This year marks exactly 40 years – September 1 1983 to be exact – when the Soviet military shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air Flight 007, killing all 269 people on board. Having flown wildly off-course for thousands of miles, deep into Soviet territory over the Kamchatka peninsula, the pilot ignored repeated warnings. The Soviet authorities, claiming that they confused the airliner with a spy craft, eventually blasted it from the sky.

That incident was seized upon by then US President Ronald Reagan to increase military spending in the United States. The corporate media had a field day, highlighting this act of barbarism as concrete evidence of Moscow’s utter ruthlessness and indifference to human suffering. While I was still in high school at the time, I remember this issue because it helped to educate me about the hypocrisies upon which American foreign policies are based.

How a civilian airliner was able to fly so flagrantly off-course is a mystery to me. It flew over sensitive Soviet military bases and installations in that part of the USSR. Why the pilot, Chun Byung-in, an ex-military man, deliberately ignored the warnings of Soviet military authorities is unclear to me. While I do not like to dabble in conspiracy theories, it is rather odd that a South Korean airliner would fly deep into enemy territory.

The American authorities, years later, admitted that the Soviets mistook the airliner for a spy plane. Moscow claimed that the KAL007 was similar to the US RC-135 spy plane. A flimsy pretext perhaps, but then Boeing, the company that manufactured the Korean airliner, is heavily involved in the construction of military aircraft. In subsequent decades, Boeing has gotten involved in the building of drones.

The Boeing corporation announced, in 2021, that they would construct unmanned drones at a facility near Toowoomba, Queensland. The ABC, which reported the story, helpfully reminds us that this development will create jobs, thus alleviating our concerns about the lethal consequences those machines will generate.

It is worth exploring the conduct of the US authorities in this regard. In 1988, five years after the Soviet shoot down of KAL 007, the American navy deliberately shot down an Iranian civilian airliner. Iran air flight 655, clearly a civilian air bus, was flying on its usual course over the Persian Gulf. The American navy ship the USS Vincennes, which could clearly identify the Iranian aircraft, shot it down killing all 290 people on board. The naval commander of the US warship was subsequently awarded a medal for his ‘courage.’

Former US President George Bush, when asked about the shoot down, angrily dismissed concerns from the relatives of the victims, stating that he would never apologise, being completely unconcerned about the facts of the case.

The KAL 007 flight, crewed by an experienced team, surely knew that they were diverting from their usual flight course. The plane’s mapping information would have contained information about the weather, the geography of the land formations on their path – so the crew would have clearly seen the rocky Kamchatka peninsula beneath them. Why did the pilot not warn the civilian authorities that he was off-course?

I am not suggesting that I have definitive answers to all these unexplored questions. What I can say is that as a consequence of KAL007 straying off course, Soviet air bases and radar systems lit up, thus exposing their locations in that part of the world. A veritable treasure trove of precious intelligence information would have been available about Soviet air defences.

On board KAL007 was Larry McDonald, a fanatical ultrarightist and member of the John Birch Society. The latter is an ultraconservative, libertarian organisation dedicated to pushing American politics further to the Right. McDonald became a kind of ultranationalist martyr for the cause, and Reagan’s White House launched a hysterical campaign of militarist spending. His administration deployed nuclear capable missiles to then West Germany.

Creating a groundswell of domestic public opinion friendly to the idea of increased military spending has lasting consequences. Mass hysteria remains in the collective psyche, able to be revived and recycled against new enemies. By the way, McDonald, during his long political career, once nominated Rudolf Hess for a Nobel Peace prize. Hess, a convicted Nazi war criminal and racist, made a desperate attempt to avoid all-out warfare with Britain, but failed.

What is wrong with that, you ask? After all, do we not regard Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich, as a hero for his ultimately failed coup d’état? Yes, we do – and we should not. Did Stauffenberg object with Hitler’s genocidal plans for war with the Soviet Union? No, he did not. Did Stauffenberg object to the use of concentration camp labour in manufacturing German armaments? No, he did not.

What relevance does all of this have for contemporary times? There are striking parallels between Reagan’s exploitation of the KAL007 tragedy, and the ballooning Sinophobic hysteria (pun intended) over the alleged Chinese spy balloon which drifted into American air space. The Pentagon, after shooting down that particular aerial intruder (and several other harmless aerial visitors) finally admitted that the Chinese balloon did not have any spying capabilities.

However, the media frenzy accompanying the balloon-paranoia is remarkable. The public is fed a steady diet of ultra processed sound bytes and public relations material based on the concerns of the US military industrial-intelligence complex. Suspicion of the ulterior motives of states designated as enemies becomes a public hobbyhorse for the media commentariat and its docile audience.

Ballooning rhetoric, while keeping us preoccupied, only serves to distribute hot air. It is time to puncture these self-serving tropes and analyse the policy implications of mass hysteria.

Firstly, stop recycling the tired old claim of Hamas antisemitism to deny Palestinians their voice. Secondly, the charge of antisemitism is serious, and it is also used as an emotionally manipulative weapon to slander Palestinian solidarity as undergirded by irrational hatred.

Let’s examine some important and related developments in the wake of the October uprising by Palestinian guerrillas. The accusation of antisemitism, flung with repetitive regularity at supporters of Palestinian rights, is aimed at silencing all opposition and condemnation of Israel’s genocidal military campaign against Gaza. The breakout of the besieged territory of Gaza – under Israeli land, sea, and air blockade since 2007 – not only exposed Tel Aviv’s military vulnerability, but also upended the apple cart that is the Abraham Accords.

Tel Aviv’s leaders are nursing their shattered collective ego, now that the carefully cultivated myth of Israel’s military invincibility has been shattered. Zionism’s supporters have spent decades deliberating manufacturing a media image of Israel’s allegedly sophisticated intelligence apparatus, backed up by a network of informants and highly advanced military technology. Gaza airspace is constantly buzzing with drones.

It is impossible to overestimate the propaganda impact, particularly in the Anglophone nations, of the Zionist-friendly image of Israel as a military power, backed by courageous and dedicated warrior citizens, for whom violence is the last resort. Making the ‘desert bloom’, these hardy and intelligent partisans of Zionism have made a home in Palestine, all the while confronting a barbarous, savage-minded, medieval Arab/Muslim ocean of hostility.

Binoy Kampmark writes that Palestinian casualties of Israeli military violence die by the thousands, condemned to anonymity and depersonalisation. Tower blocks are destroyed by Israeli Defence Force (IDF) missile strikes, and the Palestinian fatalities are barely reported. Israeli victims of Hamas attacks on the other hand, are named, their families interviewed, their lives remembered and humanised.

Our sympathy is perverted to serve the propagandistic aims of Zionism. The Palestinians and their supporters are marginalised. Julian Sayarer, writing in Jacobin magazine, makes a point with which this article was started – stop deployed the Hamas bogeyman to deny Palestinians’ independent agency.

The stereotype of the young, bearded, AK-47 waving angry Muslim has become so ubiquitous in our corporatised culture, it is difficult to challenge it. Underlying this stereotype is the perverse insinuation that Palestinian and Arab communities are motivated by an irrational antisemitism in their opposition to Zionism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s make it clear – Hamas, an Islamist organisation, included antisemitic elements and tropes in its 1988 foundational document. It recycled hateful stereotypes from fraudulent sources, such as the disgraceful Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist Russian forgery. The Hamas charter, written by a people dispossessed by military violence and facing a marginalised existence, reflected the thinking of the organisation at that time.

In 2017, Hamas issued a new document, archiving the old charter. Replacing the antisemitic elements with a political perspective, Hamas agreed to a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, and repudiated its connection with the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas specified that its conflict is not with Judaism, but with the colonialist project of Zionism. These distinctions are subtle, and important. Casting the opposition to Zionism as an anti colonial fight, not an age-old Crusading battle between Muslims and Jews, is an important step.

It is relevant to note here that Israeli politicians, whose differences are nuanced and afforded an explanation in the corporate media, routinely threaten to wipe out Palestinian and Arab populations. Benny Gantz, former IDF chief of staff and political ‘centrist’, has openly boasted of killing Palestinians. Such sentiments have not affected his political career.

Abraham Accords

Hebh Jamal, writing about the Palestinian military operation of early October, states that Palestinians are not celebrating death and destruction. No, they are not rejoicing at the killing of civilians, or the deaths of children – though the viral story about Hamas decapitating babies remains unverified. They are celebrating a chance at life. Having reduced Gaza to basic subsistence level, Israel has contributed to creating a new generation of aggrieved Palestinians.

The siege of Gaza is actually a case of collective punishment. Colonial powers, as Chris Hedges writes, normally impose collective punishment on rebellious populations – the Germans against the Herero in Namibia, the British against the Kikuyu in Kenya. For that matter, Gaza today resembles the conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War 2.

The major political consequence of the October prison break is the upending of the Abraham Accords. A series of bilateral treaties between Tel Aviv and Arab states, the Abraham Accords were portrayed as ushering in a new era of Israeli-Arab normalisation. A propaganda triumph for the former Trump administration, relations between Tel Aviv and its Arab regional neighbours was always predicated on abandoning the aspirations of the Palestinians.

Normalisation, in the context of Middle Eastern politics, is promoted as a pathway of peace; a reconciliation between traditional enemies and the triumph of pragmatic thinking over ancient hatreds. There is one major problem with that image; the Palestinians remained excluded, and their legitimate demands for an independent state forgotten. For instance, Morocco, having signed a treaty with Tel Aviv in 2020, abandoned even the pretence of speaking up for Palestinian sovereignty.

During the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer competition, after Morocco defeated Spain, Moroccan fans waved both the Moroccan and Palestinian flags, in a spontaneous and yet politically conscious display of solidarity. Defeating the former colonial power in Morocco, touched a deep chord of sympathy in the Arab psyche. Opposition to normalisation is a deep seated issue in the Arab world.

The outpouring of Palestine solidarity protests around the world demonstrate that Palestinian lives do matter. It is reasonable to oppose ‘condemning both sides’; rejecting the false equivalency between the violence of the slave owner with the enslaved. The colonial power deploys mechanised and systematic violence, while the oppressed fights back with whatever weapons are at their disposal. New York State Senator Julia Salazar wrote that the Palestinians deserve liberation because they are human beings.

Psychology presentations do not usually end up with fisticuffs and a punch up. However, fifty years ago, there was a brawl sparked by a controversial psychologist’s speech which has lessons for us today. The fracas, and the reasons for it, are issues which still reverberate throughout our cultural and social life.

Hans Eysenck, intelligence and race

German-born British psychologist Hans Eysenck (1916 – 1997) was the preeminent psychologist of his generation. Heavily cited in the literature, he was the go-to academic in matters of psychology. Assigned to speak about intelligence, IQ and race at the London School of Economics in 1973, his upcoming presentation was the focus of protests by leftwing student groups.

Eysenck, taking up the torch from American educational psychologist Arthur Jensen (1923 – 2012), claimed that intelligence was not only largely inherited, but that different racial groups achieved unequal social outcomes due to genetic differences. Eysenck and Jensen’s view were popular among white nationalist circles. They provided a veneer of scientific ‘respectability’ to viewpoints long considered racist and beyond the pale.

No sooner had Eysenck begun his speech, than students from Maoist and Afro-Asian solidarity groups jumped the stage and assaulted Eysenck. Knocked to the ground and beaten, the incident became one of the first no-platforming episodes in recent history.

It turns out that the Maoist students were correct, though not for the reasons they stated. Eysenck, similarly to his mentor Sir Cyril Burt, was posthumously exposed as a scientific fraud and systematic liar. Manufacturing data to support his pre-existing conclusions about race, heredity and intelligence, Eysenck’s papers have been declared unsafe by his previous employer as a result of his scientific misconduct.

Genomics – explaining ourselves through genes

Psychology, along with the rest of the social sciences, has taken up the gene-centric perspective of society. To be sure, neuroscience, the study of the brain and nervous system, predates the discovery of DNA by decades. However, genetic explanations of every aspect of human behaviour, from alcoholism to sexual orientation, has become predominated by the sweeping and swift genomic claim of ‘it’s in the genes.’ Mapping the human genome was supposed to unlock the mysteries of the basis of human behaviour.

The concept of heritability has been surrounded by confusion – and deliberate sleight of hand – by proponents of genetic determinism for a long time. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, two psychologists and coauthors of The Bell Curve, postulate that intelligence is largely inherited. Following in the footsteps of Eysenck – and the American psychologist Arthur Jensen – the hereditarian advocate locates the origins of capitalist socioeconomic and racial inequality in an individual’s genes. A meritocratic society, we are told, will be rewarded for their ‘good’ genes.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of heritability here. Heritable is implicitly equated with inevitability, or determined. In casual conversation, we all talk about children inheriting traits from their parents – height, hair colour and so on. Let’s have a closer look at the concept of heritability. When something is genetic, it does not mean that it is inevitable in the phenotype.

Let’s look at genetic factors for disease risk. Heritability is a statistical concept, which means that the risk factors for a particular disease within a given population are due to heredity. The heritability estimate of a trait is expressed within the range of 0.0 to 1.0; 0 means little if any genetic factors, and 1.0 means entirely all the trait is due to heritability. For instance, Crohn’s disease has a heritability estimate of 0.75.

What does that mean? It means that within a given population, 75 percent of the risk factors for developing the disease are attributable to hereditary causes. No, it does not mean that if your parents have Crohn’s disease, you as an individual have a 75 percent chance of developing it. No, it does not mean that 75 percent of Crohn’s disease is determined by your genes. Heritability estimates apply to a given population, not to specific individuals in that population.

There is not a simple, linear gene-to-trait causal linkage. For instance, there are multiple genes identified with the expression of schizophrenia. The multifactorial causes of schizophrenia, many of which are non-genetic, are slowly being understood. There is no single ‘intelligence gene’, let alone a racial component in the expression and exercise of intelligence.

Pankaj Mehta, associate professor of physics at Boston University, observes that most phenotypes outcomes, such as height and eye colour, are not purely dependent on genes alone. Mehta explores the example of height, which we think is influenced by genes alone. There is an example, while drawn from horrifying social conditions, does illustrate the point.

During the 1980 and 90s, the Guatemalan Mayan community was targeted by American supported death squads. Mayan children who fled with their families, were raised in the United States. When comparing the respective heights of Mayan children who remained in Guatemala as opposed to US-raised Mayans (between six and twelve years old), researchers found the American-raised children were 10 centimetres taller than their Guatemalan counterparts. Better nutrition, diet and stable educational lifestyle all played a part, more so than heredity, in determining the height outcomes of these children.

Eysenck – spokesperson for big tobacco

Scientists are always debating each other. Controversy is part of the job. However, when a scientist is paid by an interested party in that controversy to manufacture misinformed doubt, that is scandalous. Eysenck, back in the 1990s, produced papers purportedly demonstrating that personality types, rather than cigarettes and its carcinogenic ingredients, were the main determinants of lung cancer.

His theory of ‘cancer prone’ and ‘heart disease’ prone personality types removed the culpability of smoking cigarettes (and the tobacco companies who own and sold them) for human mortality. Years later, an interesting fact came to light; Eysenck had received thousands of pounds in funding from tobacco companies for his research.

It is not so much Eysenck’s financial skulduggery which is at issue here, outrageous as that is. It is the pervasive and secretive influence of dark money on our political, media and scientific institutions. Not only have tobacco companies spent billions manufacturing doubt about the links between nicotine and lung cancer, American and British billionaires have funded fake think tanks, astroturf citizen groups – denying the reality of human-induced global warming.

The Koch family has spent billions on academic institutions which promote the ultra-libertarian philosophy of free markets and reduced government. Denouncing the influence of ideology, they advocate an ideology of unfettered neoliberalism. The ultrarightist Cato Institute churns out seemingly scholarly output in defence of right wing politicians. It advocates a version of individual liberty which somehow morphs into the freedom of corporations to exploit and plunder.

The malign influence of dark money did not end with Eysenck’s death. It continues to metastasise in the institutions of government and science. We must not allow the billionaire megaphone from drowning out the voices of the marginalised. I do not advocate individual violence in the manner of the Maoist students who attacked Eysenck. However, storming the outsize megaphones of the billionaire class is just as urgent today as it was fifty years ago.

We have all heard about fugitive Nazi war criminals, escaping post-war Europe, finding sanctuary in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay or some other South American nation. You could be forgiven for thinking that coddling Nazi mass murderers is somehow endemic to the Hispanic condition.

However, that stereotype is incorrect. Providing sanctuary for Nazi criminals however, is not something unique to the Latin temperament. The country in the Americas that has consistently welcomed Nazis, and assisted in rehabilitating their doctrines, is north of the equator – predominantly Anglo Canada.

In September this year, the Canadian parliament gave a rapturous ovation to Ukrainian Yaroslav Hunka. Who is he? Now 98 years old, Hunka was a member of the Waffen SS, specifically the First Ukrainian Division. This unit, originally known as the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division, was mostly made up of ultranationalist Ukrainians who fought alongside Nazi German troops in World War 2.

Motivated by the racist ideology of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, this division – also known as 1st Galician – committed numerous atrocities against Jews, Poles, Russians and other minority groups. Condemned as a criminal organisation at the end of World War 2, the veterans of the Galician division escaped justice in Europe. Thousands of them found refuge in Britain – and Canada. In fact, Canada is the largest recipient of fleeing Nazi war criminals on the American continent.

The fact that Hunka was officially invited to attend the official address of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the Canadian parliament, exposes the dark side of Ukrainian ultranationalist criminality.

There is one positive side to this story. As Jeremy Appel notes, the international community has asked serious questions regarding Canada’s disturbing record in rehabilitating Ukrainian ultranationalism. Nazi war criminals like Yaroslav Hunka, are not exactly isolated strangers in the wider Ukrainian-Canadian community.

I seem to recall the almighty tsunami of outrage by the Israeli and European governments in response to antisemitic remarks by Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with senior European politicians, denounced what they saw as a repeat pattern of antisemitism on the part of Abbas. They also condemned what they viewed as the Palestinian authority’s footdragging when it comes to confronting antisemitism in its own ranks.

The Canadian government, in its turn, forcefully denounced Abbas and the Palestinian authorities for their perceived antisemitism.

If that is the case, what would the international community, and Tel Aviv’s supporters, make of Ottawa’s longstanding policy of cultivating, rehabilitating (and now applauding) East European Nazi collaborators? The latter are responsible for the mass murder of thousands of Europeans Jews. After the war, Ottawa, in cooperation with the UK, overlooked the racist criminal past of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator veterans, and provided them with sanctuary.

Ali Abuninah, writing about this topic in Electronic Intifada, notes the rank hypocrisy of those whose current silence on the issue of Canadian sanctuary for Nazi war criminals is deafening:

One might think that the members of this chorus truly care about preserving the memory of the victims of the Nazis, and even take seriously their regular invocation of such slogans as “Never Again.”

But that would be a mistake.

After World War 2, with the Cold War in full swing, thousands of Eastern European Nazi collaborators, including Ukrainian members of the Waffen SS Galician unit, were provided sanctuary in Canada. There, they established vibrant communities, with newspapers, churches, schools, sports clubs – and were a reliable anticommunist bulwark against the Canadian labour movement and trade unions.

Waffen SS veterans, such as the Ukrainians who fought in the 1st Galician division, were given refuge in Britain after the war. The UK government at the time regarded these former SS members as ‘good stock’ who were racially acceptable, and would provide bodies for labour shortages. In the 1950s, Hunka and thousands of his colleagues moved to Canada.

In Canada, these Ukrainians set up the Ukrainian Cultural Congress (UCC), an umbrella organisation dedicated to, among other things, promoting a sanitised version of the Galician division’s record. The mass killings of Jews, Poles and Russians was basically forgotten, and the Ukrainian SS members were portrayed as simple patriots driven into the arms of the Nazis by Stalinist repression. So, the excuse is – ‘the Russians made me do it’.

The Ukrainian nationalist lobby, which provided the recruits for Himmler’s Galician unit, saw Jewish Bolshevism as the main enemy to be confronted. I am certain there was a German politician who said the same thing, and targeted European Jews as the existential threat facing western civilisation. Himmler himself inspected the ranks of the Ukrainian Waffen SS soldiers, solidifying his control over the Eastern European collaborators.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with the Canadian political establishment, apologised for inviting and applauding Hunka. The Speaker of the House, Anthony Rota, resigned his position in the wake of the scandal. This incident is being summarily dismissed as a PR gaffe. That is a pathetic attempt to trivialise a serious issue.

It is hardly a mistake when current Canadian deputy PM, Chrystia Freeland openly boasts of her grandfather’s role in recruiting for the Ukrainian Waffen SS division. It is hardly Russian disinformation to point out Ottawa’s deliberate cultivation of a haven for Ukrainian war criminals.

Canada’s willing reception of Waffen SS veterans exposes the moral bankruptcy of Ottawa’s foreign policies. Their scarcely credible claims of fighting for democracy and freedom stand exposed as deceptions. It is high time for Trudeau and Freeland to face the consequences of their actions. The next time you are looking for Nazi refugees, don’t only look at South American nations – cast your view at a nation further up north.