Do yourself a favor. Go back and re-read the Declaration of Independence, but do it this way: skip the beginning and the end, and read the bill of particulars in the middle. It’s too long to quote here. You really just have to read it for yourself. Once you do, you’ll see that details aside, we’re living in the very world that the Declaration describes, excoriates, and uses as the basis of its declaration of war. Virtually everything in it is something that our present government is doing to us. Like the people of British North America ca. 1776, we are a people under military occupation. Continue reading
Tag Archives: History
“When the World Breaks”
Veterans Day at Peddie
Peddie is a well-known elite prep school in New Jersey, located in Hightstown, a small town just east of Princeton. According to Niche, it’s ranked #2 out of 126 in a listing of the Best Private High Schools in New Jersey, and #2 of 112 of the Best College Prep Private Schools in New Jersey. It also ranks first out of 139 of the Most Diverse Private High Schools in New Jersey. I’m at least vaguely familiar with the place, having been there a few times, having interviewed Peddie students applying for admissions to Princeton, and having grown up myself (for better or worse) in the elite Jersey prep school milieu. In short, within its rarefied circles, Peddie is a trend-setter. Continue reading
The Immigrant Trust Tour: October Update
To the best of my knowledge, the municipal-level campaign to persuade the New Jersey state legislature to pass the Immigrant Trust Act started last December in Madison, New Jersey, an affluent college town in a relatively conservative part of the state. By March, about a dozen municipalities had followed suit.
Things quieted down in the months after that, but with the impetus of a constant drumbeat of ICE raids, things started up again in June with the campaign for a resolution in Princeton, which eventually passed in August. Whether it’s correlation or causality or both, the movement has heated up since then and gone statewide. About twenty municipalities and two counties have at this point passed pro-ITA resolutions, and plenty of county commissions and town councils across the state are facing demands to pass more. Continue reading
The Fascist Regime
Back in March, I wrote a post here called “I Think They Call This Fascism,” meant to be a preliminary inquiry into how to define “fascism” and apply it to present circumstances. I laid out seven methodological issues that arise in defining “fascism,” the second of which was how the concept of “fascism” applies to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. At the time, I was conceptualizing totalitarianism as revolutionary and all-encompassing, and conceptualizing authoritarianism as traditional and more limited in scope. Though I still think that totalitarianism vs authoritarianism is an essential issue, it now occurs to me that the preceding conceptualization, somewhat uncritically adopted from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s account, is misleading or wrong.
Continue readingMorituri Te Salutant
I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best friends in Palestine, someone who lives in a small village in the South Hebron Hills. I’ve excerpted it below, deleting personal names, and omitting place names and other particulars, and corrected the grammar of one sentence for clarity. It’s in English, but I’ve provided a tl; dr translation just after the block quote. The word “football” refers throughout to soccer. Continue reading
Resistance and Retaliation
Notes on Migrant Justice
In two posts here, I’ve taken issue with the idea that Princeton’s recent passage of (or even mere discussion of) the ITA Resolution has induced ICE to raid the town and detain people. The basic premise behind this claim is that ICE operations target municipalities that express opposition to ICE. The further implication is that if you want to avoid ICE operations where you live, you have to tone down your public opposition to ICE, and adopt a “quiet” form of dissent. It can’t be stressed enough how dangerously out of touch with reality this claim is. If put into practice, it would mean the end of public opposition to ICE at a time when public opposition is clearly working, and is all we have. Continue reading
Resistance in Action (5)
A Response to John Heilner
Toward the end of the August 11 Princeton Council meeting at which Princeton’s ITA Resolution was adopted, John Heilner, a Princeton resident, offered a comment that has now been transcribed in the August 13 issue of TapInto Princeton and in the August 13 issue of Town Topics (updated on August 18). Though Mr Heilner’s comment has not to my knowledge elicited very much public comment, I think it demands comment. To put the matter bluntly, I regard his comment as both incoherent and irresponsible, and am amazed that a Council that has spent the better part of the last six months lecturing us about matters of facticity and tone has received it with such apparent equanimity. Continue reading
Resistance in Action
I’ve previously mentioned my work with Resistencia en Acción, a migrant defense group based in Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. Much of what Resistencia does is to face down ICE whenever the need arises. And to put it bluntly: ICE has to be faced down. It’s less a law enforcement agency than a glorified group of thugs–an American Gestapo–intent on solving, by brute force, problems that they themselves have confabulated. Continue reading
PFS on Yechiel Leiter: A Response
I subscribe to an email list owned by a group called Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), which just today put out an open letter to Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton University, in advance of tomorrow’s speech by Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. I don’t ordinarily feel the need to respond to statements by PFS, but in this case, a brief comment is in order. Continue reading
Engels on Social Murder
“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 