Global

Do you remember SARS? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was so contagious; a SARS-afflicted man on an Air China flight in 2003 infected 20 passengers sitting at a distance away from him and two crew members. The simple act of flushing the toilet spread the deadly lung disease and health care workers had to wear HazMat suits to treat patients. Eight hundred people died including Pekka Aro, a senior official with the United Nations.

Where did the disease come from? This is what the Journal of Virology wrote.

By Klaus Gistinger (Translation by Loren Balhorn) January 15, 2020 (2064 words)

https://jacobinmag.com/author/klaus-gietinger

On January 15, 1919, the leaders of the German revolution were murdered by far-right soldiers enraged by the rising socialist movement. The man who masterminded the killings was Waldemar Pabst — a fanatical nationalist officer whose paramilitaries became the rank and file for Nazism.

On January 15, 1919, the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by a gang of right-wing army officers. Their killings came after the crushing of the January Uprising in Berlin and enjoyed the tacit approval of leading members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had taken power only weeks earlier.

The dismal conflict that erupted this week between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should never have happened. But now that it has, supporters must provide grassroots leadership to mitigate the dangerous mess.

The argument that broke out between Warren and Sanders last weekend and escalated in recent days is already history that threatens to foreshadow tragedy. Progressives cannot afford to give any more aid and comfort to the forces behind corporate contenders Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, or the plutocratic $54 billion man Michael Bloomberg waiting in the wings.

In a sense, this moment calls for Sanders and Warren supporters to be better than their candidates, who’ve descended into an avoidably harsh conflict that hugely benefits corporate power and corporate Democrats -- and will do so even more to the extent that it doesn’t subside.

So much is at stake that Sanders and Warren must be called upon to look beyond their own anger, no matter how justified. A demolition derby between the two -- or their supporters -- won’t resolve who’s right. But it will help the right wing.

Why has the hash tag #CNNisTrash been popular since this week’s presidential primary debate? There was nothing new about the corporate, militarist, anti-progressive slant of the debate “moderation.” What was new was the level of blatant bias so extreme that even viewers who knew nothing about the issues couldn’t miss it, plus the amount of time CNN focused on expressing its hostility toward a single candidate, Bernie Sanders.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win . . . or so the saying goes. The Bernie Sanders campaign is well into stage 3 out of 4.

For a remarkably well-done, thoroughly realistic WWI battle scene, I hope that readers of this column will watch the 6 minute video: https://genius.com/Sabaton-the-price-of-a-mile-lyrics.

The video portrays a scene from World War I, in which German infantrymen defend against a French attack across No Man’s Land, The attack is “successfully” repelled (with French “surrender monkeys” eventually running away to their trenches), only to see the German “Master Race” soldiers foolishly counter-attack - going “over the top” - only to see the attack fail miserably, The final scene shows the Germans “running away” back to their trenches. Powerful imagery revealing the futility of war.

At the end of the video, the following quote appears, from Erich Maria Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front”:

There really only is one option when it comes to nuclear weapons, and that is to do everything we can to abolish them before they abolish us. New York City Council will be voting on January 28, 2020, to do its part by voting on two measures that already have enough sponsors to give them veto-proof majorities.

One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals—government people—is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be.

When I do so, an internal distress signal starts beeping and won’t stop, especially when the issue under discussion is war and mass destruction, i.e., suicide by nukes, which has a freshly intense relevance these days as Team Trump plays war with Iran.

What doesn’t matter, apparently, is any awareness that we live in one world, connected at the core: that the problems confronting this planet transcend the fragmentary “interests” of single, sovereign entities, even if the primary interest is survival itself.

At a talk I delivered in Northern England in March 2018, I proposed that the best response to falsified accusations of antisemitism, which are often lobbed against pro-Palestinian communities and intellectuals everywhere, is to draw even closer to the Palestinian narrative.

In fact, my proposal was not meant to be a sentimental response in any way.

“Reclaiming the Palestinian narrative” has been the main theme in most of my public speeches and writings in recent years. All of my books and much of my academic studies and research have largely focused on positioning the Palestinian people - their rights, history, culture, and political aspirations - at the very core of any genuine understanding of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism and apartheid.