The New Georgia Project “Financial Investigation” Nothingburger

On November 11, the left-leaning newspaper Politico published a report of financial irregularities at the New Georgia Project (NGP), a progressive GOTV organization to which I contribute monthly. After reading the report quickly, I almost struck NGP from my list. But on more careful re-reading and reflection, I reconsidered. This short essay explains why I reconsidered, and why I think the report, although based on a long and necessary investigation, was abysmal journalism.

Here are the key facts that I gleaned from the report:

Amounts possibly misappropriated or embezzled from both taxable and nontaxable arms of NGP:

$57,693 by an unnamed administrator, since fired;
$13,242 by Nse Ufot, fired former head of NGP, and
an unstated portion of $11,000 in gift cards used for employees’ expenses.

Maximum total of amounts possibly misused: $81,935
Amounts donated to NGP during the relevant period: $51.5 million
Ratio of suspect amounts to total donations: 0.16 percent
Status of major figures involved: fired and under requests for reimbursement
Status of minor figures (employees) involved: under investigation and/or with requests for reimbursement under discussion
Involvement of rising progressive stars (Stacey Abrams and Senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock): NONE (both left NGP before the alleged/possible misuse and long before it was discovered)

Why was this report abysmal journalism?

First, in defense of the author, whom I will not name, let me say that the investigation was necessary, that I’m glad it was done by a progressive rag, and not by Fox or the WSJ, that it appears to have been thorough, and that it took the author a reported six months.

That said, here are its sins, in decreasing order of gravity:

Defaming innocent rising stars by implication. The story’s use of the names of Abrams and Warnock, in the headline no less, was inexcusable clickbait, worthy of Fox. The actual reporting revealed that neither had anything to do with the events under investigation, except possibly by having appointed or having helped appoint some of the figures involved. But I had to read the whole, long report carefully to discover this vital fact.

Dismal organization. Like much, if not most, of mainstream journalism these days, this story reads like a short story or a cleaned-up daily journal of the investigation. Facts appear in chronological or random order, or in the order in which discovered. There is no lead paragraph summarizing the results, and no logic or coherence to their presentation. This non-organization made me wonder whether the author ever took a class in journalism, let alone majored in it, and whether, if so, classes in journalism now focus on clickbait and media profit rather than informing readers logically and writing strong lead paragraphs.

Failure to make the facts clear: The culpability of the suspected figures remains unclear, probably because NGP’s internal investigations and disputes were (and maybe still are) ongoing. The only exception was the unnamed administrator, who appears to have deliberately taken money surreptitiously. It’s understandable that, after six months of discovering so little wrongdoing, neither the reporter nor Politico wanted to wait around for the ultimate denouement. But the extent of knowledge of the suspected actors’ culpability should have been part of that missing lead paragraph.

Exorbitant length and fulsomeness. The published story was five to ten times long as good journalism required. Its length should not have reflected the reporter’s labor, but the reliable results discovered. If scientists can report months or years of experiments with a few pages and a half-page abstract—equivalent to the lead paragraph in journalism—journalists can do likewise. This report’s excessive length and byzantine organization only increase its susceptibility to misuse by the likes of Fox, Breitbart and the Freedom Caucus.

Why I reconsidered. As I read the report carefully a second time, three key facts emerged for me. First, the maximum amount of money possibly misused—even if all had been criminally embezzled—was rounding error compared to the amount of donations processed and presumably applied ably to GOTV efforts. I believe that the percentage of employee pilferage in the average department store is far higher. In the worst possible interpretation of the facts, no one at NGP, even those fired, was getting rich from stealing.

(There was also the matter of a $1.5 million marketing contract with an apparently external firm, but that appears to have been be a matter of poor business judgment, or possibly a fleecing by the external firm. No evidence was reported of anyone inside NGP being involved or in cahoots with that firm.)

Second, the minor suspected pilferage through misuse of the $11,000 of gift cards apparently arose because some or many of NGP's grass-roots workers had no bank accounts. So the alternatives were giving them cash, always a bad idea, or gift cards whose amounts were clear and recorded. Receipts for individual expenditures could have been (but apparently weren’t) sent to a central accounting point by having the employees input a central email address to the terminals that charged their gift cards, and requiring them to reimburse improper amounts and amounts for which no receipt had been sent. No doubt the lawyer who is now in charge of NGP will figure this out and implement this or another good accounting plan.

Finally, NGP is a worthy organization, and a vital one in turning Georgia permanently blue. The report itself reveals that all alleged irregularities and improprieties have been fully vetted, that discussions are under way and lawsuits being considered to recover the money, that people believed responsible have been let go, and that much of the trouble relates to the lack of financial sophistication among NGP’s workers. The last point begs tolerance, if only because the workers were chosen precisely for their ability to relate to and persuade poor, marginalized and cynical people who are reluctant and only occasional voters.

In my view, door-to-door and neighbor-to-neighbor GOTV work like NGP’s is the best, if not the only, way to insure that we remain a democracy, and that Georgia become fully blue. In comparison, spending money on thirty-second sound bites or video clips in an attempt to break the oligarchs’ and right-wing media’s death grip on electronic media is a fool’s errand and a waste of money.

So, yes, I will continue my monthly donations to NGP, which will increase fourfold next month until the election. And I will have confidence that NGP’s new leadership will figure out the nuances of accounting and documenting employees’ business expenses while doing God’s work of saving our democracy, one battleground state at a time.

P.S. Anyone has my permission to distribute or republish this post, in full and without editing, on any platform and to anyone anywhere, for the purpose of supporting NGP.


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Defining Terrorism

In order to discuss terrorism, we first must define it. Here’s my proposed definition:

“Terrorism is the deliberate, reckless or negligent maiming and/or killing of innocent civilians in pursuit of a military or political objective.”

If you accept this definition, at least for purposes of discussion, you can see what a global swath terrorism has cut through our species in just the last half century.

For us Americans—and possibly for the world—the most terrible act of terrorism was Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. Using two hijacked aircraft, it utterly destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. Other near-simultaneous attacks damaged part of the Pentagon (where civilians also worked) and crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, PA, killing all aboard. Together, these four deliberate attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians. So 9/11 was likely the single most “successful” act of terrorism in modern history.

Although not quite in this century, the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, certainly qualify as terrorism, although their objective is still not clear. Those blasts killed 224 people, including twelve Americans, and wounded more than 4,500 people.

Back in America, and further back in time, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 killed 168 people, injured 680, and caused an estimated $652 million of damage. Domestic anti-government extremists and white supremacists planned and carried out that one. The ringleader was executed; his accomplice was sentenced to life in prison; and another person in on the plot got twelve years in prison for failure to warn.

Then there are the cases of what I would call “chronic” terrorism. In those, the terrorists make up in volume what their attacks lack in death and destruction individually.

Chief among them is “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which lasted about three decades. It was basically an ethno-religious conflict between Irish Catholics and England-sympathizing Protestants in Northern Ireland, focused on the city of Belfast. It involved conventional battles between paramilitary and military forces, but it also involved plenty of bombings, fires and small-scale terror shootings of civilians. About 3,500 people were killed, 52% of them civilians, until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 mostly put a stop to it.

A second and similar situation involves the ethnic Kurdish population of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. For historical reasons, the Kurds, although a distinct ethnic group with their own language, have never had a state of their own. They have been steadfast allies of the United States, as well as clever and effective fighters in local civil wars.

But Turkey has outlawed a group of them called the “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” (initials “PKK” in Kurdish) as a terrorist organization. Over the 45 years since its founding, members and affiliates have undoubtedly committed serial acts of terrorism, including bombings and military-style attacks, against civilians as well as military forces. Turkey is now citing the refuge of PKK members and other Kurds in Sweden as an excuse to delay or prevent Sweden’s accession to NATO.

A third example of “chronic” terrorism is repeated air assaults on the civilian population of Israel from paramilitary forces in Southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Northern Gaza (Hamas). These assaults use home-made missiles and drones and, increasingly, missiles and drones made by Iran and supplied knowingly for that purpose. While Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defenses have shot many of these aerial weapons down, some inevitably get through. When they do, they damage property and occasionally kill or maim innocent civilians at random. The effect of these attacks, so far, has been to make civilian life in Israel a bit less safe and a lot less happy, and to motivate Israel’s population to shift politically to the right.

While terrorism is less of a general scourge in Asia, that continent has not entirely escaped the plague. Military and paramilitary forces have committed terrorism against innocent people in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the Philippines. These acts of terrorism have definite religious overtones: in Myanmar they involve persecution, massacres and displacement of Rohingya Muslims by majority Buddhists; in the Philippines they include acts of terrorism by Muslims against (national) majority Christians, and vice versa, especially in the south where Muslims predominate.

This dismal list is necessarily incomplete. But it shows how widespread terrorism has become in just the last half-century. It can strike anywhere at any time.

Terrorism makes civilian life precarious and fearful, even in nations that, unlike our own, refuse to put automatic weapons of war in the hands of many civilians. Even where firearms are controlled, easy availability of the ingredients of bombs and poisons, including airborne poisons, makes terrorism possible and sometimes likely. Even ordinary appliances of modern life, such as cars and trucks, have become instruments of small-scale terrorism. So there is no doubt that terrorism is on the rise globally.

Before concluding this definitional essay, I’d like to focus on the key words “reckless or negligent” in my proposed definition.

The traditional view of terrorism is that it involves deliberate killing or maiming of civilians to make a political point, or sometimes to provoke a military overreaction that might trigger a general uprising. This view sees terrorism as an act of “asymmetrical warfare,” in which disgruntled civilians or a rag-tag rebellious military have no alternative in fighting an overwhelmingly superior conventional military force.

But in my view there is another side of terrorism that has received too little attention, in both the press and academic thinking. Increasingly, dominant military forces have used overwhelming air superiority and massive and catastrophic bombing from the air to cow civilian populations and control or suppress popular uprisings. Increasingly these air attacks have involved massive civilian casualties and massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, including housing, hospitals, civil police stations, and distribution centers for food, water and electricity. Among the objectives of these wantonly destructive acts are to cow a rebellious civilian population and suppress legitimate civic dissent.

Perhaps the most egregious terrorism of this kind was the conduct of Russian and “loyalist” Syrian forces in the recent Syrian civil war. Massive aerial bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure—not just rebellious military and paramilitary forces on the ground—reduced some towns and cities virtually to rubble, including much of Aleppo.

That city became the modern equivalent of the bombing by Nazi warplanes of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, so starkly depicted by Pablo Picasso in his famous painting of the same name. But the destruction wrought on innocent and defenseless civilians and their infrastructure by modern aircraft and modern bombs—not to mention missiles, drones and “bunker-busting” bombs—was and is incomparably worse.

Is this “terrorism”? I would argue emphatically “yes.” Loyalists to brutal Syrian dictator Bashar el-Assad, and his Russian backers, would argue that “there were probably enemy soldiers and weapons somewhere down there.” But I think that argument strays not far from the words of an unnamed major in our first losing war, in Vietham. He reportedly said of the nearly obliterated Vietnamese village of Bén Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it [from our Viet Cong enemy].”

That kind of argument, it seems to me, is not just illogical but inhumane. Carried to its conclusion, it would make civilian life not just insecure, but untenable, in every place where political disagreement turns into war, civil or otherwise. It’s a slippery slope that has no end: it justifies the massacre of civilian noncombatants.

And so we come to the last point of this essay. How should we describe Israel’s current massive air assault on Gaza, in an attempt to root out and destroy a relatively small number of Hamas terrorists, hiding among Gaza’s two-million-plus civilians?

The Hamas terrorists were responsible for the October 7 Massacre in Southern Israel. That ground-based terrorist attack killed about 1,200 Israeli civilians. As of December 20, Israel’s massive air assault in response has killed at least 20,000 civilians and destroyed a large fraction of the civilian infrastructure of Gaza’s densely populated cities.

Let’s not get bogged down in assessing whether this air assault is “proportionate.” It’s not. The proper measure of proportionality is not the ratio of civilians killed in Gaza to civilians killed in Israel on October 7. At least I hope that human civilization has progressed beyond the eye-for-an-eye Code of Hammurabi.

The proper measure of proportionality in an operation like Israel’s is the ratio of innocent civilians killed or wounded in Gaza to guilty terrorists killed or captured there, i.e., to killed or captured Hamas militants that were involved in the October 7 Massacre, whether directly or in planning, financing, supporting or supplying it. In short, the proper measure of proportionality is the human ratio of “collateral damage” to military “success.”

In the case of Gaza that ratio is not precisely known. News reports suggest that Israel has killed or captured only a few dozen Hamas leaders. Even if that number is as high as 200, the proportionality ratio would be 100, or the success-to-collateral-damage ratio only about one percent. That’s not, in my view, sufficient to justify such massive civilian killings.

I make this numerical point because I’m a “quant” at heart. But the “optics” are terrible, too. Under the continuing, massive aerial assault, all of Gaza is beginning to look like Aleppo after Russia’s air force, urged on by bloody dictator Assad, obliterated it. Is that something that Israel, let alone the US and the “West,” wants to bear on its or their consciences?

The ghosts of Guernica and Aleppo cry out, “No!” So how ought international law and diplomacy address this situation?

Israeli military strategists will argue that the prospect of stopping the massive bombing will give individual Gazans a strong incentive to serve up the Hamas terrorists among them. That may be so, although I’m skeptical. But even if the massive aerial assault does have that desired effect, doesn’t it amount to collective torture of Gazans? Isn’t that saying, in effect, “If you want to stop the wanton killing of your family and neighbors, as well as the devastation of your cities, then give up the Hamas terrorists in your midst”?

If so, is it reckless or negligent to expect a large population held captive by terrorists to give them up when threatened with death from skies, when the terrorists have lived among them for decades, have completely free reign to dominate civilian society, and when the leaders urge them on from afar where no ordinary Gazan civilian can reach them, either for talks or more persuasive measures? I think so.

Lets be clear about one thing. Israel has every right to “avenge” the October 7 Massacre by destroying the militants who perpetrated it, including their leaders abroad and those who participated indirectly, through supply, planning, financing and external (foreign) support. But Israel has to identify and find them first.

In this difficult practical task, Israel has three distinct disadvantages. First, Gazans distrust and hate its armed forces and its soldiers even more than the Hamas bullies in their midst, who make their day-to-day lives miserable and willingly sacrifice them to shield military assets or for small military “successes.” Second, Israel’s ground soldiers, by and large, don’t speak Arabic, let alone like natives. They don’t understand or practice Islam. Therefore, they have no basis for establishing rapport even with Gazans who hate Hamas and might like to turn its leaders in. Finally, by waging such an asymmetrical war among a largely civilian and innocent population, Israel will quickly turn those pliable Gazans, and many world leaders, not to mention sympathetic Muslims, against it. (If I, an American Jew and erstwhile strong supporter of Israel, have grave doubts, you can image what the leaders and “people on the street” in the Arab and Muslim worlds think.)

As a retired law professor, I would describe Israel’s air massacre of Gaza’s civilians today as “reckless.” It’s culpability is more than mere negligence, defined as the failure to take reasonable care to avoid civilian casualties.

Without useful knowledge of who and where the Hamas October 7 Massacre’s leaders and perpetrators are, Israel’s massive air assault will have two sure effects: it will kill and maim a lot of innocent Gazan civilians and destroy much, if not most, of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Those certain practical effects in turn will have three sure political effects: (1) they will drastically reduce political support for Israel in the United States and throughout the world; (2) that reduction in support may, in time, reduce the military and technical assistance that tiny Israel needs to survive in a hostile neighborhood in the long term; and (3) the “shock and awe” that Arab populations feel on seeing Gaza’s devastation will slow, if not halt, their recently increasing acceptance of Israel as a powerful, technologically advanced and potentially helpful neighbor.

No doubt the Hamas militants who planned and perpetrated the October 7 Massacre were aware of, and hoped for, all these effects. If so, they are accessories to terrorism, not just in Israel (where their culpability is obvious and direct), but in Gaza, too.

Yet in Gaza, where the toll of death and infrastructure destruction is considerably higher, the Israelis are directly responsible, either recklessly (in my view) or at least negligently, i.e., failing to use reasonable care to limit civilian Gazan casualties in their assault. In other words, Israel’s massive air assaults on Gaza today are a poster child for my view that the definition of “terrorism” should include not just willful and deliberate acts, but acts of recklessness and negligence that have the same effect.

It’s no answer, in my view, to cite the similar acts of Russian air power in Ukraine. Nor is it sufficient to argue that Israel made some attempts to warn Gazans of the air strikes in advance, even giving some warnings of the attacks’ general locations. Ukraine, in which no warnings at all were given, is a huge country with lots of open space, while there was nowhere for many, if not most, “warned” Gazans to go. And in any event significant aspects of Russia’s air campaign in Ukraine, including the apparently deliberate targeting of power stations, apartment buildings, hospitals, theaters, and cultural centers, ought in my view be considered terrorism, too.

Gaza is a tiny, densely populated flat land with little open space or safe areas of lodging in which to hide. After years of external blockade, it also has few resources to accommodate civilians fleeing zones of conflict and warning, which in some cases included the most populated portions of Gaza. So many, if not most, of Israel’s warnings were practically incapable of saving civilians from the start. They were litle more than “window dressing” on indiscriminate slaughter from the air.

It took English common law centuries to come to the conclusion that murderous and destructive acts of recklessness and negligence deserve legal condemnation and punishment much like deliberate acts. With the deadliness of weapons and tools of terrorism literally exploding before our eyes, and with planetary heating threatening our species’ survival if we get distracted, we don’t have that kind of time to recognize reckless and negligent terrorism as a threat to our species’ survival and happiness. Just as the common law once recognized reckless and negligent acts as torts and crimes, so the international community should recognize reckless and negligent slaughter of civilians as “terrorism” when it has similar motivations and produces similar results.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Israel and Palestine: “There ought to be a law!”

How recent is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? It was adopted on 9 December 1948, after the Holocaust and going on two generations after the Turks’ attempted genocide of Armenians in 1915. One day later, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Think about that. This Jewish New Year, which began in September, is now Year 5784, not far from six millennia. If we take that as a rough gauge of the span of recorded human history, we self-appointed Homo sapiens have outlawed genocide and recognized human rights globally for just 75 years, or 1.3% of our recorded history.

Before the Convention, we not only tolerated genocide. We celebrated it. I can remember, as a high-school student of Latin in the early sixties, learning about ancient Rome’s obliteration of Carthage. Cato the Elder stood up in the Roman Senate and repeatedly declared “Carthago delenda est!”, or “Carthage must be destroyed.” And eventually Rome did just that. It attacked Carthage with overwhelming force. It killed most of Carthage’s able-bodied men (plus many women and children), took the survivors as slaves, burned down the city, tore down the stone city walls, and sowed the city’s fields for crops with salt. It was a deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire city and its people completely and forever. And it succeeded.

No one in my high-school Latin class, least of all the teacher, called it a “genocide.” The term hadn’t yet come into general use. The general attitude was one of grudging admiration. We all viewed the genocide as evidence of both the power of Cato’s oratory and the awesome might and grandeur, for its time, of ancient Rome. Only much later did I learn that the cause of this genocide was basically a commercial dispute: Carthage had been eating into Rome’s commercial markets in the Middle East.

Much later, the European conquerors of North America adopted the slogan, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” (This referred to Native Americans, not people from India.) The once-foreign conquerors didn’t subsequently wipe them all out. Instead, they forced Native Americans off their traditional lands, rounded many up into “Reservations” on lands no white settlers wanted, and herded their kids into “Indian Schools,” whose explicit purpose was to erase their languages and culture, and where many of them were abused and died.

What’s the point of reciting these dismal tales of historical fact? Our social evolution proceeds slowly, but far more rapidly than our biological evolution. Just three years after the invention and first use of nuclear weapons, we apparently began to understand that ceaseless tribal warfare and attempts at genocide, if only by provoking violent responses, might eventually lead to the extinction of our species, and by our own hands.

A second point is the evolution of international law. It also reflects our social evolution, but often it doesn’t happen fast enough. Two centuries ago, women were pretty much property (i.e., slaves to their husbands) in most of the world. Now things have changed a bit: women can own property, divorce their husbands, retain custody of children, vote, and become leaders (maybe some day even President!), in most of the developed world. But there’s backsliding, of course; witness the attempts, in many American states, to make pregnant women slaves for baby bearing.

So what does all this say about the current Israel-Hamas war? It illustrates the biggest perennial problem on our species’ plate. How do we tamp down, and eventually eliminate, the senseless tribal conflicts that produce untold death, destruction and despair, and that could spin out of control in the nuclear age?

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just the most recent and the most ugly. In the last thirty years, we’ve see the Myanmar Buddhists force out and massacre the Rohingya, the 1995 attempted genocide of Tutsi and other tribes by the majority Hutu in Rwanda, and the repetitive, deadly clashes between Christian Armenians and Islamic Azerbaijanis. And try not to think of what Russia is doing in its “Far East,” ethnically cleansing a number of tiny ethic minorities by sending their young men to Ukraine as cannon fodder.

We all know these tribal wars are senseless, horrendously destructive, and serve no useful purpose. In the end, and if not controlled, they could produce our species’ extinction, whether by triggering a wider war that might go nuclear, or by distracting us from planetary heating of our own making, which is our species’ greatest, most pressing and most immediate existential threat.

We all know, deep down, how wrong these wars are. Yet most of us don’t try hard to stop them; many of us just choose sides. In the case of Israel and Palestine, it’s easy to choose sides because the warring parties themselves make religion an issue. There are plenty of Muslims and Jews (and non-Jewish sympathizers) around the world to take up the cudgel of tribalism. Often they cheer on the perpetual, reciprocal “smiting” that the Bible so well describes but provides no remedy for. Or they twist themselves into rhetorical knots trying to justify the unjustifiable, or trying to parse and differentiate varying levels of pure evil.

Let’s be honest. Murdering innocent men, women and children in their houses, places of worship, crop fields and beds is wrong, let alone raping and torturing women before killing them, and mutilating their bodies afterward. All that ranks quite low on the “bad-ometer.”

Maybe holding over two million civilians prisoner for decades in a tiny strip of land, without adequate food, water, human interchange, and electricity, let alone commercial supplies to build a decent economy and a modern way of life, is not as evil. But it’s still not good. The same is true of progressively changing the “rules of engagement” to permit more and more of those civilians to be killed and maimed in a so-far-futile quest to wipe out the terrorists hiding among them.

And then there were the Israeli extremists who smashed and burned the homes and cars of innocent Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, then killed them when they tried to defend their homes and property. Sure, there were only a few such incidents. But they happened.

Although partly assimilated, I’m an American Jew. While Hamas’ massacres of innocent Israelis on October 7 of course shocked and outraged me, I can’t ignore the near-reckless destruction of homes, hospitals, lives and families in Gaza, nor Gaza’s growing similarity to the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II (with, we hope, no similar final outcome).

Nor can I ignore what happened in the West Bank. In the late nineteenth century, my own ancestors—and those of many of my Jewish friends—fled what’s now Ukraine (then Russia), because of similar attacks on their communities. The attacks in Ukraine then were more frequent, more persisent, and more deadly than those in the West Bank now, and sometimes the Russian Army and the Cossacks participated. But the dismal truth is much the same. We now see the specter of Jews (Jews!) committing pogroms in the West Bank, mostly (as far as I can tell) without much pushback from official Israel and without strict accountability.

The word “pogrom” comes from the Russian and Ukrainian words “to burn.” And if it strikes you as something “minor” compared to what Hamas did in Southern Israel, imagine it being done to your home, let alone by people who consider you subhuman, irredeemably violent, or otherwise undeserving of life, let alone basic human rights. And recall that some of the defending Palestinians were in fact killed.

I’m NOT trying here to equate clearly different levels of evil. Nor am I trying to emulate our Demagogue by saying there are “very fine people on both sides.” I’m just trying to show that attempts to compare and contrast levels of atrocity will get our species nowhere. All must be repudiated and condemned. All must be stopped.

So the task for good people outside the war zone is not to assess shades of guilt. It’s to stop the horror. Just as “good people” react to a bar fight by grabbing and controlling the fighters, the outside world has to step in and stop these repetitive, reciprocal atrocities. If not, they will continue forever, perhaps until a real genocide by one side or the other results.

Who else can stop the cycle of violence? Israel’s current war obejctive is to wipe out Hamas and its terrorists in Gaza. But to do so, Israel has so far accepted an unacceptable level of “collateral damage,” if only because Hamas is embedded and hidden inside Gaza’s civilian population, in tunnels and basements and maybe even mosques and hospitals.

The key to understanding the practical difficulty of what Israel has undertaken is knowing that Gazans likely distrust and hate Israelis even more than they may distrust and despise Hamas.

What might happen, for example, if a trained security force of Palestinians, all native speakers of Arabic, were to undertake the same task? Wouldn’t they be much less likely to cause horrendous “collateral damage,” to kill innocent civilians, women and children? Knowing the language, the religion and the culture, wouldn’t they be much more likely to secure the trust and assistance of the civilian population and succeed? And having destroyed or captured most of Hamas, wouldn’t they be more capable of capturing or marginalizing the remnants and nurturing a civil society with basic human rights and some capacity for future success?

This is not the place to put forward a detailed plan. That would require great military and cultural expertise. But the greater likelihood of success for such a force, as compared to Israeli invaders bent on revenge, is self-evident.

Where might the Palestinian soldiers and spooks come from? There are millions of displaced Palestinians living peacefully in Jordan, and no doubt many in Egypt. Some might even be found in broken, battered and dysfunctional Syria. All they might need is incentives, training, weapons and pay. Isn’t the thought of a cleansing military force of Palestinian Arabs who know the price of displacement and terrorism but also the value of peace, law and order worth considering?

Somehow, the world outside the warring parties has to step in and stop the progressive, reciprocal atrocities. If not, they are likely to continue forever, just like the reciprocal “smiting” described in the Bible some two millennia ago.

To provide a framework to do that in a rational and systematic manner, there has to be some law. Law can provide the abstract basis for stepping in, plus a blueprint for future intervention. Just as the then-unprecedented Nuremberg Trials imposed personal responsibility on leaders, instead of their hapless dupes [search in linked post for “other shoe”], so the law should focus on the individuals who keep the flames of conflict growing, and the leaders who luxuriate abroad while the carnage continues.

I don’t underestimate the magnitude of the task in war-torn Isael and Palestine. In 1945, Germany was broken, battered and beaten. So was Japan. It was easy for the victorious Allies to step in and impose their own rules.

But look at what happened next. Germany has become human history’s most contrite and repentant once-brutal conqueror. It has made and continues making reparations. It has outlawed hate crimes, giving us reason to believe that not all speech is helpful. It teaches its past sins in detail to its children. And it was mostly disarmed until the Russian atrocity in Ukraine renewed the need for military strength.

While less explicitly and completely repentant, Japan has assumed a leading position among advocates for peace and rational economic rules. The two nations, once broken in war, now enjoy the world’s third and fourth largest economies, despite their small populations relative to India, China, the USA, and even Indonesia. They are universally respected for their engineering, science, productivity and consumer products.

All of this, I contend, was no accident. It was a direct result of our nation’s and Europe’s enlightened occupation of the beaten enemies and our gentle inculcation of human rights and rational law as the foundation for economic and civic success. We and Europe spread the Enlightenment, which began about four centuries ago in Britain and France, to the once-fearsome “Axis” powers of the last century.

Today, the problem is much harder. There is no general war and so there will be no decisive victory. In fact, the last thing we outside the region want is for war to spread and grow. So we have to use our collective strength to impose good rules on both Israel and Palestine, without widening the war. We have to get both groups to recognize each other as human, and thus to honor the human rights of every individual. Whether that means a “two-state solution,” or Palestinian Arabs and Christians living as equals to Jews and happy citizens inside an Israel that is democratic, peaceful and accommodating to all its citizens, is for future history to tell.

But two things should be clear by now. First, the outside world, including our own nation (but excluding Jordan), has been mostly AWOL in the struggle for reason and against extremism in the Middle East. It must bear the responsibility, and much of the cost, for imposing a solution. Without the outside world stepping in, making law and enforcing it, the “smiting” could continue forever, and this conflict, plus maybe others between Iran and the Arab nations, could distract us all from the climate change that is our species’ principal enemy. Such senseless conflicts could help extinguish our species.

The old German phrase “Macht macht recht!” (“Might makes right!”) was abhorrent when used by one people to justify aggression, atrocities and genocide against others, let alone under a nonsense theory of racial superiority. But it has a gentler ring when applied to an Enlightened global community, and when it includes not just military might and terrible weapons, but the softer “might” of economic pressure, blandishments, embargoes, boycotts and diplomacy, and the still softer “might” of general rules of law, moral judgments and the universal human desire for a peaceful, prosperous and healthy world in which to raise families.

The international community, with special emphasis on the warring parties’ neighbors, must make good law and enforce it. Otherwise, this ghastly conflict will make the Biblical inter-tribal “smiting” the hallmark of our twenty-first century, like all the numbered centuries that came before.

If that happens, it could vastly increase the chances for a big planetary heating die-off and/or human extinction. Every one on this planet has a stake in stopping this atrocity-filled international escalation of a bar fight before it goes regional, global or nuclear, and before it makes our still-young new century more terrible than the last.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Crunch Time is Now

“They came for the Communists, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Communist;”
They came for the Socialists, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Socialist;”
They came for the labor leaders, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a labor leader;”
They came for the Jews, and I didn’t object – For I wasn’t a Jew;”
Then they came for me – And there was no one left to object.”
— Martin Niemöller, German Protestant Pastor

We have about eleven months to save our Republic. We face a unique threat from inside.

We must prevail or lose everything. If we lose our democratic America, then, in the long run, Europe, Japan and the rest of the democratic world will suffer, if not fall. The world will descend into a new Dark Age of despotism, of unknown length and horror, exacerbated by runaway planetary heating and massive, accelerating migration.

The ugly fall began just the same way in Weimar Germany. Then the threat was precisely the same: extreme politics backed by mob violence. Then the mob was unified and organized. It had a single name: the Brown Shirts. Our American mob is various and loosely organized and has many names, including Blood and Honor, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys. But our cultural individualism does not make a mob, or many mobs, any less dangerous.

So far, our national response has been much the same as in Weimar Germany. Leaders who should know better have caved for fear of losing their power, their offices and—in more than a few cases—their families’ safety. Citizens have gone along because of real and imagined grievances, because they are jealous or resentful of others, or because they are cowards.

The Nazis had a single scapegoat group, Jews. Our Demagogue has replaced them with a whole rainbow of scapegoats, including Black people, Hispanics, Chinese, Indians (in both senses), LGBTQ folk, Muslims, and progressives. But Jews are still in the mix; just listen to Elon Musk.

If you think the variety of scapegoats will save you when they come for you, think again. That’s not how tyrants work; that’s not what history teaches; that’s not what Martin Niemöller wrote. And lately “woke” progressives have become part of the scapegoat group.

Our media have not just been whistling by the graveyard; they’ve been singing happy tunes. They obsess about their ratings and their profits. They report every bit of distracting trivia to increase them.

And they normalize the would-be-tyrant’s lies, threats, insanities, and blunders, while neglecting the accomplishments of our grossly underrated President. Even their “fact-checking” is weak: by lumping all lies together in one place, it normalizes lies and fails to call out the really important ones: the “stolen” election, the alleged innocence of the January 6 insurrection, the ”harmlessness” of Covid, and the so-far completely unproven “crimes” of Joe Biden.

When the authorities or the mob come for the reporters and their families, they’ll be sorry. But it’ll be too late. Eighty-eight journalists reportedly were killed in Russia during Putin’s early years in power, just through 2009. And, so far, our media are focusing on the “horse race” as usual. If you want to know how deeply mistaken and existentially threatening their malpractice is, watch this.

This is not a normal election season. It cannot and will not be normal. This is a fight for the survival of democracy and justice in the central part of North America. If the good guys and gals don’t win, the bad guys will fire, marginalize, sideline, impoverish, threaten and, yes, ultimately kill them.

That’s how democracies become despotisms. Free media and their workers are often the first to go to the gulags. Leaders with little intelligence and discretion, plus a lust for vengeance, become persecutors, tyrants, crushers of careers and families, and ultimately killers.

If you want to know the details and the precisely how tyrants work and how close we are now, read this. Notwithstanding Nikki Haley’s valiant efforts, it’s inconceivable that The Demagogue will not be the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Once that happens, the Party, its leaders and its rank and file will fall into line, for all the sordid and banal reasons of power, money, career, prestige, lack of obvious alternatives, and sheer inertia.

That’s how otherwise normal, even God-fearing Germans became mute witnesses to, and often participants in, the Holocaust. When the mob or suborned authorities came for them and their families, it was far, far too late.

The underlying mechanism is simple human psychology. For all our moaning about economic troubles and inflation, we Americans survived the pandemic and its recession better than most countries. Few of us are starving, and most of us have good jobs. And just like pre-Hitler Germans, we can’t believe that politics can take it all away.

But “just politics” can, as it did to them. And if we don’t prevent it, it will. On Kristallnacht, good Germans taught themselves to ignore the broken glass of Jewish shops and homes. They looked the other way as soldiers took away their neighbors. Later, they told themselves that the smell of burning bodies from the Holocaust ovens couldn’t be burning flesh. But in the end, they all participated in the Holocaust, if only by inaction. They all suffered in a horrible war that left their nation in ruins and that took half a century to rebuild.

Will we repeat that kind of catastrophe? Right now, it seems possible, if not likely. Acquainted with history, we have the obligation—to ourselves and our species—to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

This is an “all hands on deck” moment the like of which we Americans have never had. Even our Civil War can’t compare with the “indispensable nation,” on which a frying world depends for strenth and leadership, falling to the likes of Hitler. You know in your heart what will happen to concerted efforts to address climate change in that case.

Each of us must make sacrifices. Each of us must focus. Each of us must vote, get our friends and family to vote, and help convince others to vote, whether by donating to organizers, or by working as organizers ourselves. This is no time even to think, “It’s not my problem.” And it’s certainly no time to demand perfection, to let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

It will be your problem if our democracy fails, unless you hide under a rock or flee abroad until it’s over (which could take centuries). So make it your business to do everything you can to prevent that from happening.

Not voting, or voting for a third-party candidate, will only help insure catastrophe. In fact, the spooks who plot our national doom in Iran, Russia and China are pushing exactly that: they want a replay of 2000 and 2016, when third-party candidacies doomed the best leaders, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively. Just think of those years and imagine how much better off we all would be today if Gore or Clinton, let alone both, had won.

Amidst exponentially expanding Internet pleas for my money during this Holiday Season, I’ve made an executive decision. I’m not giving to my usual charities this year. I’m giving only to political causes that promise to help save our democracy and that seem to know how.

I’ll do my best NOT to support yet more thirty-second media ads that try to push thoughtless people’s buttons. Most of the targets of those ads are already lost to reason because: (1) the right wing propaganda machines captured their souls long ago; and (2) thoughtless people generally don’t follow the media organizations that I support.  (I certainly don’t want to support the likes of Fox in any way.)

More important, I’m convinced that in-person visits arranged by organizations like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action are the only things that can effectively overcome the influence of electronic propaganda, Internet lies, foreign disinformation, Fox, right-wing talk radio, Facebook and X.

But to each his or her own. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and I wouldn’t bet my democracy on my way being right, let alone the only right way. The more hands on deck, and the more ways of helping out, the better. The important thing—in fact the only important thing—is not to sit this one out.

I’m 78 years old, and I’ve started thinking seriously of how to get my assets and my body out of the country should the worst happen. If I’m thinking of planning for the worst, you can imagine what I think anyone under 35 should be doing.

If you want a country worth living and raising a family in, you’re going to have to vote, work hard, donate and/or fight for it, at least for the next eleven months. If you haven’t yet realized that, you haven’t been paying attention.

Good luck, and may the good and sane guys and gals win, with your and my help.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Blaming Won’t Resolve Anything

Are we a problem-solving species? Or are we a bunch of blamers and finger-pointers?

The same questions apply to us Americans. If you’d asked it in the postwar era, the answer would have been clear. Then we solved problems.

We proposed and established the UN to help avoid future wars and advance peaceful economic development. We established the Bretton-Woods talks and the postwar economic framework, the GATT, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and (much later) the WTO to smooth international trade and finance and reduce the risk of financial panics and crashes. We created NATO to resist foreign aggression. All these institutions are now under stress, but they kept the peace and encouraged global cooperation for about half a century.

In technology, we invented television, transistors, digital computers, computer chips, lasers, and MRI and CAT-scan machines, to make life easier, bring people closer together, and facilitate communication and dialogue among nations and rival groups. These advances made us look like something resembling a rational species.

But now? Now! When confronted with problems that pale in comparison with World War II or our own Civil War, we degenerate into an orgy of blaming and finger-pointing. Our media—our nation’s eyes and ears—join the orgy of blaming as eagerly as if it were a sex orgy. They report every claim, blame, lie and exaggeration with apparent relish and an eye on ratings.

The worst example is our own national politics. One entire political party—one-half of our traditional political “establishment”— has degenerated into a machine of blame.

The Republican Party blames President Biden for persistent national inflation, which is now easing and anyway was never as bad as it still is abroad. It blames him for crime in our cities, national debt, homelessness, decaying social order, and rampant unlawful immigration—which will get much worse as planetary heating makes parts of the tropics uninhabitable. It even blames him for Russia’s atrocious imperialism in Ukraine, on grounds that: (1) he could have prevented it, (2) he’s not arming Ukraine vigorously enough, or, contradictorily, (3) he’s spending too much money on it that could better be spent at home, or to reduce taxes. (Consistency, apparently, is not the point of blame: the point is on the end of your finger.)

And the GOP is putting much of its visible effort into finding yet more reasons to blame, making investigation after fruitless investigation the primary focus of its work. It obsesses over Hunter Biden’s grifting while the world literally burns.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The entire thrust of the Republicans’ political program is to blame Democrats for all our ills. The only actual programs they espouse are to: (1) cut taxes, mostly on the wealthy, including by emasculating the IRS; (2) lower the national debt by squeezing the IRS, regulators and the poor; and (3) restrict what we teach in our schools and what we read in our libraries (which is itself a form of blame).

In the face of this onslaught of finger-pointing, the Democrats sometimes fall into the same trap. They blame back.

Of course they have more cause to blame, given the spectacularly incompetent approach of our Demagogue President to international order, pandemic preparedness and response, infrastructure, government regulation, our military, and the climate crisis. But that’s not the point. By following the Republicans down into the blaming sewer, the Dems lose perspective, forget their own programs and accomplishments, and abandon the quest for realistic solutions to our many national and global problems.

Our media don’t help. Reporting blame seems to be their conditioned reflex. It’s too hard for modern reporters, apparently, to do the work of analyzing solutions and following up to see whether they work. The best reporters depend on academic researchers to do their jobs; the worst don’t even look for solutions and don’t analyze the ones already in place. Apart from getting George Santos expelled from the House for especially egregious misconduct, they have sparked few actual accomplishments. Mostly, they produce clickbait and obsess about their ratings.

The Greek tragedian Euripedes is suppose to have have said, “Those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make mad. ” But if the USA goes down the sewer of lost democracies next year, which it actually might do, it won’t have been Euripides’ “gods” that will have done the deed. It will have been society’s own eyes and ears. It will have been our Fourth Estate: the one charged with keeping us in touch with reality.

Are there solutions to todays’ intractable problems? Of course there are. The general outlines, albeit maybe not the details, are not hard to see.

Want to stop fossil-fuel vendors from demagoguing and resisting every climate-friendly infrastructure development, from EV charging stations, through new direct-current grids, to wind and solar power? Give them a piece of the action. Give them a way out of their moribund businesses which, except for coal, are going to die out for lack of product in this century. Let them, or require them, to invest in the future of energy, rather than the past, and to reap the financial rewards of doing so. Let their money “talk” truth and reason.

Want to stop the Israelis and Palestinians from committing atrocities on each other, as if they were still biblical tribes “smiting” each other in the Bible? Try something new: let peaceful, secure and powerful neighbors impose order on chaos.

Put international forces into Gaza to clean out weapons, terrorists, explosives and tunnels. Then open the prison doors and let the 2 million go free. Put international observers in the West Bank to stop the nascent trend of mutual pogroms, and to lay down some rational rules for who moves where and how.

Decades ago, the noted Israeli author Amos Oz described how Israelis and Palestinians could come to know peace: “teeth-clenching compromise.” It’s now clear that they need outside help in coming to that compromise; left to their own devices, they will continue the cycle of violence forever.

People from outside can help. I once knew such a man, a Black African from Ghana named Modibo Ocran.

The late Professor Ocran was an illustrious jurist. Eventually he was nominated to the Supreme Court of Ghana in absentia. He commuted to his judging job from his family’s home in Akron, Ohio, where he was my colleague at the University of Akron School of Law.

Before all that, Professor Ocran had done something extraordinary. He had put on a blue UN helmet and spent two years keeping the Bosnians, Croats and Serbs from each others’ throats.

Today the Balkans are still not pretty, but they’re at peace. If an African from Ghana can spend two years and risk his life to bring that peace to the Balkans, perhaps Arab and African neighbors, and maybe even Iran and Syria, can stop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it reaches its first century.

Another relevant example is the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, which goes by the name of “The Troubles.” After centuries of enmity and struggle, including many acts of terrorism, our own President Bill Clinton helped the warring parties reach the so-called “Good Friday Agreement,” which has maintained an uneasy peace to this day.

I know these solutions sound glib and general. But the point is you have to start somewhere. Pointing fingers doesn’t move the ball forward. It just makes people angry and obstinate. Anyone who’s lived as a human being, let alone politicians, ought to know this.

Our American political leaders used to know it. At least they once seemed to have an instinct for solutions, not blame. They seemed to have a talent for finding Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.”

We need to get back to those old days of faith in ourselves and “American ingenuity.” We need to involve our brothers and sisters from other lands, other continents, and all ethnic groups. But most of all, we humans need to seek solutions and stop blaming each other, lest our Biblical “smiting” go on forever and drive us to extinction.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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