I watched a few clips of the Oakland city council meeting last night during which a few speakers defended Hamas and considered the slaughter of 1400 innocent people an expression of resistance. Much could be said, but suffice to say (for now) that this peculiar brand of anti-imperialist politics with more than a dollop of antisemitism won’t travel well across the country and its diverse communities. It will attract an audience, but it will never fill an arena nor evolve into a political majority with the capacity to make progressive change.
At old theater house in Kingston NY waiting for Lukas Nelson (Willie’s son) and Promise of the Real! Live music is a good salve in a moment in which the seams that tie together a liveable world ( or the hope of one) feel like they are unraveling.
The Minsk agreements were interpreted differently by the Ukrainians and Russians from the start. There was never a mutually agreed upon understanding of the agreements shared by the two antagonists – the Ukrainians defending their national independence and the Russians violating it. Thus the insistence coming from a section of the left to return to the Minsk agreements, as if they settled anything, is simply bogus. It amounts to shifting the blame for the outbreak in fighting from Putin to Ukrainian leaders and Biden, both of whom it is said refused to comply with the Minsk agreements.
The elections next year look like they could be a test of the political maturity of progressive, social justice, and left activists and organizations. Let’s hope they do it better than we did back in the day.
It seems like ancient history now, but the youth movement and the left failed miserably in negotiating the political dilemmas and contradictions of the 1968 elections. Legitimately angry at the Johnson administration for its prosecution of the war in Vietnam, infuriated by the state sanctioned violence against protesters at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, and turned off by the nomination of Vice President Humphrey, many of us sat out the presidential elections that year.
And what were the results of our stand on “principle,” our refusal to support the “lesser evil?” Nixon to begin with! A prolonging of the war! Watergate! The success of the Southern strategy and the beginnings of the long rise and consolidation of right wing extremism!
Let’s hope that today’s young will make better choices than we did. Otherwise the results of next year’s election could, if you can believe it, make 1968, as bad as it was, seem like a pale imitation to what would await the country and world if Trump is elected.
