Monthly Archives: February 2022

I keep writing the obit for AIPAC as the sputtering warhorse of the Israel lobby not so fast. Today the leading pro-Israel organization is boasting that it brought more than 40 Congresspeople to Israel, a reported 27 Republicans and 14 Democrats, to celebrate the importance of the special relationship between the countries. One of the largest delegations ever to visit Israel, says one congressman. The land of milk and honey, says leading Democrat Hakeem Jeffries.

Some of the Democrats even met with disgraced rightwing leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Netanyahu boasts. So all our liberal political values go out the window when Israel comes in the door. It appears that almost all the Republicans met separately with Netanyahu and were thrilled to do so.

The two delegations had separate gatherings with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. The Democrats look joyful on the same day that Lapid is trashing the Iran deal our country is trying to reenter and warning that Israel will take action, using its army and intelligence service. Some friend

The Republican and Democratic trips got together in bipartisan harmony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, minority leader Kevin McCarthy side by side with majority leader Steny Hoyer. The trips were sponsored by AIPACs American Israel Education Foundation.

This is not to mention the eight Dems who went to Israel last week on a Nancy Pelosi junket.

The lobby has expressed concern about the Squad, young progressive urban members of color, who are critical of Israel. Here it answers with a video by Jeffries of Brooklyn, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, with fellow New York congressmen Ritchie Torres and Adriano Espaillat. We got Brooklyn, uptown [Manhattan] and the Boogie Down [the Bronx], here in the land of milk and honey, Jeffries gushed. Its so wonderful to express our support for the special relationship between the United States and Israel, which we will continue to dedicate our service to making sure is as strong as ever. (Recall that Jeffries said during an Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2014 that killed more than 500 children Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.)

Ritchie Torres offered AIPAC his own video promotion for tourism to Israel and said hed been to an illegal Israeli settlement, the City of David, in East Jerusalem (continuing the legacy of Trumps religious-Zionist ambassador to Israel, David Friedman). Torres seems to savor his role as lead advocate for Israel among Democrats:

Look, theres no country that is the target of more disinformation than Israel. And so its more urgent than ever for people to come to the state of Israel, see the reality on the ground with your own eyes, and come to your own conclusions

Torres said he had walked on the pilgrimage road leading up to the Temple Mount, and that was a blessing. He did not mention the fact that the Temple Mount is the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims, the site of sacred events in their tradition.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida also tweeted a spiritual/political message to AIPAC: about praying at the Western Wall, visiting a Christian holy place, and meeting with the rightwing Defense Minister Benny Gantz:

Talking w/ Def. Min. @gantzbe, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, to leave a prayer at the Western wall for my mom and peace, reaffirms how vital this ally is to America. @AIPAC

Gantz is also working against the Iran deal. He lately moved to ban six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as terrorist a fascistic move that has met with no meaningful protest from Democrats. Gantz yesterday bragged about his meeting with Democrats at the King David Hotel. Among them were Dem leaders Steny Hoyer and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as Florida Israel lobby stalwarts Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Ted Deutch (AIPAC reports). That meeting surely included reference to the supposed threats posed by Palestinian human rights groups or as Gantz put it, the strategic and operational challenges that Israel must be prepared to face including the importance of ensuring that Israel has the means to defend its citizens.

Deutch, by the way, accused fellow Dem Rashida Tlaib of antisemitism on the House floor last September when Tlaib dared to quote from Human Rights Watch report labeling Israel an apartheid state.

Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Manning of North Carolina also gave a video to AIPAC celebrating Israels incredible new government. Though that government is just as rightwing as Netanyahus, albeit with a rightwing Arab party in its coalition, Manning was all praise:

Israel has an extraordinary broad coalition government unlike any its ever had before. Its important for us to be here to understand the complexity of this incredible new government and also to demonstrate the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

(Manning is a former chair of the Jewish Federations, a Zionist organization.)

P.S. Floridas Ted Deutch double-dipped, he was on Nancy Pelosis trip last week and the AIPAC one too.

So where are the Palestinian voices in mainstream media?

Mondoweiss covers the full picture of the struggle for justice in Palestine. Read by tens of thousands of people each month, our truth-telling journalism is an essential counterweight to the propaganda that passes for news in mainstream and legacy media.

Our news and analysis is available to everyone which is why we need your support. Please contribute so that we can continue to raise the voices of those who advocate for the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and peace.

Palestinians today are struggling for their lives as mainstream media turns away. Please support journalism that amplifies the urgent voices calling for freedom and justice in Palestine.

Link:

'In the land of milk and honey' It's springtime for AIPAC and Democrats in Israel - Mondoweiss

Veterans of the extreme-right nationalist Azov Battalion, a unit of Ukraines national guard, hold a rally in the capital Kiev, 14 March 2020. Far-right and neo-Nazi organizations played a key role in the Western-backed overthrow of Ukraines president in 2014, leading to the current crisis.

Just a day after Moscow recognized the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukraine, the European Union came out swinging against what it characterized as Russian aggression.

It condemned Moscows move as illegal and unacceptable and vowed swift sanctions to target those who were involved in the illegal decision.

The measures will also hit banks that are financing Russian military and other operations in those territories and aim to thwart the ability of the Russian state and government to access the EUs capital and financial markets and services.

The US is also laying out sanctions in response to what Washington describes as a Russian invasion of the two eastern regions that have been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since 2014.

Germany, which is largely dependent on gas supplies from Russia, announced the suspension of plans to build the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

The crisis in Ukraine today can be traced to American sponsorship of the 2014 coup against the countrys elected pro-Russian president that brought far-right and even neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists to power.

Washingtons goal has been to bring Ukraine into the anti-Russia NATO military alliance something Moscow sees as an existential threat and is strongly opposed by many among Ukraines large ethnic Russian population.

Yet the sudden concern for international law regarding Ukraine is nowhere to be found when it comes to Israels illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian and Syrian land, and its imposition of an apartheid regime on the entire Palestinian people a crime against humanity.

These Israeli crimes could of course not be perpetrated without American and European support or acquiescence.

When the Trump administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017, effectively recognizing Israels illegal annexation of the city, the EU rejected the move.

The EU also rejected the 2019 US recognition of Israels illegal annexation of Syrias occupied Golan Heights.

Ironically, one of the handful of countries ready to follow the US in recognizing Israels illegal annexation of Jerusalem is none other than the US and EU-backed government in Ukraine.

Indeed, Biden himself maintains an illegal US occupation of parts of Syria.

Under Trump, its explicit purpose was to plunder the countrys oil.

Yet the European Union, which has criticized both the US and Russia for their actions, has not imposed any sanctions on Washington for aiding and abetting Israels crimes.

That is hardly surprising. For decades, the European Union has acknowledged that Israels occupation, theft and annexation of Palestinian land is illegal, but instead of sanctioning it, Brussels rewards and encourages it.

For us as Palestinians, we see this discussion and we ask ourselves, where is this discussion when it comes to Palestine? Wesam Ahmad, of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, said on Tuesday.

Ahmad was speaking during a webinar hosted by Finnish lawmaker Veronika Honkasalo, focusing on a bill she has introduced to ban trade in goods from occupied territories.

The occupation of Palestinian territory has been going on for a much longer period of time, Ahmad observed.

He said that the persistent lack of action in response to Israels violations of Palestinian rights and international law undermines the credibility of the rule of law being something that applies across the board.

Frustrated with the complicity, hypocrisy and unaccountability of their leaders, people across the continent are launching a European Citizens Initiative to force Brussels to close European markets to products and services from settlements in occupied territories, including Israeli colonies on Palestinian and Syrian land.

A European Citizens Initiative is a formal process that is meant to allow citizens to influence EU policy. It requires gathering the signatures of at least a million people from across the bloc.

This one has already passed the first hurdle of being formally registered by the European Commission, the EUs executive body.

That came after the Commission had refused to register a similar initiative in 2019, a decision that was overturned last year when organizers went to court.

Even though illegal settlements constitute a war crime under international law, the EU allows trade with them, said the European Legal Support Center, one of 100 organizations urging EU citizens to sign on to the initiative.

Human Rights Watch one of several major human rights groups that over the last year have concluded that Israel perpetrates the crime against humanity of apartheid is also backing the initiative.

Settlements unlawfully rob local populations of their land, resources and livelihoods, Bruno Stagno, chief advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch, stated. No country should be enabling the trade in goods produced as a result of land theft, displacement and discrimination.

Frances Black, an Irish senator who sponsored legislation in her country to ban trade in settlement goods, is also urging support for the initiative.

Meanwhile, the similar bill in Finland is coming up for its first vote on Friday. It has secured 35 sponsors out of Finlands 200 members of parliament.

If it passes, this would be only the first step towards becoming law.

More than 40 Palestinian human rights, political and cultural organizations have written to Finnish MPs. In a letter seen by The Electronic Intifada, they urge lawmakers to support the bill, calling it a crucial opportunity for Finland to lead by example on complying with relevant obligations under international human rights and international humanitarian law.

In September, the European Court of Justice annulled an EU trade deal with Morocco because it included Western Sahara without the consent of its people and their internationally recognized representatives, the Polisario Front.

During Tuesdays seminar hosted by Finnish MP Honkasalo, Salah Abdulahe Mohamed, an advocate for Sahrawi self-determination, charged that the EU continues to allow the import of goods plundered from Sahrawi territory such as sardines and tomatoes that are falsely labeled as products of Morocco.

The European Citizens Initiative that would stop trade with Israels settlements faces an enormous uphill battle. Of course, it would not even be necessary if EU governments really respected the norms they now accuse Russia of violating.

But time and again, international law proves not to be a yardstick against which all are measured, but a club used by the strong exclusively for their own advantage.

More:

Ukraine crisis highlights West's hypocrisy over Israeli land theft - The Electronic Intifada

Iowa City looks vastly different from what it was when the University of Iowa was first established in 1847.

The steps of the Old Capitol used to run into vast greenery. No buildings existed near the site after its construction in 1840.

Nine days after construction started, architect John F. Rague resigned, and Chauncey Swan, a territorial government commissioner, finished overseeing the job. The building started with only four rooms, as it housed the Iowa Legislature for a few years and the entire university until 1863.

From there, the UI expanded in physical infrastructure, student population, and educational courses.

The entire campus was housed in the Old Capitol for six years, while the universitys South Hall was occupied and several buildings were beginning construction to build campus blending together Iowa City and the university campus on which we all now call the city home.

Its such a visible place in Iowa City, said Aiden Bettine, UI community and student life archivist, of the Old Capitol. You see a lot of the blur between campus and community, and the town and gown relationship, throughout time in that location.

Since the universitys founding, the Old Capitol, cut from Iowa River limestone, has been the center and heart of campus. The Pentacrest, however, looked very different when the inaugural Hawkeye class stepped onto campus.

Mary Bennett, special collections coordinator at the State Historical Society of Iowa and a former Hawkeye, said the red brick campus used to stand where the Pentacrest is now. The era featured tall buildings with chimneys instead of the four buildings that stand there today which were inspired by the Beaux-Arts Movement, she said.

There were all red buildings, kind of like Calvin Hall, she said. It wasnt until 1900 or 1901 that they started with Beaux-Arts, stone buildings that we know now. So, the look of the campus changed drastically after that.

The Pentacrest space housed the Old Capitol, the Medical Building, South Hall, the Second Observatory Building, the Dental Building, North Hall, and Science Hall from 1865 until 1894.

The major buildings on campus were all located on the east side of the Iowa River in the UIs early history, with the main campus sitting between Madison and Linn Streets.

The final Pentacrest building was built in 1924, when Jessup Hall was completed over a decade after MacLean Hall. The heart of the UI, however, was not done growing as higher education busied in Iowa with the creation of a competing public institution.

Timeline by Jami Martin-Trainor/The Daily Iowan

Iowa State University was founded 11 years after the UI. As a land grant institution, it provided new opportunities for Iowans who wanted to pursue higher education, said Allison Sheridan, curator for Iowa State Universitys University Museums.

The land grant provided land to the designee, so in our case the land was in northwest Iowa and the state sold that land to fund a [new] university, she said. It started as an agricultural college and the land grant pushed to make that a reality.

Because the land was designated and sold, students could begin at ISU without paying tuition, she said. Students were expected to do chores and work on campus in exchange for their education, she said. This took away from the UIs applicant pool in the 1800s.

Sheridan said that because the UI did not have designated lands and funds from the federal government like ISU did, the university began focusing its scope and investing more in certain programs.

The University of Iowa became highly focused, she said. It was like a division. If you wanted that practical, science education in engineering or agriculture, you would go to Iowa State. If you wanted arts, doctor, philosopher, or English, youd go to the University of Iowa.

RELATED: University of Iowa history, told through the head Hawks eyes

As higher education expanded in the state, the two campuses continued to look different. From the very start, faculty members and students lived on campus at ISU, Sheridan said.

The UIs first residence hall didnt open until Currier Hall was built in 1914, nearly 70 years after the institutions first classes.

Bennett said the two schools had different characters, with the UI often taking on a more cosmopolitan and political role, especially after World War I.

There was more student radicalism going on here [the UI], she said. Iowa State was originally more vocational, and more geared towards engineering and home economics. The UI was more of a traditional liberal-arts college with a focus on the humanities. They were, and are, two distinctive campuses.

A primary motivator behind her decision to attend the UI instead of ISU in the 1970s was that the former was more political and progressive at the time, Bennett said.

Regardless of the differences, Sheridan said the two universities found ways to succeed and grow together.

There were overlaps still are overlaps, she said. But weve got our lanes. And I think that was the perfect set up for success for all three universities we have now. Not many states can boast two big universities that are this successful, but no matter what you want to do, you can continue to find success within our state because of the focuses of the two.

As the UI expanded in the 1800s and early 1900s, the campus underwent many changes and huge renovations.

Although the university used a few buildings that were built before its doors opened to students, several buildings have been built and demolished to create the campus people see today.

The Dey House, which still stands by Currier Hall, was the first building built after the founding of the UI. It was commissioned in 1857.

South Hall was built in 1863, on the present-day grassy area between Schaeffer and MacLean halls. The building burned down in 1901.

Fifteen university buildings, including the Old Capitol, were built in the late 1800s. In addition to the Old Capitol, only two still stand: Old Brick Church and Calvin Hall which was originally on the Pentacrest. Seashore Hall is the most recent 1800s building to be demolished. The building was destroyed in May 2021.

Between 1900 and 1983, 74 buildings were built. The expansion of the university eventually bled into downtown Iowa City.

The Old Capitol Mall used to just be buildings and storefronts of local businesses, Bennett said. And now, the university just bought it [in 2022].

The university didnt expand into the western side of the Iowa River until the 1920s and 30s. Buildings continue to be built to accommodate growing areas of study and the larger number of university students.

At the beginning of the universitys tenure, student enrollment varied.

By 1856, 124 undergraduate students were enrolled. At this point, there were only three types of degrees the university could give to students. Students could earn degrees from the Preparatory Department, the Normal Department which would eventually become the College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts.

Twenty-five years later, the UI welcomed 729 students, including 169 graduate students. At this point, the university added three more degree programs and eradicated two departments for undergraduates from the original three.

While it still offered a language-arts degree, undergraduates could also learn about law, medicine, and homeopathic medicine. Those degrees were also expanded to graduate students.

By the turn of the 20th century, the undergraduate population had multiplied twelve-fold. In September 1900, the UI welcomed 1,542 undergraduates to Iowa City, as well as 352 graduate students.

Data visualization by Eleanor Hildebrandt/The Daily Iowan

In 1935, undergraduate student enrollment hit 10,000.

On the universitys 100th birthday, there were nine colleges with 15,634 people enrolled 59 percent of whom were men.

As the world reached Y2K, 26,956 students were enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs at the UI.

The university celebrates 175 years of education this spring with 20,187 undergraduate students in nine colleges that arent the same as those in the 1950s. Currently, 6,141 graduate students are enrolled in 13 programs, and 1,866 professional students are enrolled in four programs.

The university is currently made up of more than 28,000 students, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

That is 227 times the amount of people who originally walked into the Old Capitol for the first university classes in the state of Iowa.

Today, just over half of enrolled students are women. Nearly 60 percent of students are from Iowa.

Bennett said increased enrollment has changed how students interact with campus. When she received her bachelors degree in the 1970s, there were closer to 21,000 students at the UI.

As enrollment numbers continued to rise, so did the universitys expansion into downtown Iowa City, Bennett said. She added that North Liberty and Coralville also began to blossom as a result of the universitys increasing population.

You could walk places when the campus was smaller, she said. Coralville was virtually nothing back in those days. There were things out on Highway 6 back then, but it wasnt anything like the way it is now. I think Iowa City has lost some of its thunder in a way and has been superseded by Coralville and North Liberty.

Regardless of how its changed over the 50 years since Bennett arrived, Iowa City is still one of the most beautiful places shes been to, Bennett said.

Its a beautiful campus it always has been, she said. And Im proud to be an alum.

Continued here:

UI campus, student population evolves over 175 years - UI The Daily Iowan

JD Vance, Ohios senatorial candidate, and one of the most interesting new voices in the debate about American grand strategy and Ukraine threw a bomb yesterday online in an interview, where he said that he doesnt care about Ukraine one way or the other, and that it is ridiculous that America is focused on Ukraines border and sovereignty, and not Americas own borders with Mexico.

Great powers care more about their immediate neighbourhood

I think its ridiculous that we are focused on this border in Ukraine. I got to be honest with you, I dont really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other Vance said in an interview, later adding, What explains both the Russia hawkishness and the dereliction of duty at the border is this: elites dont care if my neighbours die. Fentanyl coming across the border kills people I care about. Declaring the cartels a terrorist org would do more for them than a Ukraine war.

Vance isnt the only one. Tucker Carlson has been on the forefront of conservative realism, questioning the Ukraine debate. Recently there has been a flurry of conservative realism on Ukraine, one that harkens to an older pre-war Republican conservative tradition in the US.

Sohrab Ahmari wrote about the propaganda effort of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine with carefully placed photoshoots of older Ukrainian Gun Karens (to use the memorable phrase of Mary Harrington) targeted to appeal to liberal NGOcrats in the West. The reaction has been apoplectic. Bruno Maes, Portugals former EU-crat and consultant, said that the idea that one should care about the border with Mexico more than the border of Ukraine, is idiotic. Former State and National Security Council Russia hand Fiona Hill called Vance and Tucker the ultimate stooges. Noted intersectional feminist Bill Kristol asked what is wrong with MAGA-men.

Vance and Carlson are, needless to mention, closer to the average American. Its not just absurd but ahistorical and borderline delusional to claim, demand or expect great powers must and should care more about some faraway war somewhere in some faraway land, instead of their own immediate borders, especially when the northern border is facing extreme political polarisation and political violence and the southern border is a hub of human trafficking and drug cartels bordering an increasingly lawless northern Mexico.

Vance, Ahmari and Carlson can of course defend their own arguments, but for what its worth, not a single one of them said Russia is worth backing against Ukraine. They just dont want us to be involved as there are more important things to focus on. And thats a solid realist position.

The argument that Americans should care more about Ukraine than about Mexico also defies international relations theory and strategic logic. As Mike Sweeney wrote recently in the British Armed Forces blog Wavell Room, One does not need to be an advocate for spheres of influence, to acknowledge the reality on the ground in eastern Europe today. Russia simply has greater strategic interests in Ukraine and also more immediate military means to bring to bear on Ukrainian territory.

Put simply, spheres of influence is a fancy IR way of saying great powers care more about their immediate neighbourhood. It is also organic; spheres develop due to structural variables and interests, such as aggregate power and geography.

The reason America would worry about foreign missiles in Cuba is the same reason Russia is concerned about Ukraine, which was the same reason Royal Navys home fleets primary duty was to guard every single square inch of the grey waters in the English Channel, so much so that they essentially sacrificed Singapore and Australia when push came to shove during a world war.

His intention is to bring back an older way of statecraft,

Alternatively, the lack of interest in faraway lands is also truer to the realities of democratic politics. People dont go to war due to some deep interest in safeguarding norms and values. They are more likely to go to war when their way of life is threatened by a hovering menace of invasion. One might not like that, but it is reality.Refusing that logic is juvenile or ideological. The actors might change over time, the ideas might differ, the governing coalition and system might vary, but the iron rules of great power rivalry remain the same.

Incidentally, the part that was most important in Vladimir Putins speech was where he highlighted (albeit in his own cherry-picked way) the motivation behind Russian action:

Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks policy and can be rightfully called Vladimir Lenins Ukraine. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents, including Lenins harsh instructions regarding Donbass, which was actually shoved into Ukraine. And today the grateful progeny has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine.

But then came the subtle but menacing threat. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine. The implication, significance, and interpretations of these particular sentences deserve more study.

Consider for a moment a question; how many current political figures can go on an extempore rant about history, even if it is cherry-picked, and use that as a rhetorical justification for potentially the most consequential military action since the second world war?

The most common reaction to Putins speeches on social media was a throwback to calling him a Soviet apologist trying to recreate the former USSR. It couldnt be further from the truth. Only clinical midwits think Putin is a Sovok. Putin despises the USSR and communists. He is as imperial as they come and the only thing he could do to make him any more reactionary would be a ceremonial Romanov restoration.

His idea of political alignments is more Holy Alliance than Warsaw Pact. His intention is to bring back an older way of statecraft, that reflects aggregate power in a world where great powers decide and smaller states follow, instead of smaller states condescendingly lecturing and hectoring great powers to act against their interests.

Its a worldview fundamentally opposed to any collective voices, globalism and political equality. Which is why the progressive and liberal outrage against him, as they, more than the western conservatives, understand just how much Putin threatens their worldview and idea of historys progressive and egalitarian march.

One can hope that this might change the way international relations is studied, one that returns to a more classical approach, instead of the nonsensical theoretical frameworks that Putins war will prove wrong. Putins ordering of forces to cross the borders of Ukraine and a potential partition of Ukraine will take the borderlands to a former Habsburg-Romanov dividing lines.

Ukraine simply does not matter enough to the majority of people

The small states talking about norms in the UN where a P5 has veto powers will prove, once again, the importance of power and geography, and the irrelevance of values in the international anarchy. We have been in such a conceptual vacuum since the early nineties, that to understand how time can be turned back by sheer force in a pure Great Man Theory fashion, is too much for a lot of commentators to grasp.

Thats why conservatives who grew up in the unipolar era, are talking about defending norms, and progressives are livid that imperialism can just straightforwardly come back like this. Russia is turning into an empire not a liberal or communist one but rather a conservative and reactionary one, and thats not the ideological framework that a lot of people are used to.

However, given that the real world is different than liberal or progressive theories, the revealed preferences indicate that Ukraine simply does not matter enough to the majority of people in the West to deter Putins ambitions. The howls of outrage are therefore a loud and activist fringe with disproportionate power and platforms. That doesnt mean that they are not capable of significant sway, as most historical events are usually led by an activist fringe.

Everyone feels sympathy for Ukraine. But the conflict there does not threaten the way of Western lives. This is just the reality, noting that is honesty, and not being either pro or anti Putin, as the question is simply irrelevant.

In that light, the most notable thing is the quality of rhetoric on the American right-realist spectrum. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I recently wrote in these pages, that a grand-strategy of realism would need a counter-elite:

Advocates of a restrained foreign policy will face an uphill struggle even if they manage to form some redoubtsthey will constantly be undermined on all sides by an NGO-industrial complex thats busy writing its brand of evangelism as constituent code into the whole liberal international order, and there are many more establishments churning out nodding-dogs for such than there are for realists.

And therefore, the rhetoric of restraint needs to, therefore, reflect the target audience, that is the newly realigned working-class men of the American electorate, and that realists will need such ruthlessly honest and populist rhetoric to sell to those people who will form the backbone of this new movement, which will sometimes test the boundaries of electoral propriety. There will be a need for a vocal defence of nationalism, the national interest, and national borders.

Foreign policy realism, predicated on national interest, is of course a fundamentally narrow and reactionary worldview that is opposed to any utopian, revolutionary and crusading instinct of promoting universal values across the globe, with blood and treasure if necessary. Hans Morgenthau wrote:

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish), but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival.

Vance, Ahmari, and Carlson can therefore claim themselves to be on the right side of history and democracy (so to speak) as they are giving voice to the voiceless majority, who will defend their country when attacked but would otherwise prefer to be left alone.

Read more here:

Putin and the new global order | Sumantra Maitra - The Critic

The Official Opposition is calling on the province to take thefields where potato wart has been found on P.E.I. out of potato production permanently.

Peter Bevan-Baker says the move would help contain any future spread of the fungus and reassure buyers of Island potatoes.

The Green Party leader made the comment in the legislature Tuesday, three months after the CFIA imposed a ban on exporting P.E.I. table-stock potatoes to the United States over the wart issue.

"This province has absolute jurisdiction over land use," Bevan-Baker said. "We can choose to take those fields out of production obviously compensate the farmers appropriately. "

Currently, fields where potato wart has been found can be replanted with wart-resistant potato varieties after five years have passed.

Since 2000, there have been 33 detections of potato wart on Prince Edward Island, according to the Canada Food Inspection Agency. "The latest detections in October 2021 represent the largest area and highest number of associated fields," said the CFIA website."This increase required the strongest action to date against the further spread of potato wart off P.E.I."

The CFIA confirmed last fall that the fungus was foundin the two fields that have a combined area ofapproximately 20 hectares. The agency didn't indicatewhere the farm is located, other than specifying it was in Queens County.

Agriculture Minister Bloyce Thompson said he agrees such land parcels should be taken out of production permanently.

But he said he wants to hear from federal authorities in the U.S. before making any changes.

"We have no problem doing it, but we want to wait to see what they say because they could say, 'Well, that's great.But we want you to do that,this, this and this,'" he said.

"[After] we know what their demands are, then we can go above and beyond if we have to."

He saidthe province could move to make the change before the coming growing season,but he didn't commit to doing that.

Thompson did tell the legislature: "We will not stop until we get our farmers back to what they know and love:farming."

Bevan-Baker said the aid programs brought in by Dennis King's government have been "enormously helpful," but added: "The biggest problem here is that we have lost control of the biggest element of our province's economy."

Liberal MLA Robert Henderson, noting that he himself once grew seed potatoes, said the crisis has had "an indelible negative impact on our potato industry."

He said that 180 growers account for 85,000 acres of potatoes on P.E.I., with 10 per cent of the Island's potato acreage in seed-potato production.

"Land management certainly needs to be figured out That definitely has to happen," Henderson told the legislature.

The rest is here:

Greens ask P.E.I. to take fields where potato wart has been found out of production permanently - CBC.ca