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Without conceding a millimeter of Ukraine’s besieged territory, we can yet make a bold bid for peace. I saw the Parade of Tall Ships in New York Harbor on July 4, 1976. That fleet included two Soviet ships—Tovarish and Kruzenshtern. On that Bicentennial Fourth, the world was at peace. We need peace again.
The United States should ask His Majesty King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to invite the major seafaring nations to send their Tall Ships to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. We should urge the Peace Parade to include Japan’s Kaiwo Maru and Germany’s Gorch Fock. The message from these former enemies of Russia and the Allies is that Peace is Possible. From there, they could seek Gospodin (Mr.) Putin’s permission to sail on to St. Petersburg. There, they could embark Russian climate scientists and return to Britain.
From London, the Russians could join an international team of climate scientists for the flight to Punta Arenas, Chile. There, the scientists could continue their voyage to Antarctica. To carry them, we could dispatch the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star, and a Canadian icebreaker, hopefully to rendezvous with Russia’s 50 Years of Victory. The Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker is the world’s largest.
We can demonstrate that our objective is cooperation on the global environmental crisis. We can hope that this would be a bridgehead for efforts to negotiate on the Ukraine war. In the 1970s, the U.S. exchanged with China teams of table tennis players. It was then called “Ping Pong Diplomacy.” Our new effort could be called “Diplomatic Icebreakers.”
It is essential for us to show that we have no deep-seated hatred for the people of Russia. Far from it. This writer has recommended sending our hospital ships—USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy—to Odessa treat Ukrainian patients and even wounded Russian soldiers. As well, we proposed a peace conference at Torgau to resolve the issues in this unjust and tragic attack on Ukraine. Torgau, Germany, was the city where the Red Army and the U.S. Army clasped hands in January 1945. That brief but essential cooperation between Russians and Americans can yet serve as a precedent for agreement.
Obviously, the recent charges leveled against Gospodin Putin by the International Criminal Court will make any cooperation on any issue difficult. But it is not insuperable.
At the Yalta Summit Conference in February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Why didn’t the democratic leaders denounce Stalin’s murder of 20,000 Polish prisoners of war, Catholic priests, and intellectuals in the Katýn Forest? Certainly, Churchill and FDR were fully apprised of this atrocity.
Their silence on this heinous episode was understandable. Stalin was calmly sacrificing more than 20,000 lives of his own soldiers every day in the war. Roosevelt and Churchill knew that without Stalin’s help, we would have had to face all those battle-hardened Germans. Eighty-five of every hundred German soldiers who died in World War II died fighting the Russians. Stalin didn’t have to worry about Russian mothers’ reactions to such appalling losses. American and British mothers were also voters.
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were fully apprised of Soviet horrors in their brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. Americans read with horror of Soviet conduct in James Michener’s shocking exposé, The Bridge at Andau. Eisenhower and Kennedy doubtless knew that one episode spoke to KGB savagery. The Soviet secret police had recruited a Hungarian woman who hated all men. Disfigured by teenage acne, heavy-set “Major Meatball” regularly inserted glass catheters in her victims. Then beat them until they shattered.
When the U.S. invited Nikita Khrushchev to visit the U.S., Eisenhower and Kennedy knew of KGB’s monstrous record. Churchill had once denounced Communists’ depravity for “capering like baboons on a mountain of skulls.” Nothing of Soviet conduct had changed since he wrote those words in the 1920s.
Our urgent need for peace with a nuclear superpower, however, overrode the calls for bringing Khrushchev to justice before any international war crimes tribunal. Because Roosevelt and Churchill, Eisenhower, and Kennedy acted with restraint, we avoided World War III.
Their cool analysis and restrained response to aggression is what is needed now to avoid a Third World War. Gospodin Putin will not be the collaborator that George W. Bush saw when he said: “I looked into [Gospodin Putn’s] eyes, into his soul, and saw a good man.” Dissident Russian writer Vladimir Bukovsky was asked in Washington about President Bush’s naïve comments. “I have looked into many a KGB’s eyes. I have not found that a particularly spiritual experience.” When Vice President Joe Biden visited the Kremlin in 2011, he told the Russian leader “I don’t think you have a soul!” In this, Mr. Biden erred on the other side.
Worse still, after Gospodin Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden asked for God to remove him from power. This is an echo of King Henry II’s cry for help: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry’s barons got the message. They cut down Thomas à Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, as he celebrated Mass.
Even more shocking was Hillary Clinton’s demand for “regime change” in Moscow. Gospodin Putin knows what she means. He shared with his cohorts videos of Hillary cackling at the lynching of Gaddafi in 2011. The Senate’s leading Republican on foreign policy, Lindsey Graham, has gone so far as to call for assassinating the Russian leader. That is a violation of international law and is a crime under U.S. statutes.
All of this threatens our ability to bring Gospodin Putin to the table to negotiate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. The costs to the world are incalculable. The U.S. is spending more than $100 billion a year defending Ukraine. This is our moral duty, but it is not painless. This war’s collateral damage makes the case for a Peace Overture all the more urgent.
President Kennedy preserved the peace by never personalizing his differences with the Soviet rulers. “Let us remember that civility is not a sign of weakness and sincerity is always subject to proof.” Kennedy’s wisdom can be applied to our conflict with Russia. Then, let’s set sail for St. Petersburg!
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Demonstrators during an Amazon Labor Union (ALU) rally outside an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York on April 11, 2023. (Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Is the current labor uptick just more hype than reality? Numerous articles have recently made this case, pointing to the continued decline in union density in 2022. This skepticism also appears to be the prevailing view among most national union leaders. Though rarely stated publicly, labor’s continued routinism suggests that few people up top see our moment as particularly novel or urgent.
But contrary to these skeptics, there is compelling data indicating that things really are changing — and, therefore, that unions should immediately make a major turn to new organizing.
Consider, for instance, the statewide 2018 educators’ strikes, which were largely begun over viral rank-and-file Facebook groups. This was the first US strike wave since the 1970s, impacting millions of students and involving hundreds of thousands of school workers. Strike activity in 2018 rose to its highest peak since the mid-1980s, and it remained high in 2019 as the wave spread to blue cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. The qualitative shift was even more significant: unlike in the Reagan era, the red-state revolt consisted of work stoppages that were mostly illegal, statewide in scope, offensive in their demands, and generally victorious in their outcomes.
Number of US Strikers, 2002–2019 (in thousands) (Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers”)
Union membership numbers present a grimmer picture. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 273,000 workers joined unions last year. Yet because total employment rose at a faster rate, union density fell from 10.3 to 10.1 percent from 2021 to 2022. Clearly, we are not currently in an upsurge analogous to the 1930s. As exciting as recent campaigns may be, we should be sober about their very real limitations.
Dwelling only on the continued decline of union density, however, misses the forest for the trees. One of the reasons why recent worker-driven campaigns are so qualitatively important is that they have won union elections at some of the largest corporations in the world. Amazon’s 1.1 million employees, for example, constitute the country’s second-largest workforce, and Starbucks’s workforce is the eighth largest.
Winning elections at these types of firms is a major development that is not captured by membership rolls alone. National unions have for decades generally avoided pushing for union elections at such large companies, believing not unreasonably that they were simply too powerful to defeat — at least under our current, threadbare, and barely enforced labor laws. As such, the vast majority of years since the Fortune 500 was established in 1955 have witnessed zero, or at most one, union drives at the nonunion companies on the list. In contrast, 2021 saw three such drives and 2022 saw eight.
Given labor’s overall risk aversion, it is not surprising that a majority of those organizing efforts were instances of what I call DIY Unionism — strikes and union drives that are initiated by self-organized workers and/or in which workers take on key responsibilities traditionally reserved for union staff.
Fortune 500 Companies Targeted by Unionization, 2021–2022
Labor’s opponents are well aware of this increase in worker-to-worker organizing. In a 2022 report, the notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson sounded the alarm:
There has been a shift in how people are organizing together to petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be represented.
To be sure, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, Google, and other megacorporations are still a long way away from winning a first contract. That will likely take many years, more intervention from state actors, and greater resources from established unions toward boosting, and defending, new organizing. But it is a major historical development that unionizing the US private sector’s biggest players no longer seems like a distant fantasy.
The fact that these recent drives have won elections against such economic heavyweights helps explain why news coverage of unions shot up in 2022 — as does the fact that media outlets have become one of labor’s most dynamic growth areas.
Yearly Press Coverage of Unionization (Newspapers.com. Salience of the term “unionize” by year, in over 22,000 archived US newspapers)
Increased publicity about David versus Goliath workplace organizing, and negative publicity about union busting, is bad news for corporate America. Stories of ordinary workers taking on billionaire CEOs tend to spur copycat attempts. And coverage of illegal (or morally reprehensible) union busting tarnishes company brands, while increasing pressure on elected officials to defend and enforce labor law.
When it comes to fomenting today’s pro-union zeitgeist, the growth of pro-union sentiment over social media is no less significant. To cite just a few examples: Antiwork — a misleadingly named Reddit group focused on exposing bad working conditions and promoting unionization — shot up from eighty thousand members in early 2020 to 2.3 million members by late 2022. The labor-focused media outlet More Perfect Union has received 150 million views on its YouTube and TikTok videos. And videos of Starbucks workers walking out in response to illegal firings now regularly go viral, racking up millions of views and exposing the hypocrisy of a nominally progressive corporation. Starbucks’s vice president of partner resources thus recently admitted that she had to turn off social media because it “has been very disheartening. And yet perception is reality in some way shape or form.”
Media attention on its own will not turn things around for unions, but it is nevertheless critical for keeping up momentum and bringing “the labor question” back to the center of US politics. Millions of workers are finally beginning to see that nonunion jobs can become union jobs — and that they personally could play a role in making that happen. No less important, coverage of recent union drives among white-collar and (largely female) pink-collar care workers has undercut the still-common myth that unions are just for white men in hard industry. Multiple worker-organizer interviewees explained to me that the first thing they had to do was disabuse themselves and their colleagues of the assumption, to quote a New York Times tech worker named Vicki, that “unions are just for coal miners or something — not for us.”
Google analytics allows us to measure the increase in search queries last year asking the question: “How do I form a union?” The following graph captures a surge in bottom-up unionization interest, particularly in the wake of the highly publicized union win at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. Today’s active interest in unionization constitutes a major contextual difference from the 1990s and 2000s, when labor’s halting turn to new organizing stumbled over the high staff resources required to spark workers to unionize.
Google Searches for “How do I form a union?” (Google Trends. Data collected on January 17, 2023)
Qualitative data also indicates that there has been an increase in individual workers directly reaching out to unions asking them to organize them — what unions usually call “hot shops.” To quote a cannabis-industry-worker-turned-Teamsters-organizer in Illinois, “these workers are reaching out to us for help, so that’s unusual. It used to be we were seeking them out and now they’re coming to us. Our phones are ringing constantly with workers who want protection, higher wages, better benefits and accountability from these companies.”
Put simply: despite the immense power of the forces arrayed against them, rank-and-file organizers today are continuing to take big risks to win power and democracy at work. Unions should follow their lead.
Israeli soldiers claim they are forced to share special ceramic plates on a rotating basis due to shortage; IDF vows to investigate the claims.
By World Israel News Staff
Israeli soldiers stationed in Judea and Samaria have not been properly equipped for combat situations, leaving them forced to share the use of protective body armor, Israel Hayom reported Tuesday.
The investigative report cited Israeli soldiers deployed to Judea and Samaria, who complained of a severe shortage in the IDF of protective gear and other key military equipment. Similar shortages were also reported in units stationed elsewhere in the country.
To ameliorate the problem, soldiers claimed, the army’s Judea and Samaria Division has been rotating ceramic body armor between brigades.
While this stopgap solution is intended to allow different units to effectively share the armor – rotating it back and forth based on the unit’s operational status – combat soldiers have claimed their units are often sent on missions without the entire team being issued protective gear.
Soldiers also reported that protective gear is rotated between units in such a way as to be rationed for guard duty.
“It’s like sending a soldier for a stakeout with a plastic gun,” one source said. “How come there is enough money to fund the haredim [Ultra-Orthodox] and the yeshivot but not saving lives? This is just mind-boggling.”
An IDF spokesperson downplayed claims of a shortage of personal protective equipment and denied that any combat soldiers had been sent on potentially dangerous missions without the necessary gear. The spokesperson added that the army is working to remedy the “uneven distribution” of body armor.
“We have been aware of claims made that there is an uneven distribution of the equipment used for ceramic body armor,” he said.
“The military is currently working on further procurement and in recent weeks units in Judea and Samaria have been given additional ceramic vests. We stress that fighters do not get sent on missions that require such protective gear if they do not have it.”
The post Shortages in IDF are forcing soldiers to share body armor – report appeared first on World Israel News.
It’s not easy to accept that alternatives to the dilemma created by letting it become an independent terrorist state may be worse than the status quo.
By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
Upon its conclusion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly lauded the Israel Defense Forces for its brilliant work during “Operation Shield and Arrow.” The five-day campaign exacted a heavy toll on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organization as the IDF took out several of the group’s leaders, along with rank-and-file members, as well as a considerable amount of its armaments and infrastructure.
And thanks to the Iron Dome air-defense system, PIJ did very little damage to Israeli targets, making the terrorists much less likely to risk their remaining personnel and rockets on another barrage on the Jewish state in the immediate future.
But like every other previous exchange with Gaza-based terrorists, even the most successful strikes do not solve the problem Israel created in 2005. Israel is unwilling to pay the price to wipe out the Hamas organization that rules Gaza with an iron fist and continues to terrorize Israeli civilians. This gives the Islamist groups a degree of freedom of action enabling them to start hostilities time and again, disrupting Israeli life with relative impunity.
This raises an important question that is hard for both Israelis and Americans to answer: How do you live with an essentially insoluble problem?
The answer from most Israelis is the pragmatic one that Netanyahu and the country’s security establishment have settled on, albeit reluctantly.
The IDF doesn’t have the opportunity to defeat the terrorists in a conventional military manner, in which they would be disarmed and stripped of their ability to inflict future harm on Israelis—let alone fire, as PIJ did last week, more than a 1,000 rockets and missiles at the Jewish state. Only a few got through, including one that scored a direct hit on a building in Rehovot and killed an elderly woman, and another that ironically killed a Palestinian from Gaza who was working in Israel.
Still, the Israelis do have the capability to inflict considerable harm on the terrorists, forcing them to rebuild and rearm, essentially continually kicking the can down the road. The IDF calls this “mowing the grass,” an inelegant yet descriptive metaphor for a strategy whose optimal result is to preserve an unsatisfactory status quo or at least push off the threat to an indefinite future.
Not everyone in the country agrees with this.
For example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reacted to the end of the latest fighting by saying that it was “inevitable” that Israel would be forced to undertake a “major ground operation” in Gaza to get to “the root of the problem” and dismantle and disarm the terrorist infrastructure.
That’s logical, though few other Israelis have any appetite for such a fight.
In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every Israeli settlement, settler and soldier from the Strip in the hope that this gesture would lead to the Palestinians creating a model for peace and development. Sharon assured skeptics that if the Palestinians used their control of Gaza to begin firing into Israel, the IDF would be able to easily deal with the situation and even reverse the withdrawal.
But that’s not what happened.
Gaza became an independent terrorist state in all but name. And it became apparent almost immediately that the cost of going into Gaza to end the terrorist threat—in terms of Israeli and Palestinian casualties, and equally, international support—would be too high for any Israeli government to pay.
And so was born a problem to which there is no answer. For the past 17 years, much like Smotrich, many Israelis have said that the current situation cannot go on. And yet, it does.
In this way, dealing with the terrorists in Gaza has become very much like the conundrum in Judea and Samaria, where much of the world believes that the Palestinians should be allowed to set up yet another independent state, either with or without Gaza.
In the 56 years since Israel unified Jerusalem, and took control of Judea and Samaria, pundits and foreign-policy “experts” have been saying that the status quo cannot go on for much longer. Yet it has.
Despite the talk of doom and gloom for an Israel that continued to “occupy” the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland and guaranteed its security by ensuring that no hostile army could set foot on the western bank of the Jordan River, those predictions were proven wrong.
Rather than being swamped by a demographic problem that (thanks to Jewish population growth and Arab emigration) was nowhere near as serious as many thought or subjected to a South Africa-style isolation campaign that broke its ability to go on, Israel has continued to thrive. It now has a First World economy and is a regional military superpower that counts several formerly hostile Arab and Muslim states as allies and strategic partners—developments that were unimaginable when the “occupation” began.
How was that possible?
For one thing, the perennial belief on the part of the foreign-policy establishment that “solving” the Palestinian problem was the key to dealing with all of America’s problems in the Middle East was completely wrong. Even if the Palestinians got everything they wanted, which basically means Israel ceasing to exist, it wouldn’t do a thing to deal with Islamist terrorism in the region or Iran’s quest for regional hegemony.
First Egypt in 1979, then Jordan in 1994, and in 2020, as a result of the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, other Arab and Muslim states realized that allowing themselves to continue being held hostage to Palestinian intransigence was madness that did nothing to help their countries.
And as unpleasant as the task of dealing with terrorism in the territories continues to be, it is not so onerous as to prevent Israel from becoming a relatively prosperous and strong nation.
The same is true for having to suffer the existence of a terrorist enclave on Israel’s southern flank. It’s a problem that remains expensive and frustrating. But it’s not so difficult as to inflict anything but superficial damage to Israel’s economy or security.
That’s doubly frustrating for those American governments that have always wrongly viewed the conflict with the Palestinians as a territorial dispute that could be solved by compromise. Even former President Donald Trump, who led the most pro-Israel administration to date, harbored delusions about being able to broker the “deal of the century.”
But that was no more true for the former real estate mogul than it was for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
They all failed because the conflict is not about real estate or the result of misunderstandings to be overcome with reason and compromise. The Jews have been agreeing to compromises for decades, including the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan and the 1993 Oslo Accords, and subsequent offers of Palestinian statehood made by Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. But each such effort has failed for one reason: The century-old Palestinian war on Zionism is a zero-sum game. The Palestinian goal isn’t a state alongside Israel of one size or another. It’s the destruction of Israel, period.
Once that becomes clear, then learning to live with the anomalous situations in Judea, Samaria and Gaza isn’t that hard to understand.
In a war in which one side cannot be appeased by anything short of their opponent’s complete destruction, compromise is impossible. Just as important, total war solutions employed to end conflicts in other parts of the world are not available to Israel. The Jewish state has no appetite for unleashing mass devastation on the other side’s population and wouldn’t be permitted by its allies and international opinion to do so.
That doesn’t satisfy Israelis who want an end to the Gaza terrorist nightmare or Americans who cling to myths about “land for peace.”
The conflict will end when the Palestinians finally admit defeat and acknowledge that Israel is the victor in their long struggle. Since Israel can’t do what is necessary to convince them of the futility of their struggle to erase the history of the last century, for the foreseeable future, maintaining the status quo is the best anyone can hope for.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The post The Gaza Strip and learning to live with insoluble problems – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.
Russian issued repeated warnings that the hazardous effects of munitions containing depleted uranium would be impossible to control or even assess the exact areas that would be affected. However, the UK’s response has been almost completely Pilatian, as London officially rejected bearing responsibility for any possible consequences of the use of depleted uranium munitions.
French president Emmanuel Macron holds an outdoor press conference with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin on February 2, 2022 in Tourcoing, France. (Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images)
In the era of anti-“wokisme,” it’s been easy to forget what French republicanism really stands for. A short history of the Human Rights League (LDH) is a good reminder. One of France’s oldest rights advocacy groups, the LDH was founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, joining the network of forces that defended the Jewish officer (falsely convicted of treason) and blocked a protofascist right from drowning the country’s fledgling democracy. Barring a milquetoast critique of colonialism, the LDH has been a consistent watchdog on state and social violence since then, defending everything from a liberal interpretation of secularism to freedom of expression and the right of workers to strike and organize. Unsurprisingly, the organization was banned during the grimmest years of France’s twentieth century: the Vichy regime.
The recent wave of attacks against the LDH is therefore an all-too-telling sign of just where Emmanuel Macron’s government is taking France. Leading an effort to muzzle civil society, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, questioned the public subsidies granted to the LDH, suggesting during a round of hearings on French policing in early April that the group had abused its status as an observer at protest marches.
“There’s not a problem with the police, there’s a problem with the ultraleft,” the interior minister said, dismissing the documentation produced by groups like the LDH of the aggressive use of police force at an environmentalist protest in Sainte-Soline in western France or against demonstrators opposed to the government’s retirement reform. Instead of reining in her subordinate, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne doubled down on Darmanin’s attacks, saying before the Senate a week later that she “no longer understood” many of the LDH’s positions and that its stance on secularism reflected softness on “radical Islamism.”
The LDH has long been a favorite target for blood-and-soil French conservatives; human-rights-ism is an old right-wing dog whistle to dismiss anything that seems to threaten state authority. Mayor of the small city of Tourcoing in northern France since 2014, Darmanin has tried to withdraw a €250 town subsidy provided to the LDH’s local branch, making him bedfellows with likeminded far-right mayors who’ve also attacked local funding for the group.
But Darmanin’s latest attacks on the LDH come from a national pulpit — and show how he could deploy an expanded arsenal of powers aimed to constrain civil society. After taking over the interior ministry in July 2020, one of his signature early reforms was the 2021 law Reinforcing Republican Principles, also known as the “separatism” law. Widely criticized by French NGOs, the law has over the last several months been rolled out by local prefects, who’ve set about using the legislation to harass activist and community organizing groups.
The 2021 law institutionalizes many of the practices that have been improvised since the 2015 terrorist attacks, facilitating state oversight and possible dissolution of associations. One of its hallmark measures requires that organizations that receive public funding agree to a so-called “contract of republican principles,” with vague stipulations that they not disrupt “public order.”
The Interior Minister’s latest attacks show how he could deploy an expanded arsenal of powers aimed to constrain civil society.
“We’re not going to be in financial jeopardy, even if Mr. Darmanin moves ahead with removing our state funding,” tempers Marie-Christine Vergiat, vice president of the LDH. The lion’s share of the LDH’s budget comes from donors, with another 30 percent from public subsidies — much of it outside the purview of the interior ministry. In fact, since the attacks leveled by Darmanin and Borne, the organization has seen a groundswell of support, with droves of new membership applications and tens of thousands of euros of donations.
“That being said, this is a matter of principle,” Vergiat told Jacobin. “The interior minister can’t just decide on a whim that because an association says something that doesn’t please him, and that questions the behavior of police forces, he can withdraw public funds. He ought to seriously look at how the police do their work: unfortunately, we’re trapped in a worrying spiral in France and it’s getting a lot of attention abroad.”
Darmanin’s latest scuffle with the LDH may pass — besides his remarks and those of prime minister Borne, little has materialized. But they’re symptomatic of this government’s eagerness to constrain actors viewed as thorns in the state’s side. This round of attacks on the LDH shows how this campaign is now even targeting organizations at the heart of France’s ecosystem of advocacy groups. Appointed by Macron in 2020 to lead the Rights Defender, an autonomous public watchdog, Claire Hédon sounded the alarm over the “intensifying risks” to freedom of association in a recent interview with Mediapart.
Maron’s government has developed a less than discreet “hatred of contestation and popular mobilization,” says Clara Gonzales, a jurist at Greenpeace France. And while aggressive policing and the use of legalistic means like “preventative arrests” to harass activists and protesters often get the most coverage, this shouldn’t divert our attention from what Gonzales calls the “gag solution” found in new regulations targeting associations.
‘The fact that an association can be dissolved because it is said to have provoked violence against goods or property is completely disproportionate and represents a threat to freedom of association and expression,’ says attorney Raphaël Kempf.
“They’re creating tools with an enormous potential to infringe on civil liberties,” says Gonzales. “For the time being, there’s a relatively moderate government in control of the state, but we don’t know who’ll be in charge in five years.”
Macron’s government seems wedded to the idea that “civil society actors should not get involved in politics,” says Julien Talpin, a sociologist and director of the scientific advisory council at the Freedom of Association Observatory. According to Talpin, the government’s outlook is part of a “systemic phenomenon” in French political culture, which has long looked with suspicion at nongovernmental actors that seek to constrain state prerogatives.
The skirmish over the LDH was kicked off by the violent police clampdown on environmental protesters in Sainte-Soline. At the instigation of the so-called Revolts of the Earth, a loose collective of environmentalist and rural rights groups, thousands of protesters descended on the small village on March 25 to oppose a water reservoir project that they deemed a favor for agribusiness. The demonstration saw a replay of clashes that had already taken place near the site last fall, after which Darmanin referred to the protesters as “ecoterrorists.” In March, they were again met with a massive police presence that fired over four thousand grenade rounds. Two protesters were left in critical condition.
Days later, Darmanin announced that he would seek to dissolve the Revolts of the Earth. In the letter of grievances, which Jacobin was able to consult, the interior ministry’s main argument is that the collective “incites and participates in the commission of material degradation and sabotage.” This same criterion is found in the separatism law, which expands the possible justifications for dissolution to include violence against property, and not just persons.
“The fact that an association or a grouping can be dissolved because it can be said to have provoked violence against goods or property is completely disproportionate and represents a threat to freedom of association and expression,” says Raphaël Kempf, an attorney representing the collective. (An undeclared organization, the Revolts of the Earth would be dissolved as “de facto grouping” thanks to a 1936 law originally designed to combat far-right paramilitary leagues.)
Administrative dissolutions are enacted by decree in a cabinet meeting. But since his bellicose announcement in mid-March, Darmanin appears to have backed off, likely in response to the enormous support that has rallied to defend the collective. Government spokesman Olivier Véran told journalists after the April 13 cabinet meeting where the final decision was expected that “you have to develop the case before declaring a dissolution — this takes time.”
“If Darmanin persists with his desire to dissolution, France would be one of the few countries on earth to potentially threaten a Nobel literature laureate with prison and extrajudicial surveillance,” Kempf told Jacobin, a reference to Annie Ernaux, one of the many high-profile personalities (such as filmmaker Ken Loach or Noam Chomsky) who have signed on to the organization alongside thousands of others in the days and weeks after Darmanin’s initial threats. Attempting to maintain a dissolved association or grouping is punishable by up to three years in prison and a €45,000 fine while former members can be the object of surveillance without oversight by the judiciary.
The dissolution of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France caused nowhere near the same outcry as the government’s current attacks on freedom of association. But with the benefit of hindsight, it provided much of the script for today’s campaign.
Going ahead with the dissolution would be an extremely provocative shot across the bow against the entire French environmental movement, and it appears that there’s little more than political calculations holding the interior minister back. Technically speaking, however, Darmanin has amassed a legal arsenal designed to be used in cases like the Revolts of the Earth’s. The State Council, France’s highest administrative court that would arbitrate in the event of an appeal, also often heeds the government’s arguments when it comes to dissolution orders.
For the time being, however, it’s possible that Darmanin has gotten what he wanted. “The purpose of dissolutions and of all ways of sanctioning associations is to send a political message,” says Talpin of the Freedom of Association Observatory. “To conservatives, it’s a way of saying ‘look at how we’re working to preserve republican order.’ And it’s a Sword of Damocles over civil society actors: ‘If you go too far, if you’re too critical, we have the means to sanction you.’”
Even if the attacks on the LDH and Revolts of the Earth fail to take full form, it might stand for little more than a tactical retreat by the government. Organizations out of the media spotlight — from minority rights groups and smaller networks of environmental activists to community organizers holding civil disobedience workshops — are feeling the pressure of a state campaign to bring civil society under check.
“Honesty, I’m not surprised by these latest attacks,” Jawad Bachare told Jacobin. “Everyone can potentially be a target: everything that doesn’t fit into the logic of this government is liable to be considered a threat to the Republic.”
Bachare was a director of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), an association that Darmanin moved to dissolve in late 2020 in one of his early shows of force as interior minister. Taking advantage of the context following the murder by a Muslim man of history teacher Samuel Paty, who in a class on freedom of expression had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Darmanin presented the CCIF as an organization dedicated to the propagation of “Islamist propaganda.” Awaiting an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, the CCIF, which self-disbanded in France, has since reconstituted as the Belgium-based Collective Against Islamophobia in Europe.
“I was always told that it was impossible to dissolve a civil rights association — for us at the CCIF, that’s just what we were,” says Bachare. “For the far right, of course, we were an association of Islamists or Salafists or what have you, because we defended people who experience discrimination due to the fact that they are Muslim or appear to be Muslim.”
Everyone can potentially be a target: everything that doesn’t fit into the logic of this government is liable to be considered a threat to the Republic.
At the time, the dissolution of the CCIF caused nowhere near the same outcry as the government’s current attacks on freedom of association, with only a handful of left-wing political figures or organizations like the LDH speaking out against it. But with the benefit of hindsight, it provided much of the script for today’s campaign.
“Following [the 2015 terrorist attacks], we saw the development of a number of tactics used to harass Muslim associations or those that contained a significant number of Muslim members,” says Talpin, citing things like forced closure of bank accounts and associative spaces to redoubled scrutiny of financial records. “These were essentially institutionalized in the 2021 separatism law.”
The privilege of a country like France is that developments like these are kept at a safe semantic distance, exceptions to the rule in the so-called “land of human rights” that would only be dangerous should they fall into the wrong hands. But France’s governors are already willing to use their expanded arsenal of powers, and the case of Darmanin they’re being deployed by a figure who came of age intellectually and politically on the far right. (The interior minister was close to the Dreyfus Affair-era fascist organization Action Française early in his career.) Darmanin’s sham fight for “republican order” is little more than an alibi for constraining opposition forces and civil society — and attacking France’s left.
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