#even sharing the smallest of israeli propaganda

[mahoushojoe]

i keep saying this every night because there are new horrors every day, but genuinely this night will haunt me for the rest of my fucking life.

[perrysoup]

Idk why Tumblr thinks I want to see posts from December by Zionists talking about how innocent Israel is and how it's all Hamas' fault

And I can't help but wonder, what the fuck have I posted or shared that makes it think I believe them? Edit:

Blocked someone on here who replied that Hamas kills its own citizens when:

1) Not a state, what citizens 2) Israel is bombing the areas they told civilians to go 3) Israel has killed it's own people who were fleeing civilians holding white flags because…they thought they were Palestinian citizens 4) Legit just say you don't keep up with anything other that Israeli claims

Listen, I get it, accepting you have been fed lies by your nation is hard. You think I was born disgusted with America? Fuck you think I made it to 10 grade not loving the shit out of my perfect country? You think I didn't get sick satisfaction from my government killing civilians because I was so deep in the "us v them" propaganda that I didn't care? I knew it was bad and treated it like I would a joke.

THAT'S WHERE I AM COMING FROM

You are not a bad person because your country is Your country doesn't have to be you As long as you act in defiance, even in the smallest way, they don't represent you. But if you are okay with what they are doing, or are horrified but won't speak up, it DOES represent you. You can see my blog, repeatedly I talk about how I could do nothing and be golden. White Male Southern Adult I won the genetic lottery. But it's not just about me. It's not just about you. It's about them. All of them. Helping all of them. Loving all of them. And that includes you.

But you can't put others pain to the side because the alternative makes you feel better. You help them when they hurt. You mend them and nurture them. What the US has done, and is doing, is awful. And I genuinely believe that the US should not exist as an entity. I say this, again, as someone who has the world as my oyster as far as current laws and actions go. It's time you recognize Israel did too.

Criticizing your country when it does bad things is not bad. Not criticizing them when they do bad things is.

We can all be free and happy, but not without admitting our failings and working to get better, together.

[tuungaq]

(i’m making this vent post unrebloggable for obvious reasons and this is long so bear with me. to talk about an experience this week re: jewish families and the uphill battle of unlearning Zionism, i have to start with context.)

in elementary and middle school, i went to reform Hebrew school at my temple twice a week after school, plus Sundays. looking back, way more time was devoted to judaica at the expense of learning vital prayers like the mourners’ kaddish.

within that “judaica” category, i overwhelmingly learned a “history” of israel that left a LOT of key information out. At the expense of the truth of what Israel did and does to the Palestinians. At the expense of learning about the history of how it treats and treated Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, etc. and very little time was spent on American Jewry or learning about the diaspora - some, but certainly less time.

I’m ashamed to say that up until about five years ago, I not only didn’t know what the Nakba was - I believed it was a disinformation campaign. what i had been taught at Hebrew school was strong enough in my mind that it led me to abandon the curiosity that typically guides me through life.

in 2019-2021, I had some wonderful friends who shared articles with me and sat with me as I wrestled with a history I had never been taught. Questions about the Nakba. About what the Israeli militants did to create a jewish-majority state. About Jerusalem. About the right of return. About the wall. Questions that put my own leftist politics to the test. It took years for me to start to move away from Zionism, and I’m still very much learning.

so cut to 2024. last week, in the car on the way to a family Seder. It’s just me and my mom. we’re having a conversation about the campus wide protests. I tell my mom I don’t inherently believe antizionism is antisemitism and she rolls her eyes (there is a language/definition gap I will post about another time that contributes to this). I then go on to say to her this truth: that until 5 years ago I didn’t believe the nakba was real.

My mother’s response: “I don’t know what the Nakba is, and I don’t think I want to know.”

and I am trying, desperately, to be patient. patient in the way my friends were with me. I am trying to remember it took me years to question the propaganda I was taught. and yet what is going on in Gaza is so unconscionable and so I can feel myself losing my mind and my patience with her. she can’t see it because the blinders are SO thick.

so to those having these hard conversations with their jewish, raised-as-Zionist families - I see you and I love you and we will carry on with these conversations because we must, even if it’s poking holes in their POV in the smallest of ways. “We are not obligated to complete the work; nor are we free to abandon it.”

(i am by no means claiming my life is hard or i am experiencing material consequences. i just needed to vent. If you got this far thanks for reading.)

[cyber-front-blog]

The Future of War Will Be ‘Liked’ | Foreign Policy

In the social media age, what you share is deciding what happens on the battlefield.

BY PETER W. SINGER, EMERSON BROOKING

| OCTOBER 2, 2018, 10:00 AM

It was, perhaps, the strangest demand in political history:

“The middle photo is taken from Hungarian porn. Stop using fake photos to ‘trick’ people into supporting your lost cause.”

This Nov. 18, 2014, tweet from a now-defunct Twitter account run by the U.S. State Department offered an early glimpse into a new front in the future of war: trolling. The message was the outgrowth of an effort the department had launched in 2011 to track and counter terrorist propaganda, first against al Qaeda, then against the fast-growing Islamic State that had spun out of its Iraqi remains.

The campaign may have sounded sensible, but it soon backfired. Instead of cheering on the online battle against extremism, Twitter users piled on with more questions than the staid Foggy Bottom bureaucrats manning the account were prepared to answer. “How did the State Dept. know it was Hungarian porn?” @SpaSuzy asked. “dude �� it’s really weird you know so much about hungarian porn,” @7thhorse added.

How did the State Dept. know it was Hungarian porn?  #TheXXXFiles

After an avalanche of criticism, the State Department decided it was inappropriate for the U.S. government to get stuck in the muck of social media—better to stick to airstrikes—and pulled the plug on the Twitter account.

Four years later, such scruples seem almost quaint. In an era in which President Donald Trump didn’t just rise to power through his deft use of the same medium, but then even used it to fire his first secretary of state, the old notions that government should stay above the social media fray have evaporated. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become crucial battlegrounds for politics, war, and even truth itself. Social media has emerged as an arena in which virality—how far and wide a message spreads—trumps veracity. In this domain, attention is power. Win enough of it and you can reshape the very fabric of reality.

A generation ago, the new notion of what was called “cyberwar”—the hacking of networks—began to take conflict into a new domain. Today, what we call “like wars”—the hacking of the people and ideas on those networks—mark the latest twist in the ever-evolving nature of warfare.

* * *

On the surface, many of these battles waged on social media can seem like mere propaganda and an often silly version at that—like teenaged trolling transposed onto the global stage. In August 2017, for example, the Ukrainian government’s official Twitter account attacked Russia with a mocking South Park GIF; in June 2018, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., answered a fire-and-brimstone threat by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with a Mean Girls meme; and in May 2018, the U.S. Air Force cracked jokes about airstrikes in Afghanistan while the Taliban returned the favor by poking fun at former U.S. commander David Petraeus’s illicit love affair.

The goal for all such actors is not merely the lulz but to ridicule their foes and expand their influence, in a world where online sway can drive real-world power. Yet beneath it all, a more serious side of conflict also takes place, its ammunition the bevy of images taken from actual battles. Today, nearly all our moves are tracked, including those in anything from election campaigns to military ones.

Some of it is intentional: selfies taken in the midst of battle, observers watching events, smartphone in hand. Others are captured in the background: be it images that lay in the distance or even information in the digital background, from the geolocation of CIA black sites revealed by guards’ use of exercise apps to the metadata that accompanies every online post. The result is that the smallest of firefights is observed by a global audience, while terrorist attacks are even shared out live by the killers themselves. Open-source intelligence analysts then use these very same digital breadcrumbs to reveal new secrets, documenting war crimes that would go otherwise untracked or assessing the strength of enemy formations that would go otherwise unobserved. It works for both good and bad: Terrorists use this information to win new recruits; human rights activists use it to highlight the plight of civilians caught in harm’s way and even steer rescues their way. During the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul—the most livestreamed and hashtagged siege in history—thousands of virtual observers waited for each new snippet of content, spinning it to all of these ends at once.

These battles that play out in the digital shadows are not just about unveiling secrets but burying truths—and even shaping hearts, minds, and actions. Russian sockpuppets and botnets, for instance, did quite a bit more than simply meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They used a mix of old-school information operations and new digital marketing techniques to spark real-world protests, steer multiple U.S. news cycles, and influence voters in one of the closest elections in modern history. Using solely online means, they infiltrated U.S. political communities so completely that flesh-and-blood American voters soon began to repeat scripts written in St. Petersburg and still think them their own. Internationally, these Russian information offensives have stirred anti-NATO sentiments in Germany by inventing atrocities out of thin air; laid the pretext for potential invasions of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by fueling the political antipathy of ethnic Russian minorities; and done the same for the very real invasion of Ukraine. And these are just the operations we know about.

Such online skirmishes may appear insignificant compared with real fights conducted with real weapons, but they have become just as important. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the highly decorated former commander of Joint Special Operations Command, stated at a military conference in 2017, for the foreseeable future what happens on social media will be crucial to the outcome of any debate, battle, or war. The reason, he explained, is that battles are now being waged over truth itself. In these fights, “the line between reality and perception will be blurred,” he said. “Separating fact from fiction will be tough for governments but almost impossible for populations.”

McChrystal’s comments may seem to echo the ravings of the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose website Infowars uses the tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind!” But that doesn’t make them any less truthful. With our personal and political understanding of the world increasingly filtered through online sources, images and ideas distributed and created on social media may become more important than objective facts. As McChrystal put it, “Shaping the perception of which side is right or which side is winning will be more important than actually which side is right or winning.”

Indeed, the messages coursing through social media today shape not just the perceived outcomes of conflicts but the very choices leaders make during both military campaigns. Russia, for instance, has crafted its information operations into a potent, nimble weapon that can target U.S. voters or pinpoint artillery strikes in Ukraine, using what happens in the online world to geolocate soldiers—and then message their looming death right before the cannons fire. Social media even shapes the overall flow. A 2016 study by the American University professor Thomas Zeitzoff of the Israel Defense Forces’ 2012 air campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip found that the conflict followed the pace set on Twitter; the tempo of operations and targeting shifted depending on which side was dominating the online conversation at the time. The military officers and civilian leaders were watching their social media feed and reacting accordingly.

Sometimes, social media posts can even spark new fights, especially when they play to long-standing tensions or hatreds. The Sri Lankan government blamed viral Facebook rumors for stirring up the hatred that led to a brutal assault on the country’s Muslim minority this March. In June, false reports circulated among India’s 200 million WhatsApp users spurred a spate of lynchings. Meanwhile, racist messages and rumors shared on Facebook continue to fuel the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar.

Mounting evidence suggests that these online tug of wars may not just start fights and mass killings but also make conflicts harder to end. Criminologists who study the spike of murders in cities such as Chicago note how an increasing share of gang violence is attributable to social media trash-talking. Sometimes, the spark is a disrespectful emoji; other times, it’s a long-forgotten post, dug up in a moment of escalating tensions. Unlike the interaction in the street (or by diplomats in a traditional negotiation), it doesn’t matter if the original insult was made a year ago or hundreds of miles away. All that matters is that the world is watching and the internet never forgets. It’s easy to see how a similar dynamic will haunt future cease-fire negotiations, whether the end of an insurgency or the conclusion of a major interstate war. There’s always some people intent on keeping the violence going. And online, they never lose their voice.

Daunting as all this may seem, however, social media has only just begun to shape the future of war. Only half the world is online, while the tools of “like wars” today are like the biplanes of air war. Indeed, new machine intelligence is making it ever harder for humans to discern truth from lies and is possibly reshaping our conception of reality itself. Over the last year, the techniques needed to create “deep fakes”—hyper-realistic digital forgeries generated by advanced artificial intelligence neural networks—have become increasingly accessible. This technology, currently used mostly by cutting-edge computer scientists and inventive pornographers, will soon flood the internet with pitch-perfect voice imitations, photo-realistic video fabrications, and vast networks of chattering bots indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And like everything else, deep fakes are also likely to be weaponized, both in elections and even battles. We’ve already had a taste of it; in its run to seize Mosul, the Islamic State was able to use a mix of real and fake news to help spur retreat by Iraqi Army units. Even U.S. information war units now train at sowing false digital trails to misdirect their foes. We may one day even face the prospect of a digital Gulf of Tonkin, where the very case for a real war is built wholly on AI-constructed lies.

These changes reshape the speed, experience, and even the reach of conflict. In the social media age, every election, every conflict, and every battle is simultaneously global and local. Even as the physical experience of war grows more alien to the average Westerner with each generation, it has also become more personal than ever. Our choices of what to “like” and share (or not) shape not only the outcomes of elections and battles but also what our friends, family, and the wider world treat as real. You may not be interested in like wars, but the future of war and politics is very much interested in you—and your clicks.

Peter W. Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at New America. He is a co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Twitter: @peterwsinger

Emerson Brooking is a former research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Twitter: @etbrooking

[newstfionline]

The Future of War Will Be ‘Liked’

By Peter W. Singer, Emerson Brooking, Foreign Policy, October 2, 2018

It was, perhaps, the strangest demand in political history:

“The middle photo is taken from Hungarian porn. Stop using fake photos to ‘trick’ people into supporting your lost cause.”

This Nov. 18, 2014, tweet from a now-defunct Twitter account run by the U.S. State Department offered an early glimpse into a new front in the future of war: trolling. The message was the outgrowth of an effort the department had launched in 2011 to track and counter terrorist propaganda, first against al Qaeda, then against the fast-growing Islamic State that had spun out of its Iraqi remains.

The campaign may have sounded sensible, but it soon backfired. Instead of cheering on the online battle against extremism, Twitter users piled on with more questions than the staid Foggy Bottom bureaucrats manning the account were prepared to answer. “How did the State Dept. know it was Hungarian porn?” @SpaSuzy asked. “dude … it’s really weird you know so much about hungarian porn,” @7thhorse added.

After an avalanche of criticism, the State Department decided it was inappropriate for the U.S. government to get stuck in the muck of social media--better to stick to airstrikes--and pulled the plug on the Twitter account.

Four years later, such scruples seem almost quaint. In an era in which President Donald Trump didn’t just rise to power through his deft use of the same medium, but then even used it to fire his first secretary of state, the old notions that government should stay above the social media fray have evaporated. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become crucial battlegrounds for politics, war, and even truth itself. Social media has emerged as an arena in which virality--how far and wide a message spreads--trumps veracity. In this domain, attention is power. Win enough of it and you can reshape the very fabric of reality.

A generation ago, the new notion of what was called “cyberwar”--the hacking of networks--began to take conflict into a new domain. Today, what we call “like wars”--the hacking of the people and ideas on those networks--mark the latest twist in the ever-evolving nature of warfare.

On the surface, many of these battles waged on social media can seem like mere propaganda and an often silly version at that--like teenaged trolling transposed onto the global stage. In August 2017, for example, the Ukrainian government’s official Twitter account attacked Russia with a mocking South Park GIF; in June 2018, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., answered a fire-and-brimstone threat by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with a Mean Girls meme; and in May 2018, the U.S. Air Force cracked jokes about airstrikes in Afghanistan while the Taliban returned the favor by poking fun at former U.S. commander David Petraeus’s illicit love affair.

The goal for all such actors is not merely the lulz but to ridicule their foes and expand their influence, in a world where online sway can drive real-world power. Yet beneath it all, a more serious side of conflict also takes place, its ammunition the bevy of images taken from actual battles. Today, nearly all our moves are tracked, including those in anything from election campaigns to military ones.

Some of it is intentional: selfies taken in the midst of battle, observers watching events, smartphone in hand. Others are captured in the background: be it images that lay in the distance or even information in the digital background, from the geolocation of CIA black sites revealed by guards’ use of exercise apps to the metadata that accompanies every online post. The result is that the smallest of firefights is observed by a global audience, while terrorist attacks are even shared out live by the killers themselves. Open-source intelligence analysts then use these very same digital breadcrumbs to reveal new secrets, documenting war crimes that would go otherwise untracked or assessing the strength of enemy formations that would go otherwise unobserved. It works for both good and bad: Terrorists use this information to win new recruits; human rights activists use it to highlight the plight of civilians caught in harm’s way and even steer rescues their way. During the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul--the most livestreamed and hashtagged siege in history--thousands of virtual observers waited for each new snippet of content, spinning it to all of these ends at once.

These battles that play out in the digital shadows are not just about unveiling secrets but burying truths--and even shaping hearts, minds, and actions.

Such online skirmishes may appear insignificant compared with real fights conducted with real weapons, but they have become just as important. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the highly decorated former commander of Joint Special Operations Command, stated at a military conference in 2017, for the foreseeable future what happens on social media will be crucial to the outcome of any debate, battle, or war. The reason, he explained, is that battles are now being waged over truth itself. In these fights, “the line between reality and perception will be blurred,” he said. “Separating fact from fiction will be tough for governments but almost impossible for populations.”

McChrystal’s comments may seem to echo the ravings of the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose website Infowars uses the tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind!” But that doesn’t make them any less truthful. With our personal and political understanding of the world increasingly filtered through online sources, images and ideas distributed and created on social media may become more important than objective facts. As McChrystal put it, “Shaping the perception of which side is right or which side is winning will be more important than actually which side is right or winning.”

Indeed, the messages coursing through social media today shape not just the perceived outcomes of conflicts but the very choices leaders make during both military campaigns. Russia, for instance, has crafted its information operations into a potent, nimble weapon that can target U.S. voters or pinpoint artillery strikes in Ukraine, using what happens in the online world to geolocate soldiers--and then message their looming death right before the cannons fire. Social media even shapes the overall flow. A 2016 study by the American University professor Thomas Zeitzoff of the Israel Defense Forces’ 2012 air campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip found that the conflict followed the pace set on Twitter; the tempo of operations and targeting shifted depending on which side was dominating the online conversation at the time. The military officers and civilian leaders were watching their social media feed and reacting accordingly.

Sometimes, social media posts can even spark new fights, especially when they play to long-standing tensions or hatreds. The Sri Lankan government blamed viral Facebook rumors for stirring up the hatred that led to a brutal assault on the country’s Muslim minority this March. In June, false reports circulated among India’s 200 million WhatsApp users spurred a spate of lynchings. Meanwhile, racist messages and rumors shared on Facebook continue to fuel the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar.

Mounting evidence suggests that these online tug of wars may not just start fights and mass killings but also make conflicts harder to end. Criminologists who study the spike of murders in cities such as Chicago note how an increasing share of gang violence is attributable to social media trash-talking. Sometimes, the spark is a disrespectful emoji; other times, it’s a long-forgotten post, dug up in a moment of escalating tensions. Unlike the interaction in the street (or by diplomats in a traditional negotiation), it doesn’t matter if the original insult was made a year ago or hundreds of miles away. All that matters is that the world is watching and the internet never forgets. It’s easy to see how a similar dynamic will haunt future cease-fire negotiations, whether the end of an insurgency or the conclusion of a major interstate war. There’s always some people intent on keeping the violence going. And online, they never lose their voice.

Daunting as all this may seem, however, social media has only just begun to shape the future of war. Only half the world is online, while the tools of “like wars” today are like the biplanes of air war. Indeed, new machine intelligence is making it ever harder for humans to discern truth from lies and is possibly reshaping our conception of reality itself. Over the last year, the techniques needed to create “deep fakes”--hyper-realistic digital forgeries generated by advanced artificial intelligence neural networks--have become increasingly accessible. This technology, currently used mostly by cutting-edge computer scientists and inventive pornographers, will soon flood the internet with pitch-perfect voice imitations, photo-realistic video fabrications, and vast networks of chattering bots indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And like everything else, deep fakes are also likely to be weaponized, both in elections and even battles. We’ve already had a taste of it; in its run to seize Mosul, the Islamic State was able to use a mix of real and fake news to help spur retreat by Iraqi Army units. Even U.S. information war units now train at sowing false digital trails to misdirect their foes. We may one day even face the prospect of a digital Gulf of Tonkin, where the very case for a real war is built wholly on AI-constructed lies.

These changes reshape the speed, experience, and even the reach of conflict. In the social media age, every election, every conflict, and every battle is simultaneously global and local. Even as the physical experience of war grows more alien to the average Westerner with each generation, it has also become more personal than ever. Our choices of what to “like” and share (or not) shape not only the outcomes of elections and battles but also what our friends, family, and the wider world treat as real. You may not be interested in like wars, but the future of war and politics is very much interested in you--and your clicks.

[thefabulousfulcrum]

Full Text of Remarks by Top State Dep’t Official Discharged by Trump’s White House–Tom Countryman’s Powerful Farewell Address

via Just Security

By Ryan Goodman

Last week, six top State Department officials were suddenly discharged by the White House—an Undersecretary, an acting Undersecretary, and four Assistant Secretaries—without notice and without even a nominee selected to replace them. Tom Countryman, who served the nation for 35 years and at the time as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, was in Amman booked to fly to an international meeting on nuclear arms control when he received the discharge and orders to turn around and fly back home. Earlier this week, Foreign Policy’s John Hudson wrote about Countryman’s farewell remarks to former colleagues which Hudson described as a “soaring and thinly-veiled critique of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.” It is that and more, including a powerful message to public servants in this administration to keep the faith in our Constitution and in their work on behalf of the national good. With Countryman’s permission, Just Security is reproducing the full text of his remarks.

Thomas Countryman Remarks at Retirement Ceremony (as prepared) January 31, 2017

Thank You! When I entered the State Department, I never intended to rise high enough to merit a retirement ceremony. And when it occurred to me that I had, I pictured instead an off-campus bacchanalia. But now we’re here, and it is altogether fitting and proper, and I thank you.

Some of you have asked if recent events have left me disgruntled. The answer is No; I am probably the most gruntled person in the room.

When Ambassador Robert Pelletreau retired 20 years ago, he said “The State Department doesn’t owe me anything. It has given me everything.” It is the same for me. In my very first tour, the Department gave me more than I could ask for in a lifetime. It sent me to Belgrade, where in 1984 I met my wife, Dubravka Trklja, the greatest thing ever to happen to me. She reminds me often that she could have had a better husband, but I suspect she feels what I feel so strongly: that I could never have had a better friend. And as a result, I have something else, the only thing for which you should envy me: Stefan and Andrew, the two best sons and the two most remarkable young men anyone could have.

The Department gave me and my family the opportunity to see the world, and not just as tourists. It allowed me to see the reunification of families divided by the Iron Curtain, and to see Israelis and Palestinians negotiate face to face. I saw – and contributed a little to – the restoration of democracy in Serbia. And for the last few years, it’s given me the chance to speak for the United States about a priority shared by eleven successive Presidents: reducing the risk of a nuclear holocaust.

This career gave me a constant resurgence or energy in the form of bright young officers with brilliant careers ahead of them, people like Rafik Mansour, Patrick Connell, Daniela Helfet, Seth Maddox, Lizzie Martin and David Kim. It allowed me to work for Ambassadors legendary in the Foreign Service (some of them here today), like David Anderson, Dick Miles, Barbara Bodine, Emil Skodon, Patrick Theros, Skip Gnehm, Frank Wisner, Bob Pelletreau, Marc Grossman and Charlie Ries. From them I learned the four words central to diplomatic success: “High Road, Hard Ball.” And it gave me the great honor to stand beside exemplary Secretaries of State like Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

The Department gave me the chance to be part of, and to lead, amazing interagency teams at Embassies abroad, in the European Bureau and at the White House. These were great organizations, but it was only when I spent a year and a half in the PM Bureau, and five years in the ISN Bureau, that I came to fully value the true strength of the Department, a Civil Service cadre every bit as talented as the Foreign Service. It was perhaps my highest honor to learn from, to guide, and to take credit for the accomplishments of the deepest bench of experts in any agency.

The State Department owes me nothing. But we still owe America a lot. We still have a duty – you have a duty – to stay and give your best professional guidance, with loyalty, to the new Administration. Because a foreign policy without professionals is – by definition – an amateur foreign policy. You will help to frame and make the choices.

Because that is WHAT we do.

Our work is little understood by our fellow Americans, a fact that is sometimes exploited for political purpose. When I have the opportunity to speak to audiences across this amazing land, I explain “We do not have a Department of State – we do not have a foreign policy – because we love foreigners. We do it because we love Americans.”

We want Americans to prosper, to sell the world’s best food and the world’s best products everywhere in the world. We want Americans to be protected and safe when they are abroad, whether they are missionaries, tourists, students, businessmen or (for those you have done consular work) the occasional false Messiah.

We want Americans to sleep the sleep of the righteous, knowing that the smallest fraction of their tax dollar goes to ease poverty and reduce injustice. We want them to know that our consular officers are the first of many lines of defense against those who would come to the US with evil purpose. We want the families of America’s heroes – our servicemen – to know that their loved ones are not put into danger simply because of a failure to pursue non-military solutions.

And we want Americans to know that the torch borne by the Statue of Liberty is not just a magnet for immigrants, it is a projector, shining the promise of democracy around the world. The United States is the world’s greatest economic power, the world’s greatest military power, and with your vigilance, it always will be. But the greatest power we project is hope, the promise that people can establish liberty in their own country without leaving it.

I’ve seen it in the country second dearest to my heart: Serbia. I saw democracy born in Serbia. I saw it stolen. I saw – and played a minor role in – its restoration. And I know this: that if a generation stands up and insists upon defending the rights of the people, they will succeed. And if the next generation stands up and resists every corrosive attack on democracy, they will triumph.

If we wall ourselves off from the world, we will extinguish Liberty’s projection, as surely as if, as the Gospel says, we hid our lamp under a bushel basket. If we do not respect other nations and their citizens, we cannot demand respect for our citizens. If our public statements become indistinguishable from disinformation and propaganda, we will lose our credibility. If we choose to play our cards that way, we will lose that game to the masters in Moscow. If our interaction with other countries is only a business transaction, rather than a partnership with Allies and friends, we will lose that game too. China practically invented transactional diplomacy, and if we choose to play their game, Beijing will run the table.

Business made America great, as it always has been, and business leaders are among our most important partners. But let’s be clear, despite the similarities. A dog is not a cat. Baseball is not football. And diplomacy is not a business. Human rights are not a business. And democracy is, most assuredly, not a business.

Each of us came to this work with our identities – more or less – fully formed, and have preserved our values – with greater or lesser success – against the professional deformation caused by any bureaucracy. Just for myself, I came here with my identity framed: as a Christian, as an Eagle Scout, as a taxpayer. These didn’t require me to go into the State Department, but they define my obligations as a citizen: to spend tax dollars wisely; to look out for the best interests of the US and its people; to share the best of America with the world; and to be not only optimistic, but also – to use a word so suddenly fallen from favor – altruistic. I line up with Steven Pinker. In his book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” he describes the ‘escalator of reason’: “…an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs.”

That is HOW we do it.

“…an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs.”

That’s the very definition of the work I’ve been privileged to do, that I will pursue now in different clothes, and that I leave to you.

That’s the sermon, and in a moment I will let you go in peace. First, I want to thank you for so many messages of support and appreciation. One of you here compared the situation to the scene in Star Wars, when Obi-Wan Kenobi is struck down, and I found that touching. Another compared it to the scene when Princess Leia strangles Jabba the Hutt, and I found that confusing.

The most meaningful came from my son Stefan, a future Nobel laureate in physics, who wrote: “I am proud of your decades of service to this country and the world…You gave everything you could for the people of this world in a slow and painful line of work…You have given more than your share…The values you upheld in your career are part of what makes me who I am.”

And that is WHY we do it.

Even if you don’t have your own children, what you do in this building tomorrow can mean another generation will live in a habitable world, can enjoy peace and liberty. If we are firm in our principles, steadfast in our ideals, and tireless in our determination to uphold our oath – to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” – then for many generations, another American will stand in this spot with the same satisfaction and hope I feel today.

I leave you with one last thought, from one of my favorite philosophers. If you’ve never read him, or not for many years, I urge you to take the time now. His name is: ….Winnie the Pooh.

And he said:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

Thank You and God Bless You!