During the last hundred years, Russia has undergone huge changes.

At the beginning, it was ruled by the Czar, in an absolute monarchy with some democratic decorations, a “tyranny mitigated by inefficiency”.

After the downfall of the Czar, a liberal and equally inefficient regime ruled for a few months, when it was overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” lasted for some 73 years, which means that three generations passed through the Soviet education system. That should have been enough to absorb the values of internationalism, socialism and human dignity, as taught by Karl Marx.

Editor’s Note: We agree with Avnery in most of his points except in his characterization of Putin as a new czar, which we regard as a bit too harsh and not reflecting the narrow choices facing him as he tries to reconstruct Russian power in the face of a rapidly advancing American offensive. 

The Soviet system imploded in 1991, leaving few political traces behind. After a few years of liberal anarchy under Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin took over. He has proved himself to be an able statesman, making Russia into a world power again. He has also instituted a new autocratic system, clamping down on democracy and human rights.

When we view these events, spanning a century, we are obliged to conclude that after undergoing all these dramatic upheavals Russia is politically more or less where it started. The difference between the realm of Czar Nicholas II and President Putin I is minimal. The national aspirations, the general outlook, the regime and the status of human rights are more or less the same.

What does that teach us? For me it means that there is something like a national character, which does not change easily, if at all. Revolutions, wars, disasters come and go, and the basic character of a people remains as it was.

Let us take another example, closer to us geographically: Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal was a fascinating person. People who met him when, as an officer in the Ottoman army, he was serving in Palestine, described him as an interesting character and a heavy drinker. He was born in Thessaloniki in Greece, a town which was mostly Jewish at the time, and took part in the revolution of the Young Turk movement, which aimed at the renovation of the Ottoman Empire, which had become the “sick man of Europe”.

After the Turkish defeat in World War I, Mustafa Kemal set out to create a new Turkey. His reforms were very far-reaching. Among others, he abolished the Ottoman Empire and the ancient Muslim Caliphate, changed the script of the Turkish language from Arabic to Latin, pushed religion out of politics, turned the army into “the guardian of the (secular) republic”, forbade men and women to wear traditional dress like the fez and the hijab. His ambition was to turn Turkey into a modern European country.

In 1934, when the surname law was adopted, the national parliament gave him the name “Atatürk” (Father of Turks). The people adore him to this day. His picture hangs in all government offices. Yet now we witness the reversal of most of his reforms.

Turkey is today ruled by a religious Islamic party, voted in by the people. Islam is making a major comeback. After staging several coups, the army has been pushed out of politics. The present leadership is accused by some of neo-Ottoman policies.

Does this mean that Turkey is returning to where it was a hundred years ago?

One can cite examples from all over the world.

Some 220 years after the mother of all modern revolutions, the Great French Revolution, the frivolous adventures of the present French president are being compared to those of the Bourbon kings. Nothing much has remained from the times of the austere Charles de Gaulle, neither morally nor politically.

Italy has still not attained political stability, after the intermezzo of the clownish Silvio Berlusconi. A much reduced Great Britain still thinks and behaves like the empire in its heyday, striving to get away from the Europe of the Frogs and the Wogs.

And so forth.

I like to quote (again) Elias Canetti, the Nobel-prize writer claimed by Bulgaria, England and Switzerland, not to mention the Jews.

In one of his works he claims that every nation has its own character, like a human being. He even undertook to describe the character of major nations by symbols: the British are like a sea captain, the Germans are like a forest of tall, straight oaks, the Jews are formed by the exodus from Egypt and the wandering in the desert. He sees these characteristics as constant.

Professional historians may laugh at such dilettantism. However, I believe that the injection of some literary insights into history is all for the better. It deepens the understanding.

All this  leads me to the Jewish-Israeli metamorphosis.

Israel was literally created by the Zionist movement. This was one of the most revolutionary of revolutions, if not the most far-reaching of all. It did not aspire to the change of a regime, like Mandela in South Africa. Nor to a profound change of society, like the Communist movements. Nor to a cultural change, like that of Atatürk. Zionism wanted to achieve all that, and much more.

It wanted to take a dispersed religious-ethnic community, born in ancient times, and turn it into a modern nation. To take masses of individuals from their homelands and natural habitat and transfer them physically to another country and another climate. To change the social status of each of them. To cause them to adopt a new language – a dead language that was brought to life again, a task no other people ever succeeded in accomplishing. To do all this in a foreign country inhabited by another people.

Of all revolutionary movements of the 20^th century, Zionism was the most successful and enduring. Communism. Fascism and dozens of others came and went. Zionism endures.

But is Israeli society really Zionist, as it claims loudly and repeatedly?

Zionism was basically a rebellion against the Jewish existence in the Diaspora. In the religious sphere, it was a reformation more profound than that of Martin Luther.

All prominent Jewish Rabbis, both Hasidic as anti-Hasidic, condemned Zionism as a heresy. The People of Israel were united by their absolute obedience to God’s 613 commandments, not by any “national” bonds. God had strictly forbidden any mass return to the Land of Israel, since He had exiled the Jews for their sinful behavior. The Jewish Diaspora was thus decreed by God and had to remain, until He changes His mind.

And here came the Zionists, mostly atheists, and wanted to bring the Jews to the Land of Israel without God’s permission, indeed abolishing God altogether. They built a secular society. They held abysmal contempt for the Diaspora, especially for the Orthodox “ghetto Jews”. Their founding father, Theodor Herzl, held that after the foundation of the Jewish State, no one outside it would be considered a Jew anymore. Other Zionists were not quite so radical, but certainly thought along these lines.

When I was young, many of us went even further. We disclaimed the idea of a Jewish State, and spoke instead of a Hebrew State, connected only loosely with Diaspora Jewry, creating a new Hebrew civilization closely connected with the Arab world around us. An Asian nation, not identified with Europe and the West.

So where are we now?

Israel is re-Judaizing itself at a rapid pace. The Jewish religion is making a huge comeback. Very soon, religious children of various communities will be the majority in Israeli Jewish schools.

Organized Orthodox religion has made immense inroads. The official Israeli definition of a Jew is exclusively religious. All matters of personal status, like marriage and divorce, are ruled by the Rabbinate. So is the menu of most restaurants. Public transport, on land and in the air, is halted on the Shabbat. Non-Orthodox Jewish religious denominations, like the “Reformists” and the “Conservatives”, are practically banned.

In a scandal that is rocking Israel at the moment, revolving around a Qabalistic rabbi, is appears that this miraculous person has amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars by selling blessings and amulets. He is but one of many such rabbis who are surrounded by tycoons, cabinet ministers, senior gangsters and senior police officers.

Herzl, who promised to “keep the rabbis in their synagogues and the professional army in their barracks” is surely turning in his grave on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl.

But these are still relatively superficial symptoms. I am thinking of much more profound matters.

One of the basic convictions of Diaspora Jewry was that “the whole world is against us”. Jews have been persecuted throughout the ages in many countries, up to the Holocaust. In the Seder ceremony on Passover eve, which unites all the Jews around the world, the holy text says that “in every generation they arise to annihilate us”.

The official aim of Zionism was to turn us into “a people like all peoples”. Does a normal people believe that everybody is out to annihilate it at all times?

It is a basic conviction of almost every Jewish Israeli that “the whole world is against us” – which is also a jolly popular song. The US is concluding an agreement with Iran? Europe turns against the settlements? Russia helps Bashar al-Assad? Anti-Semites all.

International protests against our occupation of the Palestinian territories are, of course, just another form of anti-Semitism. (The Prime Minister of Canada, who visited Israel this week and made a ridiculous speech in the Knesset, also proclaimed that any criticism of Israeli policy is a form of anti-Semitism.)

Does this mean that in Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish State, all the old Jewish attitudes, suspicions, fears and myths are coming to the fore again? That the revolutionary Zionist concepts are disappearing? That nothing much has changed in the Jewish outlook?

As the French say: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Or, as Ecclesiastes puts it in the Bible (1:9): “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Barcelona.

On Friday, January 10, three thousand people took to the streets in the city of Burgos, Spain, protesting a construction project that would remodel a normal street into a deluxe boulevard, taking an important step forward in the gentrification of Gamonal, a long-time working class neighborhood. The police charged to disperse the protest, and the story would have ended there: another failed attempt to stop the latest austerity measure, foreclosure, mass layoff, or destructive “urban renewal” project.

Nearly three years after the plaza occupation movement swept Spain, the abuses keep raining down from on high. Largely fruitless, the popular mobilizations have waned. It’s been more than a year since the last general strike, and though motives to protest abound, the crowds rarely reach ten thousand. The real estate bubble in Spain has long since burst, yet speculative projects like the one in Gamonal, projects that displace people and forcibly change the character of once accessible neighborhoods, continue to occur.

But that Friday in Gamonal, the story took an unexpected turn. Rather than dispersing, people stayed in the streets, they set up barricades, and they began destroying banks and construction equipment. The next day, they took to the streets again, demanding the unconditional release of all the people arrested the night before.

For four consecutive nights, Burgos was rocked by riots. At first the mayor, who has strong ties to the construction industry, refused to withdraw his support for the project. Locals began organizing blockades to prevent the arrival of new machinery. Then solidarity protests started popping up in other cities across Spain. First in Madrid, and then by January 17 in over forty other cities. Two nights in a row, the 14th and the 15th, mobilizations in Madrid that were attacked by police turned into riots. In Melilla, one of Spain’s North African colonies, a protest linking the movement in Burgos to a similar situation of undesired urbanization happening locally, also sparked confrontations with the police.

On the 16th, there were extensive solidarity riots in Zaragoza and Barcelona. In the latter city, masked protestors damaged banks and multinationals like Starbucks and Burger King along the exclusive Laietana Avenue, and then occupied the plaza in front of the Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government, where they clashed with police guarding the building.

That same day, the rich and powerful of Burgos bent to popular demands and announced that construction of the new boulevard would be cancelled. People in the streets are jubilant, but no one can be heard to suggest that the struggle is over.

One neighborhood’s battle against gentrification has resonated with people across Spain. Their outrage throws the crisis that is growing across Europe into sharp relief.

Deaf to popular protests, the European Union and the banks it has bailed out continue unswervingly down the path of neoliberal austerity. They have made it clear that the welfare of an increasingly precarious workforce is no longer on their agenda. Yet the response from the street has shown that more than just the particular capitalist strategy of neoliberalism is at stake. While rising unemployment certainly fuels popular anger and makes social rebellion more likely, many of the targets have not been features of austerity but the hallmarks of democratic capitalism itself.

In Gamonal, the target was gentrification, a process that is just as associated with boom times as with times of crisis. In the earlier plaza occupation or “indignados” movement, a principal target were the political parties, which continue to be non grata in most spaces of protest. On January 15, in the sleepy Catalan city of Girona, a crowd tried to stop the deportation of a Moroccan man who had participated in a local anti-foreclosure group. When the police van finally broke through the crowd and took him away, people ran amok through the city center, attacking cops and destroying banks. Just a couple weeks earlier, the traditional New Year’s Eve noise demo outside the immigrant prison in Barcelona sparked an uprising on the inside that was put down with brutal police force and the speedy deportation of several immigrants. Forty prisoners went on hunger-strike. The EU policy of mass detentions and deportations that has earned it the nickname of “Fortress Europe” was put into practice in the boom years of the ’90s. It is not a byproduct of neoliberalism per se, but a feature of capitalist government plain and simple.

In other words, people are not just reacting to the austerity measures that are slashing their benefits or privatizing health and education. They are taking the opportunity presented by the rising social unrest to take aim at a great many pillars of modern government and economy, phenomena that long predate neoliberalism, such as borders, deportations, political parties, and gentrification.

Similar cases could be drawn from any of the austerity-wracked countries in Europe. Even in remarkably stable Germany, there’s the case of Hamburg, where authorities placed three entire neighborhoods under martial law after crowds protesting the planned closure of a beloved social center clashed with police on December 21 and attacked police stations a week later.

In Spain, the government has responded to popular unrest with an iron fist. At the end of 2013, Madrid passed a reform to the penal laws that criminalizes unauthorized protests and protests that surround Congress or other government buildings, and adds heavy penalties for protest arrestees wearing masks. The reform also allows police to declare “security zones” in which protests will not be allowed, and prohibits the filming of police if doing so violates the vague criterion compromising their honor or security—and this just a month after police were filmed beating an immigrant to death in Barcelona.

After the rowdy March 29, 2012 general strike, the Catalan Interior Minister announced that vandalism would be punished as harshly as terrorism. True to his word, dozens of people arrested in the strike and in other moments of social conflict, such as the May Day protests of 2013 or various attempted blockades of the Catalan parliament in Barcelona or the national Congress in Madrid are still facing severe charges.

Occurring hand in hand with all of these movements, there has been an increase in actions of nighttime sabotage. The government response has followed a clear pattern: criminalization and heavy punishment for any acts of property destruction or disobedience in moments of mass protest, with the intent to dissuade resistance and exhaust the movement; and the use of the antiterrorism law to drag any secretive sabotage actions out of the terrain of popular resistance and into the terrain of state security and mass paranoia.

Spain is a pioneer in the development of antiterrorism as a tool to repress social movements, deploying a state of exception against the Basque independence movement. To erode widespread public support and crush resistance, Madrid used the antiterrorism law against the armed group ETA (which like the Spanish state had killed quite a few civilians) but also against Basque youth groups involved in the organization of protests or alternative media.

In the age of austerity protests, the chief target of Spain’s antiterrorism law have been anarchist groups that have killed no one. While the police kill immigrants with impunity on a monthly basis or shoot old ladies’ eyes out with rubber bullets during protests, the media distracts everyone with the spectacle of terrorism, harping on acts of property destruction.

In less than a year, thirteen anarchists across Spain have been arrested under the antiterrorism law. On May 15, 2013, the second anniversary of the plaza occupation movement, five people were arrested in the city of Sabadell, accused of running a Facebook page that expressed support for anti-government riots and property destruction, and that featured jokes about beheading or otherwise deposing Spain’s king. The charges: encouragement of terrorism. The police took advantage of the occasion to raid an anarchist social center with which the detainees had no relation. In their press statements, faithfully produced en masse, the police claimed that anarchists had infiltrated the plaza occupation movement, when the truth of the matter is that those targeted by the raid, as well as anarchists in other cities, had openly participated in the movement from the very beginning. This case bears strong resemblance to the arrest of five anarchists in Ohio on the anniversary of the Occupy movement, targeted in a police operation that smacks of entrapment.

On November 13, 2013, five anarchists were arrested in Barcelona, accused of being the authors of a small bomb attack that had occurred in an empty cathedral, destroying a couple wooden pews and injuring no one. The statement that claimed responsibility for the attack focused on the Catholic Church’s role in the colonization and despoliation of Latin America. Incidentally, the police have no evidence connecting any of the five to the bombing. They have grainy video in which two of the accused are supposedly seen in a café and a bus station near the cathedral, although they can’t be positively identified due to the quality of the images. Much more convenient for the police is that those two had also been accused—and fully acquitted—of similar charges in a 2010 case in Chile; all five are foreigners; and all five are active anarchists.

And now, on January 14, three anarchists were arrested and charged with terrorism for the 2012 attack on a businessmen’s club in Galicia, northwestern Spain. This act of terrorism consisted of the lobbing of two molotov cocktails against an empty building, again with no injuries. Molotov cocktails were a standard part of the neighborhood struggles of the ’70s and ’80s, which helped force an end to the fascist dictatorship in Spain, though they continued throughout the following decade as destructive urbanization only accelerated under democracy. Short on historical sentimentality, the government would like to permanently remove those devilish little devices from the popular arsenal.

Cities across Spain are beefing up their riot police squads, buying sonar weapons, crowd control tanks armed with high-pressure water cannons, and other gadgets. Meanwhile, they are criminalizing the “less lethal weaponry” of the people within the rubric of antiterrorism. No surprise, since the law is just another of their gadgets.

Layoffs, evictions, gentrification, prisons, mass deportations, criminal codes, surveillance cameras, privatization of education and healthcare, the gutting of social security, riot police, the stirring up of nationalism: these are the weapons of the rich and powerful in this current crisis. In Spain as in a growing number of countries, the weapons of the weak and exploited to defend themselves against the onslaught have included protests, strikes, building occupations, open assemblies, prisoner support, books and flyers, the free sharing of goods, graffiti, posters, urban gardens, the self-organization of healthcare and education, the looting of supermarkets, barricades, the smashing of banks and other institutions of wealth and power, riots, and sabotage.

Sometimes, it turns out our weapons aren’t so weak after all. Those who took to the streets in Gamonal and other cities achieved a small but important victory. And many of those people share in a growing consciousness that they are part of something that extends across the globe. An integral part of that consciousness is the desire to spread news of their cause and pass on lessons and experiences that could be useful to similar causes around the world.

In Gamonal and beyond, the struggle continues.

Peter Gelderloos is the author of several books, including Anarchy Works and the newly published The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy. He lives in Barcelona.

While Angela Davis is well known for her progressive perspectives on race, gender, and class, less well known are her views on species, which are quite forward-thinking. The great socialist scholar, it might surprise some to hear, does not consume animal products.

“I usually don’t mention that I’m vegan but that has evolved,” Davis said at the 27th Empowering Women of Color Conference, according to a transcript available at RadioProject.org. “I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective – how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.”

Challenging this form of food production, Davis said, would involve witnessing animal exploitation firsthand. “It would mean being aware – driving up the interstates or driving down the 5, driving down to LA, seeing all the cows on the ranches,” she stated. “Most of people don’t think about the fact they’re eating animals. When they’re eating a steak or eating chicken, most people don’t think about the tremendous suffering that those animals endure simply to become food products to be consumed by human beings.”

For Davis, this blindness is connected to the commodity form. “I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world,” she said. “We don’t go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object- we don’t think about the relations that that object embodies- and were important to the production of that object, whether it’s our food or our clothes or our iPads or all the materials we use to acquire an education at an institution like this. That would really be revolutionary to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non-human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment.”

Davis struck a similar note in a video recording uploaded to the Vegans of Color blog.

“I don’t talk about this a lot but I’m going to do this today because I think it’s really important,” she said. “The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.”

Davis suggested viewers watch the film ‘Food, Inc.’ “And then ask yourself,” she said, “what is it like to sit down and eat that food that is generated only for the purposes of profit and creates so much suffering?”

Davis concluded her comments by explicitly linking the treatment of humans and animals.

“I think there is a connection between, and I can’t go further than this, the way we treat animals and the way we treat people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy,” She said. “Look at the ways in which people who commit such violence on other human beings have often learned how to enjoy that by enacting violence on animals. So there are a lot of ways we can talk about this.”

Jon Hochschartner is a freelance writer from upstate New York. Visit his website at JonHochschartner.com