Daily Archives: February 4, 2021

Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.

Since this moral consensus could be readily presupposed, Americans (and other free peoples) could and did abridge the language of politics to give priority to rights over duties, choice over the content of what was chosen, and the pursuit of happiness over the pursuit of truth and virtue. But this was precisely an abridgement because the other half of the equation was always more or less presupposed. The American Founders, for example, were in no way moral relativists, let alone moral nihilists. Rejecting religious sectarianism and the forceable political imposition of religious truth, they nonetheless appealed to honor, civic virtue, and the honorable determination of a free people to govern themselves. Facile relativism or easygoing nihilism, where all values are created equal, would have appalled them. The idea that moral judgments are utterly arbitrary, that distinctions between right and wrong, and better and worse ways of life, are wholly subjective, was completely alien to them. Almost all of them spoke of a human moral sense without which freedom degenerates into moral anarchy and despotic self-assertion.

Unlike the French Revolutionaries, they did not repudiate Christianity or begin the world anew with some ideological Year Zero (neither 1776 nor 1787 became the first year in some new revolutionary calendar). The vast majority of the Founding generation remained religious believers and combined a belief in natural rights with deference to the natural moral law. For them, rights without duties were unthinkable, freedom without self-limitation unlivable. Such was the American consensus.

All the prominent Founders were fundamentally anti-utopian (even Tom Paine), and had, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, an acute sense of human sinfulness and imperfection. They were not the Puritans or Calvinists of old, but neither did they endorse the materialism and reductionism of the radical Enlightenment or its misplaced belief in an ideology of Progress. They still believed that human beings had souls and were much more than matter in motion. They had no trouble rejecting both the theocratic temptation in politics and a relativism that severed the essential connections between truth and liberty, freedom and the pursuit of the good life. Moral subjectivism (Whos to say what is right and wrong?) was wholly alien to their hearts and minds, precisely because they were civilized men and women.

We now live in a different moral universe, and by no means a better one. Of course, inspired by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the early civil rights movement, we have made considerable progress in overcoming racial injustice, and the legacy of the great injustice that was chattel slavery. That is all to the good. But an emphasis on inclusiveness, however necessary and legitimate, does not define or exhaust the moral foundations of democracy. Today, even religious believers habitually speak of morality in terms of values, a term derived from economics which suggests that something is good because we value or choose it (its modern use was made famous by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber). Whether people who use that language know that they have succumbed to what C.S. Lewis derided as the poison of subjectivism is largely beside the point. As Allan Bloom argued in The Closing of the American Mind over 30 years ago, the language of values, and the language of right and wrong, are by no means the same thing; they ultimately point in different directions. The latter partakes of confidence in the reality of moral facts, the former of thoroughgoing relativism and subjectivism. Language matters, and the language of values is, whether we like it or not, the language of moral relativism, even moral subversion. Of course, some thinkers of note use the language of values and disvalues while dissociating those terms from a framework of moral relativism. But there is peril in that path.

It is not just a question of nomenclature. There is a deep ambiguity inherent in the modern categories of self-determination and popular sovereignty themselves. I dont believe that the architects of our political order believed in human self-sovereignty in the strict sense. They did not endorse the truly radical and subversive idea that human beings should repudiate a Higher Power, a superintending principle of Justice or Goodness as Hamilton called it, above themselves. They were not political atheists and did not believe that men should aspire to be gods. This is the great divide that separates the Founders as prudent revolutionaries, in Ralph Lerners phrase, from the proto-totalitarianism already apparent in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution (1792-1794). The Declaration of Independence invokes not only Natures God but also God as Creator, Providence, and Supreme Judge. It thus readily accommodates, and draws together, deists, theists, and believers in the biblical God, while fully tolerating skepticism or atheism as a private belief. The new order of the ages that our currency appeals to took for granted civilizational and moral continuity. Americas prudent revolutionaries were in that important sense conservative revolutionaries, too.

Let us return to the ambiguity to which I referred. Political emancipation, even the self-determination of a free people, quite logically gives rise to more radical claims about human beings governing themselves without any natural, metaphysical, or moral restraints getting in their way. Today, many people thinkers, theorists, and ordinary citizens alike speak breathlessly about human autonomy or even self-ownership of rights without duties, of freedom without any deference to the moral law or a natural order of things. Of course, Tocqueville already noted at the beginning of the second volume of Democracy in America that democratic men and women readily succumb to inertia, to vertigo or moral panic, when they are obliged to choose but have no star and compass to guide them but the imperative of choice itself. The result is either a debilitating passivity or a creeping conformity where distraught men and women take their bearings from the predictable uniformity of the crowd. Promethean declarations of independence, of radical self-sufficiency, give way to immersion in petty and paltry pleasures and a small-minded democratic conformity. But as the bitter experience of the twentieth century suggests, autonomy understood as the rejection of Nature and Natures God can also give rise to an inhuman totalitarianism, where political atheism wars with the natural order of things. That is the path of tyranny and terror.

There is, of course, a more noble and constrained view of autonomy and self-determination. Kant, the great moral philosopher of modernity, heralded obedience to the moral law, to the categorical imperative to treat every human being as an end, not as a means to our own purposes, as a defining trait of the morally serious person who governs himself. And if one reads his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), it is apparent from page one that Kant adhered to a demanding morality that required a good deal of self-command. But Kant, for all his philosophical profundity, fatally separated morality from any ground in nature. And so latter-day Kantians, academic philosophers and law professors, think respect for the dignity of human beings requires that we not only tolerate but esteem every life-style choice no matter how base, self-absorbed, self-destructive, vulgar, or ignoble. Autonomy has been divorced from self-command and self-respect. The new moral dispensation refuses to tolerate only those who still live up to the humanizing and civilizing requirements of the moral law. This convoluted use and abuse of autonomy is a powerful impetus behind political correctness and the soft totalitarianism that inspires the cancel culture. We are now authorized to cancel those who still believe in God and the moral law, who still believe in moral self-command. The old restraints, the old absolutes, are now seen as the enemy of human freedom.

Today, we still appeal to human rights, ever more expansive, ever more indiscriminate, ever more bereft of prudence while the old idiom of natural rights, which largely presupposed natural law or the natural moral sense, can barely be heard. How else could we arrive at the conclusion that biological nature can be dismissed at will and that human beings inhabit 73, or is it 153, different genders? This is the reductio ad absurdum, the farcical concluding stage, of the view that human beings create themselves and are beholden to no standards above, or outside, the human will. This is a recipe, as we see all around us, for both moral anarchy and political self-enslavement.

Self-government and autonomy, so understood, will remain forever incompatible. But there is a complication that we defenders of the American Founding are obliged to acknowledge. The ambiguity of which I have spoken has been retrospectively read back into the Founding documents themselves. The Founders were torn between the idiom of the state of nature, bequeathed by political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and their own richer subordination to superintending principles of Goodness and Justice that transcend the will of men, or the founding of civil society. We all agree today that no man should be governed without his consent. But as Orestes Brownson had already pointed out in The American Republic, published in 1865, some locate this prohibition against despotic rule in the absolute autonomy of the individual, rather than in light of a more traditional understanding of what Tocqueville eloquently called liberty under God and the law. This is the ultimate root of the culture wars: whether liberty demands permissive egalitarianism, a life without law, or whether self-government is inseparable from rationally ascertainable moral and civic virtues. That is the great divide within the heart of liberalism, and liberal democracy more broadly.

We need to make explicit a moral-political-philosophical premise presupposed but not emphasized by our great forebears: Man is not God, independent, self-existing, and self-sufficing, as Brownson strikingly put it. In an age where toxic relativism and toxic moralism coexist and merge, we need to theorize, to emphasize, to stress, what our forebears could still largely take for granted. In contrast to their situation, the moral capital of Western civilization can no longer be taken for granted since it is depleting by the hour. Against the poison of subjectivism and its ugly twin, unthinking moralistic and egalitarian rage we must renew the Great Tradition with its reasonable confidence in self-rule and self-command. Our civic and civilizational renewal must be informed by moral facts and truths inherent in our nature and ultimately bequeathed to us by the divine source of our rights and obligations. Such is the great unspoken presupposition that gives life to the American civic tradition.

Excerpt from:

Op-Ed: Civic virtues as moral facts recovering the other half of our founding - The Center Square

The anti-reforms protest by farmers of Punjab, Haryana and some parts of western Uttar Pradesh, targeting the three laws enacted by Parliament to make agriculture more market-friendly and offer more remunerative choices to cultivators, has transmogrified into a #hashtag campaign on social media. This completes the by-now-familiar cycle of disruptive and insurrectionary dissent in the times we live in. There is nothing either amusing or asinine about this #hashtag campaign, especially after the violence on Republic Day when protesters ran riot at Red Fort.

In keeping with global trends, the #hashtag campaign is vicious and inflammatory. A hateful #hashtag, containing the word genocide, that was promoted and trended on social media platforms, bears out this point. With prominent foreign political and social media personalities, who are not known to have demonstrated any interest in or knowledge of Indian affairs in the past, wading in to bump up their numbers and grab eyeballs, the edge of the campaign has got sharper and more malicious, prompting a formal response from the Government of India.

In many ways, the evident disruptive anarchy in the guise of democratic dissent, which is not unique to India as recent events in the US and other countries would bear out, is reminiscent of the original Naxalite Movement and its subsequent avatars in various forms, spanning multiple shades of ideology and political impulses. The common thread binding them together has been the defiance of the Indian state and rejection of its constitutionally-mandated institutions.

Like the 2020s, the 1960s too were a decade of global turmoil. India was not untouched by the ferment. In 1967, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), born of a split in the Communist Party of India three years earlier, splintered with the Marxist-Leninist faction led by Charu Majumdar calling for an armed democratic revolutiona violent insurrection that would come to be known as the Naxalite Movement, named after remote Naxalbari in rural West Bengal, a place of which nobody had heard till then.

Majumdars aim was to ignite a prairie fire, fuelled by the Historic Eight Documents, encapsulating his Far Left extremist agenda of supplanting the Indian Republic with a revolutionary state. He was confident that the fire lit by him would sweep through Indias many villages and finally engulf the countrys too few towns and cities, and Robespierrean mimic men and women would seize power not through ballots but bullets.

The Peoples Daily, propaganda organ of the Communist Party of China, ran a lengthy editorial on July 5, 1967, extolling the virtues of the Naxalite Movement and exaggerating its power to bring down the Indian state. A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India, it wrote, Our great leader, Chairman Mao, teaches us: The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution.

The China-inspired Naxalite revolution failed, and miserably so, as did its latter day Maoist reincarnation some three decades later. The road to world revolution, Lenin is believed to have said, lies through Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta. Much to the disappointment of the ultra-Left, the PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) did not come marching in and the road to revolution stopped at Shanghai.

ALSO READ| Provocative Remarks on Farm Laws Are Part of A Larger Disinformation Campaign Against PM Modi Govt

But even in its failure the Naxalite Movement extracted a terrible price and left behind a dark legacy of anarchic extremism. Like an obstinately mutating virus, this extremism is persistent and its disruptive tactics continue to be invoked again and again, even as yesterdays revolutionary pamphlets have morphed into social media hashtags. Anarchy now rides along with dissent and protest. B.R. Ambedkar had warned the nascent Republic of India of the grammar of anarchy. That warning is coming true with disruptive regularity.

The Hashtag Naxal (#Naxal) is not necessarily a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary motivated by Mao and the Marxist-Leninist ideology he espoused. But, like the pamphleteering Naxals of the 1960s, todays #Naxal is both a disruptor and an instigator of violence in varying forms, deftly exploiting the faultlines of democracy and of an incredibly diverse populace. The nihilism lives on like a stubborn cancer, seemingly incurable and un-excisable.

For Naxals of the age of ferment the state was the enemy and its organsthe Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciarywere to be mocked and ridiculed, the elected were to be replaced by the proletariat, and the comprador bourgeoisie were to be put against the wall. The #Naxal of the social media era remarkably thinks similarly and rejects the constitutional mandate to Government, Parliament and Judiciary, even as it seeks the privilege of constitutional rights. If in the times of Maos Little Red Book power flew from the barrel of a gun, it now flows from tweets with hashtags.

Yesterdays comprador bourgeoisie is todays corporate sector, to be reviled and despised by the #Naxal who may have nothing to show by way of any alternative offering that may have worked in a pluralistic society. In the 1960s, India was on the verge of being defeated by poverty, hunger and disease, desperately struggling to stay afloat. In 2021, its an entirely different India. It could be argued that the faultlines of democracy remain and divisions in society are real, but that would be true for all democracies. Yet they become the reason for debunking Parliament and diminishing Judiciary, as has been attempted, for instance, by successive agitations of recent years.

The disruptive anarchy we are witnessing stands in sharp contrast to the realities of India today where the Government with no external support has rolled out the worlds largest Covid-19 vaccination programme with a Made in India vaccine produced by an Indian enterprise and businesses. In the early-1970s, during another pandemic, it was abjectly dependent on the WHO for smallpox vaccine. Indian technology now sustains space science and indigenous drones. Indian fighter planes are set to add heft to Indias defence capabilities. India produces and procures more food than the country can consume. Indias growing entrepreneurial class creates millions of jobs and generates wealth for the humblest of homes.

The list is long, the comparisons well-known. That said, it is nobodys case that things must not be better, and that missteps and failings are not part of the national story. It is also no ones case that governance deficits are not aplenty. The answer, however, does not lie in weaponising either mass mobilisation in the streets or #hashtag mobilisations on social media platforms. Disinformation, irrespective of which corner it emerges from, is truly a curse in our otherwise exciting times.

The #Naxal is both unmindful of these realities and, as some would argue, willing to play the game of those who would want to see India halted in its tracks, weighed down by losses inflicted by anarchy that uses the Constitution as its shield. Make no mistake, this anarchy comes with a steep priceto be paid, ultimately, by the people. In the last three months the damage to strategic infrastructure has been incalculable, the losses of a single large Walmart store are reported to have crossed $8 million, and it will take months to calculate the losses on account of disruption of highway traffic.

ALSO READ| As PM Modi Unleashes Wave of Reforms, He is Going to Face Even More Resistance

Constitutional rights are now interpreted as a belligerent privilege to pollute the air the masses breatheor, rather choke onand the right to prevent the installation of smart electricity meters so as not to be deprived of the licence to consume power without paying for it. The entitlement stretches to disrupting Republic Day celebrationssomething never done beforeand bunkering down regardless of the consequent misery inflicted on millions of people. It was mind-numbing to see tweets by political actors urging their digital comrades to destroy economic infrastructure. It was frightening to note that there was complicity in most quarters in the acceptance of such #Naxal behaviour.

The 1960s Peoples Daily is todays Global Times which gleefully eggs on the #Naxal anarchy: Failing to tame the pandemic and maintain economic growth, the Modi Government is cornered now. Domestic dissatisfaction is surging. Its reported that thousands of farmers from several Indian states have been camping on the outskirts of New Delhi for weeks, rattling the administration China senses another Spring Thunder moment.

It is silly to recall, as is the flavour of this silly season, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhis satyagraha and compare the insurrections of our times with the Mahatmas protests, thus seeking to legitimise anarchy. Gandhi used Truth as a weapon in his many protests to bring down a colonial, unelected, unrepresentative Government whose sovereign head was the British Crown. What we are witnessing now is an insidious attempt to change the outcome produced through ballots by unleashing unrest on the streets through tweets that trend #hashtags.

Nihilism still rules. But ballots must prevail.

Disclaimer:Kanchan Gupta is a senior journalist and political analyst. Views are personal.

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Farmers Protest and #Hashtag Anarchy as Dissent in the Age of Social Media - News18

Welcome to Horrorscope, a monthly column keeping horror nerds and initiates up to date on all the genre content coming to and leaving from your favorite streaming services. Heres a guide to all the essential horror streaming in February 2021.

Smell that? Love is in the air. A loveof horror, that is!

Valentines Day may fall in February, but dont let the cheap chocolates and the gradually increasing daylight fool you: this months as spooky as the rest of em! After all, what could be more romantic than pledging your undying love for horror films? Passive entertainment remains a challenge as the world continues to burn (thanks, ongoing global pandemic!). So, if you can, give yourself and the genre a little love this month.

Speaking of which: February comes bearing blood-soaked gifts, from hotly anticipated new releases to old bangers waiting to be re-discovered. Weve got a body-swapping sophomore flick from Brandon Cronenberg, a nihilistic family haunting, an underrated British counterculture gem, and the best Dracula dance film ever made.

Be sure to peruse the complete list below, calendar in hand, for a full picture of what horror flicks are coming and going from your favorite streaming services this February.

Synopsis: Theres losing yourself in your work, and then theres this. Tasya Vos is an elite assassin; a corporate mercenary who commandeers the minds and bodies of unsuspecting victims to fulfill her deadly contracts. But when her latest assignment gets the better of her, Vos finds herself trapped in the mind of a hostile target that would see her destroyed.

Possessor makes good on the often unfulfilled promise of its peers. For a change, the gore actually lives up to the hype! The films two nightmares are devilishly compatible: an intrusive sense of dissociation coupled with a corpulent knockdown of chipped teeth and mangled flesh. While ultimately Possessor amounts to more of a concept than a narrative, its visceral gait is more than enough to get under your skin. The loss of bodily autonomy, a simultaneous crunch of bone and self, is more compelling than half of the lesser fare in Possessors elevated weight class.

Brandon Cronenbergs second film deftly quells any residual handwaving leftover from his wanting debut. There can be no doubt: he is a tremendous talent well worth watching. As Vos, Andrea Riseborough is as fantastic as weve come to expect; a cool killer who finds herself in the throes of an identity crisis at work and at home. Christopher Abbott has been fantastic for a long time (especially in 2018s Piercing), and I hope more directors follow Cronenbergs lead and give the man more starring roles. All told: Possessor is not above being genuinely queasy and disgusting. And I respect that.

Arrives on Hulu on February 1st.

Synopsis: In an otherwise peaceful English village, spoiled brat Tom Latham chooses to raise hell with his occult motorcycle gang. Sure enough, the goth apple doesnt fall far from the tree. Toms black-magic dabbling mother just so happens to know the secret to immortality. So, how do you cheat death? Frog magic and just plain deciding not to die, of course! Thrilled at the prospect of being an eternal public nuisance, Tom giddily sails off a bridge, only to burst out of his grave with a vengeance. Soon enough the gangs name, The Living Dead, takes on a more literal meaning.

Released as The Death Wheelers in the US, the 1973 film Psychomania is a bonkers example of a larger aesthetic shift in early 1970s British horror from the gothic chills to modern thrills. Of the bunch, Psychomania is perhaps the weirdest example of an attempt to cash in on the youth market. The kids love nothing more than pagan frog cults, zombies, and motorcycle culture. Right?

Psychomania was directed by Australian-born Hammer Films veteran Don Sharp (The Kiss of the Vampire), and he brings much of the black humor and efficient pacing that defined his marvelous work throughout the 1960s. Ted Moore, who shot seven of the James Bond films, contributes his professional touch. And the legendary John Camerons pre-synth score is as haunting as it is underrated.

Beryl Reid (Dr. Phibes Rises Again) and George Sanders (Village of the Damned) co-star as Toms Satan-worshiping mother and her spooky butler, respectively. All this amounts to a wonderfully offbeat gem with eccentricities to spare. There is no better film about a frog-worshiping, motorcycle death cult.

Arrives on Shudder on February 22nd.

Synopsis: In the late 19th century, a mysterious foreigner, Count Dracula, arrives in London. The unsuspecting socialite Lucy invites the stranger into her home. Her mistake proves fatal, and Dracula bites Lucy, who succumbs to the Counts curse. Her fianc entrusts her care to Dr. Van Helsing, who confidently diagnoses the vampiric source of her affliction. When Lucy dies under mysterious circumstances, Van Helsing and literatures preeminent himbo, Jonathon Harker, are on the case!

Look, Im Canadian. And there is nothing more Canadian than the government producing a silent-era-styled performance of the Royal Winnipeg Ballets adaption of Bram Stokers Dracula directed by our nations greatest weirdo, Guy Maddin. If this isnt already a Heritage Minute, it should be.

Dracula: Pages From a Virgins Diary is, as The New York Times astutely remarks, simultaneously beautiful and goofy. A fine line to walk, no doubt, but one which Maddin frequently, and graciously, skips across with ease. Here, Maddins reputation for stylish anachronism is on full display, with Dracula mimicking many of the aesthetic traditions and special visual effects of the era.

Amidst its delirious stylish flares, the film is impressively loyal to Stokers text, making it one of Maddins most accessible films. And yet, Maddins pointedly postmodern touch is undeniable. Notably, in casting Chinese-Canadian Zhang Wei-Qiang as the titular Count, Maddins Dracula underlines the xenophobic themes of Stokers text in ways past and future films have yet to match.

Think youre well-versed with the Dracula corpus? I implore you: this wildly sexy Canadian silent-era pastiche dance film is the Dracula film.

Arriving on The Criterion Channel on February 28th.

Synopsis: Drawn to their rural childhood home, a sister and brother visit their dying, bed-ridden father. Isolated on their secluded goat farm, the siblings grow increasingly paranoid and suspicious that something evil is targetting their family. After a horrific tragedy confirms their unease, the siblings are forced to confront their grief and lack of faith as the increasingly hostile presence strengthens its chokehold on their lives.

The Dark and the Wicked is a rare 2020 release in that it is a film that was released in 2020. What a concept. For a decidedly dark year, the film is, well, fittingly dark. There are enough jump scares to satisfy the contingent of genre ghouls who get off on a good jolt. But The Dark and the Wicked hits hardest when it leans into ambiguity and its admirably unrelentingly bleak atmosphere.

The film sits comfortably on the same shelf as other modern psychological family affairs like The Babadook and Mama. Though, if you take issue with the increasingly popular trauma-as-horror trend, your mileage may vary. But if youre a fan of nihilism (like our own Rob Hunter, who christened the film as one of the years best horror offerings), The Dark and the Wicked may just be worth a peek.

Arrives on Shudder on February 25th.

More here:

All the Horror You Need to Stream in February 2021 - Film School Rejects

The February 4announcement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that President Biden would end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen was understandably met with celebration by those opposed to the war. Almost six years of the U.S.-SaudiU.A.E. war on Yemen have left the country devastated by humanitarian disaster and famine. Anti-war activists have spent these yearsfirst during the Obama-Biden administration, then the Trump-Pence administration, and now the Biden-Harris administrationagitating to end U.S. participation in the onslaught. It has been an organizing effort that often seemed like shouting into the wind, as the bombings of hospitals, factories and weddings piled up. The countless people who have been toiling in obscurity to end this war, and the people in Yemen who have joined in this effort even while surrounded by hardship and death, certainly deserve praise and gratitude for Thursdaysannouncement.

But Bidens foreign policy speech, delivered just hours after Sullivans teaser, unfortunately underscored that we must not celebrate the end of the war until we verify that it has actually, materially ended. That is because Bidens remarks leave just enough room for the president to gesture toward ending the war without actually halting all U.S. participation init.

Biden first noted that USAID will reach Yemeni civilians who have suffered unendurable devastation (the Trump administration suspended aid to much of Yemen in 2020) and declared this war has to end. He then added, We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen including relevant arms sales. But the president continued, At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks and UAV strikes and other threats from Iranian supplied forces in multiple countries. We are going to continue to help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and itspeople.

Unfortunately, qualifiers like offensive and relevant do not signal aclear commitment to ending all forms of support for the U.S. war in Yemen, which includes targeting assistance, weapons sales (the U.S. is the largest supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia), logistics, training, and intelligence sharing with the Saudi-led coalition. Labeling Yemens Houthis as Iranian supplied forces, and making acommitment to defending Saudi Arabias sovereignty, echoes President Obamas initial pretense for entering the war on Yemen in 2015. The White House statement that signaled Obamas illegal entry declared, In response to the deteriorating security situation, Saudi Arabia, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, and others will undertake military action to defend Saudi Arabias border and to protect Yemens legitimate government. In other words, from the outset, this onslaught was framed by the U.S. asdefensive.

Importantly, Sullivan noted that ending the war in Yemen does not extend to actions against AQAP, or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. While sanctioned by the AUMF, its important to oppose this parallel U.S.-led war in Yemen that has also led to the killing ofcivilians.

Now, more than ever, it is vital to hold afirm line about what areal end to U.S. participation in the Yemen war means: an end to all U.S. assistance, including intelligence sharing, logistical help, training, providing spare parts transfers for warplanes, bomb targeting, weapons sales and support for the naval blockade (we still dont know the full extent of U.S. support for the latter). It also requires that the United States immediately reverse the Trump administrations designation of the Houthis as aForeign Terrorist Organization (FTO), adetermination that is cutting off critical aid to northern Yemen and significantly escalating the crisis of massstarvation.

Because these things have not yet come to pass, it is critical to keep up the pressure until the war is really ended. As much as we might welcome positive messagingno doubt aresult of the pressure exerted by dogged organizerswe must not rest until we have won actual materialrelief.

This is not to sow nihilism: It is significant that President Biden, whose own Obama-Biden administration first initiated U.S. involvement in the war, feels that he has to answer to anti-war activists. Aglobal day of action to end the war on January 25 saw people mobilize from streets to online forums demanding an immediate halt to the war, reflecting the growing power of an international movement to end theonslaught.

And the Biden administration has taken some steps. In the 24hours before leaving office, Trumps final act of war on Yemeni civilians involved signing a $23 billion arms sale to the U.A.E., in addition to the designation of the Houthis as an FTO. Two days after taking office, Bidens State Department launched areview of the FTO designation, citing deep concern about the designation that was made is that at least on its surface it seems to achieve nothing particularly practical in advancing the efforts against the Houthis and to bring them back to the negotiating table, while making it even more difficult than it already is to provide humanitarian assistance to people who desperately need it. And one week after taking office, Biden temporarily froze the sale of F35s included in the Trump deal, as well as precision-guided munitions destined for SaudiArabia.

But these temporary halts and reviews have not yet had any tangible effects, as the FTO has not been reversed and arms sales to Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. have not been cancelled. Indeed, acelebrated Wall Street Journal report from January 27 about the Biden administration pausing arm sales to Saudi Arabia subtly noted in paragraph three that the pause isnt unusual for anew administration and many of the [arms] transactions are likely to ultimately go forward. Still, these steps could indicate awillingness by the Biden administration to end U.S. involvement in the war onYemen.

But rhetoric and positive signals are not enough. We need amaterial end to all U.S. assistance now, before one more Yemeni dies, and we need to verify that this assistance has ended before we declare victory. The Trump administration claimed, at various points, that it was working toward the end of the war via a political solution. Of course, the Trump administration horrifically escalated the warrhetoric to the contrary did not shield Yemenis from U.S.-manufactured bombs, or the assault on the port city ofHodeidah.

Rep. Ro Khanna (DCalif.), in his January 25 address at the World Says No to War on Yemen Global Online Rally, noted his commitment to ending the war in Yemen by re-introducing the War Powers Resolution that Trump previously vetoed. Senator Sanders and Iwill be advocating and introducing again aWar Powers Resolution to stop any logistical supportany intelligence support, any military support to the Saudis in their campaign in Yemen, he said. Passing another War Powers resolution with these provisions would provide additional and significant pressure on the Bidenadministration.

The Obama-Biden administration made numerous announcements in 2012 and 2013 that it would end the U.S. war in Afghanistan by 2014. But we saw that declarations do not, in themselves, signify that the job is done, especially ones loaded with red-flag-raising qualifiers like offensive operations and relevant weapons systems. We should know in amatter of weeks what the details of Bidens plans for Yemen are. The job in the meantime is to maintain pressure, to ensure the Biden administration brings about areal end to the war that the president helped startand says he wants to bring to aclose.

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Biden Says He's Ending the Yemen WarBut It's Too Soon to Celebrate - In These Times