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 know 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)

 

Wholesale Terrorists (U.S. and Israel) Created the Retail Terrorist Problem

It's always good to start by asking the question, "Who started the fighting?" and "Who's in whose back yard?" The people over there (in Iran) are not in our back yard. We're in their back yard - relentlessly - supporting dictatorships, overthrowing regimes, backing Israel to the hilt, all kinds of civilians slaughtered. It was Israel and the United States 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. Well, that obviously backfired. And the rise of ISIS can be attributed to the Bush-Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq, and even Hizbollah arose because we backed Israel's 1982 invasion of Southern Lebanon, killing a lot of Shi'ites who had no real stake in the Palestinian issue in the process. And the Lebanese army was too small to protect them. So, even including the mujahedeen in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded that country (1979) we were behind bolstering and weaponizing them, so why are we creating our own enemies here? The bungling is staggering, and it's staggering into, I think, a clear description of the United States as a state terrorist, and Israel as a state terrorist. Yet, we only call resistance or other violent groups in the Middle East "terrorist." Where would you put the U.S. under the rubric of state terrorism and the same thing with Israel . . .  Would you call them state terrorists?

-----Ralph Nader, March 28, 2026, The Ralph Nader Radio Hour

If The U.S. Couldn't Beat Sandino 100 Years Ago, How Can It Defeat Iran Today?

They never learn. 

In 1912, the United States extracted a huge indemnity from Nicaragua for having the nerve to request that U.S. companies pay taxes. American bankers generously loaned the cost of the indemnity, and Washington dispatched the Marines to compensate for a lack of collateral. Taking over the customs houses, national banks, and railroads, they never got around to leaving.

Fourteen years later General Augusto Cesar Sandino decided to serve an eviction notice, forming Nicaragua's first army of national liberation with twenty-nine illiterate San Albino miners. The men were working fifteen hours a day hacking gold out of the earth for a U.S. company and sleeping jammed together in a shed. When Sandino gave the word they dynamited the mines and followed him into the mountains. 

The patriotic prostitutes of Puerto Cabezas divulged the location of a Marine stash of rifles and cartridges they had learned from pillow talk, and soon the army of liberation had its first arms and ammunition. 

Sandino's men also grabbed rifles from fallen enemies and carved bullets out of tree bark where they had become embedded. Machetes proved useful for chopping off heads, and sardine-can grenades filled with glass, nails, screws and dynamite scattered the enemy efficiently. The State Department accused Sandino of using "the stealthy and ruthless tactics which characterized the savages who fell upon American settlers in our country 150 years ago." 

In short, Washington complained that "the General of Free Men," as Sandino was known in Nicaragua, wasn't conducting his killing in a civilized manner. Sandino's reply indicated he was not one to be easily trolled: "Liberty is not conquered with flowers," he said.

Enjoying overwhelming superiority of force, U.S. bombers blew apart cattle and horses, wrecked crops, and destroyed villages, but Nicaragua's "crazy little army" (Gabriela Mistral) avoided toe-to-toe engagement, biding its time until attack was least expected. Then Sandino and his men would ambush from behind or strike the enemy along its flanks, before vanishing into the jungle unscathed. 

With Nicaragua's army of national liberation growing and winning, thousands of Marines and dozens of warships arrived to bolster Washington's puppet president, Adolfo Diaz, and hunt down the "bandit" Sandino. Yet, of dozens of battles, large and small, the U.S. lost nearly all of them.

For all their firepower, the Marines proved to be no better than sitting ducks. Loaded down with heavy equipment, they stomped wearily through the jungle, baked by the sun, drenched by the rain, choking on dust, wilted by humidity, easy targets for repeated attacks by Sandino's men, who popped out of the brush to slit their throats with alarming regularity. 

Eventually, Washington resorted to a bribe, and let Captain Hatfield hint of surrender.

From his mountain hideout Sandino declined the offer with exquisite courtesy: "I don't sell out or surrender," he wrote, followed by his signature: "Your obedient servant, who desires to put you in a handsome coffin with beautiful bouquets of flowers."   

After years of occupation, U.S. officials dominated Nicaragua from top to bottom and did not want to leave. Clifford D. Ham was comptroller of customs and general tax collector, and also the Nicaraguan correspondent for United Press. Another U.S. official, Irving Lindberg, was the correspondent for the Associated Press. A U.S. colonel headed up the "Nicaraguan" army, a U.S. captain directed the police force, and U.S. Brigadier General Frank McCoy - dubbed by one U.S. newspaper "the Mussolini of Nicaragua" - was in charge of the National Electoral Junta. The elections of 1928 were organized by General Logan Feland, commander of U.S. occupation forces, who had 432 Marines and a dozen U.S. planes on hand to guarantee "security" at the voting tables. 

The year before the elections, President Coolidge requested Colonel Henry L. Stimson visit Nicaragua to see if he could pacify the country behind the puppet Diaz. Stimson spoke no Spanish and regarded Nicaraguans as "like children and unable to maintain the obligations which go with independence." In his view Nicaragua could only escape civil war through revolution, which he discounted, or else "a concentration of practically all the powers of government in presidential dictators," which he regarded as the more reasonable option.

Stimson managed to get all warring Nicaraguan factions to lay down their arms - except Sandino - who he made the mistake of ignoring. Sharing the racist view that whites occupied the top rung on the world's racial ladder, he failed to take the proper measure of his adversary and the people who overwhelmingly supported him. 

"Sandino is a man of the people, and therefore nothing better than a bandit," he said simply.

By 1928, Sandino was big news in the United States. The Washington Herald devoted pages to covering his "outlaw band." With the U.S. suffering high troop losses and the war costing taxpayers millions, the U.S. faced increasing criticism at home. Montana Senator Burton Wheeler suggested that Chicago was a more appropriate location for fighting bandits than Nicaragua was. Another critic wrote that if Washington thought it could establish democratic elections so easily it might try its hand in corrupt Philadelphia. A U.S. businessman complained that U.S. policy "has proved a calamity for the American coffee planters . . . Today we are hated and despised" because the Marines were sent "to hunt down and kill Nicaraguans in their own country."

Four years later Sandino triumphantly entered the capital Managua, causing the U.S. occupation forces to fall back in disarray. On the first day of 1933, the U.S. packed up its ships and planes and left Nicaragua. 

That's what happened when Washington tried to occupy and govern a small republic with virtually no military in the U.S.'s "backyard." What are the chances it can now successfully take over a large West Asian nation of ninety-three million people armed with tens or hundreds of thousands of missiles and drones?

Sources:

Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel - The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950 (Knopf, 1990) pps. 108-10, 119, 172; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side - The United States & Right Wing Dictatorships (University of North Carolina, 1999), pps. 50-55; Walter LaFeber, The American Age, (W. W. Norton, 1989) pps. 246, 342-4 Peter Davis, Where Is Nicaragua?, (Simon and Schuster, 1987) p. 27 Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, vol 3, (Pantheon, 1988) pps. 19, 62, 68-71

 

 

Rape and Mass Hysteria

 "The hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women . . . has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder."

----Noam Chomsky, e-mail to Jeffrey Epstein, February 23, 2019

 

The critique of feminist hysteria below was written by Janice Fiamengo, a retired professor of literature who worked at the University of Ottawa until cancel culture made the career she had eagerly sought and long loved no longer enjoyable. Before she entered academia she was a radical feminist (1990s) and animal rights crusader who dreamed of  heroic "resistance" actions to set tortured animals free. She had a sea change after 911, deeply troubled by the complete lack of sympathy for the American victims she witnessed among her colleagues, many of whom could think only of how to immediately use the tragedy to promote favored political ideologies in the classroom. Since then, Fiamengo has become a full-blown anti-feminist crusader. For over ten years now she has published The Fiamengo File (with Steve Brule), a prolonged but very dispassionate debunking of feminist actions and ideology going back to the very founding of modern feminism in Seneca Falls (1848).

The piece that follows is from 2016, a year after Noam Chomsky became friends with Jeffrey Epstein, so it offers good background for Chomsky's comment (quoted above) about hysteria and sexual abuse. One could certainly quibble with the claim of Clarence Thomas's alleged brilliance or the "generosity" of men in general, but the general thrust of the piece shows considerable insight.

Feminist Mass Hysteria, The Fiamengo File, Episode 42, September 8, 2016

by Janice Fiamengo

Reading news stories about our culture of rape, misogyny, objectification and sexual harassment I often feel that either I am crazy or some significant portion of our society is. Is it possible that feminism is actually a form of mass hysteria? That's my subject on today's Fiamengo File. 

I'm Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa, and welcome to Season 3 of the Fiamengo File, where we'll continue to explore our current bizarre and often horrifying cultural moment, in which the very foundations of our civilization are in peril. This is a time when the National Organization For Women, which bills itself as the largest grassroots women's organization in America can give its woman of courage award to Emma Sulcowicz,* a messed-up young woman who has made rape claims, rape falsehoods, and rape fantasies her life's work. This is a time when thousands of women and men in Canada can claim to know that media personality Jian Ghomeshi, accused of sexual assault, deserved to rot in prison despite irrefutable evidence that his three accusers had lied repeatedly in court and to the police. It's a time when over a million people in the United States signed a petition to recall the supposedly too lenient Stanford rape trial judge in a case about which most commentators knew nothing beside a few inaccurate headlines. It's a time when a wealthy British actress (Souad Faress) can accuse a commuter of sexually assaulting her in a busy London underground station in the split second in which he walked past, not even breaking stride, a literally unimaginable crime, but the police and prosecutors pursued the case to the bitter end. Thank God Mark Pearson was at last acquitted.

Meanwhile, sexual harassment, now a major concern of university and workplace policy has been defined so broadly by the American Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it can literally include anything a man says or does if the woman claims it made her feel uncomfortable. Surely this is far more than a rational political movement that is occasionally taken too far, as some say. Surely this movement is irrational to its core. Such will be our subject over the next episodes with a special focus on university campuses, because we know that what happens at the university doesn't stay at the university.

Recently, I was re-reading Jessica Valenti's New York Times article titled, "What Does A Lifetime of Leers Do To Us?" And I was trying to figure out, "What is wrong with a woman as successful and influential as Valenti that she views her entire life through a lens of undeserved sexualized suffering? Valenti acknowledges in the article that feminism has made many gains for women, but she rejects the possibility or even the desirability of moving past what sexism has, as she says, done to us. In her opinion, feminists need to dwell a lot longer on the misery of being female.

Valenti claims to be speaking for all women, not just herself, in a characterization that's not at all unusual in contemporary feminism. To be female is to be dehumanized, she asserts. She describes how she used to take the subway to school in Queens, New York, when she was growing up, and was frequently groped and saw men exposing themselves. But it didn't end then, she assures us. It goes on and on, and it's never just one incident or one threatening man, it's a continuous panorama of full-on misogyny, decades of what she calls, "gendered trauma," constantly chipping away at her "sense of safety and sense of self."

Merely to exist as a full human being in such a hateful culture is a perilous struggle. It's typical that none of the experiences that Valenti names, even the explicit ones, can ever be verified. We are simply to accept her word that she was groped at least a dozen times, that her high school teacher tried to date her, that an ex-boyfriend wrote "whore" on her dorm room door, that she is daily threatened with rape on Twitter, and so on. And we are to accept that such are other women's experiences, too. If this is a con job, it's a successful one, for these stories of victimhood leave most critics speechless with discomfort. How dare we question a woman's experience.

Every time I've given a talk at a university, I've been assailed afterwards by university-age girls telling me of the intolerable reality of their trauma, how they can't walk from their front door to the bus stop without being catcalled, their constant exposure to male sexual attention.

Such stories are as predictable as they are, frankly, completely unbelievable. I've looked for it, believe me, and I can't find it. I have never witnessed the behavior described on anything like the scale asserted. I've never had a friend who had to run a gauntlet of male leers. And the account bears no relation to my own experience from the time I was a young girl until now. Walking down the street, riding public transit, attending school, working at various secretarial jobs, I knew there was no generalized sexual threat. If I felt someone looking at me, it didn't feel like a violation. If I was complimented it didn't feel demeaning. Yeah, I was sometimes embarrassed or irritated by certain comments, but I didn't feel diminished in my very soul.

And I hasten to say that I didn't lead a particularly sheltered life. I went to an ordinary public school in a working class area. I hung out for years at a roller skating rink frequented by rebellious kids, and I got into more than my share of trouble and took way too many risks, so I had some bad experiences, as most people do, but none of them determined who I am, in a society where women have never been so free or so protected. So why do so many girls and women feel compelled to tell sad stories like Valenti's and to make that the definitive reality of their lives?

There are a few possible explanations. One, perhaps my experience was unusual. Maybe it just happened that men exempted me and all my friends from their catcalling and their harassment. They took out their sexual aggression on others and always when I was out of range. This is a possibility, but it seems highly unlikely. 

Two, perhaps the women who tell their victim stories are simply exaggerating, overplaying a few minor incidents in order to reap the rewards that come to victims in our culture, all that sympathy. This may account for some of the victim obsession that I've encountered, but it doesn't seem to account for it all. So many of these women, Valenti included, don't seem to be enjoying themselves, despite living lives that, by any measure, are incredibly safe and prosperous, thanks largely to the brilliance and generosity of men, of course. But these women's pain and their anger, especially their anger, they seem too genuine to be a mere conscious exaggeraton.

Which brings me to the third explanation. Which is the possibility that a significant portion of these women, especially those who obsess over their injuries so unrelentingly, are actually experiencing a form of low level hysteria spread across the Western world through social media. I'm not a psychologist, obviously, but it seems that our current preoccupation with all manner of sexual abuse shares some characteristics with other episodes of mass hysteria.

Except that feminist hysteria is longer-lasting and much more diffuse in its effects. Historically, in mass hysteria we see a relatively short-lived collective delusion characterized by anxiety, irrational behavior and beliefs, and by baseless symptoms of illness, as in, for example, Le Roy, New York, where fourteen teenage girls and one boy suddenly began exhibiting Tourette-like symptoms in 2012. Or a 1994 case in a small Illinois town, in which female residents thought they were being poisoned by a gas that caused their throat and lips to burn, though no gas was ever found, and their symptoms went away when they talked to police. Or a case in Martensville, Saskatchewan, in which dozens of children claimed to have been abused in satanic rituals at a day care center, resulting in over a hundred charges made against more than a dozen people, including a number of police officers, all of it ultimately found to be groundless.

Any google search will turn up many fascinating historical examples. Medical doctor Andrew Wilner has put together an overview of episodes of hysteria on a website called Medscape. He makes clear that although much remains unknown about the causes, mass hysteria is a phenomenon in which the power of suggestion is key. Witnessing others, even a single other, can cause the behavior to spread. Now think of Anita Hill's accusations.

In 1991, against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which a brilliant lawyer, Thomas, was nearly denied a place on the Supreme Court because a single woman alleged that he had – many years before – spoken of an interest in pornography to her, and said, famously now: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” This alleged harassment was flat-out difficult to believe, not least because Hill kept in close contact with Thomas for years after the incidents were supposed to have taken place.

But even if true, they were remarkably trivial issues, entirely unworthy to have held the attention of the whole nation  during the confirmation hearings. Yet they did, and the impact of that scandal on North American culture is, I believe, incalculable.

According to a university website reporting on this incident, in the five years that followed Hill's accusation against Thomas sexual harassment cases more than doubled in the United States, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in 1996. And over that same period awards to victims under federal law nearly quadrupled, from $7.7 million to $27.8 million. Now, feminists would say, of course, that Anita Hill's courage inspired other women, who were previously suffering in silence. Another explanation, of course, would be that the affair inspired women to see what had formerly been understood as innocuous banter, or normal expressions of sexual interest, as intolerable harassment. And this is how it goes. One case leads to many others, all manifesting the same irrational symptoms, the tearful accusations – he touched me, he propositioned me, he said things, I couldn't sleep, I was never comfortable in that office again. I could feel him watching me. He made me so afraid.

As the National Organization of Women knows in giving its award to Emma Sulcowicz, the more alleged victims are celebrated for their supposed courage in dwelling on the alleged abuse, the more other women will be inclined to view their experiences through that lens of sexual trauma, for which they will require a long, long, perhaps lifelong period of healing.

It is surely significant that girls and women are especially vulnerable to mass hysteria. Historical episodes have often included only, or predominantly, female hysterics. Like most hysterics, of course, feminist hysterics are true believers. No matter what evidence is presented to contradict their irrational fear the evidence can't shake their bedrock belief and they experience depressive or anxious behavior such as weeping, trouble getting out of bed, fear of public spaces, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

I've noticed this in news reports of harassment cases, in which the woman reports being unable to get out of bed for months in response to what to any reasonable person would be only the most minor of incidents, such as a university teacher allegedly expressing some kind of sexual or romantic interest. The utter lack of resiliency, the prolonged indulgence in the probing of imagined wounds; it betrays a severely disordered mindset, yet in our time feminist hysteria has gained so many adherents that attempts to point out its irrationality are considered further evidence of the so-called threat. Denial of rape culture is proof of rape culture, and so on.

Just recently, Ms. Magazine, a mainstream women's magazine with millions of readers, tweeted out a claim about the moral equivalence between the actions of ISIS and those of American college administrations. It said, “While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrators similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses.” That word - “similarly” - is a breathtaking admission of insanity. The suggestion that there is any kind of moral, or any other parallel between a U.S. college administration and a barbaric death cult that uses sexual torture to terrorize whole populations, is crazy, especially given the extent to which college administrations are actually under the thumb of government-mandated feminist policy. But Ms. can make the allegation with no appreciable blowback, and many women will believe that there is an essential truth to the comparison. Even as those women are living lives of unprecedented security.

One of the great unknowns about hysteria is how it is cured. I'm not aware that there has ever been a case where the cure involved validating the delusion. You don't tell a person who's worried about gremlins releasing poisonous gas into their home that the government is going to outlaw such gremlin activity. That just confirms the hysteric in her delusion.

Wilner suggests that the most effective treatment involves separating hysterics from others who have the same symptoms and rationally persuading them out of their delusion. But we're now in a situation where that form of cure is nearly impossible because entire media organizations and government bodies exist to support and affirm feminist delusions about rape culture, patriarchy, and women's oppression. And naysayer voices, no matter how evidence-based, are either drowned-out or completely silenced. Feminist hysterics actually want to change the law, so that it's easier to convict men of sexual assault on a woman's word. They want every school and workplace to have a vast punitive machinery to punish men for anything a woman doesn't like. And generally authorities are inclined to give in to their insane demands. So this is where we are. Don't expect the hysteria to go away any time soon. But don't stay silent while it spreads.

 

*A former Columbia student, also known as "the mattress girl," she "found out" she had been raped long after the sexual contact occurred. See "Dumb Means Dumb: Fighting Rape By Expanding its Definition," Legalienate, October 26, 2017.

Clueless Trump Going Down Bragging

Just short of three weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, western media have started to examine the string of blunders Donald Trump has committed while launching his lunatic venture, carried out without a defined strategy, in total ignorance of his opponent and even of his own available resources, against all geopolitical sense, and from an egocentric posture built on boundless delusion.

All this has become clear from ridiculous and contradictory daily statements, a bad definition of means and ends, and an incompetent decision-making process. Taking in this entire picture, we can safely say that the president will inevitably lead us into further disaster.

It's downright jarring to see a war carried out with an obvious and profound lack of planning on the part of the most powerful military in the world, whose commander-in-chief openly admits he was surprised that Iran decided to defend itself. According to one press account, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine warned the president that Teheran would probably respond with attacks on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime passage between Iran and Oman, through which passes a fifth of world oil and gas exports. Trump replied that the Iranian government would collapse before the Strait could be closed, and if that wasn't the case, the United States would keep it open. When the Revolutionary Guard then closed the Strait, Trump bragged that it would be easy to open it again, then solicited help from allies he had insulted for a year, including China, against which he had launched a trade war eight years ago. 

Once he saw that no one responded to his appeal for help, he went back to bragging that Washington didn't need any help. He later added that the U.S. didn't need any oil from the region either, and announced that he might leave it to those who do to fix the disastrous mess he has made (i.e., open the Strait), unless they want to do without the oil they need to survive.

For the umpteenth time we see the misinformation, irresponsibility, and downright foolishness with which Trump attempts to govern, in this case refusing responsibility for the fire that he himself ignited in the Middle East, one that has already reached disastrous dimensions. 

It's a geopolitical catastrophe, in fact, one that has shown his Arab allies that Washington won't lift a finger to protect them, in spite of the fact that they've ceded the U.S. territory to build naval and air force bases on, while also abruptly threatening the supply of hydrocarbons traditional U.S. allies in Asia and Europe heavily depend on, without offering any advance warning that this was coming. This is also a military debacle because it offers no credible definition of success. It's strengthened rather than weakened the Iranian government and exposed vulnerabilities to an infinitely weaker opponent. Finally, it's an economic calamity that has produced a predictable surge of inflation, with an ever increasing likelihood of exploding into full-blown crisis with each day hostilities are prolonged. 

Above all else, Trump's war on Iran is a disaster on the home front; the costs of the war will send the federal deficit soaring out of control; the American people don't support a new war on the part of a president who campaigned on ending precisely this kind of military idiocy; then also Trump has gifted his political adversaries - as much in the Democratic Party as in Republican ranks  - a winning issue for the mid-term elections in November (assuming there are such), and, to top it off, he's betrayed the yearning of his base for smaller government.

In a nutshell, aside from being a flagrant violation of international law, the invasion of Trump and Netanyahu against Iran could be the political tomb for the reality T.V. star this November, and pave the way for a bitter second half of Trump's term without Congressional complicity. If it turns out that way Trump will have nothing to blame but his own arrogance in hurling himself into a venture as horrible as it was unnecessary.

 

Source: "Iran and the Self-Destruction of Trump," La Jornada, March 18, 2026

Top Trump Counterterrorism Official Resigns In Protest Over Iran War

• Director of National Intelligence
• National Counterterrorism Center
•  

President Trump,

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealthy and prosperity of our nation.

In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS.

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.

 

Joseph Kent

Director, National Counterterrorism Center

 

Source: "U.S. counterterrorism director Joe Kent resigns over war: 'Iran posed no imminent threat'
March 17, 2026, www.cnbc.com

Operation Epic Folly

"If America attacks . . . Iranians will unite, forgetting their differences with their government, and they will fiercely and tenaciously defend their country."

-----Shirin Ebadi, Iran's 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate

 

The only thing truly epic about the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is the chasm between the facts on the ground and the media spectacle put forth by President Trump and his fawning aides. 

Folly is the best term to capture the reality of a president who until very recently presented himself as uniquely qualified to bring peace to the world via his "Art of the Deal" genius, then turned on a dime to endlessly repeat that the U.S. would inflict maximum damage and suffering on Iran, a country he had said would be a particularly bad place to try and carry out regime change, not to mention a policy he claimed to have rejected no matter where it might be recommended, wisdom he allegedly learned from the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

After steady coaching from Benjamin Netanyahu, however, he changed his mind, becoming convinced that a quick decapitation of Iran's leadership would lead Iran's suffering masses to topple the mullahs and install an American-friendly government. He claimed that Iran's clerical regime would fall in 48 hours. 

That prediction failed so fast it didn't even allow time for a G.W. Bush style "Mission Accomplished" declaration to whet the appetite for the inevitable anti-climax of disintegration and civil war a few months later. In this as in so many other areas Trump is a prodigy, failing almost as fast as he can dream up fresh lunacies to aggravate the world with. As the Ugly American, he's way overqualified.

Since February 28 we have been treated to desperate, ever-changing, and contradictory attempts to justify the unjustifiable initiation of war, and an equally desperate, ever-changing, and contradictory attempt to define its objectives and limits, something that has proven impossible for an administration that was counting on ending the war with a single massive blow. Hence the ever-lengthening list of childish inventions: "bring the Iranians back to the negotiating table," "obliterate the Iran nuclear program," "liberate the people," "strike a deal Venezuelan style," "complete regime change," etc. etc. None of it has anything to do with reality.

For Trump and his henchmen, where reality is not merely tinged with fantasy but subsumed by it, "nothing is impossible" is a necessary watchword. For them, thoughtlessness is a virtue, as shown by Trump's nonchalance in admitting that they hadn't found a replacement yet for the murdered Iranian head of state because the U.S.-Israeli attacks were so successful that all the potential replacements had also been killed. No need for woke nonsense like knowing what you're doing.

With gas prices soaring and Americans already coming home in body bags, an obviously desperate Trump yearns to declare victory and withdraw, but he cannot do so, because the Iranian government is still very much in place. Lacking an exit strategy, his war doctrine is "flexible," by necessity, since he has no idea how he fell into the current trap, let alone how to get out of it. Ever the narcissist, however, he gives himself an "A" for effort, assessing the initial phase of the U.S. war as a 15 on a scale of 10.  

In other words, we're watching another reality TV episode, full of kitsch and cliches, with Pete Hegseth comparing the mass killing to a football game. Iranian leaders knew the first few "plays," said the war secretary, because they had been scripted before the war started, but once the "game" was underway they didn't "know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle." Filled with adolescent pride at unleashing massive waves of lethality, he claimed the U.S. was "fighting to win," even as Trump showed eagerness to negotiate a way out, an option that Teheran flatly rejected.

Badly conceived, sloppily improvised, and based on the repetition of past errors and disasters, the Trump and Bibi war moves from tragedy to farce and back again, only this time on a vaster scale and with potentially far graver consequences. 

It's difficult to recall a greater folly. 

 

Sources:

Shirin Ebadi quoted from David Barsamian (with Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian, Nahid Mozaffari), Targeting Iran, (City Lights, 2007)

Maciek Wisniewski, "Operation Epic Farce," La Jornada (Spanish), March 7, 2026