The Woods, A Socialist Utopia - From Community Organization To Environmental Justice, A Bronx Tale

Esta Cohen was born and brought up in a Jewish neighborhood of the Bronx, a place, said her grandfather, unofficial mayor of Mott Haven, of 'kosher, kaddish, and kibbutz'. Everyone in Mott Haven observed the sabbath and seder, sat shiva, went to temple, and were supporters of Israel. 

Esta never saw anything other than some scratchy planters the Goldfarb family donated to the neighborhood playground thanks the considerable profit realized from the sale of both their jewelry store and hattery.  The Goldfarbs were an item in the Bronx - successful business people, devout Jews, and dedicated progressives, advocates of the labor reforms of Samuel Gompers and his Jewish union organizers.  Although unionism would certainly affect Jewish trade, the Goldfarbs had the larger community in mind and were all in for socialist reforms.  They were 'Irish Jews' - faithful to Guinness, bar fights, and the Emerald Isle, but good Americans when it came to political favors. 

The Goldfarbs are beside the point, for this is a tale of elision - how a good Jewish girl, daughter of the Brandeis, Lafollette generation of labor activists, and fierce socialist, evolved into a modern progressive who embraced the canon of environmental activism, social justice, race, gender, ethnicity, and universal diversity.

The evolution is not hard to envisage, for the philosophy of utopian social reform is one of general human welfare and the particular causes of which are conditioned by culture, society, and current zeitgeist.  She grew up the daughter of Ladies Garment Workers radicals, fought for workers' rights from an early age, and was weaned from that goodness only when modern threats emerged. 

She took to environmentalism because as mentioned she had never seen a tree growing on its own until she left the Bronx, and when she saw one of many growing in profusion at Anthony Wayne park across the river in Hudson County on a trip organized by the 161st Street YWCA, she knew that this was God's gift to Man; and she had to do everything in her power to protect, promote, and defend the environment which nurtured them. 

 

After Columbia which she attended on a Rosenzweig scholarship, and where she became thoroughly educated in the ways and means of the progressive canon, she joined a Washington, DC non-profit, Citizens For Social Responsibility, a group which, perhaps unfairly but accurately was characterized as a liberal catch-all. Under Bob Muzelle's leadership, the group went from civil rights to peace to women to gays and to the environment never losing a step in what had become a familiar cadence and rhythm. 

Bob had earned his stripes in battle - on Freedom Rides to Montgomery, in sit-ins in Selma, and in marches with Martin and Ralph across the Pettus Bridge where he had been beaten by Bull Connor's thugs, bitten by his attack dogs, and tossed aside by the legions of Dixie crackers along the way. 

Bob saw that the progressive mantel covered a variety of different issues - it was the reform and salvation of humanity which mattered most, whether through resetting the racial compass, admitting homosexuality as an unequivocal gender choice, or most importantly claiming the climate as the existential issue of the day. 

Esta was delighted to be part of the Muzelle 'Juggernaut for Social Justice', but hewed not surprisingly to environmentalism.  For a girl raised on the mean streets of New York City who had to wait until she was sixteen before seeing anything growing wild, having to spend her days in the woods was ideal.  

She loved every minute of protest before dams, proposed data centers, endangered species habitats, and wild kingdoms.  The environment, Nature, was her new home and she would defend it to the death. The spotted owl, snail darter were her orphans. 

 

To be honest, Nature was too buggy, too dense, and too monotonously boring to be a serious existential issue.  She had had it with tents, mosquitos, lumpy air mattresses and gross improprieties, and wondered whether she had made the right progressive choice. Her civil rights colleagues were getting fucked by the likes of Pharoah Jones, super pimp and headman of Anacostia, Washington's inner city, or camping it up with Dupont Circle gay boys in the hottest clubs in the DMV while she was damp and bitten in the Shenandoah. 

 What was this Nature fetish all about, she wondered after having spent her time in the woods and emerged no more enlightened or illuminated than before?  It was a faux idyll, she concluded, a liberal wet dream, a fantasy, a confected utopia of universal harmony. 

'You haven't seen the real Nature, she was advised by a colleague. 'For that you have to go West'; but after a trip to Livingston, Montana where she joined others in a protest against BLM - the rapacious federal bureau of land management - and their intention to turn old growth forests into logging heavens, she was not moved.  She missed the ruggedness of urban life, its symphony, its discordancy, its life!  There was nothing to save here that couldn't be seen virtually.  Who needs the real thing, a childish playground, a kindergarten coloring book?

She grew to like Livingston, not its wide open spaces but its bars that open at 9 am, its open carry permissiveness, its five-mile freight trains carrying coal from the Dakotas to the coast, and its hardly civil tolerance of Eastern ranchers. 

  

She put in her time at the barricades, but then retreated to Dry Gulch, the go-to bat for railroad workers who shunted trains and loaded coal on the east-west freights which stopped at Livingston Junction, her piece of urbanity in the progressive Never Never Land of her colleagues. 

Virtuality trumped reality every time, at least when it came to 'The Environment' or 'Nature'.  Why would anyone hike the Absarokas, or the Blue Ridge or the Catskills for that matter when the virtual experience was far more personalized, engaging, and real?

The virtual world was replacing zoos, penitentiaries for wild animals, and the virgin forests necessary for logging to meet the demand for modern living.  Why would anyone want to bang along with a hundred other tourists on rutted Serengeti, tsetse fly infested tracks when the virtual experience was far more graphic, intimate, and personal?

 

The lure of the wild, the natural, the undeveloped had a particular allure for Etta Cohen when she as a forming adolescent - anything but the projects, concrete, and corner shops - but once she set foot into the woods, an unpleasantly buggy, boring, predictable, and totally uninteresting place, she understood the febrile fantasy of her youth.  

'The Environment' was a non-starter and so was its Apparition, Global Warming. It made no difference to her that the premises of global warming were being debunked - no sea rises, no coastal flooding, no incineration of Iowan corn crops, no decrease in polar ice, no death of tropical coral.  She on her first outing from the Bronx got the picture. Nature was no more than a feature of human settlement, to be done with as conditions demanded. 

Nothing brilliant, nothing existential, nothing more than resources on the one hand and Hollywood idolatry on the other. 

Esta did not return to the Bronx but to Park Avenue from which penthouse she was able to observe the comings and goings of the greatest city on earth and forget entirely her dalliance with all west of the Hudson. 

Putin And Xi's Last Laugh - The Spirit Of Marx, Lenin, Mao, And Stalin Alive And Well In America

Mao's Great Leap Forward - a forced collectivization which forced millions into the countryside and consigning them to poverty, famine, and death - is well remembered by their children, now prospering in a China that never could be imagined in a million years during that time of isolation and misery. China in the space of little more than thirty years has turned from a peasant society to one of the world's most modern, powerful, and influential. 

 

China is still a one party Communist state, but all traces of Maoism, collectivism, and forced agrarianism are gone, painful historical relics as the country regains its imperial, dynastic rule. 

With this great industrial engine unleashed, with the vast entrepreneurial energies of the people suppressed for so long; without losing sight of the central Confucian ethos of the past; and governed by a nationalistic, determined, disciplined ruling elite, there is no stopping world Chinese hegemony. 

This particular blend of communism and capitalism, never before seen - the world has experienced only the retrograde, punitive, gulag-minded regimes of Mao and Stalin and the wild, untamed, undisciplined, and chaotic democracy of America - has proven to be the ideal.  The first reformist leaders of China made it clear to the West that the only freedom above all was the freedom from want.  The hallowed freedoms of the West, those that favored individual expression, were obstacles to the task of raising hundreds of millions out of poverty.  

Current Chinese President Xi has noted that whereas China has never veered from this essential purpose and would do all to achieve it, the West has weakened itself through the failed ideology of progressivism, a historically dangerous byway to inevitable destruction. Europe is awash in unwanted immigrants who threaten polity, culture, and state; and America is divided by false assumptions of race, gender, and ethnicity. 

President Putin of Russia is from the same cultural and historical tradition.  He recalls the greatness of Imperial Russia, the golden age of the czars, and the centuries of world history where Russia stood firmly atop all others.  He too remembers the dark days of Communism when Stalin ruined the country, impoverished millions, and sent millions more to their death in Siberian gulags and vows that it will never recur.  Russia will in time regain its world, imperial power. 

He like Xi rules autocratically, but such well-defined, nationalistic leadership is embraced by the Russian people who laud his elimination of Caucasian terrorism and his intent to restore the cultural and political integrity of the nation. There is no residual sentiment for the old days of communalism, for only the Politburo benefitted, and ordinary Russians suffered the enforced penury, cold, and shortages provoked by a failed system. 

So it is with a resounding laugh that both Putin and Xi look at their principle adversary, America and the elections of 'Democratic Socialists' in New York City and Washington, DC and a wave of equally radical politicians in the wings of the Democratic party. 

They who know better than anyone else how radical socialism destroyed their countries and consigned them to decades of poverty and oppression, wonder just what is happening in America. Of course they are delighted to see the movement accelerate and spread - the more governments reject the engine of capitalism and nationalistic entrepreneurial spirit which they, Putin and Xi, have endorsed, the weaker they become.

How could this have happened many New Yorkers wonder as they see their new mayor make good on his promises to make all public services free, tax the wealthy and redistribute their incomes, and watch these services fall into disrepair and disrepute and those who have built the city leave it? 

Thanks to diversity, one longtime resident, journalist, and economist has observed.  The uneducated, barely literate thousands of voters hear only free rent, free transport, and free food; see the multicultural, multiethnic face of Zorhan Mamdami and say 'One of us, one of us...'. 

Be that as it may, this observation does not account for the election of a Mamdani clone in the Nation's Capital, a woman who has vowed to undertake the same radical reforms as her counterpart in New York. 'I will reduce the burden on the poor', she said, 'by increasing it on the wealthy'. And in keeping with the progressive policies of the last decade will defund the police, replace strongarm tactics with community policing and compassion, and turn the District of Columbia into a model sanctuary city. 

Bernie Sanders, multi-decade Socialist Senator from Vermont, sees his star rising and has joined forces with Congress' young socialist radicals and promoted a reformist agenda.

How, say conservative historians, can they ignore the past?  The dismal failures of socialism and communism, the failed states of North Korea and Cuba? The sordid, murderous history of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the corrosive socialist regimes of Africa?

The idea of socialism - equality, each according to his need, each according to his ability, a community of like-minded, cooperative, consensual people - sounds good, but the reality has always belied the claim. Socialism is at heart an adolescent fantasy, and utopian progressivism has taken this idealism and made a policy of it. 

There is no country with as much national will, subscription and adherence to uniform philosophical and historical principles, and as much collective determination to restore the country to greatness as China. 

Everywhere the Chinese diaspora has prospered, focusing as it has on learning, discipline, intellectual rigor, hard work, respect, and ambition.  The Chinese have left whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks far behind in every educational category.  Their enterprise, duty, work ethic, and cultural honor have made them invincible and desirable.

The Chinese community in New York wants nothing to do with the flaccid, uninspired, degrading notions of socialist Mamdani.  They have never relied on government for their well-being, and have grown through enterprise, ownership, and management. 

These Chinese Americans laugh at woke and the progressivism which has eroded the once-prevalent American ethos of enterprise, independence and ambition. 

Xi knows that the Trump counter-revolution may be short-lived and that in the next elections the country will reject his virile nationalism and conservative principles and turn to the easier, more friendly, more accommodating progressive notions of communalism; so he is patient.  This too will pass, and America will fly its familiar colors of democratic chaos again. 

Putin is no different.  He has been responsible for the resurgence of Russia, taking it from the medieval ruins of Stalinism to world power status.  He like Xi watches America knowing that the rot is within, that the country now too far down the path of idealism, false identity, and bourgeois preference to recover its former post-colonial greatness.  Ukraine will be his just like Crimea, and he will reassert Russian influence throughout the region and the world and regain its imperial status. What is happening in America is predictable, welcome, and expected. 

The American Left has no geopolitical instincts, no understanding of international politics, no sense of history; and has contented itself with a fairytale notion of equality, diversity, and good will while America's adversaries, steeped in history, political philosophy, and a hardened nationalism go on to the next stage of power and influence. 

Violence vs Compassion - American Foreign Policy, Genghis Khan, And The Inevitable Course Of History

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

Genghis Khan's imperial conquests, and his absolute, indomitable and unalloyed will to victory, make him the perfect example of human nature expressed without reservation and without constraint. Wars have been perhaps the most common denominator of all periods of history - no era except for the two hundred years of Pax Romana - has been except from war.  The Egyptian city-state wars of 3000 BC were some of the first recorded conflicts, but human rivalries extend far earlier into prehistory. 

The Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the Napoleonic Wars, the Deccan Wars, The Thirty Years War and the various perennial armed civil conflicts in China are but a few modern examples.  The Twentieth Century with WWI and WWII along with the Maoist, Soviet, and Khmer revolutions and killing fields was one of the bloodiest.   The Twenty-First Century has started off in a similar vein. As of yet there have been no punishing, major, global wars with millions of deaths, but the century is still young. 

 

Pax Romana was possible because of Roman imperial hegemony.  Wars against the empire did not happen because Roman military and civil authority was so complete.  That condition - complete dominance - is very rare indeed, and most conflicts arise because of a presumption of victory. 

The Cold War of the Twentieth Century was a period of calm because of the second condition of peace - military standoff.  The Soviet Union and the United States were both so equally armed with nuclear weapons, that neither side wished to pull the trigger - 'Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)'. 

For today's American progressives war is unconscionable, a throwback to a more primitive, unevolved, prehistoric state of untamed territorialism; but one which need not be permanent.  Human nature, despite its predictable rampages throughout history, can be tamed, modified, and molded into a non-violent, compassionate, and considerate force for good. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  American military policy during the war in Vietnam was based on 'winning the hearts and minds of the people', a campaign to show villagers the benefits and rewards of liberal democracy.  In order to win the war, American military and civilian planners insisted, America must gain the support of the common man.  To do so villagers were provided food, clothing, and medicine in an attempt to show American generosity and good will and express the promise of a bright, Communist-free future. 

The Vietcong also wanted to win the hearts and minds of rural Vietnam, but did so through threat, intimidation, and unmitigated terror.  Any village even contemplating complicity with the enemy would suffer the consequences, and the Vietcong were as ruthless as Genghis Khan who left a trail of decapitated heads on spikes leading into and out of every conquered village.   

The story of how American soldiers vaccinated a hundred Vietnamese children, and how the Vietcong came into the village after the Americans left and cut off the vaccinated arms of each and every child was the apocryphal message of Vietnamese victory.

 'The horror...the horror...', Kurtz's dying words in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness expressing the tribal violence in all men, also expressed the pure, unalloyed, absolute will to victory of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. 

The US never learned the lesson of its defeat in Vietnam, and went on to apply the same losing strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Whereas the politics of post-Saddam Iraq were clear - rival militias ready to fight for supremacy - and the institution of a decade long military occupation of the country was the only way to assure a lasting democratic peace, the US withdrew.  The people of Iraq have spoken, President Bush claimed. 

Whereas annihilation of the Taliban in Afghanistan was the obvious solution to the problem of Muslim terrorism and the spread of radical Islam, the US held off, preferring to negotiate, to compromise, to 'bring to the table' opposing parties.  However just as in South Vietnam where the US installed a corrupt puppet regime, it did so in Kabul.  Negotiations were moot since the puppet regime was making millions from Taliban poppies. 

The current war between the US and Iran is a stalemate because of US reluctance to finish the job - completely destroy the theocracy and its military capacity.  Think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some Pentagon strategists have urged - victory at all cost, or don't bother. 

There is no doubt whatsoever that Russia and China, America's two implacable adversaries, would not hesitate to use whatever means at their disposal to achieve geopolitical dominance if not hegemony; and both laugh at the moral weakness of America where talk of sexual diversity, transgenderism, and male pregnancy dominate public discourse.  

China and Russia, both former imperial powers with desires to restore their storied past, have a well-defined central ethos.  Whether nationalism, Confucianism, or imperialism, these nations are unified in a Machiavellian universe.  The US is not, nor never can be. 

There is room for compassion in foreign affairs but after victory, taking care of the dispossessed, but never before. Victory requires amoral will and absolute determination.  Israel understands this because for them every war is an existential war.  Truman understood this as well when he authorized the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

A troubled world, lament progressives.  Give peace a chance; but history's lessons are clear.  Peace is a fiction, a pipe dream, a fairy tale; and the best one can hope for is standoff, intimidating incursions, defiant defense.  It is a fantasy to conclude that the world is becoming a more peaceful place.  The recently concluded Twentieth Century was one of the most bloody in history not a peaceful one. 

So, fight wars only when they are in a nation's self interest, and pursue them until complete, unequivocal, absolute victory is achieved.  There is no problem with adversaries and there is no point in wishing them away.  They simply must be regarded as territorial, aggressive, and amoral and must be met with the same resolve.