the confederate south

Video - Oathkeepers 10 Orders We Will Not Obey

Oathkeeper.org | “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army” -- Gen. George Washington, to his troops before the battle of Long Island

Such a time is near at hand again. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this Army -- and this Marine Corps, This Air Force, This Navy and the National Guard and police units of these sovereign states.

Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, peace officers, fire-fighters, and veterans who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic … and meant it. We won’t “just follow orders.”

Below is our declaration of orders we will NOT obey because we will consider them unconstitutional (and thus unlawful) and immoral violations of the natural rights of the people. Such orders would be acts of war against the American people by their own government, and thus acts of treason. We will not make war against our own people. We will not commit treason. We will defend the Republic.

Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey
Recognizing that we each swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and affirming that we are guardians of the Republic, of the principles in our Declaration of Independence, and of the rights of our people, we affirm and declare the following:

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

The attempt to disarm the people on April 19, 1775 was the spark of open conflict in the American Revolution. That vile attempt was an act of war, and the American people fought back in justified, righteous self-defense of their natural rights. Any such order today would also be an act of war against the American people, and thus an act of treason. We will not make war on our own people, and we will not commit treason by obeying any such treasonous order.

Nor will we assist, or support any such attempt to disarm the people by other government entities, either state or federal.

In addition, we affirm that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to preserve the military power of the people so that they will, in the last resort, have effective final recourse to arms and to the God of Hosts in the face of tyranny. Accordingly, we oppose any and all further infringements on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. In particular we oppose a renewal of the misnamed “assault-weapons” ban or the enactment of H.R. 45 (which would register and track gun owners like convicted pedophiles).

2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects -- such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.

One of the causes of the American Revolution was the use of “writs of assistance,” which were essentially warrantless searches because there was no requirement of a showing of probable cause to a judge, and the first fiery embers of American resistance were born in opposition to those infamous writs. The Founders considered all warrantless searches to be unreasonable and egregious. It was to prevent a repeat of such violations of the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects that the Fourth Amendment was written.

We expect that sweeping warrantless searches of homes and vehicles, under some pretext, will be the means used to attempt to disarm the people.

3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

One of the causes of the American Revolution was the denial of the right to jury trial, the use of admiralty courts (military tribunals) instead, and the application of the laws of war to the colonists. After that experience, and being well aware of the infamous Star Chamber in English history, the Founders ensured that the international laws of war would apply only to foreign enemies, not to the American people. Thus, the Article III Treason Clause establishes the only constitutional form of trial for an American, not serving in the military, who is accused of making war on his own nation. Such a trial for treason must be before a civilian jury, not a tribunal.

The international laws of war do not trump our Bill of Rights. We reject as illegitimate any such claimed power, as did the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan (1865). Any attempt to apply the laws of war to American civilians, under any pretext, such as against domestic “militia” groups the government brands “domestic terrorists,” is an act of war and an act of treason.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor.

One of the causes of the American Revolution was the attempt “to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power” by disbanding the Massachusetts legislature and appointing General Gage as “military governor.” The attempt to disarm the people of Massachusetts during that martial law sparked our Revolution. Accordingly, the power to impose martial law – the absolute rule over the people by a military officer with his will alone being law – is nowhere enumerated in our Constitution.

Further, it is the militia of a state and of the several states that the Constitution contemplates being used in any context, during any emergency within a state, not the standing army.

The imposition of martial law by the national government over a state and its people, treating them as an occupied enemy nation, is an act of war. Such an attempted suspension of the Constitution and Bill of Rights voids the compact with the states and with the people.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.

In response to the obscene growth of federal power and to the absurdly totalitarian claimed powers of the Executive, upwards of 20 states are considering, have considered, or have passed courageous resolutions affirming states rights and sovereignty.

Those resolutions follow in the honored and revered footsteps of Jefferson and Madison in their Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and likewise seek to enforce the Constitution by affirming the very same principles of our Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights that we Oath Keepers recognize and affirm.

Chief among those principles is that ours is a dual sovereignty system, with the people of each state retaining all powers not granted to the national government they created, and thus the people of each state reserved to themselves the right to judge when the national government they created has voided the compact between the states by asserting powers never granted.

Upon the declaration by a state that such a breach has occurred, we will not obey orders to force that state to submit to the national government.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

One of the causes of the American Revolution was the blockade of Boston, and the occupying of that city by the British military, under martial law. Once hostilities began, the people of Boston were tricked into turning in their arms in exchange for safe passage, but were then forbidden to leave. That confinement of the residents of an entire city was an act of war.

Such tactics were repeated by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, and by the Imperial Japanese in Nanking, turning entire cities into death camps. Any such order to disarm and confine the people of an American city will be an act of war and thus an act of treason.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

Mass, forced internment into concentration camps was a hallmark of every fascist and communist dictatorship in the 20th Century. Such internment was unfortunately even used against American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Whenever a government interns its own people, it treats them like an occupied enemy population. Oppressive governments often use the internment of women and children to break the will of the men fighting for their liberty – as was done to the Boers, to the Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, and to the Chechens, for example.

Such a vile order to forcibly intern Americans without charges or trial would be an act of war against the American people, and thus an act of treason, regardless of the pretext used. We will not commit treason, nor will we facilitate or support it.”NOT on Our Watch!”

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control” during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.

During the American Revolution, the British government enlisted the aid of Hessian mercenaries in an attempt to subjugate the rebellious American people. Throughout history, repressive regimes have enlisted the aid of foreign troops and mercenaries who have no bonds with the people.

Accordingly, as the militia of the several states are the only military force contemplated by the Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, for domestic keeping of the peace, and as the use of even our own standing army for such purposes is without such constitutional support, the use of foreign troops and mercenaries against the people is wildly unconstitutional, egregious, and an act of war.

We will oppose such troops as enemies of the people and we will treat all who request, invite, and aid those foreign troops as the traitors they are.

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.

One of the causes of the American Revolution was the seizure and forfeiture of American ships, goods, and supplies, along with the seizure of American timber for the Royal Navy, all in violation of the people’s natural right to their property and to the fruits of their labor. The final spark of the Revolution was the attempt by the government to seize powder and cannon stores at Concord.

Deprivation of food has long been a weapon of war and oppression, with millions intentionally starved to death by fascist and communist governments in the 20th Century alone.

Accordingly, we will not obey or facilitate orders to confiscate food and other essential supplies from the people, and we will consider all those who issue or carry out such orders to be the enemies of the people.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

There would have been no American Revolution without fiery speakers and writers such as James Otis, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and Sam Adams “setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

Patrick Henry: “Give me Liberty, or Give me DEATH!”

Tyrants know that the pen of a man such as Thomas Paine can cause them more damage than entire armies, and thus they always seek to suppress the natural rights of speech, association, and assembly. Without freedom of speech, the people will have no recourse but to arms. Without freedom of speech and conscience, there is no freedom.

Therefore, we will not obey or support any orders to suppress or violate the right of the people to speak, associate, worship, assemble, communicate, or petition government for the redress of grievances.

— And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually affirm our oath and pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. Oath Keepers

The above list is not exhaustive but we do consider them to be clear tripwires – they form our “line in the sand,” and if we receive such orders, we will not obey them. Further, we will know that the time for another American Revolution is nigh. If you the people decide that you have no recourse, and such a revolution comes, at that time, not only will we NOT fire upon our fellow Americans who righteously resist such egregious violations of their God given rights, we will join them in fighting against those who dare attempt to enslave them.

NOTE: please also read our Principles of Our Republic We Are Sworn to Defend

More About Oath Keepers

Oath Keepers is a non partisan association of currently serving military, peace officers, fire-fighters, and veterans who will fulfill our oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God.

Our oath is to the Constitution, not to the politicians, and not to any political party. In the long-standing tradition of the U.S. military, we are apolitical. We don’t care if unlawful orders come from a Democrat or a Republican, or if the violation is bi-partisan. We will not obey unconstitutional (and thus unlawful) and immoral orders, such as orders to disarm the American people or to place them under martial law. We won’t “just follow orders.” Our motto: “Not on Our Watch!” or to put it even more succinctly, in the words of 101st Airborne Commander General Anthony McAuliffe at the Battle of the Bulge, “NUTS!”

There is at this time a debate within the ranks of the military regarding their oath. Some mistakenly believe they must follow any order the President issues. But many others do understand that their loyalty is to the Constitution and to the people, and understand what that means.

The mission of Oath Keepers is to vastly increase their numbers.

We are in a battle for the hearts and minds of our own troops.

Help us win it.

economics and the american revolution

NYTimes | When Benjamin Franklin returned to America in 1762, after almost five years in London, he was shocked at the housing prices.

“The expence of living is greatly advanc’d in my absence,” he commented. “Rent of old houses, and value of lands ... are trebled in the past six years.”

Franklin, it seems, had come home to a real estate bubble. It eventually popped — bringing on a credit crunch and deep recession that was the macroeconomic backdrop to the American Revolution.

Sound familiar?

The parallels between the current economy and the one Franklin saw highlight a debate among historians: how big a role did economics, as opposed to ideas, play in fomenting revolution?

“I think there’s reason to doubt the Revolution would have happened as it did if it weren’t for these economic conditions,” said Ronald W. Michener, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, in a radical departure from today’s popular notion that the Revolution was a product primarily of grand ideas about self-government.

banksters and churches and shepherds - oh my!!!

Greenspan states that the Fed is above the law shortly after 7:30 in the interview

Churches, modern banks and associated political institutions are based largely on perception, and deception.  In order to work, they have to convince you that they are doing you a favor, bringing value to the transaction in exchange for getting you to relinquish real labor value to their custody.

In order to make the scam complete, they must make the bank/church, its employees, its building, its presentation - all look authoritative and legitimate. The bank building, like a church or government building, is large with pillars and official looking facades - conveying strength, stability and legitimacy.  

Usually there's some picture of an old guy or several guys with a big beard and royal/high class clothing to make you feel like someone important is here.  The altar/safe is placed in clear view of the public to add to the deception.  This is so when you enter the bank, church etc, you feel a sense of safety, reverence and awe.   

The entire presentation is a scam or a confidence game of the highest order.   The whole objective is to rob you of your earned value, and make you an obedient, pliable, reliable, submissive and easily managed peasant.

The big inside joke is that the only money the bank/church really has is the money you are depositing in it plus the money they collected as fractional reserves to get the banking/churching license in the first instance.  

In principle, as should be self-evident by now, money should be intrinsically worthless, and only used as a means of exchange for things of similar value. It should not be permitted for banks to create money, unless they are carefully regulated (nature, type of loans and interest rates) and/or the bank is in the public interest (usually with a public bank, a nationally chartered bank), and has a measurable multiplier effect on the economy.  

The multiplier effect should be in the expansion of goods and services which make society more productive.   Like schools which educate children (creating human capital), bridges, canals and roads which expand trade, new technologies to exploit natural resources, dams and power plants (which actually produce energy to electrify towns and cities at an affordable price).  

In this regard, Alexander Hamilton insisted that credit for such products are essential to a national economy (states included) and that debt for such purpose can be a national blessing because it can be basis for facilitating trade and national development.  The notes were usually for 20 years at 5 percent.  As such the price or interest rate should be minimal and long term, providing a stable bill of exchange which could be used for commercial transactions.

This later became known as dollar bills and dollar notes. This is where the whole concept of the dollar bill came from.  The notes were tied to productive legitimate investments so people were comfortable using these as a medium of exchange.   In fact, such bills of exchange were more desirable than gold and silver (or private bank notes)

So federalized (national) paper bills of exchange and other such instruments were favored by small and medium size businesses since they knew they these notes where for productive, useful activity for the commonwealth.  This is how the Erie and Ohio Canals were built.  This is the great innovation of Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams that freed the general populace from reliance on England, Spain, the Netherlands, and France for gold specie in order to promote business and the economy.

It was the power of the sovereign to create money in the public interest and use such dollar bills as currency directly tied to the productive capacity of the nation. Gold, and silver, if necessary, was used for payment of international trade, with countries who did not at that time accept dollars bills as mediums of exchange.

Gold and silver (or other precious metals) were preferred by kings and other sovereigns because the quantity was usually in the hands of the powerful and wealthy, and therefore could give them power over the general population.  Bonds or paper represented how much gold you had on reserve, not anything of real value or use to the general population.  It served the royalty, bankers and aristocrats, not the peasantry and small businessmen.

Under the  old European system (represented by feudal lords, kings, bankers, etc), in order to get credit you had to have gold, silver, and issue bond, paper notes promising to pay the same in gold, silver, etc).  This severely restricted trade and made it difficult for the common man.  His economic destiny depended on whether he could convince some banker, or agent of the king to part with his gold or lend against his gold for some purpose.   In this way, power over the peasantry was maintained.

Since peasants didn't have gold, they usually had to pledge their land, and anything they had, sometimes even their wives and children, as collateral.   Taxes became oppressive and cruel.  The church merely enforced the same system under penalty of eternal damnation, etc.  As a result, people began to leave Europe in search of religious, political and economic freedom.  Most royalty and bankers were happy to see some peasants go as long as they continued to pay their taxes.

When Americans didn't have any gold or precious metals (under the old system), in the early days before it was discovered in the Southwest, it forced the early settlers to innovate and create a new medium which served the public interest.   Benjamin Franklin was one of the first do this in Massachusetts and later in Pennsylvania.   Later Hamilton, after the revolution, out of necessity and invention, expanded this concept on national level for the American States.  This type of national economic independence (from Royalty and their bankers), coupled with political independence (from Royalty and their bankers), and religious freedom (from Royalty and their Church), created a potential for enormous power and influence.

You can easily see the threat the American System presented to the British crown.  Before that time, all taxes had to be paid in gold, silver and other coins, determined and controlled by the king, and credit was not easily available for the commonwealth.   All religion and worship was to the official church.   It was a syndicate.  That's why traditional gold has always been a bad medium of exchange for the general population and has always wound up increasing the concentration of private and/or aristocratic wealth.

In fact, there was no common-wealth concept.  There was the king and his subjects.  You were not citizens with rights under law than any aristocrat was bound to acknowledge.  You were peasants. The American Revolution was a radical departure from this notion.  It threatened every Monarchy and Empire on the globe, except those who allied with it and adopted some of its principles, as did Germany (protective tariffs, technological innovation, and a credit system) as a way to free itself from the same destructive economic policies.

The key features of the American Revolution, the real one, not the fake one, was political, religious, and economic independence.  That is why, despite all its problems and failures, it remains the number one threat to the psychopathocracy and must be destroyed.  It cannot be allowed to complete and further its original vision.

That is why the history of the American Revolution has been systematically redacted, and distorted, and replaced with a false narrative that distorts their forgotten original meaning. For example, Free Trade (means Austrian/London School financial capitalism with no barriers), Debt or Sound Money (Interest based or Gold based), Individual Liberty (Ayn Rand selfishness irrespective of morality and impact on others), Property Rights (Ayn Rand type (discrimination, human slavery, etc.)), Limited Government (no equal protection under the law, Confederacy/State's Rights and American Exceptionalism (Imperialism/Manifest Destiny, etc).

anti-intellectualism

wikipedia |  In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), the Puritan John Cotton wrote that 'the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. ... Take off the fond doting ... upon the learning of the Jesuits, and the glorie of the Episcopacy, and the brave estates of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons.'^[15] Not every Puritan concurred with Cotton's contempt for secular education; some founded universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

Economist Thomas Sowell^[16] argues that American anti-intellectualism can be traced to the early Colonial era, and that wariness of the educated upper-classes is understandable given that America was built, in large part, by people fleeing persecution and brutality at the hands of the educated upper classes. Additionally, rather few intellectuals possessed the practical hands-on skills required to survive in the New World, leading to a deeply rooted suspicion of those who may appear to specialize in "verbal virtuosity" rather than tangible, measurable products or services:

From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the topmost social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe [...] The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political and military power was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

The source, Thomas Sowell, describes the effect the American Revolution had on the development of American government, as established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In his opinion, the tendency to "disregard" the impartiality of the law depending upon "who you are" rather than what the author describes as the impartiality of the "supremacy of the law" conflicts with the American creed of the common man. According to Sowell, this fundamental right uniquely distinguishes the American character, forged by "the beaten men of beaten races," from that of the arrogant and privileged elites of the European aristocracy.^[17]

19th century

In the history of American anti-intellectualism, modern scholars^{[citation needed]} suggest that 19th-century popular culture is important, because, when most of the populace lived a rural life of manual labour and agricultural work, a 'bookish' education, concerned with the Græco-Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value, ergo unprofitable—yet Americans, generally, were literate and read Shakespeare for pleasure—thus, the ideal "American" man was technically skilled and successful in his trade, ergo a productive member of society.^{[citation needed]} Culturally, the ideal American was a self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man, whose knowledge derived from books, formal education, and academic study; thus, in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843), the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, A.M., said about frontier Indiana:

"We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness."^[15]

Yet, the egghead's worldly redemption was possible if he embraced mainstream mores; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a character noted that once an East Coast university graduate 'gets over' his intellectual vanity—no longer thinks himself better than others—he makes just as good a cowboy as any other young man, despite his counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of good heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.

1619 Project: Falsification To Obtain Power - What Lengths To Retain That Power?

WSWS  |  On August 14, 2019, the New York Times unveiled the 1619 Project. Timed to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia, the 100-page special edition of the New York Times Magazine consisted of a series of essays that present American history as an unyielding racial struggle, in which black Americans have waged a solitary fight to redeem democracy against white racism.

The Times mobilized vast editorial and financial resources behind the 1619 Project. With backing from the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to schools. The 1619 Project fanned out to other media formats. Plans were even announced for films and television programming, backed by billionaire media personality Oprah Winfrey.

As a business venture the 1619 Project clambers on, but as an effort at historical revision it has been, to a great extent, discredited. This outcome is owed in large measure to the intervention of the World Socialist Web Site, with the support of a number of distinguished and courageous historians, which exposed the 1619 Project for what it is: a combination of shoddy journalism, careless and dishonest research, and a false, politically-motivated narrative that makes racism and racial conflict the central driving forces of American history.

In support of its claim that American history can be understood only when viewed through the prism of racial conflict, the 1619 Project sought to discredit American history’s two foundational events: The Revolution of 1775–83, and the Civil War of 1861–65. This could only be achieved by a series of distortions, omissions, half-truths, and false statements—deceptions that are catalogued and refuted in this book.

The New York Times is no stranger to scandals produced by dishonest and unprincipled journalism. Its long and checkered history includes such episodes as its endorsement of the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936–38 by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, Walter Duranty, and, during World War II, its unconscionable decision to treat the murder of millions of European Jews as “a relatively unimportant story” that did not require extensive and systematic coverage. [3] More recently, the Times was implicated, through the reporting of Judith Miller and the columns of Thomas Friedman, in the peddling of government misinformation about “weapons of mass destruction” that served to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many other examples of flagrant violations of even the generally lax standards of journalistic ethics could be cited, especially during the past decade, as the New York Times—listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion—acquired increasingly the character of a media empire.

The “financialization” of the Times has proceeded alongside another critical determinant of the newspaper’s selection of issues to be publicized and promoted: that is, its central role in the formulation and aggressive marketing of the policies of the Democratic Party. This process has served to obliterate the always tenuous boundary lines between objective reporting and sheer propaganda. The consequences of the Times’ financial and political evolution have found a particularly reactionary expression in the 1619 Project. Led by Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones and New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, the 1619 Project was developed for the purpose of providing the Democratic Party with a historical narrative that legitimized its efforts to develop an electoral constituency based on the promotion of racial politics. Assisting the Democratic Party’s decades-long efforts to disassociate itself from its identification with the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal to Great Society era, the 1619 Project, by prioritizing racial conflict, marginalizes, and even eliminates, class conflict as a notable factor in history and politics.

The shift from class struggle to racial conflict did not develop within a vacuum. The New York Times, as we shall explain, is drawing upon and exploiting reactionary intellectual tendencies that have been fermenting within substantial sections of middle-class academia for several decades.

The political interests and related ideological considerations that motivated the 1619 Project determined the unprincipled and dishonest methods employed by the Times in its creation. The New York Times was well aware of the fact that it was promoting a race-based narrative of American history that could not withstand critical evaluation by leading scholars of the Revolution and Civil War. The New York Times Magazine’s editor deliberately rejected consultation with the most respected and authoritative historians.

Moreover, when one of the Times’ fact-checkers identified false statements that were utilized to support the central arguments of the 1619 Project, her findings were ignored. And as the false claims and factual errors were exposed, the Times surreptitiously edited key phrases in 1619 Project material posted online. The knowledge and expertise of historians of the stature of Gordon Wood and James McPherson were of no use to the Times. Its editors knew they would object to the central thesis of the 1619 Project, promoted by lead essayist Hannah-Jones: that the American Revolution was launched as a conspiracy to defend slavery against pending British emancipation.

 

If You Want to Go to War..., I'll Take You There!

wsws |  “White privilege,” “wealthy elites,” “mansplainers,” “old white people,” “ivory tower elites.” These are just a few of the epithets hurled at me and the four historians I joined in protesting the flawed and inaccurate history presented in the New York Times’s 1619 Project. A quick pass through Twitter reveals that some historians are “ashamed of,” even “heartbroken by,” our letter to the Times editor. One historian chastised us for criticizing the 1619 Project at a time when our “republic” is so dangerously divided! Really, historians? Is it no longer our right or responsibility to critique works of history, at least not when they’re about a long, ugly episode of our nation’s history? Does history not have to be accurate if the subjects were truly victims, as enslaved Americans surely were? But I digress.

On August 18, 2019, the New York Times released its highly-touted 1619 Project, featuring historical essays and original literary works aimed at “reframing” American history with a new founding date—1619, the year that 20 or more Africans were brought to Virginia—to replace 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. The project offers slavery and its legacies to contemporary American society as the nation’s central defining features. New York Times journalist and project director Nikole Hannah-Jones provides the project’s “intellectual framework,” which posits slavery as the dominant feature of North American settlement, and the American Revolution as a duplicitous movement designed to protect slavery from its abolition by the British Empire. Hannah-Jones urges that we remember Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln first and foremost for their racism rather than their ideals of nationhood. Her assertions on these topics were forcefully critiqued by historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and James Oakes in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), and by Sean Wilentz in the New York Times Review of Books (NYTR). My own criticisms, in an interview with the WSWS, centered on the Project’s historical treatment of class and race. I elaborate here on those remarks.

After reframing the meaning of the American Revolution, Hannah-Jones moves on to the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely touching on American abolitionism and ignoring the free soil movement, though both were seeds of the antislavery Republican Party. In discussing the nation’s wrenching effort to reconstruct itself after the Civil War, she asserts that “blacks worked for the most part. .. alone” to free themselves and push for full rights of citizenship through passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. Rightly emphasizing the vigilante white violence that immediately followed the victories of a Republican-dominated Congress, she ignores important exceptions, including the Southern white “Scalawags,” many of whom were nonslaveholders who fought against the Confederacy in the war and participated with blacks and Northern Republicans in passing the Reconstruction Amendments.

simple, straightforward, obvious kwestin...,

Salon | Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.

This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.

Even here, the rich have options other than hiring American citizens. Wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives agree on one thing: the need for more unskilled immigration to the U.S. This is hardly surprising, as the rich are far more dependent on immigrant servants than middle-class and working-class Americans are.

american hypocrisy in the middle-east

Counterpunch | The hypocrisy of the US government is yet again demonstrated in full bore force. The US government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, laid waste to much of the countries including entire villages and towns, and massacred untold numbers of civilians in order "to bring democracy" to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now after days of Egyptians in the streets demanding "Mubarak must go," the US government remains aligned with its puppet Egyptian ruler, even suggesting that Mubarak, after running a police state for three decades, is the appropriate person to implement democracy in Egypt.

On January 30, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that "freedom and democracy" America neither seeks nor supports the ouster of the Egyptian dictator. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the US and Europe that criticism of Mubarak must be curbed in order "to preserve stability in the region."

By "stability" Netanyahu means the unimpeded ability of Israel to continue oppressing the Palestinians and stealing their country. Mubarak has been for three decades the well-paid enforcer for the US and Israel, sealing off Gaza from the outside world and preventing aid flows across the Egyptian border. Mubarak and his family have become multi-billionaires, thanks to the American taxpayer, and the US government, both Republicans and Democrats, do not want to lose their heavy investment in Mubarak.

The US government has long corrupted Arab governments by paying rulers installed by the US to represent US/Israeli interests rather than the interest of Arab peoples. Arabs put up with American-financed oppression for many years, but now are showing signs of rebellion.

The murderous American-installed dictator in Tunis was overthrown by people taking to the streets. Rebellion has spread to Egypt and there are also street protests against the US-supported rulers in Yemen and Jordan.

These uprisings might succeed in ousting puppet rulers, but will the result be anything more than the exchange of a new American puppet ruler for the old? Mubarak might go, but whoever takes his place is likely to find himself wearing the same American harness.

What dictators do is to eliminate alternative leadership. Potential leaders are either assassinated, exiled, or imprisoned. Moreover, anything short of a full-fledge revolution, such as the Iranian one, leaves in place a bureaucracy accustomed to business as usual. In addition, Egypt and the country's military have grown accustomed to American support and will want the money to keep flowing. It is the flow of this money that ensures the purchase of the replacement government.

Because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US government has financial dominance and the ability to financially isolate other countries, such as Iran. To break free of America's grip, one of two things would have to happen. Revolution would have to sweep the Arab world and result in an economic unity that could foster indigenous economic development, or the US dollar has to fail as world currency.

Arab disunity has long been the means by which the Western countries have dominated the Middle East. Without this disunity, Israel and the US could not abuse the Palestinians in the manner in which they have for decades, and without this disunity the US could not have invaded Iraq. It is unlikely that the Arabs will suddenly unite themselves.

The collapse of the dollar is more likely. Indeed, the policy of the US government to maximize both budget and trade deficits, and the policy of the Federal Reserve to monetize the budget deficit and the fraudulent paper assets of the large banks, have the dollar heading for demise.

As the supply of dollars grows, the value diminishes. Perhaps the time is not far off when rulers cease to sell out their peoples for American money.

If .45 Was The Commander In Chief - Why Didn't He Decapitate The Intelligence Community?

roburie  |   While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA, the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin contains  recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities against Russia as the US  sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to continue the war.

The oft ascribed motive (and here) for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years. Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national defense.

In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,  the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor people for the benefit of rich Americans.

Together, these imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence that they (Five Eyes) started.

Oddly, given recent history, the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr. Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection, he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’

Implied is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance, while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.

(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one--- not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a political weapon is called lawfare).

The view in this piece is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized labor.

With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS (China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Biden was a known quantity when he was appointed by Barack Obama to be President in 2020. The CIA, acting in league with the FBI, had spent prior years softening up the American public with lies about US foreign policy, lies about American history, lies about Donald Trump and his supporters, lies about their own roles in rigging American elections, lies about the American-led coup in Ukraine, lies about Russian military ambitions, and lies about US plans for the destruction of Ukraine. To be clear, these American agencies weren’t lying to the Russians. They were / are lying to the only people who believe their bullshit--- Americans.

So, where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a surprise inside Washington and New York.

However, this is at best a partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check. Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless, citizens so effectively?

Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here) and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’ before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.

A bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in 1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism. Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism. Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part, needs enemies to justify its existence.

Following the dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.

constant conflict: a military celebration of dopamine hegemony

Video - Bob Marley Them Belly Full But We Hungry.

ICH | It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive.

This vividness, this vitality, is reflected in our military; we do not expect to achieve ultimate solutions, only constant improvement. All previous cultures, general and military, have sought to achieve an ideal form of life and then fix it in cement. Americans, in and out of uniform, have always embraced change (though many individuals have not, and their conservatism has acted as a healthy brake on our national excesses). American culture is the culture of the unafraid.

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win. Fist tap Dale.

The Long War - Consequences and Costs (Part III)

Third, Where we are going:

The Neoconservatives, who have set the foreign policy of the Bush administration, have called for what they call The Long War. They expect it to last about half a century, that is for most of your lives.

What is it? What will it do to our position in the world? What will it do to our laws and our concept of civil liberties? What effect will it have on our society and economy? What will it cost in terms of money?

• The core idea of neoconservatism is that America , alone among world powers, has the strength, the wisdom and the right to impose its will upon all the nations of the world, in effect to remake them not in the American image, as we would define it, but as subordinate states within a new American security system. These concepts have been spelled out in numerous articles and speeches by prominent neoconservatives within and outside of government. The most important have also been embedded in the 2005 “National Defense Strategy of the United States of America ” which baldly states that “ America is a nation at war [which] At the direction of the President…will defeat adversaries at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing.” That is, to engage in preemptive military strikes. Adversaries are variously described, but among the descriptions are those who seek to “limit our global freedom to act” and “dominate key regions” or “develop and use breakthrough technologies to negate current U.S. advantages in key operational domains.” Broadly speaking, “Our role in the world depends on effectively projecting and sustaining our forces in distant environments where adversaries may seek to deny us access.” In short, the official doctrine of America is world domination.

• Attempting to implement this doctrine now has us engaged in wars in Iraq , Afghanistan and Somalia . Inevitably, these military actions spill over into neighboring countries. Fighting in Afghanistan has caused in the last week to attack targets in Pakistan (infuriating not only the pro-American government and causing it to close down our supply route to Afghanistan but causing great popular anger while doing little or nothing to improve our position in Afghanistan ). We can be sure that wherever we try to implement the neoconservative doctrine, we will lose allies and friends while entrenching and embittering those we attack.

• The effect on the American society is already pernicious. Our government has acquired the habit of lying to us (as it did on the Iraq war), of withholding information even from the Congress (as it has done on the Department of Defense expenditures), of setting aside the Constitution (as it has done on incarceration and torture of prisoners of war and on invasion of privacy of our own citizens by wiretaps in violation of the law) and in numerous other ways that would have shocked our ancestors. In short we have taken several steps toward the ghastly world described by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

• It has polarized our society to a degree that makes intelligent debate on public policy nearly impossible and often dangerous and has so skewed our economy that, as I have pointed out, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world combined and more than we spend on all other public programs combined. Doing so, and refusing the admit the costs, have caused us to go deeply into debt, to allow our cities and schools to degrade and kept us from addressing the ultimate security issue of any free society, the health of our citizens.

• The cost we can project to implement the neoconservative program is literally staggering. Some estimates, which are probably underestimates, run to about double our gross national product, upwards of $20 trillion.

Is this just a fantasy? A pipedream of a bunch of unbalanced, angry and frustrated neoconservatives?

I wish I could tell you that it is. Sadly, it is much more. For example, we now have nearly 1,000 U.S. military bases in other countries. We have the troops and weapons in place to act anywhere in the world. The Bush administration maintains publicly that it has the authority to do so. The previously operative law, the War Powers Resolution (P.L 93-148 of 1973), which was passed by Congress over the veto of President Nixon, limits the president’s authority to commit American troops into hostile situations and requires him “in every possible circumstance” to consult with the Congress before so doing. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush convinced the Congress to grant him full authority (P.L. 102-1 of September 18, 2001) to “use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.” President Bush has taken the position that this resolution gives him even wider authority over anywhere he deems a threat to exist. With this in mind, the Department of Defense, under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, created a special secret force, said to number 55,000 men with a budget of about $80 billion, which does not have to report to Congress or even to civilian representatives of the Government, the ambassadors, but is authorized to carry out assassinations and even to overthrow governments. Members of this force were active in the Somalia invasion and are already said to be involved in covert activities in Iran . We learned on September 11, 2008 that some of them had been sent into Pakistan despite the refusal of its government to allow them.

It is, of course, possible to encourage proxies to act without committing American troops. This seems to have been the case in the recent crisis over Georgia .

What happened in Georgia may be almost as much a lesson for America as what is happening in Iraq , Afghanistan and Somalia . The major difference is that an attack on Russia would cause a nuclear world war. Russia, under the Tsars, the Communists and Vladimir Putin, naturally was sensitive to what happened on its frontier – just as America, under the Monroe Doctrine, has always been in Latin America. Recognizing this strategic reality, James Baker, the first President Bush’s secretary of state, promised the Russians that we would not move NATO ahead “even one inch.” We have now moved it right into Russia ’s immediately neighborhood. I agree with Mr. Baker that this was not a wise move. But worse was to follow. You would have to read the press very carefully to learn that it was Georgia that attacked South Ossetia (whose citizens have Russian passports and which has been essentially independent for about 20 years). On August 7, Georgian President President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the attack when, he claims, he was given a “green light” by the Bush administration. Anticipating the move, the Russians reacted in their usual heavy-handed fashion. So we were furious. Vice President Dick Cheney rushed to Georgia to promise them a billion dollars in aid and after considerable diplomatic arm twisting a NATO delegation rushed in to commiserate. But then, of course, nothing happened. We would not go to war with Russia to protect South Ossetia . Nor would NATO. So we created a crisis where none existed and both Georgians and inhabitants paid the bill in suffering.

Now look at what lies ahead in Iran

Two issues have dominated discussion of Iran – its alleged attempts to acquire nuclear weapons and its supposed intervention in Iraq . Of course, also, many people, particularly women, dislike its regressive social policies toward women. But, on the nuclear issue bear in mind two things:

• first, it was America that got Iran started toward nuclear weapons. As Jonathan Power wrote, “Lost somewhere in the mists of history is the knowledge that it was the pro-American Shah of Iran who initiated Iran ’s quest to build a nuclear bomb. And it was the anti-American revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini that initially suspended work on the bomb.” Also our most authoritative estimators of facts in foreign affairs, our 16 intelligence agencies, found unanimously last November that they had “high confidence” that Iran had no nuclear weapons and had no plans to attempt to build them.

I obviously do not have access to all of the data available to intelligence community, but I have learned in my foreign affairs experience that to understand any other country’s policies one must put himself, as it were, on the other side of the table, in the chair occupied by its leader. So what would I do if I were Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Mahmoud Ahmadi Najad? I would see that President Bush singled out three countries which he called “the Axis of Evil.” Then he threatened them with “regime change.” The Iranian leader would know that regime change is a euphemism for overthrowing their governments and killing their leaders. So what did America do? Iraq , which did not have nuclear weapons, was destroyed while North Korea , which did have nuclear weapons and so could not be safely attacked, was offered an aid program, money and food supplies. That leaves Iran . What would a rational, patriotic, practical Iranian leader do? No doubt he would try to acquire this ultimate defense tool as quickly and as secretly as he could. Even blowing up all the identified nuclear-related sites and killing all the nuclear-related technicians will simply delay the process and guarantee that Iran will eventually get the bomb.

• second, the Bush administration has charged that Iran was playing a significant role in thwarting our operations in Iraq – that is acting as we expected in our 2005 National Security Strategy. But the US intelligence experts found that these charges were exaggerated or unproven.

Again, if I were an Iranian policy planner, I would urge that my government do what it could to make American lives there difficult. As an Iranian, I would react as an American would if a foreign power, which proclaims itself our enemy, were occupying Mexico . Imagine our reaction to that! In fact, we don’t have to imagine. We just have to remember the Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba .

We are not yet in a full-scale war against Iran , but if we attack Iran with nuclear weapons, the estimates are that we will kill upwards of 3 million Iranians but then we will be in a guerrilla war that will make Iraq look like a picnic. Iran has 150 thousand national guardsmen, already organized and fully equipped for guerrilla warfare – in 2003 Iraq had none at all – and Iran has a fleet of fast, highly maneuverable and lethal speed boats that will attack our fleet and above all oil tankers. On attacking Iran , the “free world” is not with us. Public opinion polls tell us that whereas at least the western Europeans used to regard us as the world’s leader toward stability, many now think of us as a rogue nation. Americans would not use that term, but the latest polls in April this year show that 81% of us think that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” In my meetings with conservative business leaders, I find that practically all think that an attack on Iran would be insane. Many think that our brief role as the world’s leader is nearly ended, that if the 20th century was the American century, the 21st will not be. Now, for the first time, we are even being turned down for further borrowing by the great sovereign wealth funds. They have come to regard us the way a bank does a customer whose assets are pledged, who is spending too much and who does not seem to be acting rationally.

Interesting How Robert Kagan's Revisionist Bloviations Run For 3 Days In The WaPo...,

WaPo  |  How quickly do times of apparent peace become times of conflict; seemingly stable world orders come crashing down; the hopes of many for improvement of the human condition are dashed and replaced by fear and despair.

For the first dozen years after World War I, the three powerful democracies — the United States, Britain and France — were in substantial control of world affairs, economically, politically and militarily. They established the terms of the peace settlement, redrew the borders of Europe, summoned new nations into being, distributed pieces of defunct empires, erected security arrangements, determined who owed what to whom, and how and when debts should be paid. They called together the conferences that determined the levels of armaments the major nations could possess.

All this was possible because they had won the war; because the United States and Britain controlled the banks and the seas; because France wielded predominant military power on the European continent. With this power, the three Western democracies sought to establish and consolidate a world system favorable to their interests and preferences. They argued over how best to do this, and they became increasingly estranged from each other in these years. But they all wanted a stable, prosperous and peaceful Europe. They all sought to preserve their global empires, or, in the United States’ case, its hemispheric hegemony. They all sought to defend the liberal, capitalist economic system that enriched and protected them and in which they believed. None doubted the rightness of their vision of international order or much questioned the justice of imposing it.

And there had been successes, certainly from their point of view. By the second half of the 1920s, the world had grown less violent and marginally less miserable. In Europe especially, economies were recovering, living standards were rising, general violence was down from the immediate postwar years, and the dangers of war and aggression seemed as low as they had been in decades. Internationally, trade had risen by more than 20 percent, despite growing protectionism, driven largely by the American economic boom. Nations spent more time discussing measures for peace than preparing for war. The League of Nations had come into its own. Germany seemed to be on a moderate, democratic course. In general, the threat of a return to autocracy and militarism seemed low. Democracy seemed to be ascendant.

Even those who openly defied the new order had to move cautiously. The Soviets promoted their revolution abroad but not so aggressively as to challenge the dominant powers, and they wound up settling for “socialism in one country.” Benito Mussolini, ruling an Italy surrounded in the Mediterranean by British and French naval power and dependent on the United States for financial support, thought it best to play the responsible European statesman. The 1920s were his “decade of good behavior.”

Adolf Hitler, too, proceeded with caution as he ascended to power in the early ’30s. Impressed by the United States as “a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities” and by Anglo-American domination of the global economy, and well aware of the role it had played in selecting Germany’s past governments, he worked at first to soften Washington’s opposition to his rise. He reached out to the U.S. ambassador, gave numerous interviews to prominent American media figures, including William Randolph Hearst, in the hope of making “the personality of Adolf Hitler more accessible to the American people.” He promised to pay Germany’s “private debts” to American bankers and went out of his way to assure the English-speaking world that his national socialist movement would gain power only in a “purely legal way” in accordance with the “present constitution.” After taking power, he told the press and his own officials to play down the campaigns of antisemitism that began immediately. He sought to keep German rearmament under wraps in what he called the “perilous interval” during which the “whole world” was “against us.” Until the economy recovered and German rearmament was further along, he feared that the national socialist revolution could be crushed at any time by the superior power of the democracies.

It was remarkable how quickly the winds were shifting, though. An American journalist identified the moment when history pivoted. “In the first five years after the World War,” he wrote, “the nations of Europe, on their backs and seeking American aid, took all pains to avoid offending us and therefore appeared to give careful and weighty consideration to our altruistic advice. The succeeding five years have changed that.”

One indicator of the shifting trends was the declining fortunes of democracy throughout Europe. It was inevitable that some of the new democracies, implanted in lands that had never known such a form of government, would not survive. The rise of dictatorship in various forms in Hungary (1920), Italy (1925), Lithuania, Poland and Portugal (1926), Yugoslavia (1929), Romania (1930), Germany and Austria (1933), Bulgaria and Latvia (1934), and Greece (1935) had many internal and external causes, including the global depression that began around 1930. But the overall decline of European democracy from the second half of the 1920s onward, and the turn away from democracy in Japan, also reflected the declining influence and appeal of the great-power democracies and their order.

Liberal democracy was not just losing ground. It faced a potent challenge from a vibrant and revolutionary anti-liberal doctrine that attracted followers and imitators throughout Europe and beyond. Americans, British and French during World War I and for decades afterward assumed that Bolshevism posed the greatest threat to liberal democracy. But Bolshevism proved less easily exported than both its proponents and its opponents believed. Ostracized by the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union turned inward to wrestle with the transformation of its society. When democracies fell in the 1920s and ’30s, they fell to the Right, not the Left.

 

three things that must happen...,

Video - Bob Marley Revolution

Alternet | Transforming the United States into something closer to a democracy requires: 1) knowledge of how we are getting screwed; 2) pragmatic tactics, strategies, and solutions; and 3) the “energy to do battle.”

The majority of Americans oppose the corporatocracy (rule by giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite, and corporate-collaborator government officials); however, many of us have given up hope that this tyranny can be defeated. Among those of us who continue to be politically engaged, many focus on only one of the requirements—knowledge of how we are getting screwed. And this singular focus can result in helplessness. It is the two other requirements that can empower, energize, and activate Team Democracy— a team that is currently at the bottom of the standings in the American Political League.

1. Knowledge of How We are Getting Screwed
Harriet Tubman conducted multiple missions as an Underground Railroad conductor, and she also participated in the Union Army’s Combahee River raid that freed more than 700 slaves. Looking back on her career as a freedom fighter, Tubman noted, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” While awareness of the truth of corporatocracy oppression is by itself not sufficient to win freedom and justice, it is absolutely necessary.

We are ruled by so many “industrial complexes”—military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, and so on—that it is almost impossible to stay on top of every way we are getting screwed. The good news is that—either through independent media or our basic common sense—polls show that the majority of Americans know enough about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other corporate welfare to oppose these corporatocracy policies. In the case of the military-industrial complex, most Iraq War polls and Afghanistan War polls show that the majority of Americans know enough to oppose these wars. And when Americans were asked in a CBS New /New York Times survey in January 2011 which of three programs—the military, Medicare or Social Security—to cut so as to deal with the deficit, fully 55 percent chose the military, while only 21 percent chose Medicare and 13 percent chose Social Security.

In the words of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody knows that the deal is rotten.” Well, maybe not everybody, but damn near everybody.

But what doesn’t everybody know?

2. Pragmatic Tactics, Strategies and Solutions
In addition to awareness of economic and social injustices created by corporatocracy rule, it is also necessary to have knowledge of strategies and tactics that oppressed people have historically used to overcome tyranny and to gain their fair share of power.

Even before the Democratic-Republican bipartisan educational policies (such as “no child left behind” and “race to the top”) that cut back on civics being taught in schools, few Americans were exposed in their schooling to “street-smart civics”—tactics and strategies that oppressed peoples have historically utilized to gain power.

For a comprehensive guide of tactics and strategies that have been effective transforming regimes more oppressive than the current U.S. one, read political theorist and sociologist Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, which includes nearly 200 “Methods of Nonviolent Actions.” Among Sharp’s 49 “Methods of Economic Noncooperation,” he lists over 20 different kinds of strikes. And among his 38 “Methods of Political Noncooperation,” he lists 10 tactics of “citizens’ noncooperation with government,” nine “citizens’ alternatives to obedience,” and seven “actions by government personnel.” Yes, nothing was more powerful in ending the Vietnam War and saving American and Vietnamese lives than the brave actions by critically thinking U.S. soldiers who refused to cooperate with the U.S. military establishment. Check out David Zeigler’s documentary Sir! No Sir! for details.

For a quick history lesson on “the nature of disruptive power” in the United States and the use of disruptive tactics in fomenting the American Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, and other democratic movements, check out sociologist Frances Fox Piven’s Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. Piven describes how “ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed.” In the midst of the Great Depression when U.S unemployment was over 25 percent, working people conducted an exceptional number of large labor strikes, including the Flint, Michigan sit-down strike, which began at the end of 1936 when auto workers occupied a General Motors factory so as to earn recognition for the United Auto Workers union as a bargaining agent. That famous victory was preceded and inspired by other less well-known major battles fought and won by working people. Check out the intelligent tactics (and guts and solidarity) in the 1934 Minneapolis Truckers Strike.

For an example of “the nature of creative power” that scared the hell out of—and almost triumphed—over the moneyed elite, read The Populist Moment by historian Lawrence Goodwyn. The Populist movement, the late-19th-century farmers’ insurgency, according to Goodwyn, was the largest democratic movement in American history. These Populists and their major organization, commonly called the “Alliance,” created worker cooperatives that resulted in empowering economic self-sufficiency. They came close to successfully transforming a good part of the United States into something a lot closer to a democracy. As Goodwyn notes, “Their efforts, halting and disjointed at first, gathered form and force until they grew into a coordinated mass movement that stretched across the American continent ... Millions of people came to believe fervently that the wholesale overhauling of their society was going to happen in their lifetimes.”

In Get Up, Stand Up, I include the section “Winning the Battle: Solutions, Strategies, and Tactics.” However, a major point of the book is that, currently in the United States, even more ignored than street-smart strategies and tactics is the issue of morale, which is necessary for implementing these strategies and tactics. So, I also have a section “Energy to Do Battle: Liberation Psychology, Individual Self-Respect, and Collective Self-Confidence.”

3. The Energy to Do Battle
The elite’s money—and the influence it buys—is an extremely powerful weapon. So it is understandable that so many people who are defeated and demoralized focus on their lack of money rather than on their lack of morale. However, we must keep in mind that in war, especially in a class war when one’s side lacks financial resources, morale becomes even more crucial.

Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don’t set people free to take action. But having worked with abused people for more than 25 years, it doesn’t surprise me to see that when we as individuals or a society eat crap for too long, we become psychologically too weak to take action. There are a great many Americans who have been so worn down by decades of personal and political defeats, financial struggles, social isolation and daily interaction with impersonal and inhuman institutions that they no longer have the energy for political actions.

Other observers of subjugated societies have recognized this phenomenon of subjugation resulting in demoralization and fatalism. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Ignacio Martin-Baró, the El Salvadoran social psychologist and popularizer of “liberation psychology,” understood this psychological phenomenon. So did Bob Marley, the poet laureate of oppressed people around the world. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that we, too, after years of domestic corporatocracy subjugation, have developed what Marley called “mental slavery.” Unless we acknowledge that reality, we won’t begin to heal from what I call “battered people’s syndrome” and “corporatocracy abuse” and to, as Marley urges, “emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”