 17. Religious freedom, that’s CCPR Article 27. Are your gun rights fundamental? CCPR Article 5(2) protects them.

There is seldom any question what these documents mean. The basic compacts are defined by an evolving body of explicit agreements and case law. Humanitarian law – the UN Charter and Rome Statute – builds on the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the laws of war. The core human rights instruments – the UDHR, CCPR, and CESCR – are applied by UN agencies and regional or national tribunals. Other documents bind the standards into unifying precepts. The Declaration on the Right to Development applies human rights and humanitarian law to formally subordinate the state to its peoples. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect makes a state’s sovereignty contingent on  human rights, humanitarian law, and inclusion. The Paris Principles specify the functions of a domestic human rights body.

But why wouldn’t these standards be ignored, as the Constitution is? The standards need teeth. To assert them takes push and pull: push by civil society from within states, and pull by principled blocs acting from outside. The documents are meant to work that way: they seem to summon all the foreign devils and possessing demons most feared by our state.

Civil society means Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): voluntary nonprofit associations with a formal institutional existence, independent of public authorities and commercial entities, and not in pursuit of members’ commercial or professional interests. In some countries civil society includes the media, though not in the United States, where dominant media advance state doctrine (the New York Times and Washington Post,) partisan objectives (Fox News, for example,) or commercial interests of firms that own them (NBC and ABC, for example.) Civil society shames states. In an international order dictated by a domineering power, associations can accomplish things that subaltern governments cannot.

A civil-society coalition led 156 countries to ban landmine production and use. The coalition is applying the same approach to ban cluster munitions. The process that produced these treaties has become a promising approach for reforms that world powers might suppress. Private associations and like-minded governments are tackling small-arms proliferation both internationally and domestically – the Philippine Action Network on Small Arms is resisting the spread of gun culture there.

Each specialized disarmament campaign draws on the accumulated experience of the others. Campaigns amass evidence to shift the focus from gee-whiz military tricks to human suffering. In the seminal Montreux Meeting, the International Committee of the Red Cross brought military staff together with clearance experts, compelling recognition of the cost to noncombatants. Civil-society education and pressure is crucial, helping elective officials go over the generals’ heads with popular support. Civilian mutilées get a voice, personalizing facts that get suppressed in the ritual and argot of public military briefings. Campaigners can divert the state’s theater of threat from Why did they do it? to Where did they get that weapon? Weapons that are best at killing noncombatants come to light, and the focus subtly shifts from laundry lists of weapons to human security. The war machine feeds on enemies. These campaigns poison the war machine with victims.

The United Nations Association pushed for an international criminal court, assembled organizations worldwide when the idea gained momentum, and shaped the court’s  statute with technical assistance. The European Forum for Restorative Justice is nudging criminal justice practice from punishment toward redress and restitution. Restorative justice has legal recognition in at least sixteen European countries and pilot projects in another dozen. It has spread to the anglophone world and even gained a furtive toehold in the United States.  In France, civil society pressured parliament to convene the Quilès Commission to investigate the French government’s role in Rwandan genocide.

The World Social Forum is pure ferment, by design. It puts social justice activists and groups in contact worldwide. Like a funnel in reverse, the forums accentuate variety. Shoestring groups vie with established NGOs in a proliferating series of assemblies. It strengthens ties, that’s all – but ties may be the fundamental threat to statist domination.

One gauge of civil society’s importance is the US government’s hostility. At a UN Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, the United States’ UN ambassador listed measures unacceptable to the US government. Among the short and comprehensive list: no promotion of NGO advocacy – not even by NGOs. The US opposed civil-society advocacy not just within the United States but internationally. Our government will withhold cooperation on all agreed measures to silence voices it can’t control. That is a testament to the power of NGOs.  Domestic NGOs without international support are isolated and destroyed at home: bipartisan attacks on ACORN and Planned Parenthood fit a longstanding pattern of state conduct. The state tightened its grip on electoral politics by pushing the League of Women Voters aside for two-party debates with collusive rules.

NGOs are not our rulers’ only problem. The US government is increasingly beset by an axis that might be described as a rule-of-law bloc. Their name is Legion, you might say, for they are many. Americans are trained to see Iran as an outcast desperado among nations, terrorizing all decent people, dangerous, unreasoning, a cornered beast. So it’s jarring to come upon them presiding in elective honor over a bloc of nations comprising eighty per cent of all the people in the world.  The bloc is called the G-77. Unlike US diplomats, “trained as warriors” to “take a situation up to the brink of having to call in the military,” Iran’s representative, a former UN envoy, mediated and listened. In a cheeky rejoinder to our quasi-official “clash of civilizations” slogan, Iran initiated a year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

The majority’s secretariat resides, invisibly and inaudibly, to Americans, in New York. The majority – the overwhelming preponderance of mankind – is setting divergent interests aside so they can act in concert. And it isn’t just little poor powerless states: our chief creditor China is part of this bloc. Most of OPEC belongs to this bloc. The G-77 actually numbers 133 countries. If we mean it when we talk about democracy worldwide, Iran was the legitimate leader of the world as our state tore up the UN Charter to wage illegal war in Iraq. Nothing shows our rulers up as liars more than this: if they brought about democracy as promised, this majority would have its way.

So what do they want? The vox populi of the world has been echoing for more than a decade, since Nigeria conveyed the Declaration of the South to the democratic sandbox of the General Assembly. Of it we Americans heard not a peep – perhaps because the document was drawn up in Havana, in Cuba, that fearsome dagger pointed at the heart of Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, the maddening fly that still stampedes our ruling class after fifty years.

What do they want? Compliance with the UN Charter. Human rights for all…

Let’s stop right there and examine this from the viewpoint of America, a state that routinely contravenes the UN Charter, most recently with the highest crime, illegal aggression in Iraq and Libya. Let’s consider such state duties from the viewpoint of a state like America that denies its citizens’ core civil and political rights with obstructive reservations in breach of treaty law, and with emergency powers exercised in breach of treaty law and the supreme law of the land. Let us look at obligations from the viewpoint of our state, which refuses to acknowledge economic, social, and cultural rights binding in customary international law. Clearly, the G-77′s demands for rule of law must be put aside as an unacceptable infringement on US state sovereignty. To put the people first is beyond the pale for our state.

The G-77 pledges transparent, effective and accountable governance. They seek democratic decision-making within and among states. This is an overt threat to a state like ours, in which two approved parties carry out policies opposed by overwhelming popular majorities and coercively suppress electoral participation by unauthorized groups. In a country like America, with its institutionalized trading in influence and abuse of function, transparency is foreign subversion.

In its Teheran Consensus the G-77 pledges tighter ties among the global south, ties that are to bind at all levels of society: not just among ruling elites in ferociously-guarded secrecy, as in America’s sphere, but among civil society institutions and associations of all sorts – even including the people at large.

With the public will effectively negated by meticulous state control of the electoral process, civil society is a destabilizing threat to our state. America prefers to channel all public participation through state-controlled parties. Our state is not comfortable when foreign countries encourage too much freedom of association, or presume to give it voice. A UN debate on civil society shows our state’s approach to free association. The US delegation proposed to restrict NGO participation to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). ECOSOC has no role in the US because the US government refuses to ratify the core economic and social rights covenant. Our delegate also played the traditional American trick of attacking NGO outreach funding while reiterating US support.

Perhaps it’s hard for our government to sympathize with the G-77. Some of their concerns are poor man’s problems. The G-77 stands for eradication of hunger, illiteracy, disease, and poverty. No one of consequence suffers from those things here at home. The bloc stands for national self-determination against exploitative resource extraction. But if some of their concerns sound like special third-world pleading, others hit uncomfortably close to home. With brutal candor, the G-77 majority shreds American self-deception about shared indignities.

The world majority speaks candidly of disparities between rich and poor, and pledges to reverse them. Here at home inequality is handled by a committee of bankers, the Fed. The committee of bankers forces down interest rates, punishing powerless savers to prop up bankrupt banks. It pays public money for worthless bank assets, and permits falsified accounting to lure more of people’s savings into bankrupt banks. Bankers take the various subsidies home in annual bonuses that would be a lifetime endowment for any of this country’s poor. We call them unemployed, not poor. Ejected from housing, or poised in stores at midnight waiting for their food allowance to be disbursed, or letting their diseases go untreated, they are no less desperate than their African peers. African governments in the G-77 hold themselves to the standard of their peoples’ well-being. In America we are induced to fixate on an abstraction we call the economy, which is defined to exclude all the arrangements that take from the masses to gorge a tiny ruling class.

Perhaps it takes a wholly different civilization to make the obvious point that corporate profit maximization has nothing to do with decent jobs or human well-being. The G-77 outsiders watched a tiny minority rig the rules to free capital for unrestricted global movement while penning most labor into national markets. They are not surprised to see capital pit fragmented labor pools against each other to drive down wages and standards. However much your country has developed, this trap works equally well, and it’s as evident here as abroad. But it takes a fantasy culture like America to attribute the result of this purposive predation to lack of skills or discipline.

For a derelict state, our rulers have exceptional faith in merit. Someday, when time has obscured America’s pervasive misery, we might see the humor in our fawning idolatry of a fatuous Magoo who refracted every datum through the portentous doorstop novels of Ayn Rand. Or the slapstick devastation of Alan Greenspan falling for a giant Ponzi scheme, our objectivist superman gypped by hackneyed D.P. tricks from the old country, and in housing, of all things, that most petit-bourgeois of assets. We have come to accept people with all sorts of ridiculous occupations who manage to identify with that fictional titan of industry, John Galt – but Alan Greenspan might be the most bathetic case of all. For now, though, amid the widespread ruin of blameless lives, it is best to be grave.

The G-77 knows all about debt. It probably takes someone with the gimlet eye of the destitute to see the two faces of debt for what they are. For the victims, debt palliates a mendicant life and persists as a means of control. For the victimizers, debt, retooled as ‘leverage,’ upends economies and makes hostages of populations. It works the same way here and abroad, but only less-developed peoples see it clearly. We have our peons just as they do. We call them homeowners. They are all part of the same meek and compliant working class. The world’s majority likely casts an empathetic eye on our bustling “entrepreneurs” and “professional staff” chained to their treadmill of debt. For most, their subsistence depends strictly on fealty and obedience to their employers. A few of them will be anointed as intelligentsia, in Lenin’s contemptuous term, taught to revere the new ways imposed, and allowed to vaunt distinction and taste privilege, if they keep in line.

We Americans are the naive ones. Elsewhere in the world, they’ve seen it all before. Through bitter experience, the world’s majority is not surprised to see emergency relief aid turn into armed repression, summary execution, and detention camps. They would not be shocked to see the murderous militarized helping hand put out to Hurricane Katrina’s victims. As services and infrastructure suffer more neglect, more Americans will get to know the third-world treatment.

The G-77 majority wants more democracy in economic decision-making. The world at large sees the UN’s economic agencies pushed aside for weighted voting in the Bretton Woods Institutions. They see firms consolidating assets and power, and dominating institutions as well as markets. For the underdeveloped eighty per cent here at home, the analog is more assured and blatant. Financial institutions install cadres in the White House and bankroll agents in Congress. Administrations of both parties host closed-door industry conferences to dictate industrial policy. The vote is weighted by money at home and abroad. The franchise is increasingly restricted to the owners, of the country and of the world. However rich you think you are, you don’t own enough to have a vote: you’re not a corporate person but a human.

America’s majority is much like the world’s. For the placemen, the retainers of the dominant firms, the populace is part of les damnés de la terre, an object of pity, or scorn. At most they are a threat, if they articulate their interests, in which case they’re brutally put down. Here at home the masses cling to a derisory dream of advancement and parrot mottoes of merit and hard work. They strive against others of their caste, and most importantly, comply. Abroad, with no delusory hope of redress, the masses act in concert. Here and abroad, helpless or united, they are the same degraded class, the wretched of the earth.

The Biblical Legion of devils was actually Gadarene resistance to Roman rule. Walpurgisnacht is May Day’s eve. The peoples are the most feared of all demons. There is good reason why the wretched are les damnés de la terre – they’re a threat. It is dangerous to invoke demons. That is what treaty law does at home and abroad, with human rights and rule of law. And sometimes America’s possessing demons, the ACLU, mass in legions with foreign devils – even with Europe, once safely bottled up – to expose the crimes of our state to the public at large worldwide.  The state wants the masses dispersed and unseen but now we’ve all been evoked. We’ll see if they can cast us out again with their patriotic spells.

However, I wholeheartedly dissent from the language and the implications of the language. I know that Willers is aware of the dispossession and considers it wrong. He is focused on the now and future.

Oren Lyons, elder of the Onondaga Nation said, “Empires are built on language. When we speak their languages, we come under their empire.”²

Whether of the past or present, language is important. It is a means of communication to describe the world around us. British writer George Orwell held that language is often used to obscure reality. ³

For colonialists or their progeny to call the lands in the US (or “Canada,” or any other colonized territory) “ours,” is morally incorrect.

If land can legitimately be owned, then it belongs to the Original Peoples of Turtle Island. Ergo, to regard or refer to the lands as “ours” is to justify colonialism, imperialism, and dispossession.⁴

Acquiring the Land Where Original Peoples Live

The land was acquired by force, spread of disease from outsiders to Indigenous peoples – often with genocidal intent.⁵ Out of the genocidal miasma of Turtle Island appeared an entity formed originally from 13 colonies that expanded southwards and westwards to eventually become a hyper-power. Self-bestowed with a manifest destiny, the militaristic power would manipulate the geographic and political destinies of many countries.

Although there was treaty-making, it was of dubious legality, and observance by the White men.⁶

In Canada, treaties west of Ontario were not treaties in strict sense because they were not negotiated; Indigenous land title extinguished.⁷

The Original Peoples were outnumbered and outgunned at the time of Canadian confederation, and they were not allowed to buy land.⁸ The Original Peoples were dispossessed and placed on reserves not big enough to sustain them. In the case of the colony of least British Columbia (BC), there was a concerted attempt “to reduce the Indian to a society and land-holding non-entity.”⁹

The colonialists were imbued with a sense of racial superiority that no doubt justified for them the usurpation of land where Indigenous people lived. In BC, Scottish-born government agent Gilbert Malcolm Sproat considered the English as “a dominant race” among dominant races.¹⁰

Sproat knew the Indigenous people of the area did not want to part with their land. Sproat quotes an elder of the Sheshaht:

We do not wish to sell our land nor our water, let your friends stay in their own country…

We do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.¹¹

The acquisition of the Sheshaht land was likeliest underhanded, as there is evidence that Sproat fictionalized the purpose and account of the seizure.¹²

This was despite Sproat being aware that “colonization on a large scale … practically means displacing and extinction of the savage native population.”¹³

In his doctoral dissertation, Daniel Clayton wrote, “Native-Western interaction was circumscribed by the capitalist logic of creative destruction.”¹⁴

“Native ‘depredations’ on colonial land [sic] and life were not tolerated.” Vancouver Island colonial governor James Douglas would subject Indigenous peoples to “summary jurisdiction and military violence that was designed to give them ‘a proper idea of our capacity for inflicting punishment…’”¹⁵

Was the colonialist morality a product of the times, a common excuse proffered for sins of one’s ancestors? In 1790, Alexander Dalrymple wrote:

…common sense must evince, Europeans, visiting Countries already inhabited can acquire no right in Such Countries the Good will of the Friendly Inhabitants, or by Conquest of Those who are the Aggressors in Acts of Injury: nor can the right of Conquest be justly extended when Acts of injury, in the Natives, can be construed to proceed from fear of the Strangers, or from mistake: In either case, Both Parties being equally culpable, through no criminality in either; the European is not sufficiently explaining his Peaceable intentions and the native is not readily apprehending those intentions¹⁶

Indigenous Perspectives on Land Ownership

Shawnee warrior and renowned orator Tecumseh¹⁷ argued,

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers…. Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?¹⁸

Historically, warrior-nations who wield preponderant force have determined borders. In modern history, European states through much warring came to develop “advanced” war technology. Advanced weaponry combined with masterly divide-and-conquer tactics against designated enemies, allowed Europeans and their progeny to determine many of the borders of much of the present-day world.

The French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon argued compellingly in his classical treatise — What is Property? — that property was theft. Proprietorship of property, according to Proudhon, was anathema to equality because it established an inequality in conditions. To the assertion that inequality is a necessary evil, Proudhon responded that so then must be isolation since society and isolation are contradictory.¹⁹

Proudhon averred that there must always be an equal right to land:

One hundred thousand men settle in a large country like France with no inhabitants; each man has a right to 1/100,000 of the land. If the number of possessors increases, each one’s portion diminishes in consequence.²⁰

Ownership of land is a recent capitalist invention. The famed late Renaissance Dutch jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius said: “Originally, all things were common and undivided; they were the property of all.”²¹ The scholar Karl Polanyi elaborated much more on the original commonality of land and resources in early cultures and also argued that land could not be a commodity.²²

Ongoing Battles for Land

Near the town of Caledonia in Ontario, Canada, warriors of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have been occupying land since February 2006 that they claim the Canadian government, contrary to treaty, has stolen and sold for real estate development.²³

The invaders’ courts have been a biased arena in which to pursue nation-to-nation border grievances.²⁴

What do the Haudenosaunee and other Original Peoples want? The Haudenosaunee state:

Land is envisioned as Sewatokwa’tshera’t, (the Dish with One Spoon); this means that we can all take from the land what we need to feed, house and care for our families, but we also must assure that the land remains healthy enough to provide for the coming generations. Land is meant to be shared among and by the people and with the other parts of the web of life. It is not for personal empire building.

… Second, according to our law [Kaianerekowa (Great Law of Peace)], the land is not private property that can be owned by any individual. In our view, land is a collective right. It is held in common, for the benefit of all. The land is actually a sacred trust, placed in our care for the sake of the coming generations. We must protect the land.

… We want the land that is ours. We are not interested in approving fraudulent dispossessions of the past. We are not interested in selling the land. We want the Crown to keep its obligations to treaties, and ensure all governments — federal, provincial and municipal — are partners in those obligations. We want an honorable relationship with Canada.

That relationship, however, must be based on the principles that were set in place when our original relationship with the Crown was created. That is the rule of law.²⁵

The Haudenosaunee consider themselves a confederacy of nations. Treaties with European colonizing states recognize this nationhood. The Haudenosaunee use their own passports for international travel. Their special national status is exemplified by Article III in the Jay Treaty that grants (what is a natural right of) Original Peoples unimpeded passage across the border between Canada and the US.

Conclusion

Land is common. Few people enjoy border delays and checks when visiting other lands. While security and economic concerns are usually cited as reasons for passports and border controls, in a stateless and, therefore, borderless world, equality of conditions through equitable sharing of wealth would obviate security fears. There is nothing to be gained from violence or terrorism in an egalitarian world except by a gang of thieves seeking to reimpose property and statehood so that the thieving class can luxuriate through re-enslavement or wage-enslavement of others in society.

1. Bill Willers, “On Track to Lose Our Public Lands,” Dissident Voice, 27 May 2011.
2. Quoted from Leroy Little Bear, Menno Boldt, and J. Anthony Long (Eds.), “Spirituality, Equality, and Natural Law,” in Pathways to Self-Determinism: Canadian Indians and the Canadian State (University of Toronto Press, 1985): 7.
3. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books, 1990). George Owell, “Politics and the English Language” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 ed. Sonia Orwell and Tan Angus (London: Sewcker and Warburg, 1968). W.F. Bolton, The Language of 1984: Orwell’s English and Ours (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984): 11-73.
4. This is something that escapes many critics of Jews who are dispossessing Palestinians in historical Palestine. The citizens of Canada and the US, and other colonized states, are Zionists of a type living in apartheid states wrought by genocide. For criticism of Zionism to have moral legitimacy, that criticism must apply equally, and firstly, to ourselves.
5. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (London: Oxford University Press, 1992). “[B]y focussing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent” xii.
6. See Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (University of Texas Press, 1985.). Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Toronto: Viking, 2001).
7. Forrest E. LaViolette, The Struggle for Power: Indian Cultures and the Protestant Ethic in British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1978): 7. I will focus primarily on the Pacific Northwest First Nations because that is where I was born, but the similar history and criticism holds pretty much everywhere on Turtle Island.
8. Ibid, 11.
9. Ibid, 142.
10. Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 3. Sproat claims the white skin of Europeans made them superior: 16.
11. Ibid, 15.
12. Ibid, 14.
13. Charles Lillard (Ed.), The Nootka: Scenes and studies of savage life (1868) (Victoria: Sono Nis, 1987): 183. Cited in Daniel Wright Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000): 55.
14. Ibid, 153.
15. Ibid, 230. The Encyclopedia of British Columbia [sic] writes: “Douglas had a strong temper and was not always diplomatic with his FIRST NATIONS customers [sic].” In the ultimate capitalist rendering, the Indigenous peoples are described as “customers”! See entry for “James Douglas,” Ed., Daniel Francis, Encyclopedia of British Columbia (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2000).
16. Greg Dening, Performances, (1996) 109 cites Alexander Dalrymple, The Spanish Pretensions Fairly Discussed, (1790) 6-89. Cited in Clayton, op. cit., 187.
17. See R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984). Edmunds uses some questionable wording; e.g., he calls Tecumseh “anti-American.” What would one expect of an enemy who is dispossessing you and wiping out your people? Carl F. Klinck, (Ed.), Tecumseh: Fact and Fiction in Early Records (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1961). Quotes Governor Harrison: “I wish I could say the Indians were treated with justice and propriety on all occasions by our citizens; but it is far otherwise. They are often abused and maltreated; and it is very rare that they obtain any satisfaction for the most unprovoked wrongs.”
18. Theodore Steinberg, Slide Mountain: Or, The Folly of Owning Nature (University of California Press, 1996).
19. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library): 60-61.
20. Ibid, 67.
21. Ibid, 55.
22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
23. Hillary Bain Lindsay, “Home On Native Land,” The Dominion, 19 April 2006. See Backgrounder on Six Nations Solidarity.
24. Bruce Clark, Justice in Paradise (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).
25. The Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, Grand River Territory “Haudenosaunee Confederacy Land Rights Statement,” Six Nations Land reclamation information, As adopted in council 4 November 2006.

“We needed to sound the alarm in what I call the critical mass of threat in Iran: the nuclear threat, the threat of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, the terrorist threat and the threat of massive domestic assaults,” said Cotler.

The threat of “state sanctioned genocide”? Israel has been doing precisely this against the Palestinian people for the past 60+ years. What “terrorist threat” is Cotler rabbiting on about? The main “terrorists” in Iran that are a “threat” are the Mossad agents. And “massive domestic assaults”? Like the ones being carried out in Israel and the Occuppied Territories by the police/IDF against the Palestinian people?

How can a Zionist ideologue utter such words when they patently ring true of the Jewish state of Israel? Israel is a nuclear weapons state; hence it is – by Cotler’s words – a nuclear threat. Unlike nuclear-armed Israel, Iran is only accused of pursuing nuclear weapons. And as the lawyer Cotler should be aware, there is a presumption of innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Ergo, Iran is charged with wanting to become the threat that Israel already is. No mention was made that all Middle East nations — except Israel — wish the Middle East to be a nuclear weapons-free zone.

Besides, why can Iran not have nuclear weapons? If Israel can have them, why should no one else have them? If an enemy possess weapons superiority,is not the rational decision to at least acquire that level of weapon’s technology?

Cotler used the occasion to gather signatures for a petition that would enable him to speak to the threat of Iran in the Canadian House of Commons.

Cotler pointed to the recent sending two Iranian navy ships through the Suez Canal as a provocation of the so-called international community.

The international community recently – and over the decades has passed numerous resolutions in the United Nations about the scofflaw actions of Israel. Cotler made no mention of Israeli provocation by sending a navy ship through the Suez Canal last year – to the anger of opposition forces in Egypt.

“Iran is … in continuous defiance of the international community,” said Cotler. “In my view, Iran has emerged as the leading threat to international peace and security, to regional and Middle East stability, to Israel and the Jewish people and increasingly and alarmingly so to its own citizens. Putting the warships through the Suez Canal is just one of many instances of threats, provocations and tragically actual actions themselves.”

All this is blatter to anyone who has an iota of knowledge about the Middle East and its history. Iran has in modern history (aside from self-defense against a US-sanctioned attack from Iraq) been a peaceful country, whose people are indigenous to Iran or who have become naturalized citizens of Iran. The Jews of Israel, who Cotler claims are threatened, are on the other hand a violent European invasion force, and are indeed a threat to the indigenous Palestinians – what many state unequivocally to be an ongoing genocide, to which the Gaza massacre in 2008-2009 attests.

“I think Iran is such an international mischief maker whose tentacles reach across the globe,” Cotler stated.

Now if one were to term Israel “an international mischief maker” — whose own tentacles extend across the globe to commit terrorism and assassinations¹ – it would be nauseatingly euphemistic. Cotler’s memory is either too short or too selective. It was only last year that Mossad botched an assassination in Dubai, to add to its other historical bungles in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere. Jewish terrorism even went so far as to attempt to scare the purportedly contented Jewish community in Iran to the Jewish state.

While Palestinians – including children and the aged — languish and suffer at Israeli checkpoints, jails, gulags; while Palestinians endure dispossession, home demolitions, military terrorism committed by the apparatchiks of the Israeli state, Cotler had the chutzpah to criticize Iran on human rights. Certainly it appears that Iran leaves itself open to deserved criticism on some human rights issues. However, there is a well known axiom whereby those who commit equally egregious acts or worse should temper criticism of others for the similar acts.

Cotler preached his anti-Iran rhetoric in a Jewish holy house where Jewish supremacists would be enticed by such warmongering. His tirade was is in Canada, a state – so similarly to Israel – that was established through dispossession and genocide against the Original Peoples. Is it any wonder then that the Canadian government and its political parties support colonialism and its violence elsewhere?

If a state is to be morally legitimate, it must exist at the will of its millennial inhabitants; it must exist as a state of all peoples, not exclusively or primarily for a privileged class or race that exploits others. Until a state meets these basic conditions, then all remonstrations against other world states is mere oratorical flatulence.

1. Israel has its own Wikipedia page devoted to its assassinations.

That is the question being asked by Palestinians in the wake of a week of damaging revelations that Palestinian negotiators secretly made major concessions to Israel in talks on Jerusalem, refugees and borders.

The PA — the Palestinians’ government-in-the-making, led by Mahmoud Abbas — was already in crisis before the disclosure of official Palestinian documents by Al Jazeera television last week.

Now, said George Giacaman, the head of the Ramallah-based research centre Muwatin, which advocates greater Palestinian democracy, the PA’s “back is to the wall”.

The question of the PA’s survival, and the future direction of Palestinian politics, has gained added urgency as the wider Middle East is rocked by unrest, from Tunisia to Yemen.

Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Jerusalem think-tank Passia, said the Palestinians were “at a crossroads”. Although the streets had remained largely quiet until now, he said it was only a matter of time before Palestinians started to make clear their revulsion at their leadership.

“It is now much clearer to Palestinians that they are living in a prison and that the PA leaders are there only to negotiate the terms of our imprisonment,” he said.

He, like many other Palestinian analysts, declared the negotiations for a two-state solution over.

That sentiment appears to be shared by a majority of Palestinians. A survey in December, before the leak of 1,600 official documents, by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that 71 per cent of Palestinians believed they would not have a state within five years. The percentage is likely to have risen sharply.

In a sign of the mounting panic in Ramallah, Palestinian leaders frantically launched a rearguard action last week. Initially, they claimed the documents were fabricated, and suggested that Al Jazeera was siding with Mr Abbas’s political rivals, the Islamic party Hamas, to bring down the PA.

But several officials have confirmed the papers’ authenticity, and the PA has redirected its main attention to discovering who was behind the leak.

Mr Abdul Hadi said Palestinians would increasingly draw the conclusion that their intended future was living in “one binational state under an apartheid regime” administered by Israel.

“At the moment Abbas has his followers out on the streets but the Palestinian people are awakening to the reality of their situation,” he said.

Samir Awad, a politics professor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah, agreed that Israel was imposing a de facto one-state solution. “The fight for national independence is over and, if it is to survive, the PA must quickly reinvent its role. Palestinians are now in for the long haul: a struggle for their civil and political rights in a single state,” he said.

Asad Ghanem, a politics professor at Haifa University in Israel and an expert on Palestinian politics, warned, however, that, as the PA faltered, Israel and the US would intensify their efforts to strengthen the authority’s security forces and its repressive role.

With politics stifled inside the occupied territories, said Mr Ghanem, it was crucial that outside Palestinian leaders step in to redefine the Palestinian national movement, including Palestinians such as himself who live inside Israel and groups in the diaspora.

Mr Giacaman said the PA had long ago outlived its official purpose.

It was created by the Oslo accords as a temporary administration in the transition to Palestinian statehood, proposed as a five-year period during which Israel was supposed to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in stages.

Since the Camp David negotiations ended in deadlock in 2000, the PA has clung to power, with limited control over less than 40 per cent of the West Bank as Israel has continued to build settlements in the area under its rule.

Mr Abbas has threatened on several occasions to dissolve the PA, most recently in December, when he warned: “I cannot accept to remain the president of an authority that doesn’t exist.”

But Mr Giacaman said such threats were hollow, designed to put pressure on Israel to return to negotiations out of fear that it would otherwise have to take on the heavy financial burden of direct military reoccupation.

The PA, however, was in much deeper trouble after the leaking of the documents, Mr Giacaman said. “Without a peace process, it needs to justify its continuing existence.”

The most likely immediate focus, he said, was intensifying international action through the United Nations, by pushing for a resolution at the Security Council against the settlements.

He also thought the PA would consider changing its position and actively championing the Goldstone Report, the findings of a UN commission that suggest Israel committed war crimes during its attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

One of the leaked papers revealed that Mr Abbas had agreed under US pressure to shelve the report rather than take it to the UN General Assembly.

“The problem for the PA is that it needs to generate diplomatic crises to get the international community to intervene. But this will put it in confrontation with Israel and the United States. Israel can always threaten to cut the $60 million taxes it transfers every month to the PA,” Mr Giacaman said.

The PA’s threat to unilaterally declare statehood and then seek recognition at the UN, he added, would not change the reality on the ground. “Even if most countries recognise the state, it will still be a state under occupation,” Mr Giacaman said.

In the meantime, the diplomatic vacuum was likely to be filled by Israel. It could promote a plan similar to the one being advanced by Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right foreign minister, to recognise a Palestinian state in temporary borders. Or it could continue its separation policies, withdrawing from more of the West Bank and encouraging the Palestinians to take over what was left behind.

Mr Awad said the collapse of the PA held out many dangers for the Palestinians. One was the possibility of a convulsive civil war between the Fatah party of Mr Abbas and Hamas. Another, he said, was the “Aghanistanisation” of the occupied territories, as tribal warlords took limited control of the territorial enclaves Israel was not interested in.

While loyalty is no doubt an important form of relationship both in the private and public spheres, unpacking its precise meaning in the Israeli context reveals a disturbing process whereby the democratic understanding of politics is being inverted.

As Israeli citizens, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman want us to prove our loyalty to the flag by supporting a policy of oppression and humiliation. We must champion the separation barrier in Bi’lin and in other places throughout the West Bank. We have to defend the brutal destruction of unrecognized Bedouin villages, and the ongoing land grab both inside Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We must support the checkpoints and the silent transfer in East Jerusalem. We are also expected to bow our heads and remain silent every time government ministers, Knesset members and public officials make racist statements against Arab citizens. We must support the neo-liberal policies that continuously oppress Israel’s poor, and we are obliged to give our blessing to the imprisonment of Gaza Strip’s 1.5 million residents.

Hearing the chants at the recent demonstration, I understood that I will never be able to accept this disastrously myopic form of loyalty. I refuse to be loyal to a policy of humiliation, racism and discrimination. And, yet, loyalty is an important issue that urgently needs to be discussed because ultimately there is a firm link between the state and loyalty. The pressing questions that need to be addressed are: What is the meaning of loyalty? And who is supposed to be loyal to whom?

Surprisingly, the answer to these questions is not particularly complex. According to the republican tradition, the state is first and foremost obliged to be loyal to its citizenry and is held accountable for inequities and injustices. Yet we are currently witnessing a complete reversal of the republican relationship between state and loyalty and the adoption, instead, of a proto-fascist approach.

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this trend is that it is taking place on all levels of Israeli society. From the ongoing attacks against Israeli human rights organizations spearheaded by NGO Monitor and Im Tirzu, through the police response to the peaceful protests in Sheik Jarrah, and all the way to the McCarthyist atmosphere in the Knesset Education Committee, one witnesses how elements within civil society, the executive branch and the legislative branch are all working according to a logic similar to the one that informed Mussolini’s Italy. All of these elements expect citizens to swear loyalty to the state regardless of the government’s policies.

However, because loyalty is a vital component of politics, we need to strive to ensure that the call for loyalty meet the requirements of a democratic rather than a fascist logic. We must demand that the state be loyal to all of its citizens, regardless of race, color, sex, gender, language, religion, political opinions, national or social origin, property, or birth status.

A state that is loyal to its citizens does not discriminate between Jews and Arabs, does not expropriate land from Muslims and Christians, does not humiliate and trample on the lower classes, and does not brutally oppress the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. A state of this sort protects the rights of each and every citizen and, thus, will not need to demand loyalty because it will receive loyalty on a silver platter.

Yes, I too understand the importance of loyalty. But the appropriate chant is not ‘No citizenship without loyalty!’ but rather “Loyalty to every citizen!”

Within the current borders controlled by Israel (including pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights) there is in fact a single state. It has one electrical grid, one water system, one currency, one major highway system, one postal service, and one external border. Goods and people entering this de facto state come through harbors, airports, and a restricted number of crossings. Bills of lading and passports are checked and stamped by officials of this single state.

To avoid arguing about what is Israel and what is Palestine, call this de facto state Israel/Palestine. It has one powerful military that protects its external border and controls its airspace with the most sophisticated aircraft, tanks, drones, submarines, and surveillance hardware that money can buy. There are some militias like the Druze Border Guards, the Hamas fighters in Gaza, the Fatah policemen in Ramallah, and Jewish settlers in Kiryat Arba and throughout the West Bank, but there is really only one army, navy, and air force. It is big; it is powerful; and it is backed by nuclear weapons and the world’s only super power, the United States of America.

Although over half the population of this de facto Israel/Palestine state is not Jewish, Jewish power has enacted laws since the creation of Israel in 1948 to favor Jews and create a so-called Jewish state. This is the essence of political Zionism. It is a philosophy and a movement based on racism, chosenness, and Jewish supremacism.

The fact is that after 130 years, several hundred billion dollars in foreign aid, thousands of deaths, and persistent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, the de facto state of Israel/Palestine is not a Jewish state any more than South Africa was a white state prior to its end of apartheid. Israel/Palestine is a state controlled by Jews; it is a state where Jews have superior rights (not the least being the right of return); but with over half the population being non-Jewish, it is ludicrous to call it a Jewish state.

Zionists from both the right and the left recognize this, but refuse to acknowledge it because of their obsession with, and allegiance to, the dream of a pure, or almost pure, Jewish state. So the extreme right, like Foreign Minister Lieberman, wants to transfer the Arabs and other non-Jews (including children of migrant workers) out of Israel/Palestine. Others like Dershowitz, Pipes, and Hagee simply want to wall off the non-Jewish areas and call these reservations or Bantustans a potential Palestinian state. Even the most humanitarian Zionists, like Uri Avnery, who would tear down the mammoth apartheid wall (or security barrier), or even Noam Chomsky cannot bring themselves to endorse the right of equal citizenship for all those living in Israel/Palestine.

One state already exists in Israel/Palestine. Those who deny it do so blinded by their love for a Jewish state, a racist endeavor that should long ago have been discarded along with Aryan supremacy, Catholic supremacy, Tutsi supremacy, and whatever other supremacy forms the basis for discrimination and disregard for basic human rights.

I will argue there are many sound, rational, material reasons for working people to be in revolt against the state.

Twenty-Two Reasons Why Working People Hate the State

1. Most wage and salaried workers pay disportionately higher taxes than the corporate rich, and therefore millions of Americans work in the “underground economy” to make ends meet; thus subjecting themselves to arrest, and prosecution by the state for trying to make a living by avoiding onerous taxes.

2. The state provides generous multi-year tax exemptions for corporations thus raising the tax rate for wage and salaried workers or eliminating vital services. The state’s inequitable tax revenue policies provoke resentment,.

3. High taxes combined with fewer and more expensive public services, include growing costs of public higher education and higher health charges, feed popular antagonism and frustration that they and their children are being denied opportunities to get ahead and stay healthy.

4. Many working people resent the fact that their tax money is being spent by the state on endless distant wars and to finance bailouts of Wall Street instead of investing it in reindustrializing America to create well paying jobs or to aid unemployed or underemployed workers unable to meet mortgage payments and facing eviction or homelessness. Most workers reject the inequitable budget expenditures that privilege the rich and deny the working people.

5. Working people are appalled by the state’s hypocrisy and double standards in prosecuting “welfare cheats” for taking hundreds but overlooking corporate and banking swindlers, and Pentagon military cost overruns of hundreds of billions. Few working people believe there is equality before the law, implicitly rejecting its claims of legitimacy.

6. Many working class families resent the fact that the state recruits their sons and daughters for wars, leading to death and crippling injuries instead of public service jobs, while the children of the rich and affluent pursue civilian careers.

7. The state subsidizes and upgrades public infrastructure – roads, parks and utilities in upper end neighborhoods while ignoring the demands for improvements of low income communities. Moreover the state locates contaminants – incinerators, high polluting industries etc. – in close proximity to workers’ housing and schools.

8. The state holds the minimum wage below increases in the cost of living but encourages and promotes excess profits.

9. Law enforcement is strict in high end neighborhoods and lax in low income communities resulting in higher rates of homicides and robberies.

10. State imposes constraints on labor organizations struggling to secure wages and benefits and ignores corporate intimidation and arbitrary firings of workers. The state encourages corporate mergers and acquisitions leading to monopolies but discourages collective action from below.

11. State economic institutions recruit policy makers from banks and financial houses who make decisions favoring their former employers, while wage and salaried workers are excluded and have no representation in economic policy positions.

12. The state increasingly infringes on individual freedoms of social activists via the Patriot Act, arbitrary arrests, and grants impunity to police violence and punishes whistle blowers, rejecting citizen reviews with punitive powers.

13. The state is highly responsive to, and increases funding for, the military-industrial complex, the relocation of MNC overseas and the high income Israel lobby while cutting funding for public investment in productive activity, applied technology and high tech job training for US workers and salaried employees and their children.

14. State policies have increased inequalities between the top 10% and the bottom 50% for decades, turning the US into the industrial country with the greatest inequalities.

15. State policies have led to declining living standards as wage and salary earners work longer hours with less job security,for a greater number of years before receiving pensions and social security and under greater environmental hazards.

16. Elected state officials break most campaign promises to working people while fulfilling promises for the upper class/corporate banking elite.

17. State officials pay greater attention and are more responsive to a few big financial contributors than to millions of voters.

18. State officials are more responsive to payoffs from corporate lobbies protecting corporate profits than to the health, educational and income needs of the electorate.

19. State-corporate links lead to deregulation, which results in contamination of the environment leading to the bankruptcy of small businesses and loss of many jobs, as well as the loss of recreational areas, spoiling rest and recreation for working people.

20. The state increases the retirement age rather than increase the social security payments by the rich, with the result that workers in unhealthy work environments will enjoy fewer years of retirement in good health.

21. The state judicial system is more likely to render favorable decisions to wealthy plaintiffs with high paid, politically connected lawyers against workers defended by inexperienced public defenders.

22. State tax collectors are more likely to pursue wage and salary tax payers than upper class corporate executives employing accountants with expert knowledge in tax loopholes and tax free shelters.

Conclusion

The state in its multiple activities, whether in law enforcement, military recruitment, tax and expenditure polices, environmental, pension and retirement legislation and administration, systematically favors the upper class and corporate elite against wage, salaried and small business people.

The state is permissive with the rich and repressive of the working and salaried employees, defending the privileges of the corporations and the impunity of the police state while infringing on the individual freedoms of the working people.

State policies increasingly extract more from the workers in terms of tax revenues and provide less in social payments, while lessening tax payments from Wall Street and inflating state transfers.

Popular perceptions of a hostile and exploitative state correspond to their everyday practical experiences; their anti-state behavior is selective and rational; most wage and salaried workers support social security and unemployment benefits and oppose higher taxes because they know, or intuit, that they are unfair.

Liberal academics and experts who claim workers are “irrational” are, themselves, practioners of highly selective criticisms – pointing to (shrinking) state social benefits while ignoring the unjust, inequitable tax system and the biased behavior of the judicial, law enforcement, legislative and regulatory system.

State personnel, policy makers and enforcement officials are attentive to, and responsive and deferential to,.0 the rich and hostile and indifferent or arrogant toward workers.

In summary, the real issue is not that people are anti-state, but that the state is anti the majority of the people. In the face of the economic crises and prolonged imperial wars, the state becomes more brazenly aggressive in slashing living standards in order to channel record levels of public funds toward Wall Street speculators and the military industrial complex.

While liberal-progressives remain embedded in ‘neo-keynsian’ statest ideology, outmoded in the face of a state thoroughly embedded in corporate networks, the New Right’s “anti-statest” rhetoric resonates with the feelings, experiences and reasoning of important sectors of wage and salaried workers and small business people.

The attempt by liberals and progressives to discredit this popular revolt against the state, by pointing to the corporate financing and right wing manipulation behind the anti-statist movement is doomed to failure, because it fails to deal with the profound injustices experienced by working people today in their daily dealings with a state, largely administered by liberal corporate-militarists. The absence of an anti-statist left has opened the door for the rise of a mass based ‘New Right’.

A ‘new left’ will emerge from civil society when it recognizes the pernicious exploitative role of the state, and is capable of dealing with the powerful ties between liberalism-militarism-corporate “welfarism”. The revival and expansion of the debilitated public welfare programs for working people can only take place by dismantling the current state apparatus, and that depends on a complete break with both corporate parties and an agenda that ‘revolutionizes’ the way in which politics works in America.

Although it is difficult to separate the RAF’s theory from their actions–actions which included murder–if one does so they find an application of left theory that perceived the anti-imperialist resistance in the advanced industrial nations (First World, if you will) as just another part of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement. It was this conclusion that the RAF used to rationalize their attacks on US military installations in 1972 during their anti-imperialist offensive.. They did not believe the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be in a revolutionary situation, but justified their attacks via the argument that the US and other imperial forces (German and British) should be attacked wherever they were, not just in Vietnam or another country where they were engaged in overt warfare. This approach echoed the slogan popularized by the Weatherman organization in the US-Bring the War Home.

I lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany during the period described in this book. I attended protests against the Vietnam War, in support of the burgeoning squatters movement (and against property speculation) in Frankfurt, against the Shah of Iran, in support of Gastarbeiter rights and against the repressive regimes in Turkey and Greece. I also attended concerts and street festivals where the German counterculture mingled flamboyantly with the US servicemen and adolescents that abounded in the country then. When the IG Farben building and Officer’s Club in Frankfurt am Main were attacked by the RAF, a serious security effort became part of our daily lives. School buses taking us to the American High School in Frankfurt were boarded by military police who checked our bags while other GIs used long-handled mirrors to check underneath the buses for explosive devices. German police and military set up shop at airports and train stations, holding automatic weapons. Autobahn exits were the site of roadblocks. Wanted posters featuring the faces of the RAF members appeared everywhere. The Goethe University in Frankfurt came under increased police surveillance, especially after the playing of a tape-recorded message from RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at a national conference there. A protest held against the US mining of northern Vietnamese harbors and intensified bombing of the Vietnamese people was patrolled by police armed with automatic weapons. Nonetheless, many of the protesters chanted “Für den Sieg des VietCong, Bomben auf das Pentagon!” (For the victory of the NLF, bomb the Pentagon). The following day, the Pentagon was bombed by the Weather Underground.

Recently, PM Press in California published the book The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People. This voluminous work includes virtually all of the communiques and theoretical pamphlets published by the RAF from 1970 to 1977. This period is considered the first period of the RAF–an organization that saw its original leadership imprisoned after the aforementioned bombing offensive against US military installations in Germany. These members were followed by another set of individuals drawn to the RAF mostly through support organizations that developed to protest the conditions of the RAF’s imprisonment and their eventual deaths that many still believe were state-sanctioned murders. Over the next two decades , hundreds of others would join the organization to replace those imprisoned and killed. Besides the text written by the RAF, the editors have written an accompanying text that provides a take on the history of post World War Two West Germany that has been mostly unavailable to English readers.

The RAF was an intensely sectarian organization. They saw most of the rest of the German Left as revisionist or opportunist, unwilling to make the commitment armed struggle required. Besides invalidating the gains won by the autonomist squatters’ movement and other independent groupings, this analysis ignored the fact that other approaches might have been more effective in the long term. By positioning itself to the left of all other leftist groups in Germany, the RAF insured its limited effectiveness. Once the State was able to capture its primary membership and literally isolate them in prisons, the RAF’s purpose moved away from challenging the imperialists to one of staying alive inside a draconian and psychologically debilitating prison environment.

Indeed, as this book clearly demarcates, the bulk of the work of the RAF in the 1970s centered around the nature of their existence in prison. In what would become a harbinger of the future we live in, the German prison authority and its departmental ally the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) developed an architecture and series of mechanisms designed to destroy the minds of the RAF prisoners. Isolation cells painted completely in white where the neon light never went off. No contact with any human for months at a time. The use of informers and ultimately a trial held in a specially designed prison courthouse that took place without the defendants or their attorneys. In addition, laws were passed that criminalized not only the act taken by the attorneys to defend their clients but also the acts of any individuals who opposed the actions taken by the State against the RAF prisoners. Of course, this enabled the RAF to point out the unity of purpose between the right wing CDU-CSU West German government and the SPD (with obvious comparisons to the role played by the German Social Democrats after World War I when they used the right-wing militia known as the Freikorps to kill members of the revolutionary Spartacists). The special laws enacted against the RAF and its supporters contained many elements of laws now in existence in the US, realized most fully in the Patriot Act.

While the RAF was certainly successful in exposing the fundamental authoritarianism of the modern capitalist state through their hunger strikes and other actions, they did nothing towards rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement that the 1972 actions were conceived in. This created a situation where their developing analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it became essentially moribund. In other words, the repression by the German government and its allies was successful.

The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Fraktion during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. More than a historical document, The Red Army Faction, A Documentary History: Volume 1: Projectiles For The People provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukayama repeated a thesis of often maligned Karl Marx that liberal democracy is an integral part of the capitalist system but refuted Marx’s assertion that, “capitalism would inevitably lead to increasing class polarization and class conflict,” and “through its own inherent processes of development it is destined to give rise ultimately to its own dissolution.” It now seems that both of these scholars have erred and the more prescient is Azar Gat, Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University. In a Foreign Affairs article, “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” Professor Gat argues that Fukuyama has not considered the emergence of imposing authoritarian nations, “which could ‘end the end of history’.” Gat proposes a challenge: “These authoritarian capitalist regimes could inspire other states to follow their model.” (Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2007)

The New Statism

In a previous article, “The New Statism: The Rise of Corporate States,” Alternative Insight (Oct. 2007), this writer independently outlined a similar concept: “A new statism, in various prescriptions, exercises control over the political, moral, economic and social fabric of several nations and has the potential to control the destiny of the world.”

An earlier article, “The Socialization of America,” Alternative Insight (April 2005), stated: “The global economy has been pioneered by the United States but has not been a perfect fit for new pioneering nations. In order to provide prosperity for its people, the United States must implement policies that offset the deleterious effects of globalization. American history shows that private industry has never been the sole source of solutions to recurrent economic problems.”

The former article described several nations that can be described as “authoritarian capitalist” regimes. China and Russia are the most prominent, but India, Israel, Venezuela, Bolivia and Vietnam , and several autocratic Arab nations can also be considered New Statist. Their institutions include significant New Statist characteristics:

* The government allows free enterprise but might invest in some industries (mixed economy) and control industries related to national defense, natural resources, communications and media. In some cases it also has extensive land ownership.

* The government, by direct or indirect mechanisms, partially regulates international money transfers, international trade, wages, prices, internal investment and segments of the labor market.

* The government promotes nationalism, reinforces chauvinism and allies the education system with these efforts.

* The government exercises powers that lessen opposition and prevent excessive dissent.

The Earlier Challenge to the New Statism

George W. Bush pledged to carry democracy and free market economics throughout the globe. Apart from the new Central European nations established within the framework of the European Community, democracy has not flourished — just the opposite — the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, have witnessed the expansion of Statism: state interference in economy with trappings of free market economics. This unforeseen trend has occurred for a good reason; emerging nations, which did not experience an early industrial revolution, sought alternative means to overcome the advantages of the established liberal democracies that arrived first with the most.

Competitive advantages for the established free market economies include a lead in advanced technology and well functioning transportation, distribution, sales and financial systems. Unable to readily compete with the global economies of western industrialized nations that, despite their democratic appearances, previously engaged in imperialist adventures to seize resources and markets and utilized slave, immigrant and imported labor to construct efficient and large scale production systems, major developing nations have been forced to control aspects of their economies — labor, finance, foreign trade, currency and prices — in order to effectively compete in a global economy. These New Statists regimes don’t have a defined ideology with fixed rules; just the opposite, each New Statist nation incorporates sufficient controls and authoritarian extensions to offset limitations and satisfy distinct agendas.

New Statism Responds to the Challenge

A mix of components from previous fascist and communist regimes and from present liberal democratic states has guided the New Statist nations to notable successes. Since 1979, China has exhibited uninterrupted growth, multiplied its Gross Domestic product (GDP) by a factor of ten and emerged as a world power with the 4th largest GDP. The other large Statist nation, Putin’s authoritarian Russia, has grown an average of 6% each year since 2001. Previously minuscule contributors to the world market, these two nations now account for about 7% of total world GDP.

Rightfully scorned by liberal and prosperous democracies for political despotism and economic failure, the centralized economies recognized two principal reasons for the failure; an inability to properly allocate resources and to motivate workers. To their credit they adjusted their economies to correct for the strangling lapses. The ‘iron rice bowl’ and guaranteed employment no longer exist in the New Statist nations. State planning has not entirely disappeared, but the overpowering command economies that allocated resources have been eclipsed by a combination of public and state owned enterprises, both of which are market oriented and competitive. Score one advantage for the Statist nations — they can more easily control the recurring problem of over-production, which periodically paralyzes the liberal democracies. Excessive production can be minimized and surplus that can’t be exported can be distributed to more deprived masses. If necessary, the government can subsidize the prices. Although still lacking political and economic democracy, the New Statist nations lifted populations from poverty and constructed impressive economies. Their economic advances pose a challenge to the welfare of the western world.

A shift of low wage consumer goods production to Statist nations (China, Vietnam) together with western nation reliance on resources from other Statist nations (Russia, Venezuela) stimulated economic expansion throughout the globe, and more notably in the Statist world. Result — capital flowed from the western world to emerging nations. The accumulation of capital and foreign exchange reserves ($1.9 trillion in China and $500B in Russia) has reduced the financial dominance of the western world and placed it on a delicate footing. As the Statist nations increase their economic and financial strength, they translate the strengths into increased political and military power.

The new Russia exemplifies the shifts in power. President Boris Yeltsin inherited a Soviet Union that oversupplied a lacking demand and had inconsistent supply for internal demands. He failed to transform the slim-downed Soviet Union into a nation modeled on free market economics. Vladimir Putin followed Yeltsin and succeeded in establishing a Russia that supplies natural resources for external demands and satisfies internal demands by external supply. Noting the derogatory effects of a previous “wild capitalism,” which included concentrations of production, resources and media in the hands of a relatively few oligarchs, Putin diverted the previous economic concentrations to his own government. The present Russian government overwhelmingly participates in defense industries, controls some banking enterprises, dominates in oil and gas resources, and owns several television stations and print media. Petroleum clout and monetary reserves exceeding $500B have aroused the dormant Bear. Russia displays a fearless nature and independent spirit.

The lack of international challenges to Russia’s invasion of Georgia signified the recognition of a more powerful Russian nation. Feeling powerful, Prime Minister Putin asserted a new role in the World Trade Organization (WTO) by saying that “ Russia should abandon some of the commitments it made during World Trade Organization accession talks.” On the same day, President Dmitry Medvedev “warned that Russia might cut its ties with NATO.” Add another important shift in power: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), after 2010, expects to lack flight capacity for sending manpower to its Space Station and might be obliged to purchase seats on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

Putin has stated that U.S. hegemony is being challenged by a reinvigorated Russia and he seems eager to prove his statement. Despite western grumblings, Russia continues supplying Iran with nuclear material and Syria with weapons. Agence France-Presse, Oct. 7, 2008, reported that “A fleet of Russian warships, led by the nuclear-powered missile cruiser Pyotr Veliky, are due to take part in joint exercises next month with the Venezuelan navy near US waters, something which has not been done since the Cold War. The deployment follows the arrival of two Russian Tu-160 nuclear bombers in Venezuela last month also for exercises, an event that Chavez branded a warning to the US empire.”

The Times Online, Oct. 6, has Russia beginning “the most ambitious test of its strategic bomber fleet in almost a quarter of a century today. Up to 20 bombers are being sent into the air with full combat payloads to carry out live firing exercises of their cruise missiles.

President Medevev summed it up: “Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday that Washington had forfeited its place at the heart of the world order and he called on Europe instead to work with Russia on a new security pact.” (Reuters, Oct. 8, 2008)

China is more subtle in flexing muscle. Its superlative architectural constructions for the Beijing Olympics, the quality of the stadiums and swimming pool, the unique and original ceremonies and the giant earthworks completed in a relative short period of time — subways, boulevards, neighborhood renovations, anti-pollution controls, and immense tree plantings — demonstrated the cooperative spirit, innovation and agility of the Sino socio-economic system.

While the western nations are stagnant and remain uncertain about future capital expansion, China prepares a multitude of programs; a bullet train system between Shanghai and Beijing, subways for 15 cities, 97 new airports, 15,000 miles of roads, which includes an expressway over the mountains to Tibet and an undersea tunnel to Taiwan. The latter two projects might seem exaggerated, but the Peoples Republic ’s Transportation Ministry has them on the drawing board.

Coincident with the giant projects is a growing giant financial system that rivals the western world’s banking system. Due to havoc in global financial markets it is difficult to obtain accurate information on bank assets. Nevertheless, the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CRBC) estimated the total foreign and domestic currency assets of Chinese financial institutions at 8.45 trillion U.S. dollars, as of June 2008. Compare that sum with an estimated 2008 Citibank assets of 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars.

The advances of the China and Russia Statist systems don’t convince Fukayama. Still defending his original thesis, the scholar who stopped the world believes that “In lieu of big ideas, Russia and China are driven by nationalism, which takes quite different forms in each country.” He also trusts that “ China ‘s development model works well only in those parts of East Asia that share certain traditional Chinese cultural values.” These statements might be true, but are they the issue? The Industrial Revolution hastened the development of the liberal democracies. The post Industrial Revolution is a reshaped world where New Statism in various forms is covering the globe, in the Indian continent, the Middle East and parts of Latin America.

Look at India. A May 2006 World Bank report states:

“In India, there are 240 Public Sector Enterprises outside the financial sector. These enterprises produce 95 percent of India ’s coal, 66 percent of its refined oil, 83 percent of its natural gas, 32 percent of its finished steel, 35 percent of its aluminum, and 27 percent of its nitrogenous fertilizer. Indian Railways alone employs 1.6 million people, making it the world’s largest commercial employer. Financial sector SOEs account for 75 percent of India’s banking assets.” Although India is not an economic powerhouse, it is a nuclear equipped nation. Everyone wants India on its side.

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, despite some parliamentary governing, are principally autocratic nations with mixed economies. Oil wealth goes to ruling families and supports a plethora of private enterprises, government welfare and massive internal and external investments. The words ‘Sovereign Wealth Fund,” which are government investment funded by foreign currency reserves but managed separately from official currency reserves, are closely linked to the oil rich nations. According to Morgan Stanley Investments, Sept. 2008, The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority leads all Sovereign Wealth Funds with a worth of $875B. Saudi Arabia has a comfortable $300B and Kuwait’s Investment Authority pools $250B. All this translates into economic clout and political power. Investments have been directed to Third World nations who have found a more cooperative source for their capital needs. In a reverse twist, economically troubled western investment bankers, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch as examples, have had equity injections from the Middle East sovereign funds, which are now perceived as stabilizers for the disturbed liberal market economies.

In Latin America, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador wave the Statist banner.

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez failed to acquire dictatorial powers, but has nationalized oil, telephone and electric companies. By using Venezuela ‘s vast oil reserves to increase his regional influence, the Venezuelan president expects to diminish U.S. influence. As noted before, Chavez is willing to team with Russia and participate in challenging U.S. world hegemony

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales is more cautious than Chavez and doesn’t have the resources the Venezuelan manages. Nevertheless, the Bolivian President nationalized Bolivia ‘s gas reserves and is prepared to do more. Morale’s demonstrates his new found boldness in words and deeds: “We don’t have to be afraid of an economic blockade by the United States against the Bolivian people,” Morales said when he politely asked the U.S. ambassador to leave because of U.S. support for government opposition groups.

Ecuador President Rafael Correa, after being elected president in January 2006, informed the national assembly he will pave the way for socialism. The Ecuador President has threatened to expel foreign oil companies if they fail to lift dwindling output in the OPEC nation.

The Challenge of the New Statism

A case can be made that it wasn’t the U.S. economic engine, but China’s economy that fueled the American and other national economies during the last decade. Export of high priced industrial goods and commodities to China provided huge markets for Western and Asian surplus. The People’s Republic’s massive production and exports of low priced goods to leading industrial countries contained inflation. Currency flows from trade with China served to increase trade between all nations. Increased resource and material demands reopened mines, pumped oil, and enriched the Third World nations that were rich in natural resources. China became the new engine in the world’s economic system.

And that is from where the challenge of the New Statism begins.

The emerging nations were previously dependent upon the industrialized western world for products and capital. Now, the industrialized western world finds itself reliant upon the New Statist nations for raw materials and natural resources, whose prices the western democracies can no longer control, dependent upon imports of inexpensive goods, in competition with several new nations for markets and seeking capital from resource rich nations. The previous competitive advantages of the industrialized world have been severely reduced in the more controlled Statist environment.

A greater challenge by the Statist nations lies in their becoming less reliant on the western democracies and more cooperative with one another. With Russia supplying the material resources and China supplying the labor for manufacturing, the emerging Statist nations have the capability to control resource distribution and value added manufacture.

The democratic capitalist nations previously extracted the material resources and inexpensive labor of a Third World for benefit of the western societies and domestic oligarchs. The developed world guided the destiny of the lesser-developed world. Third World nations now extract capital from the developed nations and use their own material resources and inexpensive labor for either direct or indirect benefit for their own peoples. The New Statist nations can guide the destinies of all nations, and this is happening.

China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan compose the Shanghai Cooperation in Central Asia (SCO), a mutual-security organization launched in 2001. India could soon be included. Trilateral summits of Russia, China and India predict a strategic alliance between these large and growing nations. A joint communiqué by the foreign ministers of three countries in New Delhi on February 14, 2007 “expressed their conviction that democratization of international relations is the key to building an increasingly multipolar world order.”

With the liberal political and economic world suffering from an economic downfall, emerging nations might be less likely to adopt the free market model and more likely to consideration the autocratic Statist paradigm as an attractive alternative to liberal democracy. Even the free marketers are shelving their concepts and applying Statist solutions for private problems. Rather than an end to history, the liberal democracy movement has become only a stage in history. As predicted by rejected and non-conventional economists, a new stage of history is unfolding.