There was no shock this time, as Donald J. Trump was elected the nation’s 47^th president — probably because it felt long in the making. Trump’s second election is a landmark moment. It previews a reckoning and realignment of politics in America—one driven not by the “white working class” of 2016 but by diverse voters, especially men, united by contempt for the political establishment.

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For starters, Trump ran a better campaign this time around—appearing on every podcast that would have him, speaking in his off-the-cuff manner uniquely suited for the streaming era. He honed his message—making anti-war promises to a nation exhausted by wars, and pledging to stick it to the establishment yet again.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the party elites thought it would be a good idea—after coronating Hillary Clinton in 2016—to hide President Biden’s deterioration from the public, skip the primary process altogether, and then select a candidate whose campaign imploded in 2020 and who had been nowhere in sight as vice president. For some strange reason, they trotted out Dick Cheney as if they were trying to sabotage their own prospects. The Democrats’ entitlement to power cost them the election.

But it was Trump’s inroads with minorities and men that locked in his sweeping victory. He won Latino men and increased his share among Latina women. Trump won greater shares of the Gen Z and Millennial vote. He won greater shares of the college-educated vote. He did better among Black men. He even managed to pick up more Muslim- and Arab-Americans, who were tired of the double-talk and hypocrisy from Biden-Harris on the war in Gaza. If America First means fewer people being killed in the Middle East and Ukraine, many voters concluded that is better than a war machine continuing uninterrupted.

Trump’s supporters knew what they were voting for and against; Harris’s supporters knew mainly what they were voting against.

Trump offers men something no one else has for generations: the opportunity to vicariously experience life through a strongman leader. Someone who will deport millions, who will build a wall, who will unleash vengeance on his political enemies. He inflames their grievances, their deep sense of injustice at being left out. He gives them what Harvard, Wall Street, and Hollywood could not: the privilege to rule over the very people who once ruled over them. He offers men what authoritarians and showmen of the past have always offered: a chance at redemption.

True, some of the variables were outside of the Democrats’ control. People were exhausted by the aftermath of the pandemic and previously apolitical voters were radicalized by what they saw as the government’s heavy-handed approach to vaccines. Inflation was too high, and an economy rigged against ordinary people was an issue that cut across all races. But the Democrats’ messaging—largely talking down to men—suggested they had not learned the lessons of 2016 and 2020. Inadequately addressing these hopes and fears would prove electorally fatal. It turns out that Kamala Harris was speaking, but she was not listening.

In a sense, Trump’s victory is a good thing for the left—there is no question anymore that progressives, liberals, and the Democratic Party are out of touch with the majority of Americans. That corporatism and neoliberal pandering do not appeal to voters. The party of FDR somehow forgot that ambitious economic policy and good communication can shift the course of history. In the next iteration of the Democratic Party, perhaps people will be treated as individuals and not as subcategories of their group identity. Perhaps a candidate will emerge who speaks honestly to people’s hopes and fears and does not retreat to consultant-approved talking points.

Trump’s second election is an end of innocence moment. There are no more illusions. His victory should be the starting point of a revitalized democratic movement—one that can win the future and prevent one of Trump’s many potential heirs from taking the throne and instituting a permanent autocracy.

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I have a piece in this weekend’s The Globe and Mail which outlines the systemic political, economic, and social crises that Canada is facing. For too long, these issues have been ignored or downplayed. What’s important is that people across the political spectrum share these frustrations. Governments at all levels must start addressing ordinary people’s concerns, or watch the country deteriorate further. The full essay is below.

For much of the past decade, I spent time going back and forth between the United States and Canada. It used to be the case, especially after the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, that when returning to Canada I was greeted by good news. The country was imbued with a sense of optimism. The beginnings of an economy that worked for everyone. A renewed confidence on the world stage. The country felt ready for the future.

After the election of Donald Trump, landing in Toronto or Montreal was accompanied by a sigh of relief. At least up here, institutions were seemingly working. At least up here, the populist wave had not crashed onshore just yet. Up here, the economic game did not seem so rigged. How brief that moment was.

Those years seem so long ago. The Canada of 2024 feels like a different country.

When I returned to Canada in late 2023, I was shocked by what I saw and heard. It felt as if almost everyone I encountered now, of all ethnicities, backgrounds and ages, were angry. Friends complained about the impossibility of buying a home − homes that had been affordable when their parents came to Canada. Family members worried about car thefts and other crimes. People were making plans to leave − even those who had recently arrived.

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Nor was this limited to my immediate circle. In conversations at the local YMCA, the coffee shop and around Toronto, there was a genuine, visceral frustration. People felt stifled by the dismal state of the economy and the poor state of housing. They were working harder and, thanks to inflation, making less. The price of food (and everything else) was rising. They worried about their kids’ safety. There was a ceiling on their ambitions. The political leadership of the country had failed them, time and again, and was now unable to address ordinary people’s concerns.

At first, I thought some of this might be hyperbole. But then, after being back here for some time, I saw it myself. Driving through the Greater Toronto Area, I saw how much more congested everything had become. There were too many people with too few places to live. The increasing number of homeless people on the street. The rise in violent crime. The staggering toll of the opioid crisis. The unprecedented wave of international students, many of whom were sold a bill of goods that turned out to be faulty. The hangover from COVID-19 restrictions, almost a form of national PTSD. The pervasive feeling that success is out of reach in Canada, and even if you work hard and are successful, the government will come collecting more than they need − and then proceed to waste it, overspend it or lose it.

What I realized soon thereafter was that this country was witnessing a systemic political failure, a complete inability of politicians to get change done in ways that manifested at the dinner table. An extreme form of PR and image-management had begun to take over delivering on policy in concrete ways − and the entire country was noticing. Nor was this an accident, the unfortunate consequence of polarization or inequality, but the deliberate result of multiple policy failures − as well as failures of will.

I realized that this systemic government failure amounted to something worse than just incompetence or ineffectiveness. It was a betrayal of the Canadian dream.

What is the Canadian dream? It was a promise − less individualistic and gun-friendly than the American version, but no less ambitious. To me, the dream promised that every person here could have a decent shot at life, one that was better than that of their parents. There was emphasis on community and a strong focus on order and good government. The compact included the payment of higher taxes, and in exchange, the existence of world-class social institutions delivering for ordinary people. The immigration system worked because the same contract existed with immigrants − that they would work hard, play by the rules, become part of Canadian society through legal means, and in return, would become citizens of a highly functioning democracy where a good life was, if not guaranteed, then within reach.

The dream was based on fairness, on merit, on policies that worked. It promised breathable air and the bountiful resources of the second-largest country on Earth. It promised the principle of equality of opportunity, promised safety and peace and responsibility. It promised leaders who put the national and long-term interests of the country above their own partisan needs. The dream now feels like it’s on life support.

Canadians are not fools; their discontents have good reason. “Canada’s per capita GDP has been shrinking 0.4 per cent a year since 2020 − the worst rate for any developed country in the top 50,” noted the esteemed investor, Ruchir Sharma, in May. Investment and job growth is driven mostly by the government, while “private sector action is confined to the property market.” So the government spends, is unable to restrain itself or get results, while speculation and real estate investments drive the economy. Along with the systemic political failure, this may be an economic crisis in the making.

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For many Canadians, the cost of living has become unaffordable. The average price of a house in the GTA is $1.1-million, and Metro Vancouver is around the same. There are certainly cheaper places to live, but the average cost of a rental in Canada has reached record highs − more than $2,100 a month. According to one major study, Canada needs to build an additional 3.5 million homes by the end of the decade and is currently only building around 200,000 a year.

To make matters worse, immigration − an exclusively federal jurisdiction − has gone unchecked, which is a disservice to both the country and the legal immigrants who have been here for years. Canada’s immigration system used to be the envy of the world − focusing on merit, on the needs of the labour force, and on a generosity of spirit that was practically unrivalled. Canada will always be pro-immigration, but there needs to be a responsible conversation on the subject, not using it to divide people or sing one’s own moral praises.

In Canada, the social contract for years allowed more immigration to grow the economy, but this came with stringent criteria for who should be admitted. Today, there are more than 900,000 international students in Canada, a 170-per-cent increase over the past decade. Some of these students have been scammed by for-profit colleges. Others have been affiliated with fake schools, using their student visas as loopholes in the immigration system. The social system was unprepared for such an influx, though certain institutions benefited: colleges and universities got more fees; politicians touted rising immigration numbers; the landlord class got an endless supply of perpetual renters. Without any housing available, this has left the country unprepared to deal with multiple, overlapping economic and social crises.

Whether for immigrants or those born in Canada, the same reality unfolds. We have created an entire generation of permanent renters, people who will work and struggle and maybe build some limited wealth, but will never be able to own property. Keep in mind that more than half of Canadians are living paycheque-to-paycheque. Many in my generation have been entirely shut out of prosperity − betraying the promise of progress for millions.

One sees neighbourhoods plagued by drug abuse and crime. Statistics Canada has reported that we are witnessing a 16-year spike in violent crime. The homicide rate in Canada today is the highest it’s been since 1992. And Canada maintains one of the laxest criminal justice systems in the Western world, one where someone can cause the death of another and leave prison after six months. If America went too far in the direction of mass incarceration, Canada overcorrected in the opposite direction with mass leniency. One thing, though, is still a constant: The disproportionately largest victims of violent crimes, and specifically homicide, are Indigenous people and racial minorities.

At some point, one would think that the deaths of so many innocent and vulnerable people would elicit outrage − yet life goes on as normal. Each life is precious, and when violent criminals get off easy, or without punishment at all, they learn the terrible lesson that this country does not take its own laws seriously, so why should they? When the law loses its power to deter crime, either because of prosecutors not moving forward with cases, or because of a general laissez-faire attitude toward violent crime happening in other neighbourhoods, it is the marginalized who are harmed most.

Yet, Canadians cannot even read or share news on social-media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. It is an Orwellian experience − in the literal sense − to see one’s own articles censored and silenced in a country calling itself a democracy. This is the result of an ineffectual attempt by the Canadian government to force the biggest social-media company on the planet to pay for articles. Either Canada should not have taken on such a fight, or if it did, should have dealt more tactfully and strategically with a company known to leverage its strength.

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Normally, in a democracy, social ills can be addressed by public officials. But Canada’s own political institutions have been riven by corruption and personal ambition. And now also potentially by foreign influence. Each controversy and scandal leads people away from crucial time and policy attention that could have been spent on fixing the country’s major issues. At the parliamentary level, most members of Parliament are so frightened of speaking for themselves that they are rendered powerless. This defies the very essence of the British parliamentary system, upon which Canada’s system is based, which empowers MPs to speak on behalf of their constituents and represent their true voice in the people’s chamber.

Parliamentary committees no longer perform their functions, serving rather as poorly rehearsed theatre. Question Period involves many questions and few substantive answers. We are witnessing this systemic political failure in real time, with institutions and leaders no longer responding, or able to respond to the citizenry. This is not a failure of marketing or communication; it’s a failure of leadership and vision. The excesses of superficial progressivism have been laid bare. Cultural virtue-signalling at the expense of substantive economic progress has corroded the values of progressive politics. It was easy to blame Donald Trump when he was president; it’s much harder to deflect criticism now.

The social situation deteriorates. The housing shortage is chronic. Economic stagnation is severe. The political crisis may be even worse. At this moment, there is a backlash building. Evidence for this is everywhere − most recently in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s, which just elected a Conservative MP for the first time since 1988 − and it would be wise for leaders in office to take notice. They should admit something went wrong, re-examine old assumptions and pivot. There must be a positive vision for Canadians, bringing in new voices and faces, and grounded in a common purpose that unites all people around the shared values of hard work and equal opportunity. Most importantly, politicians should dispense with their scripts and level with Canadians about the challenges ahead.

Canada is not broken; it is wounded. But the potential inherent in this country is enormous. Its future must be reclaimed and won soon, or lost for good.

Notes From The Margins is fueled by passion and supported by readers. If you enjoyed this piece, consider sharing and subscribing. Thanks for reading.

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Anyone searching for the true beliefs of Donald Trump on any major issue is liable to come away either disappointed or aggravated. The former president is known for his fulsome diatribes, changing his mind impulsively, and articulating ideas so divergent from the establishment consensus that they provoke backlash.

It does no…

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I have an end-of-year piece in the Boston Globe that takes a step back and examines the future of democracy and conflict in world politics—and what the future holds for the West, for America, for the next generation.

The piece begins with Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s controversial ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, published in 1993, goes into We…

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I have a piece in this Sunday Christmas edition of the Boston Globe. It’s a meditation on what Christmas means to me, a journey through Christmas’s literary origins, and a reflection on this year’s Christmas that is happening in the darkness in Palestine—including for the Christians of Bethlehem. Celebrating the birth of the prince of peace occurs at a moment of significant bloodshed and violence in the very land where Yeshua/Jesus/Isa would have walked. The war goes on. It can seem like there is no hope in this darkness.

And yet—the very spirit of this holiday counsels hope. It can feel impossible, even naive. But capitulating on hope is giving up on a better world.

I hope everyone has a good Christmas and holiday season. I hope everyone is able to see friends and family. May those who have perished be in our memories, and may we repair and heal our broken world for the next generation.

Boston Globe

December 24, 2023

There’s a certain spirit to Christmas that has always delighted me. Snow falls over quiet streets. Time comes to a standstill. Amid the darkness, the lights sparkle to life in houses where families have withdrawn together. In this slowdown, Christmas can be a time of revelation.

I have always loved Christmas, though the holiday is not without its trials. My family is Muslim, and we did not celebrate Christmas in our home, though we would watch “The 10 Commandments” or a film about Jesus together. My father was secular and wanted to celebrate the Christian festival; my mother, a devout Muslim, thought it was a pagan ritual and pointed out that many Jews also refrained and that we had our own holidays. If there really is a war over Christmas, it seemed to exist in our home.

Growing up, I loved going to school during Christmas season, singing Christmas carols, dressing up. I even believed in Santa Claus, and wondered, during the quiet of many a Christmas Eve, whether Santa came to Muslim homes. Back at school, the kids would talk about what presents they received over Christmas and I would feel the slightest sting of shame.

When I became an adult, I learned the truth about Christmas — and the Islamic Jesus. This came with many surprises. The first was that Jesus — called Isa in Arabic — was a deeply revered prophet in Islam. He is referred to as the Messiah and the Christ who brought the Gospels. The details of the crucifixion story differ, but the son of Mary (or Maryam) is mentioned more times in the Qur’an than even the Prophet Muhammad. Jesus’ story is one of a dissident put to death by the authorities for blasphemy. His message — that all are equal in the eyes of God — was a radical one then and now.

Indeed, the early Puritans banned Christmas celebrations, considering them a superstitious borrowing that had no place in Christian ritual. In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the law called the Penalty for Keeping Christmas, making it a criminal offense to celebrate or feast on this day. The Puritans disliked Christmas because early celebrations involved an upturning of the social order, with the poor eating in the homes of the rich and refashioning themselves as rulers. Christmas had been banned in England a decade prior. With its roots in the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, which was about inverting the social hierarchy (and drinking), there was always a mischievous, rabble-rousing quality to Christmas. The holiday fell into disfavor.

It was only in the 1800s that Christmas was reinvented, thanks largely to Washington Irving. In 1815, the American writer traveled to England, where he witnessed the idyllic rural Christmastimes — families gathered around fireplaces, singing and decorations and good cheer. Irving asked himself if this stirring of the affections was not the true essence of Christmas. In the depth of winter, as shields of snow covered the horizon, people turned to moral sources for their renewal. “It is, indeed, the season of regenerated feeling,” Irving wrote, “the season for kindling not merely the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the genial flame of charity in the heart.”

Irving’s book “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” became a hit in America. Its most famous story was “Sleepy Hollow,” but the legends of old English Christmases brought the holiday back to life. Then, from the cold streets of London, with its squalor and industrial smoke, Charles Dickens penned “A Christmas Carol” — and the American public went wild. Dickens’s story elevated the ideas of charity, forgiveness, and emotional growth in the holiday. Massachusetts made Christmas a public holiday a decade later in 1856.

In America, Christmas was largely a literary invention. And yet who could deny there is something magical about Christmas?

As an adult, I celebrate Christmas in my own secular, nonsectarian way. The principles of charity and empathy for the less fortunate are foundational. One thinks of the hungry, the homeless, the stateless. Our gaze turns inward, to the light that exists in us all and connects us to one another. Many people have lost loved ones through the year and Christmas is a somber time. Many others are still mourning loved ones lost during the pandemic and there is an empty seat at the Christmas table, one where memories reside. Christmas is a time to remember, to grieve, especially among those innocent souls praying and wondering if God hears them or not.

During this Christmas season, the Christians of Gaza are huddled in their churches, bombed in the darkness. Palestinian children, lost in the rubble, wonder where their mothers and fathers went after the blast from above and if they’ll ever be coming back. Israeli families wonder whether their family members will be returned from captivity. Tens of thousands of Palestinian women, men, and children gather in refugee camps not knowing if this night will be their last. Many others perish, quietly, afraid and alone, in hospitals or tents. And for the Christians of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, there will be no Christmas this year. The Lutheran Church in Bethlehem has instead lit a single candle to symbolize that even in darkness, the last flame of hope can never be extinguished.

Even if you, like me, are not Christian, Christmas reminds us we can and must go on, especially in times of darkness. Christmas is a moment to rededicate ourselves to the moral commandment that all life is precious and that every child, whether born in Boston or in Bethlehem, has the right to grow up free of fear and violence. My Christmas is a prayer that people of all faiths will put our collective humanity first and begin the difficult work of building a better future. I know I am not the only one who believes we are on the precipice of something unspeakable and now is the time to save future generations.

The Christmas spirit counsels hope in this moment of distress and persistence when we feel like giving up. There is no other choice. The darkness may spread, but as the winter solstice arrives, there is also a rebirth of light. May it shine across every heart and help heal our broken world.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, recent Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, Contributing Writer at the Boston Globe, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can subscribe below. Thanks for reading.

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On November 29, 2023, Henry Kissinger, formerly secretary of state and national security advisor, died at the age of 100. He was one of the most powerful officials to ever hold office in the United States, and a repeat war criminal.

In April of 2015, Kissinger came to speak at Yale Law School. I was in my first year of law school then. It would be a who’s-who gathering of the traditional foreign policy elite.

After Kissinger’s passing, it’s important to do a full accounting, moral and physical, of all the destruction wrought by this individual, the many thousands of nameless victims, and to remember that policymakers and officials, despite their ostensible brilliance and credentials, despite their power, ultimately serve the public. They are servants of the country and its people, and should lead with those values. And the Ivy League, rather than coddling these former officials, should require students to ask of them critical and dissenting questions. Otherwise, we are all being trained to apply the same amoral calculus that Kissinger did, to repeat the same decisions—except our planet and people can no longer endure such remorseless destruction.

The full piece, originally published in Salon, is below.

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The Ivy League’s Favorite War Criminal

Ex-government officials have always occupied a particular sweet spot for members the Ivy League. Regardless of what one did while in power, regardless of how disreputable or immoral or even criminal one’s actions, the elite academy has been all too willing to embrace even the most dubious of former officials.

So it was that last Friday night, Henry Kissinger spoke at Yale -- to which he has donated an archive of personal documents, where he occasionally participates in a course with Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and where he give an invite-only talk just a year ago. Last week's “conversation” was moderated by Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, who is also Henry Kissinger’s official biographer. As if to underscore the incestuous insider game on display, sitting in the third row was Paul Bremer, the "Administrator" of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, the man who de-Baathified the country, threw millions of people out of work, and helped destroy the Iraqi state, which spurred the insurgency, the Sunni-Shia civil war, and later the transmogrification of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia into the Islamic State. A record to proudly burnish in and around Yale University.

At least members of the Yale community would be allowed to ask questions of Mr. Kissinger, challenge him on his public record, and dispute the wrongheaded assessment of the US-Iran nuclear deal he penned in the The Wall Street Journal just days prior, right? Wrong. Ferguson was to screen all questions ahead of time, and the questions Mr. Kissinger received were the intellectual equivalent of underhand softballs. There was a discussion of World Order, Kissinger’s latest book, questions about Iran and the Middle East, ruminations on China. Every question Ferguson asked could have been competently answered by an undergraduate.

The Yale community was not however informed—just as the WSJ, Washington Post, and New York Times do not inform their readers—that Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, a global consulting firm that has clients in the Gulf region of the Middle East and other regions Kissinger opines on. This is a classic conflict of interest. Astute readers will recall that Kissinger resigned the chairmanship of the 9/11 Commission when the Senate Ethics Committee, along with prominent voices in the media, demanded Kissinger disclose his client list.

It is disturbing to observe famous ex-government officials paid one compliment after another, given the floor in the auditorium of an elite university, and then protected from actual, difficult questions the public may have. Why is it that “intellectuals” like Mr. Kissinger are so afraid of being confronted, through argument and evidence, over their records? My own question, on Kissinger’s complicity in the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh that left up to three million people dead, was conveniently ignored by Ferguson. The moderator is supposed to ensure a real conversation takes place. Niall Ferguson did the opposite: He guarded his subject and censored tough questions.

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While critics often argue that free speech on university campuses is threatened by an overly-PC, overly-sensitive culture, the contest over ideas is actually threatened far more by powerful men like Kissinger (and Ferguson), who would rather commend each other for their great work than have a real debate over war crimes and human rights abuses. When you’re an insider, you’re an insider for life—and that means you get away with anything, decades after you left office.

So, in the interest of Lux et Veritas—“Light and Truth,” Yale’s official motto—a brief recapitulation of Kissinger’s record is in order:

1. Sabotaging U.S. Government Diplomacy

Five days before the 1968 election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a bombing halt of North Vietnam to begin negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Johnson needed to keep this decision a secret; any leak could jeopardize the peace he was seeking. Kissinger, who had been an adviser to the negotiators, called the Nixon campaign and said, “I’ve got some information. They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” In his own memoirs, Richard Nixon says that he had received advanced word of the negotiation “through a highly unusual channel.” Three days before the election, the South Vietnamese pulled out of the talks because a Nixon confidant named Anna Chennault informed them that they would get a better deal under a Republican administration. The number of Vietnamese and Americans killed because of Kissinger and Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris negotiations remain unaccounted.

2. Illegal War in Cambodia 

Nixon-Kissinger expanded the Vietnam War to include carpet bombings of Laos and Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?” is how Kissinger relayed his boss’s order. Nearly 3 million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia alone, more than the 2 million tons dropped during all of World War Two. Between 4,000 and 150,000 civilians were killed in carpet bombings codenamed Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Supper, and Dessert. The unintended consequence of this illegal expansion of the Vietnam War was the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a genocidal cult that killed between 1.5 and 3 million people. Kissinger, in a conversation with the Thai Foreign Minister in 1975, said, “You should tell the Cambodians (i.e., Khmer Rouge) that we will be friends with them.” This was not realpolitik but accessory to murder.

3. Complicity in Pakistan’s Genocide in Bangladesh

In 1971, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) declared independence from Pakistan after winning a democratic election that was not honored by the military dictatorship in power. The Pakistani junta attempted to suppress the victors by mass-raping women, shooting indiscriminately, and murdering children. Bangladesh’s Hindu minority was specifically targeted. In one especially gruesome episode, Pakistani soldiers went room-to-room in Dhaka University, murdering every student and staff member in sight. Up to three million people were killed and 400,000 women mass-raped in the 1971 genocide.

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The top American diplomat in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to Nixon and Kissinger that began:

Our government had failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government.

As Professor Gary Bass recounts in his magnificent book, The Blood Telegram, this was not mere realism in international affairs: There was a certain emotional relish Nixon and Kissinger felt in mocking massacred Bengalis. Kissinger congratulated Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan for his “delicacy and tact.” Nixon said Indians needed “a mass famine.” Kissinger ridiculed those who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”

If presented with the content of such statements, with the names redacted, one would think that these were criminals speaking, not American statesmen.

4. More crimes in Chile, Iraq, East Timor, Cyprus 

Kissinger aided the violent overthrow of Chile’s government by the war criminal Augusto Pinochet in 1973. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he said. He encouraged Iraqi Kurds to rebel in 1975 only to abandon them when Saddam Hussein struck a deal with the Shah of Iran, and he gave the U.S.’s blessings to Indonesian strongman Suharto’s invasion of East Timor. Kissinger knew of plans to overthrow Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus and later of Turkey’s planned invasion of the island and yet did nothing. 180,000 Greek Cypriots had to flee their homes, 10,000 Turkish Cypriots were forced to relocate, and Turkey still has an undetermined number of settlers in Cyprus. The capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, remains divided.

The bitter irony of all of this is that Henry Kissinger spoke at Yale Law School — the institution I currently attend, and one with a long history of progressive thought and a commitment to educating public-minded lawyers. Kissinger should not be barred from giving lectures. Rather, his invitations—like all invitations to government officials—should come with an understanding that he will field challenging questions. Public officials are servants of the public first, and we must not allow them to be turned into demigods without protesting their past crimes and holding them to account.

The nameless victims of Henry Kissinger’s policies will never see justice. They will not be lavished with praise or given large contracts for consulting services or given ample space in major newspapers to correct the record. They will never see a courtroom. They will remain the anonymous dead, and those of us who stay silent or jump up like Pavlovian dogs to mindlessly clap for every grey-haired former official who comes into town regardless of their record, we too will be complicit in their fates.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, recent Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can subscribe below. Thanks for reading.

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Published in The Globe and Mail, September 22, 2023.

Omer Aziz is a former foreign policy adviser in the government of Justin Trudeau and the author of Brown Boy…

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President Biden has now been in office for almost three years — so what’s his foreign policy?

This administration has presided over the United States’ historic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, funded and armed Ukraine to fight back against Russia for over a year, and put America on firmer footing in its relations with China. But what does this add up…

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On Saturday, August 5, 2023, Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was arrested and taken to a maximum-security prison. He was given a jail sentence of three years over a contested case involving gifts while serving as prime minister.

Khan’s arrest and imprisonment means he is likely to be disqualified from still-scheduled, upcoming elections. Moreover, locking up the most popular politician in Pakistan could prove fatal—for Khan, for the military, and for the country. The world should be watching Pakistan very closely.

In late June, I interviewed Imran Khan by teleconference. He was on house arrest then in Lahore. In one of his last interviews given before he was imprisoned, Khan predicted that he would be jailed soon, that the Pakistani military would try to disqualify him from the elections and reimpose a dictatorship.

“In Pakistan, people are now at a crossroads,” Khan told me. “Are they going to accept this reign of terror, this end of democracy, and just bow down to another dictatorship? In that case, Pakistan has no future.”

Read Imran Khan’s full comments below. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Let’s start with this. Why are you in this position now? If we were talking before April 2022, you would have been the prime minister of Pakistan. Now you are ousted from office, with the military cracking down—so why are you in this position?

It’s because the Army Chief then [Gen. Qamar Bajwa] led a conspiracy. The current prime minister [Shehbaz Sharif] and [former president of Pakistan] Asif Zardari, and the coterie, were all part of it.

The conspiracy was that the Army Chief wanted to get another term, an extension, and he felt the best way to get an extension was if Shehbaz Sharif came to power. Hence, he has this conspiracy. That’s how they manipulated the whole system. The agencies used by the ex-Army Chief, they had my government removed.

It’s not just about me. It’s what’s happening to Pakistan that is a travesty.

Are they trying to make an example out of you?

The military is spreading fear. When my party has 70% support in the country, what they are trying to do is terrorize the people—tell them, ‘Look, even if 70% of you are voting for Imran, we’ve determined that your vote is worthless.’ It’s spreading fear. Through spreading fear they are trying to enslave the people. This is an old tactic.

Are you prepared to negotiate with the military establishment?

Well, negotiate about what? The only thing I want to talk to them about is that the route they have taken is a disaster for Pakistan. What they are doing is rolling back Pakistan’s democracy. Remember, over a period of time our democracy has evolved. We’ve been through martial law, military rule, and we’ve tried everything. And gradually, there’s been a consensus in Pakistan that whatever happens, even a bad democracy is better than martial law, because each time you have martial law, you have to start all over again.

Our democratic institutions evolved over a period of time. After the 2007 Lawyers Movement, we actually had a fairly independent judiciary. Our media, since the 1990s, was trying to assert its independence and even the democratic governments would not allow the media to be free. But gradually, the media and certain heroic journalists, they gradually asserted their independence and in the last 20 years, became very vibrant. Now all that is rolled back.

My political party only emerged because the media was vibrant. Otherwise, how could I have broken a two-party entrenched system, with so much money in their hands? So, my party developed because Pakistan had a free media. All that is now being rolled back.

Many critics suggest that your party was supported by the military when you came to power and that you didn’t adequately play the game that was expected of you. What do you say to that?

Look, the military certainly didn’t oppose us, but they also didn’t make us win the [2018] elections. After the election, the other parties claimed it was rigged, we offered to have it opened up, whereas, in 2013, when the elections were rigged by the establishment, they would not open up the elections. We only wanted 4 out of 133 petitions that challenge the national elections. We only asked for 4 constituencies at random. And they wouldn’t open them up. Because they rigged them [in 2013]. We offered to open them all up in 2018.

On the second point, actually, I tried to work with the military because to think you can wish them away very quickly—they’re entrenched in the system, they’ve ruled directly or indirectly for 75 years, so I worked with them. It is General Bajwa who decided to stab me in the back. I had a working relationship with him but I had two problems with him. Firstly, he did not want accountability for the crooks. He had done a pact with them. After his extension—when I gave him an extension—he had done a pact with them, and he rolled back on all the accountability, which meant that, again, these people were above law. My whole idea was to bring the powerful under the law, yet the ex-Army Chief did not think corruption was a big thing.  

Later on, the issue was about his foreign policy—certainly the last six months. I mean, I wanted Pakistan to have an independent foreign policy. And his idea—he was playing on a different agenda. When he wanted us to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine, and all I said was, “India hasn’t condemned them. India is part of the Quad with the U.S.” And we need cheap oil, because the commodity super-cycle meant energy prices had gone through the roof, and India was getting cheap oil from Russia at a discounted rate, so we had already spoken with the Russians and we too would have gotten it at a discounted rate, but then our government went.

Look, my point was, Why should we be involved in other people’s conflicts? We’ve already lost 80,000 Pakistanis when we joined the U.S. War on Terror. A country that has 100 million vulnerable people—the top priority should be the people of the country.

Do you think your trip to Russia on the day of the invasion of Ukraine was a mistake? Do you regret that trip?

Well, how was I to know that? I arrived the night before and the next morning, Russia would invade Ukraine. I mean, had we known they were going to invade, obviously we would not have gone.

I’ve heard about human rights abuses committed against your party, against women in your party. Could you tell me more about that? Some of that news isn’t making it here.

There’s a reign of terror unprecedented in our history. Even during the worst of martial law, we didn’t experience anything remotely close to what is going on now. Firstly, they have completely muzzled the media. I mean, the media has been ordered to not even take my name—electronic media, print media, my name can’t be mentioned. That’s never happened before. Secondly, they have completely discarded even the verdicts of the judiciary. The judiciary announced elections, as per the Constitution, 14^th of May in Punjab, the government just discarded it. There are massive human rights abuses. 10,000 of my workers are in jail. Every day they pick up more people and put them in jail.

They are blaming all this on 9^th of May [ed: violent protests against the Pakistani military] – but 9^th of May, there’s no independent inquiry into what happened. We think it was a set-up. They used 9^th of May. The way I was picked up, was it necessary? Do you need a commando operation to pick up a 70 year old man? Why pick me up from the high court precinct with commando action and beating up people and breaking doors and treating me like a terrorist? Why do that? Because that was going to have a reaction.

I think they deliberately did it so there would be a reaction, then they would do this crackdown. The entire political leadership of my party is in jail. They can only come out if they renounce my party.

What is your message to President Biden and the United States?

My message to Biden is, look, no foreign country can fix the problems of any country. For instance, trying to bring democracy in Afghanistan or Iraq—it’s not possible. That’s not how it works. Countries fix their problems from the inside. But the U.S. has a big responsibility, because it talks about human rights, democracy, rule of law, speaks out against custodial torture—well, all those things are happening in Pakistan. Democracy is being rolled back. There is no rule of law. There is custodial torture. Abuse of human rights. And especially the way women have been treated. The way peaceful protestors have been shoved in jail, beaten up, tortured.

At least, the professed Western values—when they talk about what’s happening in China to Uyghurs, to Hong Kong, or Russia—what about this? At least they should be consistent with what their professed values are.

What’s your message to the wider world?

The same. To the democratic world, which believes in democracy and freedom—I mean, democracy means freedom, that’s why we believe in democracy. Elections don’t bring in democracy. It’s actually rule of law that brings democracy and freedom.

In Pakistan, we have the law of the jungle now. Anything goes. Anyone can be picked up. This is what I imagine happened in Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany. This is what’s happening right now. They pick up anyone. They smash their houses. Vandalize their houses. If the person is hiding, they will pick up their servants, their relatives, shove them in jail. It’s unheard of what’s happening now.

What happens if anything happens to you? If something is done to you? And what is your ultimate end game?

I’m convinced they’ll put me in jail soon. This reign of terror that’s going on is to make sure that the people are so scared that when they pick me up this time, there’s no reaction from the public. That’s why they’re picking up all our workers and terrorizing them. All this is going on to prepare the ground for when they put me in jail.

In Pakistan, people are now at a crossroads. Are they going to accept this reign of terror, this end of democracy, and just bow down to another dictatorship? In that case, Pakistan has no future. We are looking now at disaster. We are headed for the abyss. The economy has tanked. There’s a flight of capital from Pakistan—not just dollars, but human capital. About a million people have left the country, some of our best people. They see no hope. The way it’s going, if we stay passive and allow this to happen, I think there’s no hope in this country.

We have only one way. We need to have peaceful protests all over the country and not accept this reign of terror if we want to survive as a democratic country.

Thank you very much.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers. You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.

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Pakistan faces an unprecedented crisis. I wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail and spoke to Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, about the unfolding chaos. The full piece is below. Thanks for reading.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL

July 11, 2023

Omer Aziz is the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a former policy adviser to then-minister of foreign affairs Chrystia Freeland.

For weeks now, Pakistan – a nuclear-armed country of more than 220 million – has been on the brink of chaos. In May, paramilitary rangers arrested Imran Khan, the ex-cricket champion who became prime minister in 2018 in just the second democratic transfer of power in Pakistan’s history, on corruption charges. (Two days later, the Supreme Court ruled his courthouse arrest to be illegal, and he is now out on bail.) Mr. Khan lost a no-confidence vote a year ago; a few months later, he was the target of an assassination attempt, and he accused a military official of plotting it.

Protesters have since taken to the streets, with some even attacking military installations. The army has responded in kind, arresting peaceful demonstrators. A media blackout reigns. People are living in terror.

It is a volatile situation: Pakistan’s most popular politician squaring off against its most powerful institution, which wields more than 100 nuclear warheads. It is a battle between dictatorship and democracy in a country where two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30, and where countless young Pakistanis have told me that Mr. Khan represents integrity in a corrupt system. A nuclear-armed nation threatens to descend into civil war.

So why has the West largely been quiet?

Through his lawyer, I reached Mr. Khan by teleconference from his home in Zaman Park, in the city of Lahore, where he has effectively been confined. Mr. Khan appeared on screen in a black kurta, wiping sweat from his brow. He looked tired but stoic.

I asked him why he was in this position, and whether he might negotiate with the military.

“Well, negotiate about what?” Mr. Khan said. “The route the military has taken is a disaster. They are rolling back Pakistan’s democracy. There’s been a consensus, developed gradually after years of military rule, that whatever happens, even a bad democracy is better than martial law.”

Mr. Khan went on to list off scores of alleged human rights violations committed by the Pakistani military against his party, especially women.

But hadn’t Mr. Khan himself been supported by the military? Wasn’t this just a case of him now deciding not to play the game expected of him?

Mr. Khan emphasized that the military did not oppose his party’s election, but that they did not “make him” prime minister, either. He had been voted in by Pakistanis of all stripes, including millions frustrated by a system in which elites pay little in the way of taxes and do not even pretend to put the country above their private interests.

“I’m convinced [the army] will put me in jail soon,” he told me. “In Pakistan, we have the law of the jungle now. Anything goes. Anyone can be picked up. People are at a crossroads. We are headed for the abyss.”

Mr. Khan is known as one of the greatest cricket players to have ever lived. But politics – especially in a country like Pakistan – is a real blood-sport. When lines are crossed in such places, one might never see one’s family again. He says he will never leave his country, and it seemed to me that Mr. Khan was sincere in his hope for Pakistan’s democracy.

Yet the West’s relative silence around the protests effectively supports the failed status quo over the rule of law. Moreover, the consequences could be catastrophic. An implosion of Pakistani democracy would unleash instability and violence in the region. No matter how tight of a grip the Pakistani military maintains on its society, history has shown that mass unrest against military rule unleashes forces beyond anyone’s control. Then there will be nothing the West could do.

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In other countries, such as Brazil and Russia, Canada has taken a firm stance when politicians have been jailed. The West should demand that Mr. Khan be truly freed and elections, due this year, be held on schedule. If Mr. Khan is not allowed to compete, world leaders need to understand that there is a genuine possibility of mass revolt and nuclear crisis.

Abandoning Mr. Khan means giving up on Pakistan’s democracy for good. It means telling Pakistan’s 150 million young people that they will never live in a country with free elections. Our silence tacitly gives cover to the Pakistani military to continue violating human rights.

Pakistan is a vital nation with enormous potential. Another generation of Pakistanis cannot afford to live under a kleptocracy run by the military. As Mr. Khan awaits his fate, Pakistanis await their future – and it remains to be seen whether it will be a democratic or totalitarian one.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.

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I have a piece in this weekend’s Boston Globe about how Yale (and Yale Law School) radicalized a generation of conservatives. It’s now available here, without a paywall. You can subscribe to Notes From The Margins below. Thanks for reading.

Governor Ron DeSantis. Senator Josh Hawley. Senator J.D. Vance.

These days, the new conservative movement — at least its most energetic, populist wing — seems composed largely of Yale graduates. It is a curious phenomenon, one worth a deeper look, because it has something to teach liberals like me.

Senators Hawley and Vance, from Missouri and Ohio, are two of the youngest members of the Senate. Both have Yale Law degrees. DeSantis got his undergraduate degree from Yale. Another presidential candidate, the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy, who is polling at 4 percent, also went to Yale Law School.

Over at the Supreme Court, half of the conservative justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh — are Yale Law graduates. (When you include Justice Sonia Sotomayor, we have nearly half the court coming out of Yale.) And at the level where Supreme Court opinions actually get written, Yale’s influence is even starker. Of the 38 Supreme Court clerks privileged enough to work on the decisions that will soon become Law with a capital L, 12 went to Yale. Despite being one of the smallest law schools in America, Yale placed as many clerks last year at the Supreme Court as the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Virginia combined.

Other schools certainly contribute to the conservative movement and to the elite of American politics. But Yale — and Yale Law in particular — plays an oversized role in shaping the intellectual climate in which America’s politics operate. The Federalist Society, the prestigious conservative forum that has shaped generations of American lawyers and politicians, was founded at Yale.

What defines the new brand of Yale-educated Republicans? They are populist in method and disposition, they are willing to provoke and unsettle the status quo, they are gunning for foundational change, and they believe in the use of state power to enforce traditionalist ends. Today’s new conservative is actually a radical, shaped by the liberal environment of an elite campus and armed with the intellectual and legal tools to transform America’s politics. Long after Donald Trump is gone, these gilded guerrillas of the New Right will still be with us.

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I am a Yale Law graduate myself. I was there in 2015 when the conservative movement mutated, and a small group broke off and began supporting Donald Trump. This group was viewed as an oddity at first by the rest of the law school, even by other conservatives.

I was friendly with some of these students. People warned me that I was wasting my time, or worse, spending it in the company of racists. But in 2015, when everyone was laughing at Trump’s antics and Jeb Bush was supposedly destined to be the GOP nominee, these students were arguing from first principles about the conservative revolution they could unleash. I took the opportunity to hear out their arguments. If a handful of students at one of the top law schools in the world were taking Trump seriously, perhaps there was more to Trump’s candidacy than my liberal bubble assumed?

These insurgent students were dismantling the conservative assumptions of the Bush and Reagan years. Free trade? How about making sure America’s economy benefits ordinary Americans? Immigration reform? How about ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship? Detaining and policing certain groups of people? FDR did it. Better relations with China? How about a trade war? The Republican Party, one of these students told me then, had been “a convenient alliance between elite businesspeople and Evangelicals. We’re making it about the average American. No one wants another Bush.”

As for abortion, the vitriolic language from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is an echo — down to the wording — of some of these conversations years ago. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak. . . .” These new Yale-educated Republicans, supercharged off populism and traditionalism, wanted to destroy the status quo and replace it with their own vision.

There was no more room in New Haven for conservative William F. Buckley’s outdated “God and Man at Yale.” Now it was all about God and Trump at Yale.

Yale was where I heard the term “Overton window” for the first time. When the Yale conservatives invited a speaker to campus who espoused genetic theories about racial differences in IQ, I wanted to know why. No one was going to be persuaded by the talk, no policy change would come of it. People would just get angry. But the point, I was told by a student then, was to alter the boundaries of the debate itself. The very act of inviting the speaker was changing the terms of the discussion — expanding the Overton window of acceptable discourse.

I offered strong challenges and arguments in all these debates, but the conservative students always had retorts and rebuttals. Because Yale’s campus was overwhelmingly liberal, the conservatives had to buttress their arguments with reasoning. Being outnumbered turned out to be an intellectual advantage. When you’re the odd one out on every issue and at every party, you’ll invariably end up refining your arguments, sharpening your points, ultimately improving your arguments and stories in those ever so slight ways that can end up being decisive.

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As the Trump campaign gained steam, more students were attracted to the cause. Campuswide, an air of mockery and derision reigned, and students went deeper into their respective silos. It seemed impossible for students to even talk to someone who disagreed, much less be friends with them. Self-defeating progressive campus controversies around Halloween costumes and pronouns aggravated tensions further. Hardly anyone around me was paying much attention to those controversies, but when they were magnified by right-wing media, the Trumpian conservatives got a shot of adrenaline. The once-fringe group at the law school was no longer so fringe. As one liberal student told me, “Conservatives show up to Yale moderate and leave more conservative.”

Rather than allow for open argument, discussion, and debate, the campus energy turned so sour that these people were considered enemies by most. They were driven underground, where they organized and bided their time. Now they did not hear the liberal arguments at all but had fuel poured over their philosophy. Most of their discussions were now in secret. The conservatives had become radicals — and Yale, in large part, had radicalized them.

This New Right is infused with the bitter, reactionary attitude of a person who has been shunned. Except now that person has won power and soon might win some more. These elite conservative functionaries and lawyers are becoming like a Leninist vanguard, claiming to speak on behalf of the disaffected masses, willing to rattle the consensus for attentional space and policy momentum. One of them could be president in the very near future.

The lesson in all this for me is that liberals must reinvigorate our own intellectual and political project. We liberals often forget that the work of democracy is one of organization and persuasion — of literally bringing people to our side. And the growing urge, on campus and elsewhere, to deride and censor others is a recipe for a permanent failure of the liberal project. An unwillingness to engage the other side eventually leads to an inability to communicate with people not already in agreement with us.

Only by returning to first principles, building a better narrative, and boldly laying out good arguments (rather than just our feelings) will we win this coming battle for democracy. Under no circumstances should American history be conceded, but rather the longer story of America as a multiracial republic should be championed. We need less scolding and more dreaming. This means putting forth a concrete, substantive, affirmative vision of the progressive project, one that will materially improve the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. It means genuinely fighting for social justice rather than just posting about it on social media. It means reestablishing a spirit of open debate.

And it all begins by getting out of our bubbles and doing the democratic work of convincing people of our vision. It ends by winning power. In this respect, the conservatives may have something to teach us.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.

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When I was a teenager, before I grew into political consciousness, there was one president who somehow entered my world. Not Barack Obama; he would come later, in the critical year of 2007, when the railway of my life split in two opposing directions. 

This was the mid-2000s and everywhere I turned, I saw the same book, by a man called Jimmy Carter, a former president my father told me. There were only two living former Democratic presidents at the time, and Carter was one of them.

Even his name sounded unusual for a former president—Jimmy, like it was casual, unpretentious. And what President Carter was saying in 2006 made everyone sit up and pay attention. Some branded him an extremist, a radical. Unlike all the other former presidents during their lives—Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Obama—there was a constant disrespect and disparaging of Carter, even when he left office. Democrats distanced themselves from him. Republicans treated his very name like political cyanide.

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, it is even rumored that Jimmy Carter’s speaking slot was cut—a rare slight against a former president. When President George W. Bush invited the living former presidents and the new president-elect to the Oval Office, just days before President Obama’s inauguration, the photograph afterwards spoke volumes—there were the four other presidents, and then Jimmy Carter, off to the side, awkwardly.

With the news that America’s oldest former president, is now in hospice care, it is important to reflect on just who Jimmy Carter was and what his legacy means. It’s time to set straight the record on President Carter—as I prefer to call him—before the obituaries, before his personal enemies come out of the woodworks to opine in the New York Times about what a great statesman President Carter was, before the historical record is whitewashed of the vitriol, ad hominem, and invective directed at President Carter during his lifetime, done in bad faith, and which he handled with enormous grace. 

The Carter Presidency, from 1977 to 1981, was monumentally important for the United States and the world—and still shapes our own era. President Carter was not only a good president; he was a great one, and his accomplishments in foreign policy alone distinguish him among all of his twentieth century peers. 

But let’s begin at home. Carter was a peanut farmer from the small town of Plains, Georgia, elected governor of his beloved state in 1970. He was later elected the 39^th president of the United States in 1976, winning 50.1% of the vote and defeating the incumbent. Carter remains the most recent Democrat to win a majority of the South. After the scandals and crimes of the Nixon-Ford era, which included burglary and cover-ups, the Carter Presidency marked a new moment in American political life. 

From the start, Carter was different. He was a Baptist Christian and a man of genuine faith before faith became weaponized by the religious right. He promised to put human rights at the forefront of American foreign policy, after the various war crimes and duplicities of the Nixon-Kissinger era, which included the secret carpet bombings of Laos and the break-ins at Watergate. 

On President Carter’s first day in office, he announced—to the surprise of many—that peace in the Middle East would be a top priority for his administration. People wondered: What did a peanut farmer from Georgia know about the Holy Land? 

During his four years in office, Carter achieved multiple victories. On his second day Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders—a long overdue moment of healing after that disastrous war. Carter established the Department of Energy. He de-regulated airlines. He de-regulated trucking. And it is President Carter we can thank for the great American revolution in craft brewing, for Carter de-regulated the home brew industry in 1978 and opened the door to craft breweries across the country.

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If the first distinguisher of a great president is their character, Carter was already unique. Carter was a family man, a farmer, a man of reflection. He seems almost quaint in our era of mendacity and nihilism, but just compare Carter to what came before and after. He was neither a crook like Nixon, nor a salesman and actor like Reagan. In fact, nothing Carter did during his four years even touches the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Ronald Reagan’s administration secretly sold arms to Iran to fund right-wing guerrillas in Nicaragua. Carter was neither womanizer, nor sleaze, nor the privileged son of a former president. He had a rare form of integrity and authenticity—which many mistook for naïveté. 

Carter inherited a recession when he took office. In 1977, he signed a $30 billion program of tax cuts and stimulus programs. The problem was more structural than administration-specific: inflation was persistent, growth was sluggish. The 1973 OAPEC embargo, followed later by the 1979 energy crisis, sent shockwaves through the U.S. economy. Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman would help change things, eventually, but it would be too late. Carter was hamstrung by events far outside his control.

Yet it was in foreign policy where Carter really left his mark. It was Carter who began funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan, inducing the Soviet Union to invade and thereby take the first step in the crumbling of their empire. It was President Carter who, in 1980, announced the Carter Doctrine, declaring the Persian Gulf region a “vital interest” of the United States—meaning no major power could establish dominance in the region. To this day, the Carter Doctrine is the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, upheld by presidents of both parties, for good or ill.

So why was President Carter not given his due?

He lost the 1980 election and the losers of presidential elections are often forgotten in the American memory. But the outcome of that election had almost nothing to do with Carter. The major issue then was whether the Iranian ayatollahs, who had come to power in 1979, would release the 52 American hostages who were taken after the storming of the U.S. Embassy. The hostages were eventually released—after 444 days of being held by the Iranian leadership, while the American public watched.

The date and time they were released just happened to coincide with the moment that Ronald Reagan took the oath of office: January 20, 1981.

For years there have been allegations that the Reagan campaign struck a secret deal with the Iranian ayatollahs to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election. It’s an explosive claim, and has often been dismissed as conspiracy theory. Could the Reagan campaign really have conspired with a hostile, enemy regime that was holding American citizens hostage, just to get an edge over Carter?

As the New York Times reported in March 2023, after 43 years of secrecy, the Reagan campaign did exactly that.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally [Former Texas Governor], he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

In other words, the Reagan campaign deliberately sabotaged negotiations and prevented the release of American hostages. Why? Because if Iran had released the hostages, it would help the president. Perhaps if Carter had sunk to such lows he could have easily won re-election.

But my case for Carter’s greatness does not hinge upon the 1980 election, or any of his other foreign policy decisions. There was a reason Carter was maligned and targeted after he left the presidency, and as I grew up, I learned that the issue that Carter helped to solve was the one they said could not be solved.

In 2006, Carter published a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book struck many as too radical, and Carter was criticized relentlessly. I recently re-read the book; it is a gentle introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict, even-handed and almost too optimistic by today’s standards. The book, read today, is a sort of Israel-Palestine 101. When it was published, Carter was condemned—and some even insinuated that he was an anti-semite.

The maligning of Jimmy Carter is not only tragedy but farce, because, to this day, Jimmy Carter is the only American president to actually achieve peace in the Middle East.

In September 1978, President Carter announced the Camp David Accords, signed by Egypt and Israel, normalizing relations between the two nations formerly at war. The Accords came about because of Carter’s own personal diplomacy. He invited Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David for talks. Begin was a hardline Israeli leader. Sadat was a staunch nationalist. The odds were long.

But after thirteen days of President Carter’s cajoling, prodding, pushing, listening, and negotiating, a peace deal was achieved. It was a historic moment. The Camp David Accords are still the foundation of all U.S. policies in the region. Signed by both Israel and Egypt, ratified by both governments, the Camp David Accords prohibit the acquisition of land by force. They mention the “Palestinian” people by name and put the Palestinian issue on the international stage. They are the starting point for all later attempts to achieve a just and lasting peace.

Let us repeat: President Carter is the only American president to actually achieve peace in the Middle East. And every clause of the Camp David Accords has been upheld by Carter’s successors. In 1982, Ronald Reagan reaffirmed the Camp David agreement. The peace overtures during the Bush, Clinton, and Obama years also built upon the Camp David Accords. And any future peace agreement—remote as it seems now—will also be based on President Carter’s work.

At a time of such great polarization and hatred, one wonders if it is not the spirit of the man who now enters his final hours that we need the most. Generosity. Integrity. Compassion. After he left the presidency, Carter went to work solving urgent public health problems in Africa, ridding the world of guinea worm. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich,” Carter once said. He had come to serve, and long into his life, serve he did. America, and the world, are better for it. All thanks to Jimmy. 

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.

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It’s finally here. After 6 years of writing, rewriting, revising. After years of study and learning and experiences. After travels outside myself and journeys within myself. After some deaths and rebirths.

BROWN BOY: A MEMOIR is here. I poured my heart and soul into this, and probably left pieces of myself forever in these pages. It belongs to you, the reader. I hope you like it. I hope you share it. I hope it provokes you to think, and maybe even feel.

I hope it expands the possibilities and ideas of all the kids coming up next.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible. Thank you to everyone who believed. I will never forget.

Cover art by Natalia Olbinski.

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I have a piece in this weekend’s The Globe and Mail. It’s a homage to the working-class, immigrant community that raised me. Way out in Scarborough. Where we laughed and lived together, where we grew up together, where so many dreams were born, where our parents and grandparents passed on wisdom, where young people created new ideas and art that would define generations to come.

Excerpt below. Read the full piece, with family photos and classic pictures of Scarborough, on The Globe and Mail’s website. Available in print and online.

BROWN BOY: A MEMOIR coming Tuesday. Subscribe to Notes From The Margins for the latest updates on my book, writings, events, and more.

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Omer Aziz is the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir.

I don’t remember the first time I heard slander spoken on Scarborough’s name, but I do remember the last.

It was 2018, and I was at a book event in downtown Toronto. An American journalist and a local moderator had packed the hall at the Reference Library, Torontonians flocking to hear enlightened opinions about the unenlightened U.S. president. At some point, for reasons I don’t recall, Scarborough was mentioned. What I do remember is the laughter: Rippling through the room, as if to say, you know, Scarborough, that place, why mention it here among the civilized? I sat in the back row and did what I’ve always done around polite Canadians – held my tongue.

I was born in Scarborough, grew up in Scarborough, spent the first decade and a half of my life in Scarborough – and then went out into the bigger world, studying in Kingston, Paris, London and New Haven, Conn., before becoming a foreign policy adviser in the federal government and a fellow at Harvard. Yet my heart has never left Scarborough. And as an adult, I came to learn all too well that laughter, that derision, was suggestive of other things as well.

Full piece here.

I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.

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Today, Monday, March 20th, is the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War. It’s tough to believe; the Iraq War seems like a lifetime ago. 

For me, the start of the Iraq War brings back memories of the basement we lived in up in Canada. I was twelve going on thirteen. Our whole family gathered in front of the television the…

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It is almost an axiom of politics and life that the things we do not name grow in power. Death, the shadow, the awkward and uncomfortable truth—suppressed, these things emerge stronger. Call it the Voldemort principle: that which is unspeakable—or goes unspoken—only expands in energy and potential power. These days, among the unspeakable and unspoken, is the spread of a dangerous movement and ideology in politics, one we dare not name.

Last month, a man named Stewart Rhodes, leader of the far-right extremists called the Oath Keepers, was found guilty of the crime of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 insurrection. The federal court verdict, delivered by a jury of his peers, found that Rhodes and his militia plotted to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, overthrow the government by force, and keep Donald Trump in office. In total, five people—three men and two women—were found guilty of felonies related to the assault on the U.S Capitol. The conspirators were convicted of other crimes as well, but it is the guilty verdict of sedition that is the most significant. It confirms that the violent events of January 6, 2021, were the result of an organized plot to attack the nerve-center of American democracy.  

The word sedition is not commonly used in everyday speech. Simply put, sedition is the act of revolting or using violence against a legitimate government to control or destroy it. While the notions of sedition and conspiracy within Anglo-American law have historically been used to suppress dissent, the modern crime comes from the Civil War period. The law of Seditious Conspiracy, officially 18 U.S. Code § 2384, dates back to 1861, when Confederate states began seceding from the Union and launched a military assault upon the federal government. The Oath Keepers and their fanatical right-wing allies are not the Confederates, but they managed to do what not even the Confederates could: parade the flag of sedition and slavery through the United States Congress.

They were also incredibly well-organized. According to the Department of Justice, the Oath Keepers split into teams and planned to transport firearms and ammunition to Washington, DC; planned and organized trainings to teach and learn paramilitary tactics; brought “knives, batons, camouflaged combat uniforms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, eye protection, and radio equipment” to the Capitol. They breached the actual building on January 6, 2021, to “prevent, hinder, and delay the certification of the electoral college vote.” Some of the militants broke into the Capitol building itself, while others waited outside Washington in rapid response teams that were ready to transport guns and ammunition into the city to “stop the lawful transfer of power.” And of course, when inside the Capitol, they attacked law enforcement.

In other words, what the government proved beyond a reasonable doubt was that the events of January 6, 2021, were not the work of a ragtag group of disgruntled rioters, but an organized and armed conspiracy that sought to overthrow the federal government by force, end the peaceful transition of power, and use violence to reinstate Donald J. Trump as president. It was nothing less than an attempted coup, carried out at the same time as the former president was goading on the mob to storm the Capitol.

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We live in a time of double-talk and duplicity, a time where words are shorn of meaning, a time of trivializing the significant and catastrophizing the trivial, where the real threats of violence are cynically conflated with impolite gestures of disapproval, where truth is itself assailed. The legal system is still a bulwark against the threats of lawlessness and will-to-power authoritarianism that the far-right militias fantasize about. But there are more guns than people in America, and more extremists with guns than anywhere else in the world. That the Oath Keepers had insufficient ammunition and manpower this time around does not change the prospect that next time they might have more guns, and more friends.

Stewart Rhodes and I share one thing: we both went to Yale Law School. As the New York Times reported, Rhodes morphed from conservative law student at the nation’s premier law school to a far-right extremist wearing an eye-patch and on trial for sedition. At Yale Law School, Rhodes “was clean-shaven, with a prosthetic eye, the result of a self-inflicted gun accident.” He was focused on gun rights and did not strike anyone as outside of the ordinary.

But over the years, Rhodes drifted to the right, then the far-right, then acted on his ideas by leading armed insurrectionists to storm the Capitol. Sometimes, all it takes is the right dose of ideology, irrational fear, and a cult leader’s encouragement for a man, even a Yale-trained lawyer, to become radicalized and resort to violence.

Rhodes composed a message for the former president, to be delivered to Donald Trump after the insurrection. “This is Stewart Rhodes,” he wrote. “Army airborne veteran and Yale Law graduate.” He wished to tell Trump: “You must use the insurrection act and use the power of the Presidency to stop” Joe Biden from becoming president. “I am here for you and so are all my men. We will come help you if you need us,” Rhodes wrote. “Military and police. And so will your millions of supporters.”

There has been a strange tendency among educated people to dismiss the far-right threat that presents itself to America—the same far-right ideology that rears its head in Europe, in Italy, in France, in India. Indeed, just today, German authorities disrupted a far-right plot to overthrow the government. Mutations of this worldview consumed some of the most civilized and developed states in Europe less than a century ago. Denialism is a comforting analgesic, the refusal to acknowledge the parasitic ideology feeding off and growing within our democracies. Concluding what is obvious, and going where the facts lead, may disturb the certainties one has about America and liberal democracy. It cannot be what we think it is because that can’t happen here.

At a time when leading Republicans minimize the insurrection, when the Republican Senator from Missouri says he “regrets nothing” about January 6 and raising his fist in support of seditionists, when hundreds of Republicans claim the 2020 election was stolen, what shall we call this ideology? When the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, the Oath Keepers, and other criminals seek to end the democratic experiment, what shall we say? When the forty-fifth president openly brags, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people,” how will we organize? When the former president, and the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination of 2024, demands that the Constitution of the United States be “terminated,” how shall we respond? The far-right, if nothing else, will show us everyone’s true colors.

This is only the beginning of the fight against the far-right ideology that dare not speak its name. The ideology is called fascism, and it is already here, worming its way through the minds of too many people. It is a violent, sadistic, reactionary, anti-democratic ideology that is also incredibly patient. The Oath Keepers are only the start. There will be others, for the militias have been gathering arms for some time, waiting.

As our moment unfolds, all the worst variants of this dangerous ideology re-emerge, from hatred of Jews to subversion of democracy, poisoning more minds, even ones privileged enough to receive the best education in the land. The ideology spreads across the country, consuming more young men, driving them to their guns, sending tornados of violence through America’s halls of power, and its schools. Naming this clear and present danger is the first step; the hard part is what comes next.

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