Apartheid States

 The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset. 

Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)

The Death Chamber

 My home state of Florida executed two people yesterday—reportedly the first time that has happened in the state since 1964. 

The first of these two state-sponsored killings made it easy to see the futility and inhumanity of the death penalty in all its barbarism. 

Trump's Vision of Judgment

 A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."

The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."

His Prominence

 For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator. 

Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.). 

High T–Roosevelt?

 A recent piece in the Intercept traces Pete Hegseth's obsession with testosterone levels—and other manifestations of masculine insecurity—to a lifelong desire to model himself on Teddy Roosevelt. 

The writer, Nick Turse, includes an anecdote from early in Hegseth's military career: "Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt."

The Best Thing

 The Wall Street Journal published a pretty remarkable story yesterday based on unreleased footage from an upcoming Lindsey Graham documentary. Apparently, it shows just how closely involved Graham was in cheerleading and directly inspiring Trump's Iran war. 

By the Journal's account, both men took an unsettlingly personal delight in the destruction and mayhem they had unleashed. In the war's opening days—when as we now know a U.S. Tomahawk missile annihilated an Iranian school and took the lives of more than a hundred children—Graham and Trump were crowing together over the TV images of their fiery handiwork. 

Motley of Satire

 I was writing in the previous post about what I called the "counter-tradition" of European and American writers who criticized imperialism. What strikes me though about reading the examples of this counter-tradition in Sven Lindqvist's book—and in the separate examples I assembled—is how often these writers felt the need to present their criticism in the indirect form of sarcasm. 

The result is that I need to provide a whole paragraph of context, lest the contemporary reader get the false impression that Mark Twain actually meant it, say, when he wrote that "the world belongs to [...] the white man."