What Happened Today: Feb 7, 2022
Iran demands more; GoFundMe cancels truckers; Artists lick the boot
The Big Story
Iranian officials made clear Monday that they weren’t satisfied with the billions in sanctions relief opened up by the United States last week and were demanding more as a condition of reentering a nuclear deal. This followed the State Department’s announcement last Friday that the United States would waive sanctions on Iran’s civil nuclear program in an effort to “close a deal on a mutual return to full implementation” of the Obama-era nuclear deal known by its acronym JCPOA. Senior White House and State Department officials denied that the move was a concession to Iran, but Iran appeared to feel differently. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian called the move “good but insufficient.” The new waivers allow Iran to resume doing business related to what is ostensibly the purely civilian part of its nuclear program with foreign companies in Russia, China, and Europe. It also allows Iran to resume exporting oil. By lifting the sanctions, the United States is freeing up an estimated $29 billion in Iranian funds that are currently frozen abroad, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail. The waivers restore the approach of the original 2015 Obama White House nuclear deal with Iran and reverse the approach of the Trump administration. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, calling the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy initiative, which he argued would lead to Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, “the worst deal” ever. At a press conference Monday, a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry insisted that the full removal of all sanctions was a precondition for Iran reentering the JCPOA.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-says-removal-us-sanctions-is-its-red-line-revival-2015-deal-2022-02-07/
Back Pages: Armin Rosen on How Artists Have Always Loved to Lick the Boot
The Rest
→ Led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Republican officials are calling for an investigation of GoFundMe after the crowdfunding site canceled a donation drive for the Canadian trucker protests that had raised almost $9 million for the so-called “freedom convoy.” The company shared its reason for shutting down the donations in a statement: “We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.” On Monday, when the government of Canada’s capital, Ottawa, declared a state of emergency, Canadian law enforcement officials reported some 60 arrest investigations, many related to mischief and vandalism charges after 11 days of protests. By comparison, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which frequently utilized GoFundMe to raise money for bail funds and other things and never ran into any trouble with the company, involved a total of roughly 14,000 arrests.
→ Martial Simon, a schizophrenic homeless man who killed fellow New Yorker Michelle Alyssa Go on Jan. 15 by shoving the woman—a total stranger to him—in front of a subway told a state psychiatrist in 2017 that “it was just a matter of time before he pushed a woman to the train tracks,” according to an investigation by The New York Times.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/nyregion/martial-simon-michelle-go.html
→ We direct a lot of criticism at our colleagues in the media, only because we object to seeing the profession reduced to a form of propaganda. But here’s an example of how it ought to look: Matt Lee of the Associated Press pushing White House spokesman Ned Price to substantiate his claim that Russia is planning a false flag attack. Price tries to brush him off with a non-answer followed by intimidation, tactics that work on many reporters.
Thankfully, Lee isn’t one of them.
→ A map featured on American Shipper shows an unprecedented naval logjam as a record-setting 105 container ships are shown circling the coast of California, with many more waiting to berth along the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard.
→ Hardly anyone was watching when the Winter Olympics began last week in China. Television viewership is down 43% compared to the 2018 winter games, and fewer Americans are tuning in than at any point in decades. The United States is engaged in a “diplomatic boycott” of the games in protest of the host country’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in China are routinely subject to forced assimilation and interned in concentration camps; the U.S. State Department has called these practices a genocide. NBC, on the other hand, decided to air the opening ceremony twice, once live and then again during its primetime slot.
→ The scale of Israeli police spying on civilians using secretly installed spyware is even larger than previously known. In January, the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist reported that Israel’s special operations cyber unit had been using Pegasus spyware to monitor Israeli civilians without court approval and in direct violation of the law. A new Cacalist report adds several prominent members of the political and business community to the growing list of illegally targeted civilians, as well as many activists and protest leaders. Created by NSO, an Israeli company, the Pegasus spyware was sold to governments around the world. A report last November from watchdog group Citizen Lab detailed how the technology was often used to spy on domestic dissidents, journalists, and activists.
Read more: https://jpost.com/israel-news/article-695716/
→ Todd Gitlin, an activist, academic, and writer, passed away on Saturday in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was 79. Gitlin’s 60 years as a public intellectual began in the early 1960s, when he rose to prominence as president of the Students for a Democratic Society, succeeding Tom Hayden in that role. An important figure in the American New Left, he was on the front lines of the political battles of the 1960s, organizing against racism in the United States, the war in Vietnam, and apartheid in South Africa. Gitlin would go on to get a doctorate from Berkeley in sociology and become a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, as well as the chair of its doctoral program in communications. In later years, he would be both an éminence grise of the American Left, as well as one of its fiercest critics. Since 2009, Gitlin had been a regular contributor to Tablet, and his writings for the magazine reflect the freedom of his thought and the range of his interests, from his encomium for Hugh Heffner to his reflections on American Jewish identity to his meditations upon Israeli politics.
You can find the full archive of Gitlin’s Tablet pieces here.
→ The drive to censor Joe Rogan has drawn together a coalition of government functionaries, past-their-prime musicians, and less successful entertainers. But for anyone under the impression that it involves organic support from the public, this thread shows how the campaign against Rogan has been stage-managed by a Democratic super PAC.
→ Barry Wendell, 72, of West Virginia is gay, Jewish, married to a rabbi, and running to represent his deep red state’s Second Congressional District. Before he can even make it to being an extreme longshot in a general election, Wendell first has to face fellow Democrat Angela Dwyer in a May 10 primary race.
Armin Rosen reports for the Back Pages on the age-old tradition of artists begging to serve the parties in power.
Most normal people have better things to do than care about Joe Rogan, but the people who run a Democratic-supporting super PAC called MeidasTouch are playing a different game than you or me. Amid an effort to get Spotify to drop Rogan over the alleged vaccine misinformation he shared, the multimillion-dollar comms shop appears to have produced a slickly and selectively edited video compilation showing Rogan saying the N-word a number of times over the past decade. Rogan was already on the wrong side of the people who control the U.S. federal government. Last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who speaks for the president of the United States, publicly urged Spotify to “do more” about Rogan, all but calling for his firing.
But the effort to censor Rogan isn’t just being led by the Biden administration and its adjuncts. Ironically, the Rogan backlash has brought into the open the marriage between artists and state power that icons of the 1960s like David Crosby and Neil Young once seemed to overturn when they were still playing at being rebels and truth tellers. Now in line with the White House, both of them publicly took their music off Spotify as part of the campaign to get Rogan unpersoned.
“I have not and will not demand anything from Spotify or Joe Rogan,” Crosby tweeted on Feb. 2, before contradicting himself in the tweet’s very next sentence. “I just don’t want my music on there if he’s on there, so I’m taking mine off … That is not censorship.” That an artist believes it is “not censorship” to issue ultimatums demanding the deplatforming of people whose ideas they disagree with shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The intuitive idea that creative geniuses are automatically on the side of freedom of expression, and that they trust audiences to be able to think for themselves, is misplaced. It reflects a distinctly 20th-century romantic wish about what artists are “supposed” to stand for rather than the reality of what they’ve often actually stood for.
Artists have been looking for ways to serve power for as long as either has been around. The line between Imhotep’s Step Pyramid of Saqqara, the astounding final resting place of the Old Kingdom pharaoh Djoser, and the Hays Code, classic Hollywood’s government-prodded but inevitably self-enforced censorship regime, is shorter than their more than 4,000 years of distance may suggest. In between them we get Shakespeare writing a cycle of history plays justifying his patrons’ dubious claims to the English throne, along with other examples of the art-power nexus that seem indecent to mention in the same sentence as Richard III, like Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking works of Nazi propaganda or Sergei Eisenstein’s rapturous paeans to the Soviet revolution. In fact, we tend to focus in retrospect on the full-fledged Nazi propagandists like Riefenstahl to avoid the uncomfortable fact that so many of the great artists of the day, like the poets T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats, flirted with the fascist movements of the 1930s as they were rising to power. Does that mean we should burn their poetry? Of course not. The same Catholic Church that burned Talmuds in medieval France and Italy and kept an extensive index of banned books also commissioned and inspired some of the most sublime works of art and architecture ever created.
Of course Crosby, Neil Young, India Arie, and the other artists who have pulled their music from Spotify because they couldn’t tolerate being on the same streaming service as Rogan were not acting out of any direct relationship with holders of political power. They instead belong to a much more common and contemporary species of artsy free-expression skeptics: those who think that the reading, listening, and viewing public is incapable of processing complex or potentially distressing ideas and thus must have its exposure to those ideas limited for the sake of peace, harmony, and enlightenment.
It was artists who led the charge against Charlie Hebdo being given an award by PEN after much of its staff was massacred in 2015—a statement opposing the honor was signed by such literary celebrities as Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, and Junot Díaz. According to these writers, dying for the cause of free expression didn’t deserve recognition if the expression itself might be taken the wrong way.
By now the artist-as-scold is one of the most common tropes in popular culture, to the point where we’re pleasantly surprised when an artist turns out not to be a scold. In practice, the BDS movement, supported by a range of writers and musicians, acts as a quarantine on Israeli art and a blockade against creators from the Jewish state whose work threatens to corrupt the rest of the world. The great Brian Eno of the pioneering band Roxy Music, among the most prominent BDSers in the artistic community, wouldn’t even let an Israeli dance troupe use one of his songs in its performances.
In New York, it was artists who led the campaign to remove a portrait of the dead Emmett Till from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, with some demanding that it be destroyed. In 2018, Judd Apatow, John Mulaney, and Jack Antonoff all dropped off the New Yorker festival’s bill on the assumption that the presence of Trump Svengali Steve Bannon would hypnotize a crowd of Manhattan liberals into agreeing with the president’s entire program. “There’s a difference between curation and censorship,” tut-tutted the memoirist Roxanne Gay in a recent New York Times column explaining why she’d be taking her podcast off of Spotify—it’s not censorship when we dictate what you should and shouldn’t be able to see. In 2015, Gay noxiously pleaded for nuance in understanding the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff, so at least she’s remained consistent.
On and on it goes. Artists’ lofty opinion of themselves, and their low opinion of you, should be about as surprising as their natural, millennia-old alliance with power and their willingness to let an attraction to power overwhelm whatever other ideals they might once have had. Which leads to an alarming yet perhaps exhilarating insight: It should never be taken for granted that the people of special genius who would seem to benefit the most from a free society will automatically do much of anything to defend it. The responsibility lies with us, too—as much as or even more than it lies with them.
To understand more about Rogan’s appeal read Scroll editor Jacob Siegel’s exploration of the podcaster’s role as “a portal through which one glimpses the cultural mood of the American mind and spirit that is, at that moment, most popular and most repressed.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/joe-rogan-the-aleph
What Happened Today: Feb 7, 2022
Czeslaw Milosz said it best in his famous essay The Captive Mind
Have you seen this re Ukraine? I have found this group of veterans to be reliable as in truth-tellling and down-to-earth as in unbiased and supremely reasonable, based on personal and repeated experience. of war. Thisis their latest, a serious warning re Biden's war-mongering and militarism (as in the budget appropriations to our military:
"We at About Face: Veterans Against the War are alarmed by the news that President Biden will be sending an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Germany, Poland, and Romania amid heightened tensions with Russia over Ukraine. In recent weeks, the U.S. has escalated tensions with Russia through its aggressive rhetoric, by sending over 180 tons of weapons into Ukraine, and by putting 8,500 troops on “heightened alert” to prepare for a possible deployment to Russia’s borders.
As the world has seen in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, there is nothing defensive about NATO’s actions. NATO’s very existence is to further U.S. imperialism around the world, leaving entire nations and peoples in total destruction while filling the pockets of war profiteers.
We vehemently reject the imposition of U.S. economic sanctions. Sanctions are a tool of war and create conditions that cause just as much death and destruction as bombs and bullets. Sanctions always disproportionately harm poor and working-class people and otherwise vulnerable communities. We are currently witnessing this in the U.S.-created humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan today. The World Health Organization has warned that up to 1 million Afghan children may die as a result of starvation and malnutrition. We have also seen the impact of past U.S. sanctions on Iraq where, according to some estimates, up to 1.5M Iraqis, primarily children, were killed as a direct result of these sanctions.
As veterans who participated in wars, invasions, and occupations initiated by the U.S. and supported by NATO, we categorically reject the clear escalation made by the U.S. in deploying personnel, funding, weapons, and other forms of military aid to Ukraine. We call on President Biden and his administration to proceed peacefully, diplomatically, and with respect to the sovereignty of other nations, as well as a respect for human life and dignity."
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