Ben Cohen, Man of Peace, Defender of Julian Assange

In vernacular English, we speak admiringly of people who “put their money where their mouth is.” Translation into proper English: we tend to admire people who not only support a cause with fine words but dip into their pocket book to support the cause financially.

In this day and age when millionaires are, as they say, “a dime a dozen,” and you have to be a billionaire to stand out, it is highly regrettable that the billionaires among us, many of them Silicon Valley genius entrepreneurs, tend to be Neanderthals when it comes to social justice in domestic affairs and Neoconservatives when it comes to foreign policy and perpetuation of the American global hegemony.

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos confirms that generalization as owner of The Washington Post, which is familiarly known as “Pravda on the Potomac” in the American freethinking community. Meta owner Marc Zuckerberg is another proof. I heard him live when he received his honorary doctorate at Harvard. I was there for my 50th Class Reunion and Zuckerberg gave us plenty of material for the cocktail parties that followed. He delivered what he must have thought of as his maiden speech for a run at the U.S. presidency. His glowing confidence in the power of technology to solve political issues and ‘bring us all together’ is not just the delusion of this one man, but of the whole cohort of technology geniuses who are flush with money that they tend to donate to all the wrong causes.

Accordingly, to find a billionaire with a wholly different political profile you have to look in the homely domain of ice cream vendors. Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, now owned by Unilever, fits the description to a tee. He is the generous financier behind the think tank, The Eisenhower Media Network, which a month ago bought a full page advertisement in the print edition of The New York Times to call for an immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine and start of peace negotiations. Now he has outdone himself by going one big step further and put his body on the line on behalf of his political, legal and ethical convictions. Yesterday he was arrested outside the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C. while protesting the imprisonment of Julian Assange. Cohen likened the four years that Assange has spent in solitary confinement awaiting extradition to the United States to torture.

May Ben Cohen be an example to us: fine words are a start, financial contributions are a step forward, and nonviolent protest against grievous injustice is the highest proof of decency.

Gilbert Doctorow is a Brussels-based political analyst. His latest book is Does Russia Have a Future? Reprinted with permission from his blog.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2023