Why Is The Daily Beast's Russia Critic Silent About so Many Hideous Abuses?

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

01 November 15

 

comprehensive review by The Intercept of the writings of Sam Charles Hamad — author of this Daily Beast article accusing the “global left” of remaining “silent” on abuses by Russia — reveals that he has been completely silent, shockingly and appallingly so, about the following wide array of severe global injustices, never once writing about, let alone condemning, any of this:

• Police brutality in Peru (“police and the armed forces have been granted a ‘license to kill’ demonstrators”)


• High-level corruption in Malaysia (“a $681 million payment made to what is believed to be [Prime Minister] Najib’s personal bank account”)


• Fascism in the Ukraine (key militia led by “a political figure that is often described as an extremist, ultranationalist and fascist”)


• Prison overcrowding and police murder sprees in Brazil (“overcrowded, violent and brutalizing”; “every year Brazil’s police are responsible for at least 2,000 deaths“)


• Imprisonment of a publisher in Zimbabwe for running articles the government disliked (“convicted of publishing a newspaper in a southern town without government permission”)


• Arrests of Muslims for their political views throughout Europe (where Hamad studied) and outlawing of BDS activism in France


• Devastating mistreatment of migrant workers and outlawing of homosexuality (with a little-used death penalty) by Qatar (for whose media outlet, al-Araby, Hamad writes)


• Mass human rights violations by Indonesia (“The Indonesian government continues to arrest peaceful protesters. … Security forces responsible for serious violations of human rights continue to enjoy impunity”)


• Due process-free imprisonment and other pervasive abuses in Kenya (“arbitrary arrests and detentions, extortion, and other abuses against Somalis”)


• Starvation and severe hunger in South Sudan (“At least 30,000 people are facing starvation in South Sudan. … Two years of civil war have left nearly 4m people — particularly young children — facing severe hunger”)


• The still unsolved, deeply suspicious disappearance of 43 students in Mexico (“serious doubts surround the official version of events”)


• Violent, brutal persecution of Muslims in Burma by the Buddhist majority (“thousands of members of the Rohingya Muslim minority are fleeing persecution …  they are being turned away from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand” . . . . “Nearly one million Rohingya were deprived of the vote earlier this year on the grounds they could not prove their families had been long resident in Myanmar”)


• Serious threats, discrimination and violence against LGBT citizens in Uganda (“if some Ugandan politicians have their way, coming out as homosexual could mean life in prison, or worse“)


• Increasingly violent Hindu nationalism in India aimed at the Muslim minority (“Is Modi’s India Safe for Muslims?”)


• Use of brutal child labor in Bangladesh to provide garments to the U.K., where Hamad is a citizen (“factories producing clothes for British retailers are forcing girls as young as 13 to work up to 11 hours a day in appalling conditions“)

What could possibly explain Hamad’s stunning, disgraceful silence about these massacres, abuses, injustices, and extreme levels of avoidable human suffering? One might conclude from his utter silence that he supports these heinous actions. Or perhaps he is an apologist for the perpetrators, seeking to conceal their culpability by never acknowledging these crimes? Or he could just be a propagandist, fixating on certain acts of abuse and violence committed by some regimes while systematically ignoring those of others.

Or could it be that — as a single individual with finite time and energy — he’s capable of focusing only on a relatively small handful of injustices at once, and chooses the ones where he thinks he can have the greatest impact, thus necessarily paying little to no attention to other grave injustices where he thinks he can have little or no effect? Or might it be that he perceives that some injustices receive a great deal of attention in the West (e.g., the Evils of Russia, China and Iran) but that other injustices receive far less attention (those perpetrated by the West and its allies) and thus chooses — as a corrective of sorts — to devote himself to trying to shine much-needed light on the ones that are typically overlooked or ignored entirely?

No, it cannot be that, because — like so many others — he has declared that paying attention to some injustices but not all injustices constitutes “a gruesomely perfect example of … hypocrisy.” So, as he and like-minded advocates have taught us, there must be something pernicious and deeply morally culpable in his silence and the silence of so many like him on this panoply of world horrors.

It’s possible that Hamad has actually condemned all of these terrible abuses and we just didn’t find his denunciations. Why do I say that? Because people like Hamad constantly accuse people like me (who choose to focus on the bad acts of our own government and its allies) of refusing to condemn abuses committed by Russia (“nowhere in any of Greenwald’s output will you find actual recognition of the victims of the Russian strikes and the circumstances that led to their deaths”) even though I’ve done so many times. Or worse, they insinuate that people like Noam Chomsky “actively support” such crimes while ignoring his unequivocal denunciations (“Let’s take [Russian] policy in Syria … Russia is supporting a brutal, vicious government”).

So given how often people like Hamad falsely accuse others of ignoring abuses by Russia through sheer fabrication of their actual record, I’m open to the prospect that he has actually condemned the above abuses and we just didn’t find them. But our research in this regard was quite thorough, and I’ll be happy immediately to note any links he provides where he has written about the abuses in the above list.

Needless to say, the highly selective moral outrage expressed by Sam Charles Hamad is not the point here. The point is the incredibly deceitful, miserably common, intellectually bankrupt tactic that The Daily Beast just aired: smearing people not for what they write, but for what they don’t write. It’s something I encounter literally every day, almost always as an expression of the classic “whataboutism” fallacy — ironically depicted in the West as having been pioneered by Soviet Communists — designed to distract attention from one’s own crimes (OK, fine, we just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, are constantly droning innocent people to death, and are arming the Saudi slaughter of Yemeni citizens, but look way over there: Why don’t you talk more about Russia????).

And that’s to say nothing of the ignoble history of this tactic in the U.S. — dating back to the height of McCarthyism — of declaring people suspect or morally unhealthy due to a failure to condemn Russia with sufficient vigor and frequency. For decades in the U.S., one could be accused of being a “Kremlin sympathizer” without ever having uttered a syllable of support for Russia, and that’s still just as true today, if not more so. That’s accomplished by a constant measuring of how much one devotes oneself to the supreme loyalty test of publicly denouncing the Ruskies.

This tawdry, self-serving, self-exonerating tactic rests on multiple levels of deceit. “Hypocrisy” always meant “contradicting with words or actions one’s claimed principles and beliefs” (e.g., lecturing the world on freedom and human rights while arming and funding the world’s worst tyrannies). It is now being re-defined to mean: “one who denounces some terrible acts but not all.” If that’s the new standard, it should be applied to everyone, beginning with those who most vocally propound it. As a result, from now on, I’ll be asking the endless number of people who invoke this standard to show me their record of denunciation and activism with regard to the above list of abuses.

ALSO SEE: Ohio Could Become the Fifth US State to Legalize Marijuana

Why the Drug War Has Been a Forty-Year Lynching

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News

01 November 15

 

he Drug War has been a forty-year lynching….

…the corporate/GOP response to the peace and civil rights movements.

It’s used the Drug Enforcement Administration and other policing operations as a high-tech Ku Klux Klan, meant to gut America’s communities of youth and color.

It has never been about suppressing drugs. Quite the opposite.

And now that it may be winding down, the focus on suppressing minority votes will shift even stronger to electronic election theft.

The Drug War was officially born June 17, 1971, (http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war) when Richard Nixon pronounced drugs to be “Public Enemy Number One.” In a nation wracked by poverty, racial tension, injustice, civil strife, ecological disaster, corporate domination, a hated Vietnam War and much more, drugs seemed an odd choice.

In fact, the Drug War’s primary target was black and young voters.

It was the second, secret leg of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” meant to bring the former Confederacy into the Republican Party.

Part One was about the white vote.

America’s original party of race and slavery (https://zinnedproject.org/materials/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-updated-and-expanded-edition/)was Andrew Jackson’s Democrats (born 1828).

After the Civil War the Party’s terror wing, the KKK, made sure former slaves and their descendants “stayed in their place.”

A century of lynchings (at least 3200 of them) (http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html)efficiently suppressed the southern black community.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs began to attract black voters to the Democratic Party. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil and voting rights legislation, plus the 24th Amendment ending the poll tax, sealed the deal. Today blacks, who once largely supported the Party of Lincoln, vote 90% or more Democrat (http://blackdemographics.com/culture/black-politics/).

But the Democrats’ lean to civil rights angered southern whites. Though overt racist language was no longer acceptable in the 1970s, Nixon’s Republicans clearly signaled an open door to the former Confederacy (https://www.thenation.com/article/why-todays-gop-crackup-is-the-final-unraveling-of-nixons-southern-strategy/).

But recruiting angry southern whites would not be enough for the Republicans to take the south. In many southern states more than 40% of potential voters were black. If they were allowed to vote, and if their votes were actually counted, all the reconstructed Democrat Party would need to hold the south would be a sliver of moderate white support.

That’s where the Drug War came in.

Reliable exact national arrest numbers from 1970 through 1979 are hard to come by.

But according to Michelle Alexander’s superb, transformative The New Jim Crow, and according to research by Marc Mauer and Ryan King of the Sentencing Project, more than 31,000,000 Americans were arrested for drugs between 1980 and 2007 (http://newjimcrow.com).

Further federal uniform crime report statistics compiled by www.freepress.org indicate that, between 2008 and 2014, another 9,166,000 were arrested for drug possession.

Taken together, than means well over 40,000,000 American citizens have been arrested for drugs in the four decades since Nixon’s announcement.

It is a staggering number: more than 10% of the entire United States, nearly four times the current population of Ohio, far in excess of more than 100 countries worldwide.

A number that has gutted the African-American community. A national terror campaign far beyond the reach of even the old KKK.

Justice Department statistics indicate than half of those arrests have been for simple possession of marijuana.

According to US Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1980 and 2013, while blacks were 12% of the population, blacks constituted 30% of those arrested for drug law violations and nearly 40% of those incarcerated in all U.S. prisons. Thus some 20,000,000 African-American men have been sent to prison for non-violent “crimes” in the past forty years.

If the Hispanic population is added in, as much as 60% of drug arrests are of racial or ethnic minorities.

On the 40th anniversary of the Drug War in 2010, the Associated Press used public records to calculate that the taxpayer cost of arresting and imprisoning all these human beings has been in excess of $1,000,000,000.

Sending them all to college would have been far cheaper. It also would have allowed them to enhance and transform their communities.

Instead, they were taken from their families. Their children were robbed of their parents. They were assaulted by the prison culture, stripped of their right to vote and stopped from leading the kind of lives that might have moved the nation in a very different direction.

Nixon also hated hippies and the peace movement. So in addition to disenfranchising 20,000,000 African-Americans, the Drug War has imprisoned additional millions of young white and Hispanic pot smokers.

Thus the DEA has been the ultra-violent vanguard of the corporate culture war.

In 1983 Ronald Reagan took the Drug War to a new level. Using profits from his illegal arms sales to Iran, he illegally funded the Contra thugs who were fighting Nicaragua’s duly elected Sandinista government.

The Contras were drug dealers who shipped large quantities of cocaine into the US—-primarily in the Los Angeles area—-where it was mostly converted to crack.

That served a double function for the GOP.

First, it decimated the inner city.

Then Reagan’s “Just Say No” assault—-based on the drugs his Contra allies were injecting into our body politic—-imposed penalties on crack far more severe than those aimed at the powdered cocaine used in the white community.

In 1970 the US prison population was roughly 300,000 people. Today it’s more than 2.2 million, the largest in world history by both absolute number and percentage of the general population. There are more people in prison in the US than in China, which has five times the population (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=11).

According to the Sentencing Project, one in seventeen white males has been incarcerated, one in six Latinos, and one in three blacks.

By all accounts the Drug War has had little impact on drug consumption in the US, except to make it more profitable for drug dealers (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=11). It’s spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry in prison construction, policing, prison guards, lawyers, judges and more, all of them invested in prolonging the drug war despite its negative impacts on public health.

For them, the stream of ruined lives of non-violent offenders is just another form of cash flow.

Like the Klan since the Civil War, the Drug War has accomplished its primary political goal of suppressing the black vote and assaulting the African-American community.

It’s shifted control of the South from the Democrats back to the Republican Party. By slashing voter eligibility and suppressing black turnout, the Drug War crusade has helped the GOP take full control of both houses of the US Congress and a majority of state governments across the US.

But the repressive impacts hit everyone, and ultimately enhance the power of the corporate state.

Toward that end, the southern corporate Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as a Drug Warrior further broadened the official attack on grassroots America. Clinton was determined to make sure nobody appeared tougher on “crime.” He escalated the decimation of our democracy far beyond mere party politics, deepening the assault on the black community, and the basic rights of all Americans for the benefit of his Wall Street funders. Obama has been barely marginally better.

In political terms, the Nixon-Reagan GOP remains the Drug War’s prime beneficiary. Today’s Republicans are poised to continue dominating our electoral process through the use of rigged electronic registration rolls and voting machines. That’s a core reality we all must face.

But no matter which party controls the White House or Congress, by prosecuting a behavior engaged in by tens of millions of Americans, the Drug War lets the corporate state arrest (and seize assets from) virtually anyone it wants at any time. It has empowered a de facto corporate police state beyond public control.

Regardless of race, we all suffer from the fear, repression and random assaults of a drug-fueled repressive police force with no real accountability.

In the interim, the Drug War is not now and never has been about drugs.

Legalizing pot is just the beginning of our recovery process.

Until we end the Drug War as a whole, America will never know democracy, peace or justice.

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Columbus Free Press is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.