(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How will readers respond to a diary which does NOT denigrate Ben Cohen or Bernie Sanders? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-26 Ice cream, you scream The Daily Beast reported last week that Ben & Jerry’s cofounder “Ben Cohen has donated more than $1 million to a group campaigning to turn the U.S. public against President Biden’s military support for Ukraine.” That claim — a teaser displayed right under the story’s title — may be somewhat more provocative than accurate. The story naturally led to some folks on Twitter saying they’d quit eating Ben & Jerry’s, and here on Daily Kos, a diary appeared titled No more Ben & Jerry’s, founder comes out as tankie which captured well over 600 (!) recommends. That diary for some reason noted that Ben Cohen is a supporter of Bernie Sanders, and the diary’s cover illustration showed Sanders’s face on a pint of B&J’s, even though Sanders fully supports U.S. aid to Ukraine — a fact which numerous commenters pointed out and was eventually added to the diary in a postscript. So has Cohen actually invested $1 million in a messaging campaign against President Biden’s Ukraine aid policies? That’s certainly the impression one gets from the Daily Beast article’s teaser line. Thirteen paragraphs below that, it says: Public records show that Cohen donated over $400,000 to PPI during the 2015 tax year, followed by a series of smaller donations in the years since which have totalled more than $1 million. Well if that’s the case, then it sounds like the majority of Cohen’s investment in his “People Power Initiatives” organization was made before Biden became president and before Russia invaded Ukraine. Moreover, the Daily Beast doesn’t elaborate on how PPI allocated the investment, presumably because the Daily Beast doesn’t know. Cohen’s PPI organization is best-known for its “Stamp Stampede” project, which I first heard about in a laudatory Daily Kos article by Markos Moulitsas titled “How to turn your dollar bill into real activism,” posted in 2015: So I met with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame a few months ago as he was passing through the Bay Area, and we chatted about lots of things over lunch. But chief among them was his latest project, StampStampede.org, an effort to literally stamp cash with political messages to generate support for the overturning of Citizens United. The Daily Beast story is referring to another PPI project called the Eisenhower Media Network, which frankly I’d never heard of before. It’s a group of commentators who inveigh against the military-industrial complex (whence their name). They are all folks with U.S. military/government backgrounds (e.g., Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff; Michael Hoh, an Iraq War vet who entered the public eye when he resigned from his Foreign Service post in protest over the war in Afghanistan; Colleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower who was named among Time’s 2002 Persons of the Year). They are highly skeptical of Pentagon spending and believe that U.S. foreign policymakers too often favor military operations over diplomatic solutions. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with decrying the military-industrial complex and favoring diplomacy over militarism; indeed, that should go without saying here on a progressive website and one that originated as a flagship of the left blogosphere inveighing against Bush’s war on Iraq. Like you and me, the EMNers don’t have warm feelings toward George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al. And if you peruse EMN tweets, you’ll probably agree with a large percentage of them; it seems relatively few are even about Ukraine. While EMNers do seem to be reflexively distrustful of the Departments of Defense and State, their views on U.S. aid to Ukraine aren’t necessarily as simplistic as the Daily Beast article suggests. For example, when EMN’s Larry Wilkerson was a guest on NPR’s “On Point” a year ago, along with Alexander Vindman (of Trump Impeachment #1 fame), they engaged in a spirited debate, yet when Vindman suggested that the U.S. ought to increase its military support for Ukraine, Wilkerson actually agreed: I do agree with Colonel Vindman that that's what we really should be doing. Then you need to err on the light side rather than the heavy side, because the heavy side produces a stalemate, and protracted war and probably an even greater tragedy than we already have. Perhaps the most damning attribution to an EMNer in the Daily Beast article is this one: Some of them have been echoing Kremlin propaganda...suggesting that NATO expansion was one of the causes of the war. “We gave Putin just cause,” the director of EMN, Dennis Fritz, told The Daily Beast in an interview. That could be read as suggesting that this is a just cause war on Russia’s part, which is an abominable lie. But is that what Fritz meant, or did he mean NATO expansion gave Putin a “just cause” excuse? Was there a follow-up question? Was there any additional context, any condemnation of the invasion, that the Daily Beast left out? That’s important to know. For example, here’s a snippet from a New York Magazine article titled “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Tests the American Left.” If it contained just the first two sentences and not the rest, you might dismiss Matt Duss (who’s a Bernie Sanders advisor, not an EMNer) as someone taking Putin’s side: “Concerns about NATO expansion are not something that Vladimir Putin just made up recently,” said Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sanders. “There’s 30 years of evidence that this is something that is very concerning to a lot of Russian officials and the Russian political leadership more broadly.” Establishment officials have acknowledged this reality, including Clinton administration Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and current CIA director Bill Burns. “That’s not to agree with Vladimir Putin’s arguments about NATO,” Duss clarified. “It’s clear from his own speeches now that his aims are much broader, and much more expansive, than just having to do with NATO.” So what to make of Daily Beast’s provocative claim about the lefty ice cream mogul? It sounds as if Cohen has made some investment (amount unknown) in a group of commentators whose messaging includes skepticism about Ukraine policy as part of a more general critique of U.S. foreign policy and how they believe the military-industrial complex influences it to favor military operations over diplomacy. There’s no evidence that Cohen supports Putin’s actions or doesn’t support Ukraine’s sovereignty. But if you tell the story that way, it isn’t as interesting or as likely to rile folks up. “Tankies” This word isn’t yet in Merriam-Webster, but here’s Wikipedia’s current entry: And here’s a contemporary example of its usage, from the New York Magazine article mentioned above: There are also elements within the self-identified left that have soft-pedaled Russia’s aggressive foreign policy and history of human rights abuses, as Roane Carey observed in a recent piece for the Intercept. So-called tankies don’t make up the majority of DSA membership or wield much power within the broader left, but they do exist. The “key element in the tankie mindset is the simple-minded assumption that only the U.S. can be imperialist, and thus any country that opposes the U.S. must be supported,” Carey wrote. Given the current Russian president’s well-earned reputation as an imperialist/militarist thug, and the deference and even admiration that the most recent Republican president and some of his rabid followers have displayed toward Putin, it follows that nowadays the old “tankie” epithet might be used to describe anyone — on the left or right — who supports Putin’s actions. But I submit that it’s beyond a stretch — it’s a smear — to apply that term to people who don’t support Putin’s actions. I think we can legitimately label Ben Cohen (and likeminded folks) pacifists or anti-militarists and we can argue with them that strictly adhering to that humanitarian philosophy is not always ethically justifiable and will not always yield more humanitarian outcomes. I think we’re likely to make sharper, more persuasive arguments if we keep in mind that pacifism ≠ Putinism and we don’t indiscriminately label and dismiss all those folks as “tankies.” Newsweek reports that in the wake of the Daily Beast story, Cohen has been called a “fascist” on Twitter, so if that’s the case, then Twitter wins the smear award. 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