Demonized Iran – A Tale Told By An Idiot

The current failing effort to make Iran out to be a major threat to world peace starts the clock at 1979 in its propaganda effort to justify U.S. aggression against Teheran, which deliberately overlooks the events of 1953, when a joint U.S.-British effort overthrew the then secular Iranian government in order to take over the country's oil industry.

 

Much like John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who successfully plotted the U.S. coup against him, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time’s Man-of-the-Year in 1952) came from an affluent background, welcomed the principles of capitalist democracy, and loathed Marxism. What set the three men on a collision course was not their political values, but the radically unequal world around them.[1]

 

Mossadegh grew up watching foreigners loot his defenseless country. Nourished by corruption, predatory foreign companies bought up rights to establish Iranian banks and run its post office, telegraph service, railroads, and ferry lines. Other Western firms took over the caviar industry and tobacco trade. When oil was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, British officials just bribed a puppet monarch - Mozaffar al-Din Shah - to sign Iran's rights away to foreign investors. The ocean of oil underfoot became the property of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, mostly owned by the British government.

 

Thus it was that in his short span of years Mossadegh witnessed a stupendous source of national wealth siphoned off to benefit distant foreigners while Iranian peasants lived in hovels and a quarter of the population consisted of nomadic bands. The country suffered a ninety-percent illiteracy rate, an incredible fifty-percent infant mortality rate, and saw seventy percent of its land monopolized by two percent of its population. Iran exported $360 million worth of oil a year, but only received $35 million in royalties from the Anglo-American Oil Company.[2]

 

Educated Iranians of Mossadegh's era faced a choice of continuing this humiliating submission to foreign exploitation or launching a rebellion doomed to failure. Mossadegh chose to rebel, demanding full Iranian control of the nation's resources, which made him a target for Anglo-American imperialism. 

 

Following World War II Mossadegh had emerged as the leader of the nationalists in the Iranian Parliament, with a reputation for being an honest patriot.[3] He not only denounced British control of the oil industry, but also opposed a vast, mega-profit development scheme Allen Dulles had negotiated for Overseas Consultants Inc., a group of eleven American engineering firms with massive construction plans, including hydroelectric plants, rebuilt cities, and industries imported from abroad. Mossadegh denounced it as a sellout to foreign interests, a judgment that found favor in the Iranian Parliament, which killed the project by refusing to appropriate funds for it in December, 1950.

 

After delivering this heavy blow to foreign capital, Mossadegh was chosen to be prime minister in April 1951. Before accepting, he asked for a vote in favor of nationalizing Iran's oil industry, and the vote was unanimous. From that moment on he was regarded in Washington and London as the worst sort of enemy, a populist rabble-rouser who stirred the masses with appeals to independent nationalism, which was effectively treason to transnational capital.

 

In 1953, with the unanimous backing of the Iranian Parliament and overwhelming public support, Mossadegh proceeded with the nationalization, expropriating the Anglo-American Oil Company. In an impassioned address to the nation he warned that Iran was taking control of "a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon."[4] 

 

The dragon retaliated by CIA coup, overthrowing Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi. General Fazollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator and staunch partisan of American oil, became the new prime minister. [5]  President Eisenhower quickly extended him "sympathetic consideration."

 

The CIA's Kermit Roosevelt emerged as vice-president of Gulf Oil. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to divulge details of the new arrangements, because "making them public would affect adversely the foreign relations of the United States."[6] 

 

President Eisenhower told the American people that the Iranian people had "saved the day," owing to their "revulsion against communism," and "their profound love for their monarchy."[7]

 

The New York Times hailed the destruction of Iranian democracy as "good news indeed," calling the putsch an "object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid" by a country that "goes berserk with fanatical nationalism."[8]

 

Thousands of Mossadegh supporters were dispatched to jail, torture chambers, and graveyards.[9]

 

A deeply grateful Shah thanked U.S. Ambassador Loy Henderson and Kermit Roosevelt, telling them the he owed his throne to God, the Iranian people, the army, and to Washington.[10]

 

Gripped by megalomania, the Shah ruled for the subsequent quarter century in a romantic haze built on a fantasy version of Iran and also of himself. He told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he was guided by visions and messages from God, as well as Imam Ali. "I am accompanied by a force that others can't see, my mythical force, I get messages, religious messages."[11]

 

Instead of seeking psychological help, the Shah went for armaments and the technology of repression, soon becoming the central U.S. military and economic partner in the Middle East. Portrayed in the West as a far-seeing moderate in a land teeming with swarthy medievalists, he remained deeply unpopular at home due to his policies of super-militarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. Powerful Ayatollahs bitterly objected to his rule, and as they amassed a huge popular following the Shah grew increasingly isolated, clinging to power with an avalanche of weapons sent on by Washington.

 

By the mid-seventies the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Two-thirds of the population was under thirty. Cities were hideously unlivable, as urban settlements had quadrupled to twenty million in the previous twenty years. Fifteen percent of the entire country lived around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands, and a restless student generation had no prospects. The bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt.[12]

 

Hatred of the military surged as the economy gagged on $18 billion in Western arms imports (mostly from the U.S.) between 1974 and 1978, including air-to-air missiles, smart bombs, and aerial tankers, "everything but the atomic bomb," according to a State Department official. While Shiite leaders rallied massive popular support, the Shah eliminated civilian courts, held 100,000 political opponents in jail, and carried out more official executions than any other country in the world, in addition to using methods of torture that Amnesty International called "beyond belief."[13]

 

Nevertheless, enthroned as he was atop an ocean of oil, the staunchly anti-communist Shah was a greatly admired leader of the "Free World."[14]

 

For New Year's Eve in 1977 Jimmy Carter flew to Teheran to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire with the Shah. The two heads of state dined in the Niyavaran Palace surrounded by obscene luxury in a city teeming with hideous slums. 

 

In his after dinner speech Carter all but buried his face in the Shah's lap, displaying a stomach-turning capacity for obsequious flattery. He praised the "great leadership of the Shah," and proclaimed Iran a "great island of stability" in a "troubled" region of the world, which, he gushed, was a great tribute to "you, Your Majesty," and to "the respect and admiration and love" which, he alleged, the Iranian people felt for their King, though at that very moment thousands of them were political prisoners suffering Nazi torture techniques in Iranian jails.[15] Continuing in the same vein, Carter declared that "the cause of human rights is one that also is shared deeply by our people and by the leaders of our two nations." He concluded on a note of utter devotion: "There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude." 

 

A beaming Shah leaped to his feet in applause, grasping Carter's right hand in both of his. 

 

On the route to the airport the next morning the mutual admirers failed to notice thousands of young Iranians pelting the army with rocks along the side streets. Soon, nationwide riots would break out.[16]

 

Nine months later, Carter phoned the Shah during the worst crisis of his entire rule ("Black Friday"), expressing support following his machine-gunning of dozens of demonstrators (thousands according to Iranian dissidents) by troops that had been armed and trained by the United States. The following month Carter received the Shah's son (who was undergoing training at the United States Air Force Academy at the time) in Washington and told him: "Our friendship and our alliance with Iran is one of our important bases on which our entire foreign policy depends." Speaking of the Shah's liberalization policies, he added, "We're thankful for this move towards democracy. We know it is opposed by some who don't like democratic principles, but his progressive administration is very valuable, I think, to the entire Western world."

 

By that point, of course, nearly the entire Iranian population was fed up with the Shah's blood-soaked "progressive administration" and its boundless corruption. Graft and bribery were so endemic under his rule that he had amassed a personal fortune worth billions of dollars, still a large sum today, and a gargantuan one in the late 1970s.[17]

 

There can be little doubt that Carter's complete lack of concern for democracy, in spite of protestations of the centrality of "human rights" to his administration, was helping provoke an explosion of popular revulsion at the Shah's misrule. 

 

By January, 1979 the breaking point had been reached. Everyone was cursing the cold, the snow, and the Shah, and strikes paralyzed the country. As power cuts plunged the capital into darkness, food supplies ran out and long lines formed for resupplies of paraffin. Roaming gangs stopped fancy cars to siphon what they needed while oil production stopped and the army went to work the fields. With gas lines backing up for hours, soldiers kept order firing automatic weapons in the air. 

 

The Shah’s henchmen fled like startled cockroaches. Ministers carted away bags stuffed with bank notes; ladies made off with jewelry boxes; masterless butlers wandered around in a daze. Suitcases and crates crammed with paintings, Persian rugs, and precious jewelry, found their way to Europe and America, leaving palaces and elegant homes suddenly eerily empty. Bombarded by money transfers, Central Bank workers went out on strike, refusing to process the deluge. 

 

At Niyavaran palace the Shah sat behind a bank of guards and surveillance equipment wondering what went wrong. Surrounded by gilt, beveled mirrors, chandeliers, gold-plated telephones and jewel-studded gold cigarette boxes, he was plunged into gloom. Anwar Sadat beckoned him to exile in Egypt.

 

He fled, and Teheran erupted in joy.[18]

 

Two weeks later the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from fifteen years of exile, greeted by a joyous crowd of three million at the airport.[19] Two months after that, 99% of the adult population voted for an Islamic Republic in an extraordinary 95% turnout.[20] The U.S. client state was no more.

 

At every stage of its confrontation with the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. response appeared to be tone deaf and inept. A little over eight months after Khomeini's return to Iran, Carter allowed admission of the ailing ex-Shah to a New York hospital for cancer treatment, and enraged Iranian protesters poured over the U.S. Embassy walls in Teheran, seizing 66 Americans trapped inside. Telling a lurid tale of America-backed torture, murder, and looting, they announced themselves as "followers of the Imam's line," and demanded the return of "the criminal Shah." 

 

Effigies of President Carter and Uncle Sam were set aflame. American flags were spat on, trampled, and burned in the street. Blindfolded Marines, handcuffed behind their backs, were paraded before TV cameras surrounded by vengeful, chanting mobs. "Death to America! Death to Carter! Death to the Shah!"

 

The Pope, offering to mediate the crisis, was rebuffed by an angry Ayatollah Khomeini: "Where was the Vatican, when the Shah put our youth in frying pans and sawed off their legs?"[21]

 

Although the U.S. media offered extensive and dramatic coverage of events in Teheran, the non-stop chatter of the pundits did nothing to enlighten the viewing audience. Terms like Mohamedanism, Mecca, purdah, chador, Sunni, Shiite, mullah, imam, Ayatollah Khomeini, militant Islam were packaged up for American viewers in absurd three minute summaries of the meaning of Islam, which only conveyed the mis-impression that Islam was inherently violent, dangerous, and anti-American, a view that persists to this day.

 

Interviews with Iranian officials alternated with comments from the hostages' parents, bulletins on the ex-Shah's failing health, and footage of emotional street demonstrations in Iran. The rituals of the Iranian crowds were cast as though they were sick imitations of Nuremberg, circuses manipulated by mad dictators caught up in religious frenzy, in stark contrast to the level-headed millionaires psychoanalyzing their behavior in American T.V. studios.

 

Not a single establishment journalist found the U.S. responsible in any way for its Iran predicament. No one offered to make amends for the coup of 1953. The Washington Post dismissed the Shah's use of systematic torture as inconsequential, since "it can be argued that it was entirely in the tradition of Iranian history."[22]

 

In the middle of the hostage crisis another one occurred in neighboring Iraq, where Saddam Hussein overthrew General Ahmed Hassan Bakr and executed all his political rivals. A short time later, president Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly encouraged him to attack Iran, which he promptly did, invading in September, 1980 with "strong U.S. backing," according to war correspondent Robert Fisk.

 

For Saddam the goal was to seize the Shatt al-Arab waterway and Iran's oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan region; for Iran, it was to survive an existential war and defend the Islamic Revolution.

 

The war lasted eight long years and featured horrifying trench warfare similar to battles in WWI, with maimings and killings well into the hundreds of thousands on both sides, while the combined population of Iran and Iraq was only fifty-seven million. Iraq repeatedly used nerve and mustard gas thanks to a Department of Commerce license that allowed an American company to ship Saddam a smorgasbord of deadly agents for years, and both sides freely bombed civilian populations.[23]

 

Washington also provided Hussein with battle plans and satellite data. Over the course of the war, Iraq-U.S. relations became so close that the Reagan administration barely reacted when Iraqi missiles hit the USS Stark in the Gulf, killing several dozen U.S. servicemen. Only when it became convenient following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait did Washington criticize Iraq’s appalling human rights record, omitting mention of the U.S.'s starring role in his worst crimes.

 

One of the most gruesome atrocities of the war period occurred in 1988, when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in an ascending flight path over civilian airspace in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people on board. The American commander knew at the time that he was shooting down a civilian plane. 

 

Admiral William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, established the U.S. official line on the horror, accusing the Iranians of having brought the attack on themselves with irresponsible behavior.

 

The U.S. establishment media suggested that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot may have been deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed plane into the American frigate that shot it down. Articles focused on the commander's anguish in having shot the plane down, reporting the event as a tragic error. President Reagan called it an "understandable accident." Vice-President Bush declared he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are." 

 

This was all self-serving nonsense.

 

In an article in the September 1989 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings, Edward Herman reported in his 1992 book, "Beyond Hypocrisy," David R. Carlson, commander of the USS Sides, an escort frigate in the vicinity of the USS Vincennes when it shot the Iranian Airbus down, wrote that he was disgusted with the U.S. excuses for this act, as well as the attempt to blame it on the Iranians. He added that the idea that the Vincennes was attempting to defend itself against Iranian attack was based on a series of lies. "When the decision was made to shoot down the Airbus, the airliner was climbing, not diving; it was showing the proper identification friend or foe - IFF (Mode III); and it was in the correct flight corridor from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. The Vincennes was never under attack by Iranian aircraft. There was no targeting being done by the Iranian P3. The conduct of Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was profoundly nonthreatening." According to Carlson’s account, Herman wrote, for a considerable time before the shootdown the Vincennes' actions "appeared to be consistently aggressive, and had become a topic of wardroom conversation." Someone had even jokingly come up with the nickname "Robo Cruiser" for the Vincennes, and it apparently stuck.

 

Nevertheless, the New York Times continued to support the official story that the Iranians were to blame for the "accidental" shoot-down and never reported on Commander Carlson's correction.

 

Adding to the horror, the personnel on the Vincennes were given a hero's welcome when they returned to the dock in San Diego, and later made it onto national TV and became celebrities. In April, 1990, Herman wrote, the commander of the Vincennes was given the Legion of Merit award for "exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service" and for "the calm and professional atmosphere" under his command.  The destruction of the Airbus and the killing of 290 passengers was not explicitly mentioned in the citation.[24]

 

Nearly forty years later, Washington is still attacking Iran, based largely on the same highly caricatured image of the country it has held since 1979, and has learned nothing about the reality of its own relations with Teheran. The U.S. continues to be in the Iranians' back yard - relentlessly - supporting dictatorships, overthrowing regimes, backing genocidal Israel to the hilt, all of which results in a horrifying record of slaughtered civilians that has literally appalled the entire world.

 

Meanwhile, the Iranian proxy states Washington accuses of terrorism are all products, directly or indirectly, of its own foreign policy. It was Israel and the United States, after all, who took a small, Islamic group offshoot from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt called Hamas in the early eighties and built it up and funded it to counteract the secular Palestine Liberation Organization with a religious group. Hizbollah arose because the U.S. backed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, killing thousands of Shiites who had no real stake in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The rise of ISIS a generation later is directly attributable to the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003. And Al Qaeda, which preceded it, grew out of U.S. support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded that country in 1979.

 

Aside from the obvious fact that the U.S. is far and away the world leader in committing acts of terrorism, the bungling incompetence at protecting its own declared interests is staggering.

 

Meanwhile, to this day a bipartisan consensus reigns in Washington that the U.S. somehow has the moral standing to judge Teheran for its human rights record. But as is so often the case with imperial moralizing, the crimes of the accused pale in comparison to the horrors perpetrated by those who wish to see them self-righteously judged.

---

[1]All biographical data on Mossadegh is from Stephen Kinzer, “The Brothers – John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, And Their Secret World War,” (Holt, 2013), pps.119-24

[2] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 151

[3] William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S. Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II,” (Common Courage, 1995) p. 70

[4] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 151

[5] William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S. Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II,” (Common Courage, 1995) p. 67

[6] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 153

[7] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books), p. 27

[8] Noam Chomsky, “Towards A New Cold War,” (Pantheon, 1978) p. 99; William Blum, “Killing Hope – U.S/ Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995) p. 71

[9] Cedric Belfrage, “The American Inquisition 1945-1960,” (Monthly Review, 1973)  p. 202

[10] Arash Norouzi, “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you,” www.mohammadmossadegh.com

[11] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 30

[12]Walter LaFeber, “The American Age – United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750,”(Norton, 1989) pps. 659-61

[13] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 29.

[14] Lawrence S. Wittner, “Cold War America – From Hiroshima To Watergate,” (Holt, 1978) p. 393

15 On CIA torture techniques derived from the Nazis and taught to the Shah’s SAVAK, see Noam Chomsky, “Towards A New Cold War,” (Pantheon, 1979) p. 455-6n

[16] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride,” (Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 130; Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, “America Held Hostage,” (Doubleday, 1981) pps. 3-7

[17] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism” (South End, 1979) pps. 64, 292-3

[18] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride, (Simon and Schuster, 1988) pps. 15-37, 275

[19] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 37

[20] Medea Benjamin, “Inside Iran – The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran,” (OR Books, 2018) p. 39

[21] William Shawcross, “The Shah’s Last Ride,” (Simon and Schuster, 1988) p. 278 Khomeini quoted in Clifton Daniel, ed., “Chronicle of America,” (DK Publishing, 1997) p. 865

[22] Edward Said, “Covering Islam,” (Vintage, 1981) pps. 95-133 passim

[23] Robert Fisk, “The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East,” (Knopf, 2005) pps. 210-12

[24] Edward S. Herman, “Beyond Hypocrisy – Decoding The News In An Age of Propaganda,” (Common Courage, 1992) pps, 31-2. See also, Alexander Cockburn, “Corruptions of Empire,” (Verso, 1988) pps. 515-18, and Noam Chomsky, “Class Warfare,” (Common Courage, 1996) pps. 89-90. For a very detailed account, see Robert Fisk, “The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East,” (Knopf 2005) Chapter 8.

Trump, Cornered By Netanyau

Hours after Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire agreed upon with Iran as an initial step toward negotiating a lasting peace treaty - Tel Aviv launched more than one hundred attacks against civilian targets in Lebanon, resulting in the killing of at least 250 people and leaving thousands wounded. According to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in the Levantine nation, Imran Riza, "whatever the current figures may be, they are going to be much higher," due to the devastation of residential areas and the limitations of healthcare services, which have been decimated by Beirut's internal turmoil and half a century of intermittent Israeli aggression.

 

In response, Teheran pointed out that the pause in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is part of the 10-point peace plan agreed upon with Trump. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi warned Washington that it must choose between respecting the ceasefire or continuing the war by proxy through Israel, as a truce is incompatible with the massacre of defenseless civilians. Furthermore, the Iranian Parliament denounced that, even before the commencement of peace talks, the United States had already violated at least three of the ten points that the Republican had publicly acknowledged as a viable basis for negotiation. However, Trump reneged on his prior commitment: he asserted that Israel's acts of aggression against Lebanon constituted "a separate skirmish" and stated that this was not the issue.

 

From any standpoint it is evident that the resurgence of Israeli sadism against the Lebanese people constitutes a deliberate act of sabotage against negotiations with Iran, as noted by Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Secretary General of the Arab League. The weight of this assertion rests not only on the interest of the Arab petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf in bringing an end to the conflict, but also on the fact that this multilateral body harbors no sympathy whatsoever toward Teheran; on the contrary, it maintains a tense relationship with the Islamic Republic for religious, historical, and geopolitical reasons.

 

It is clear that the regime led by Benjamin Netanyahu - a fugitive from the International Criminal Court - stands today as the foremost agent of global destabilization and the most insidious instigator of wars and violations of international law, displaying absolutely no scruples in carrying out indiscriminate massacres whenever it deems such actions to yield some political or personal benefit. For years, its objectives appeared to align with those of Trump and his family; however, it has become increasingly difficult to conceal the growing divergence between the Zionist regime's plans for perpetual war and the occupant of the White House's urgent desire to extricate himself from a military campaign that was already unpopular before devolving into the resounding and irreversible failure it has become at this juncture.

 

For a long time critics of Zionism have maintained that the relationship between the global superpower and Tel Aviv is a rare instance of "the tail wagging the dog"; yet, this notion has been dismissed as a conspiracy theory rooted in animosity toward Israel. However, given the manner in which Trump is repeatedly compelled to embrace actions taken by Netanyahu - actions that are clearly burdensome to him and of which he appears not to have even been informed - it is inevitable to wonder what the source of the latter's influence over the former truly is, and to what extent the tycoon has accelerated the collapse of U.S. hegemony in order to serve the agenda of the most recalcitrant Zionism.

 

-----La Jornada editorial, April 9, 2026 (translated from Spanish)

Iran Defeats Trump

Minutes before his umpteenth ultimatum expired yesterday - the threat to annihilate Iran and its underlying Persian civilization - Donald Trump announced a cease fire, conditioned on Teheran opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was only closed in the first place because the U.S. and Israel had attacked the country without provocation. The Trump administration agreed to allow the ten conditions established by the Iranian government to end the conflict to be "a viable basis for negotiation," a major concession on its part, given that they stipulated the recognition of Iran's control over the Strait, as well as the establishment of "a secure and negotiated transit protocol," both conditions flying in the face of Washington's longstanding presumption of unilateral authority to control access to the Middle East's vast energy reserves.*

 

Had Trump not found himself in an increasingly untenable situation both internationally and at home, he would not have caved as he did. Among the points he accepted as the basis for negotiation were the immediate cessation of military aggression by Washington and Tel Aviv against Iran's allies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the Persian Gulf region; the lifting of international sanctions that have been imposed on the Islamic Republic; reparations for damages inflicted by Israeli-American bombardments; the unfreezing of Iranian funds and assets held abroad that have been confiscated by Western nations - particularly the United States; and the recognition of the legitimacy of the program for the peaceful development of nuclear energy undertaken by Teheran, which requires a certain degree of uranium enrichment. Of all of these points, only the last one can be portrayed by Trump as a concession on Iran's part, and frankly a superfluous one, since the Islamic Republic has consistently refused to manufacture nuclear weapons and therefore poses no threat of international proliferation. The remaining conditions represent a total Trump defeat across the board, no matter how strenuously he tries to present the ceasefire as the product of negotiating savvy, which he simply does not possess.

 

This outcome - temporary and uncertain - like everything that has to do with Trump - highlights the contrast between the defensive strategic intelligence carefully constructed for decades by Iran, and Trump's impulsive, idiotic, and improvised wargasm, lacking any visible purpose other than to help suicidal Israel try to impose Jewish supremacy throughout the Middle East. It also throws into relief the rapidly dwindling popular support of the Republican president juxtaposed to the admirable national cohesion of the Iranian people.

 

Indeed, the attacked country, in Trump's mind eager to applaud the attack in the name of national liberation, delivered to its tormenters and the world an admirable and quite moving lesson in integrity and courage: millions volunteered to defend their country and hundreds of thousands formed human chains to safeguard the power plants, bridges, electrical substations, desalination plants and critical civilian infrastructure marked as targets for the genocidal bombardments Trump had threatened to carry out.

 

The obvious agency and will to resist of the Iranian people demolishes the demonized caricature of them as crazed terrorists that the U.S. has repeatedly thrown in their faces since they chose to assert their national independence (1979) after twenty-five years of misery as a U.S. client state. 

 

 

*For good background on this point, see "History's 'Greatest Prize'" in Noam Chomsky "World Orders Old And New," (Columbia University Press, 1994) Chapter 3

 

Source:

"Trump, Defeated by Iran," La Jornada, April 8, 2026 (Spanish)

Trump Promises "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight" If Iran Does Not Capitulate

"They don't want to cry uncle, but they will."

------President Donald Trump, on Iran

As Carlos Fernandez Vega observed yesterday in the Mexico City daily La Jornada, any serious attempt to solve what's almost proverbially called the current crisis in the Middle East would have to start by locking up Donald Trump in an insane asylum and dispatching Benjamin Netanyahu to a maximum security prison for life.

 

The unaccustomed public humiliation of the reality TV vulgarian in being unable to win the unprovoked war with Iran he and Netanyahu foolishly launched on February 28 has taken him to the point of thrashing around like a drowning man while pretending to walk on solid ground. His "victory in two days" prediction was quickly revealed to be laughably wide of the mark, and since then he has behaved increasingly like a crazed lunatic, issuing contradictory announcements and appalling snap judgments that not only don't open up avenues towards peace, but actually re-inflame the already highly combustible conflict. 

Among recent statements, for example, Trump said, in relation to the possibility of a cease fire (which Teheran flatly rejected), that "it's possible we'll reach an agreement, because Iran wants one more than me," while leaving others in charge of re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, "because we don't need the oil" that passes through there. That was followed by an expletive-laced rant on Easter ("open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell") promising to wipe out all the power plants and bridges in the country if Iran doesn't surrender, an apparent re-iteration of his threat to bomb the country back "to the Stone Ages," where he says the Persian nation belongs. ("Vile on every level," said Tucker Carlson in reaction.) 

In the midst of contradictory messages and unhinged rants Trump fired the highest ranking official in the armed forces, bombarded a nuclear plant (dedicated only to legally allowed electricity generation), and bombed schools, private homes, food factories, bridges and the rest of Iran's civilian infrastructure, achieving nothing strategically, but reinforcing his status as an international mass murderer, the same as Netanyahu in Gaza and now Southern Lebanon.

 

Iran's response to all this arrived promptly: the Foreign Affairs Minister condemned the American attacks on the civil infrastructure of his country, and affirmed: "You will not make the Iranian population give in. Those attacks only communicate the defeat and moral collapse of an enemy submerged in chaos; each bridge and building will be re-built stronger than before and the true loss will be borne by Washington; which will never recover from the damage done to the prestige of the United States." In addition, he went on, "the Strait of Hormuz is still open and is only closed to those ships from enemy countries, and there is no reason for them to pass through the Strait; we have permitted passage to those we consider friends."

 

Trump's threats, he emphasized, "are an indication of a criminal mentality and are tantamount to an incitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity; to threaten with attacking the critical infrastructure of a country, the energy sector, would mean that he wants to put the entire population at risk; this is criminal." In case there's any doubt, the Armed Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran warned that the Strait of Hormuz "will never go back to being what it was, especially for the United States and Israel; it's the true arm of Iran; we are completing operational preparations for a new order in the Persian Gulf." 

In other words, international peace can't be left in the hands of chaos agents like Trump and his Israeli puppet-master, and as long as there is no, "until when?" in the picture, global instability can only continue to grow. Until when, then?

 

Obeying the capitalist imperative, Trump socializes the costs and privatizes the gains in his aggression against Iran. The oil companies are feasting on gains provided by a near sixty percent rise in the price of crude oil since the war began, the largest upturn in history. According to experts, the beneficiaries are tycoons that supported Donald Trump for president. 

 

Par for the course.

 

Meanwhile, Trump held a press conference last night, during which he (1) celebrated robbing Venezuelan oil while suggesting that he could be the next president of that country due to the popular support he imagines he has there (2) said that Putin is afraid of him (3) threatened to jail journalists that refuse to reveal their sources.

 

Insane, or Trump being Trump, or both? You be the judge.

Here's his complete tweet from this morning:

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World, 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

 

-----Donald Trump, April 7, 2026

 

 

Sources:

Carlos Fernandez Vega, "México, Inc." (Spanish), La Jornada, April 6, 2026

"Trump, 79, Drops F-Bomb in Unhinged Easter Morning Threat," The Daily Beast, April 5, 2026 

Owen Jones, "Trump Threatens Nuclear Attack on Iran," You Tube, April 7, 2026

Aaron Bastani, Novara Live, April 7, 2026

 

 

 

Jonathan Kozol and the Struggle Against U.S. Apartheid

We are the dust beneath your feet. We are the flowers that never bloom.

------Beggars in Bombay ¹

Although bookshelves groan under the weight of tracts about U.S. racism, no one's writings on the topic are more unsettling than Jonathan Kozol's. He is among our greatest and most eloquent dissenters. He writes not from studied objectivity but with an impassioned conviction that sears the conscience and haunts the soul. His books, once read, stay with you; his insights, once seen, can never again be unseen. Horrors we once attributed to happenstance or personal failure are revealed by Kozol for what they are: our society's deliberate punishment of innocent poor people, whose very existence reminds us of moral failures we prefer to imagine do not exist.

Son of a doctor, raised in Boston, Kozol majored in English literature at Harvard, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. When he got to the elite university he felt as though he'd already been through the experience, as everybody at Harvard had spoken in a phony Oxford accent. Bored, he abandoned the scholarship and went to Paris, spending a couple of years trying to learn how to write from top-flight authors there at the time, including Richard Wright, William Styron, and James Baldwin.

He returned to the United States with the intention of going to graduate school and becoming an English professor, a career he says he "would have loved," but dramatic political events in 1964 brought a different destiny to the fore.

That summer, thousands of young civil rights workers - black and white - poured into Mississippi with the intention of breaking the back of segregation in the state. Three among them - James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman - went ahead of the rest to locate churches and other places where poor people could be taught to read and write well enough to register to vote. They were arrested in Philadelphia, Mississippi and released from jail late at night, then taken into the woods and shot to death by a group of men, including the deputy sheriff who had arrested them. Buried in an earthen dam, their bodies were not discovered until weeks later.

Black people had disappeared many times before without provoking a public response. But this time the three who went missing were a mixed-race group, and a wave of public alarm spread across the country at news of its disappearance. Young people in particular felt an urge to do something.

The day Kozol was supposed to enroll in graduate school at Cambridge, he got in his car and drove to South Boston instead. Entering a black church, he asked the minister, "May I be of use?" The minister replied, "Yes, you can, young man," and congratulated him for realizing that one did not need to go all the way to Mississippi to find black people who needed his help. He told Kozol he could help black children learn to read right there in Boston.

Kozol worked briefly as a volunteer tutor in the church program and then applied to be a substitute teacher in Boston, a move his father cautioned him was a waste of his Rhodes Scholarship. His first assignment was a fourth grade class of thirty-five students (two-thirds black) that had had a string of substitutes all year, and studied in the corner of an auditorium, as there were not enough classrooms to go around.²

Kozol quickly discovered that his students were far short of where they were supposed to be academically: nearly a third of the class read two years behind grade level, and on the first math test, the class average was 36%.³ And the children were frankly wary of Kozol, wondering if he, too, would soon abandon them like all the other teachers had.

One shy student began mumbling to himself and was sent to the assistant principal in the school basement, who beat him with a bamboo whip.* Kozol's colleagues told him to go to the teacher supply store and get his own whip. He went, and verified that whips were indeed a classroom management tool available for purchase right next to the blackboard pointers. A fellow-teacher instructed him on how to properly use one: "Leave it (the whip) overnight in vinegar or water if you want it to really sting the hands." 

The cruelty was more than a perverse professional duty. Kozol wrote that there were times when "the visible glint of gratification becomes undeniable" in the eyes of the teacher using the whip, as it undoubtedly also had in the eyes of slave-masters down through the generations.⁴ (Sadly, over sixty years later Kozol reports that physical beatings continue in many states.)⁵

In spite of the shockingly common physical and psychological abuse, Kozol learned that he was expected to pretend that everything was fine at the school.

"You children should thank God and feel blessed with good luck for all you've got," his colleagues preached. "There are so many little children in the world who have been given so much less."

Kozol jotted in his notes why the claim was preposterous: "The books are junk, the paint peels, the cellar stinks, the teachers call you nigger, and the windows fall in on your heads," the latter a reference to a window that fell out of its rotting frame while he was teaching one day, and which Kozol quickly grabbed, a heads-up reaction that "very possibly preserved the original shapes of half a dozen of their heads," he wrote later.⁶

Given such conditions, the children were naturally distrustful, and it took Kozol until spring to win them over. Eager to spark their interest in anything, it occurred to him that there was nothing relevant to their lives in the boring textbook he had been assigned to teach from. Almost all the faces shown in the book were white, a monotony broken only occasionally by a lightly tan face.

Determined to find some way to engage the students, he went to the Cambridge library and checked out a book of poems by Langston Hughes and brought it to class. He read several of the poems aloud, including "Ballad of the Landlord," a defiant verse depicting slum conditions with raw honesty. In response, a girl Kozol had been unable to reach all year, promptly got up from her seat, walked almost the entire perimeter of the classroom to arrive where Kozol was, then gently caressed his shoulder and said, "Thank you," before asking him if she could borrow the book overnight. That night, the girl memorized the poem, came back to class the next day and recited it to her classmates, reducing them to tears. 

A day after that, Kozol was unceremoniously fired, an event that made headlines in the Boston Globe - "Rhodes Scholar fired!" He was not even allowed to say goodbye to his students. The cause of termination was "curriculum deviation," as Langston Hughes was considered "inappropriate" material for fourth grade students, and "Ballad of the Landlord" was not on the approved list of poems.

"No poetry that described suffering was felt to be suitable," Kozol wrote later, nor was "Negro dialect" considered appropriate in an English class.⁷ A school official told Kozol that his offense was so serious that he would never again be hired to teach in a Boston public school.

The parents of Kozol's students were outraged, partly out of loyalty to him, but also because of the Langston Hughes incident. They and Kozol founded a Free School the following year, run by the mothers, with Kozol as head teacher.

Kozol's next public school position was in Newton, an attractive suburb where many of his new colleagues were fine teachers directed by an accomplished principal, and all enjoyed much more attractive physical surroundings than anything he had seen in Roxbury. Still, Kozol missed the depth of involvement he had experienced his first year, and found he wanted to return to Roxbury. So in 1965 he moved there, describing his new neighborhood a decade later in the pages of The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home: 

"Twenty thousand people live here. With the exception of two redeveloped and well-demarcated sections of the district, most of the residents are Puerto Rican, black, poor-white, Chinese or Lebanese. In one direction or another, it encompasses approximately fifty square blocks. Many buildings have been boarded up; some are still partly occupied, one or two families camping out in partly heated rooms. There are many broken-down rooming houses, crumbling brownstones, urine-smelling city welfare-projects. In the alleyways and on the fringes of this neighborhood there are large numbers of poor derelicts; solitary men and penniless old women, dozens of whom die along the sidewalks or between the cars each winter, two thousand heroin addicts and four thousand homeless men, many of them alcoholics who live on the cheapest brand of sweet wine. The largest numbers, though, are neither derelicts nor alcoholics. They are the poor, the black, the undefended."⁸

In surroundings such as these, Kozol could not avoid a constant and painful confrontation between his own class background and that of the mass of poor people who lived all around him. It took all of his considerable literary talent to describe this loss of innocence, but he did so brilliantly, as in this haunting passage:

"BOSTON, BLUE HILL AVENUE, TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS: A child falls down in the middle of Grove Hall. She is epileptic, but her sickness either has not yet been diagnosed or else (more probable) it has been diagnosed, but never treated. Tall and thin, fourteen years old, she is intense and sober, devastated but unhating. Her life is a staccato sequence of grand mal convulsions: no money, no assistance, no advice on how to get a refill of expensive script for more Dilantin and more phenobarbital. 

"This night, she comes downstairs into the office where I work within the coat-room underneath the church-stairs of a Free School: standing there and asking me please if I would close the door and hold her head within my arms because she knows that she is going to have an epileptic seizure; and closing the door and sitting down upon the cold cement while she lies down and places her head within my arms and starts to shudder violently and moves about so that I scarcely can protect her wracked and thin young body from the cement wall and from the concrete floor; and seeing her mouth writhe up with pain and spittle, and feeling her thrash about a second time and now a third; and, in between, the terror closing in upon her as in a child's bad dream that you can't get out of, and watching her then, and wondering what she undergoes; and later seeing her, exhausted, sleeping there, right in my arms, as at the end of long ordeal, all passion in her spent; then taking her out into my car and driving with her to the City Hospital while she, as epileptics very often feel, keeps saying that she is going to have another seizure; and slamming on the brakes and walking with her in the back door where they receive out-patient cases, and being confronted on this winter night at nine P.M. in Boston in the year of 1965 with a scene that comes from Dante's Purgatory: dozens and dozens of poor white, black and Puerto Rican people, infants and mothers, old men, alcoholics, men with hands wrapped up in gauze, and aged people trembling, infants trembling with fever; one hostile woman in white uniform behind the table telling us, out of a face made, as it seems, of clay, that we should fill an application out, some sort of form, a small white sheet, then sit out in the hallway since the waiting room is full; and then to try to say this child has just had several seizures in a row and needs treatment, and do we need to do the form; and yes, of course you need to do the form and wait your turn and not think you have any special right to come ahead of someone else who has been sitting here before you.

"Two hours and four seizures later, you get up and go in and shout in her cold eyes and walk right by and grab an intern and tell him to come out and be a doctor to an epileptic child sitting like a damp rag in the hallway; and he comes out, and in two minutes gives this child an injection that arrests the seizures and sedates her, then writes the script for more Dilantin and for phenobarbitol and shakes his head and says to you that it's a damn shame: 'Nobody needs to have en epileptic seizure in this day and age . . . Nobody but a poor black nigger,' says the intern in a sudden instant of that rage that truth and decency create. He nearly cries, and in his eyes you see a kind of burning pain that tells you that he is a good man somehow, deep-down, someplace where it isn't all cold stone, clean surgery and antiseptic reason: 'Nobody but a poor black nigger needs to have an epileptic seizure anymore.'

"So you take her home and you go back to the church, down to the office beneath the stairs, and look at the floor, and listen to the silence, and you are twenty-eight years old, and you begin to cry; you cry for horror of what that young girl has just been through; and you long not to believe that this can be the city that you really live in. You fight very hard to lock up that idea because it threatens all the things that you have wanted to believe for so long; so you sit alone a while and you try to lock these bitter passions into secret spaces of your self-control. You try to decontaminate your anger and to organize your rage; but you can't do it this time; you just can't build that barrier of logical control a second time. It's eleven o'clock now, and soon it's quarter of twelve; and it's cold as stone down here beneath the wooden underside of the church-stairs, and still you can't stop trembling. Grand mal, you think to yourself, means a great evil; it's twelve-fifteen and now you are no longer crying so you get up and you lock the door of the coat-closet which is the office of a Free School underneath the church-stairs; and you go up the stairs and turn out the light and then you close the door."⁹

Kozol stayed in Roxbury long term, honoring the loyalties he had formed in his first teaching year, and continuing what would become a life-long battle against poverty and educational apartheid. In fact, he formed loyalties wherever he could find them in the struggle against such evils, in the 1970s even traveling to Cuba to learn about the island's astonishing success in its 1961 literacy campaign, which reduced Cuban illiteracy to under five percent in nine months, while the Latin American median remained 32.5%.¹⁰ An appreciative Kozol commented: “Cuba's triumph in the eradication of illiteracy . . . exceeded anything that has to this day been achieved by any other nation in the world.”¹¹

The means employed were as impressive as the outcome. Thousands of Cuban children spent most of a year risking their lives and working like demons while living on six hours sleep a night in the same houses and sometimes even the same rooms as some of the poorest peasants in the country, their hammocks slung above dirt floors. This remarkable story Kozol published in “Children of the Revolution – A Yankee Teacher In The Cuban Schools” in 1978.

“Cuba had been weakened for centuries,” he wrote, “by the isolation of the peasants and the consequent inability of urban students to identify with rural poverty and exploitation.” Building a sense of solidarity between these two groups was both a goal and consequence of the literacy campaign.¹²

As he did in all his works, Kozol sought out usually unheard voices and let them speak for themselves. One of those he spoke to in Cuba was Armando Valdez, a twelve-year-old “teacher” who participated in the literacy campaign and later became a member of the Cuban foreign service: “I never could have known that people lived in such conditions,” Valdez told him. “I was the child of an educated, comfortable family. Those months, for me, were like the stories I have heard about conversion to a new religion. It was, for me, the dying of an old life, and the start of something absolutely new. I cried, although I had been taught men must not cry, when I first saw the desperation of those people – people who had so little . . . No, they did not have 'so little,' they had nothing!”¹³

Contrast this painful but valuable insight with Kozol's remarkable description of how the vast majority of Americans are trained to never see poverty at all:

“There is one city in North Africa I know which never has found its way into the textbooks issued to the children in the U.S. schools. It is a city that has, for several decades, been a diplomatic colony – almost a military outpost – of the U.S. government. Each morning, U.S. diplomats and businessmen and military attaches, their wives and children come out from the hotel doorway and proceed across the city square. Outside the hotel, in a long, long line of silence, patience and despair, are dozens of very old and often crippled people, wrapped all in white, the women in white veils as well, and often with a quite small child standing at the side of mother or grandfather.

“At eight A.M., as the sun comes up above the city square, the oldest people will be standing straight with palm outstretched before them, the other hand resting gently on the child's head, the child's palm outstretched as well. By twelve o'clock, the oldest people start to bend somewhat, forehead declined beneath the heat of noon, eyes closing slightly. By night, the old, old people are asleep, or half-asleep, asleep in pain, in fixed and frightening immobility there against the long white silence of the wall beneath the evening heat.

“The Americans pass, and pass again, as they go to and fro in crisp bright jackets, seersucker and cord, attractive people, clever and adept, graceful and well-tailored in the modulation of their own compassionate reactions. Children at times will pull their mother's or their father's arm, or cry, or shudder, or in other ways react to what they see. Mother is cool and calm, well-bred and cleanly limbed and neatly dressed for travel. Father is concerned about his government assignment or his business plans.

“At midnight often, when the hotel guests return from various places they have been, voices shrill and bright with good delight and memory of fine colonial service in some French or British club, the old blind beggars have fallen down the full length of the wall, unspeaking, uncomplaining and, but for the slow decline along that wall, unmoving since the dawn. Crouched, huddled now, stooped over, bent in one white triangle of silence, anaesthesia and oblivion, the beggar slumbers at the bottom of the day's long journey downward while infant, borrowed companion or grandchild sleeps as well, curled up against the older person's side, sores on forehead, scars and scabs and growths all over legs and arms, feet filthy, small toes bare, but hand still open, outstretched still, with palm still pleading even in the sleep of midnight on this silent street, where only the attractive young Americans from New York or from San Francisco might still chance to come by once, and shudder once, then to move on to customary and appropriate places of refined and air-conditioned slumber.

“The child, unsophisticated, cries or questions. His parents, better instructed in the disciplines of North American adulthood, know well by now how to control their sense of unrest and to keep on with the evening's pleasure. If they ever stop to think about this street of misery at all, it might be only to persuade themselves that what they see before them is, in some way, spurious or inauthentic: a trick to fool the heart or to subvert the mind. In any event, they can assure themselves that grief and pain of this variety and on this scale are unrelated to the world of glass and steel in which they work and dwell.

“At worst, it is a matter of marginally perceived despair that is permitted to exist somehow within the same world as seersucker and fresh linen. Connections there are none: causations there are not any. They are Americans: rich, fortunate, well-educated, skillful. These others in the white veils are, admittedly, real people, but not rich, or fortunate, well-educated, skillful. Clean steel edges in the secret places of the well-indoctrinated brain have drawn explicit demarcations. Things break down into acceptable divisions. They are, indeed, well-educated: trained and schooled to logical postures of oblivion and acceptable self-interest. They live in one world: the starving beggars and their desperate children in another. It is a property of reason, of good sense and civilized adulthood, both to respect and understand the space that stands between.”¹⁴

Such obliviousness leads to schizophrenic social policy praising civil rights leaders (in our better moments) while perpetuating an informal segregation not all that different from the Jim Crow version they achieved their fame opposing.  Schools named after champions of integration like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall, Kozol has pointed out for years, invariably denote failing, segregated schools housed in old, filthy, ugly, often rat-infested buildings with the largest class sizes, the lowest funding, the highest turnover of teachers, and the worst outcomes, including the lowest graduation rates. 

A 14-year-old East St. Louis girl Kozol talked to for his book Savage Inequalities told him that it seemed like a "terrible joke" was being played on history: "Every year in February we are told to read the same old speech of Martin Luther King. We read it every year . . . We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King. The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black."¹⁵ Very seldom, comments Kozol, does any member of the capitalist press point out the dark irony in this glaring feature of our “equal opportunity” society.

At the other end of the spectrum are wealthy white kids, who, Kozol has often noted, tend to lose their verbal competence and stumble when serious questions of poverty, inequality, and injustice are on the table for discussion. As long as such topics are treated superficially, as though they were an abstract consideration instead of a matter of humanity and conscience, such students remain clever and adept at expressing their views, which are often glazed over with a "What's in it for us?" cynicism. Kozol warns that such self-interested competence may have been won by sacrificing access to the deepest and perhaps most valuable parts of their being: "The verbal competence they have acquired here may have been gained by building walls around some regions of the heart," he says.¹⁶

No such walling oneself off from pain is possible for poor people. When Kozol once asked an 11-year-old girl in the South Bronx how AIDS orphans handle their ordeal, she replied softly, but without hesitation: "They cry. They suffer. People die. They pray."¹⁷

James Baldwin once noted that the U.S. originally needed black people “for labor and for sport,” but that, “now they can't get rid of us.” The urge to be rid of the “problem” of race relations by warehousing black and brown bodies in ghettoes far from affluent areas puts the exploitation well out of sight and completely out of mind, a great convenience for a capitalist social order that does not want to be reminded of the cost of making profit the only goal that counts. A 16-year-old girl Kozol spoke to in the South Bronx for his book Amazing Grace said she thought white people would actually feel relieved if all the poor people died or somehow vanished. Another teenager ventured his opinion that the hideous conditions of the ghetto might even be viewed optimistically by whites, in hopes that,"maybe they'll kill each other off."¹⁸

"A sense of justified and prophetic rage," says Kozol, is voiced freely by Harlem kids, but never by the press, which prefers to refer to "racial sensitivities" and "racial tensions," but not exploitation and injustice.¹⁹ In this, the kids are more straightforward than the journalists, who know that successful careers are not built on exposing official lies about American apartheid.

Ironically, Kozol never had children of his own, though his love for them is palpable and he has spent his life among the most vulnerable of them. Some of those he befriended years ago who survived the ordeal he writes so eloquently about, today help him out in his old age, undoubtedly a great blessing for a man who turns ninety in September. Meanwhile, Kozol will publish one final book - We Shall Not Bow Down - later this month.

This is what solidarity looks like - not slogans or ideological fights - but sensible people banding together and solving their common problems with courage and intelligence. As poverty widens amidst capitalism's ever-accelerating barbarism, few lessons seem quite so important to remember.

 

*A quarter-century after publishing Death At An Early Age, Kozol provided an update on this boy in Savage Inequalities, who was an eight-year old orphan in 1965. Never given psychiatric care or counseling, he was repeatedly whipped. He had one delightful talent - drawing pictures - which the art teacher at the school shredded in front of the class while saying, "he muddies his pants." In response, the humiliated boy stabbed a pencil point into his hand. Seven years later he was an alcoholic living on the streets, demonically laughing at passersby. Three years after that he was in jail, his face "scarred and ugly," Kozol wrote, his head marked with jagged lines where it had been badly stitched together after being shattered by a baseball bat. He was serving a 20-year sentence for murder.

Footnotes

1Jonathan Kozol, “Letters To A Young Teacher,” (Crown, 2007) p. 61

2Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967) p. 29

3Kozol, ibid, p. 190

4Kozol, ibid, p. 18

5Jonathan Kozol, “An End To Inequality,” (New Press, 2024) pps. xiv, 35-39

6Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967) pps. 32-3

7Kozol, ibid, p. 202

8Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975) p. 41

9Kozol, ibid, pps. 59-61

10Jonathan Kozol, “Children of the Revolution,” (Delacorte Press, 1978) p. 54

11Kozol, ibid, p. 49

12Kozol, ibid, p. 22

13Kozol, ibid, p. 22

14Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark And I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975) pps. 36-7

 

15Jonathan Kozol, “Savage Inequalities,” (Crown, 1991) pps. 34-5

16Kozol, ibid, p. 127

17Jonathan Kozol, “Amazing Grace,” (Crown, 1995) p. 131

18Kozol, ibid, p. 40

19Kozol, ibid, p. 42

Sources

Jonathan Kozol, "The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," Portland Oregon, September 30, 2005

Source: "Social Justice In Education with Jonathan Kozol," DePaul College of Education, November 7, 2017

“Beyond Divides: A Conversation With Author Jonathan Kozol,” www.appleseednetwork.org April 24, 2024

Jonathan Kozol, “Death At An Early Age,” (Bantam, 1967)

Jonathan Kozol, “The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home,” (Continuum, 1975)

Jonathan Kozol, “An End To Inequality,” (New Press, 2024)

Jonathan Kozol, “Children of the Revolution,” (Delacorte Press, 1978)

Jonathan Kozol, “Savage Inequalities,” (Crown, 1991)

Jonathan Kozol, “Letters To A Young Teacher,” (Crown, 2007)

Jonathan Kozol, “Amazing Grace,” (Crown, 1995)