johnhelmer | In the history of the world wars, or the last century of wars in Europe, or the wars the US has waged since 1945, it has never happened that what the President of the US says, and what the head of the front-line country which the US is fighting to defend says, have mattered less than what Joseph Biden and Vladimir Zelensky say now.
The reason is that no US president running a war has ever been as incapacitated in command and control as Biden, nor as impotent among his own officials as Zelensky. Rule by crock and rule by stooge aren’t rule at all.
US public opinion polls measuring Biden’s job approval rating demonstrate that most American voters already realize this. The growing spread between American voters’ disapproval and approval of Biden’s performance since the Russian operation began on February 24 indicates also that this understanding is growing.
But this isn’t anti-war sentiment, let alone an American stop-the-war movement. At present US officials headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken aim to fight the war to the capitulation or destruction of Russia; they will fight to the last Ukrainian to achieve this goal; they will negotiate no end-of-war terms; they are not influenced or constrained by American public opinion or votes. Not yet.
Zelensky has declared he is in favour of negotiations to end the war; he has declared he is opposed to the terms which President Vladimir Putin and the Russian leadership have made clear, long before the war began and ever since, were the casus belli, the objectives for which they are fighting. The reason Zelensky regularly contradicts himself is that his power – his survival in office – depends on the Galician faction headquartered around Lvov, whose only occupation is permanent warfighting, and whose only income flows from the US and the NATO alliance. They are as committed as Blinken to operating the Ukraine as a gun platform targeted at Russia; the Galicians will destroy all of eastern Ukraine as they withdraw, in order to keep firing. The Germans thought and did as much on the same battlefields eighty years ago.
Biden, Blinken, Zelensky, and the Galicians also hate Russians with more racial virulence than has ever been shown by Americans towards a European enemy in the history of American wars.
Race hatred towards Russians now far exceeds American public opinion measured towards Germans during World War I or World War II. It is only matched, according to the US War Department’s surveys of American soldiers, by hatred towards the Japanese. During that war, six times the number of GIs polled said they “would really like to kill” a Japanese soldier as said the same for a German. When combat veterans were asked “what would you like to see happen to the Japanese and the Germans after the war”, almost one in two GIs from the Pacific theatre supported wiping out the entire Japanese nation; one in eight from the European theatre said that of Germany. During the Vietnam War, US race hatred for the Vietnamese was even less.
If these lessons are true, or if the commands in Moscow and in Washington believe them, what end to the war can be negotiated short of the destruction of one side or the other?
The simpleton’s conclusion is none – there can be no end to this war unless the Ukraine is destroyed, or Russia, or Europe, or the US. How simple-minded is that?
davidstockman | After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.
The world had descended into what had been a 77-year global war, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into the world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.
To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.
I have elaborated more fully on this proposition in“The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War“, but the seminal point cannot be gainsaid. The end of the cold war meant world peace was finally at hand, yet 25 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.
In fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation’s capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war; they ensure endless waste on armaments and the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st century high tech warfare and the terrorist blowback it inherently generates among those upon which the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.
So there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-year war ended. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.
So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.
In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1990 was thatPax Americanawould not go away quietly in the night.
In fact, during the past 25 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.
Back then a few months after the slaughter had been unleashed, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, singing and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell.
The truthful answer is that there was no good reason. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.
The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time for the same reasons. Historians can readily name the culprits from 100 years ago, such as the German general staff’s plan for a lightening mobilization and strike on the western front called the Schlieffen Plan or Britain’s secret commitments to France to guard the North Sea while the latter covered the Mediterranean.
Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastisized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.
In
the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of
historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective
…. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union.
By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United
States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S.
President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston
Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days
before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by
recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian
armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of
his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic
leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic
bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War
rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear
historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial
theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and
save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia,
Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an
invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the
atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US
secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days
before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for
peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and
Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that
there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
The
US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was
“fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that
the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later
admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to
achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His
foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified:
“There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and
that the project was conducted on that basis.”
University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former
Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S.
Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar
Alperovitz says:
Increasing
numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to
use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this
essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended:
Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,”
as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far
more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral
than American liberals in the years following World War II.
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the
United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time
that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled:
Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has
obviously raised questions among many historians. The available
evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs
may well have been used in part because American leaders
“preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put
it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack.
Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that
ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a
significant factor.
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War
II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic
bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans
haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously
concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified,
many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary
destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat
populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
General Dwight Eisenhower said,
“Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely
unnecessary” and “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t
necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
caitlinjohnstone |"American intelligence agencies have less information than they
would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture
of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and
failures," NYT told us earlier this month.
"U.S. officials said the Ukrainian government gave them few classified
briefings or details about their operational plans, and Ukrainian
officials acknowledged that they did not tell the Americans everything."
It
seems a bit unlikely that US intelligence agencies would have a hard
time getting information about what's happening in a country where they
themselves are physically located. Moon of Alabama theorized
at the time that this ridiculous "We don't know what's happening in our
own proxy war" line was being pushed to give the US plausible
deniability about Ukraine's failures on the battlefield, which have only gotten worse since then.
So
why are they telling us all this now? Well, it could be that we're
being paced into accepting an increasingly direct role of the US and its
allies in Ukraine.
The other day Antiwar's Daniel Larison tweeted,
"Hawks in April: Don't call it a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course
it's a proxy war! Hawks in June: It's not their war, it's our war!"
This is indeed exactly how it happened. Back in April President Biden told the press the idea that this is a proxy war between the US and Russia was "not true" and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said "It's not, this is clearly Ukraine's fight" when asked if this is a proxy war. The mainstream media were still framing this claim as merely an "accusation" by the Russian government, and empire spinmeisters were regularly admonishing anyone who used that term on the grounds that it deprives Ukrainians of their "agency".
Then May rolled around and all of a sudden we had The New Yorker unequivocally telling us that the US is in "a full proxy war with Russia" and hawks like US congressman Seth Moulton saying
things like, "We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re
fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia,
and it’s important that we win.”
And now here in June we've got war hawks like Max Boot coming right out and saying that
this is actually America's war, and it is therefore important for the
US to drastically escalate the war in order to hand the Russians
"devastating losses".
So the previously unthinkable idea that the US is at war with Russia
has been gradually normalized, with the heat turned up so slowly that
the frog doesn't notice it's being boiled alive. If that idea can be
sufficiently normalized, public consent for greater escalations will
likely be forthcoming, even if those escalations are extremely
psychotic.
Back in March when I said
the only "agency" Ukraine has in this conflict is the Central
Intelligence kind, empire loyalists jumped down my throat. They couldn't
believe I was saying something so evil and wrong. Now they've been told
that the Central Intelligence Agency is indeed conducting operations
and directing intelligence on the ground in Ukraine, but I somehow doubt
that this will stir any self-reflection on their part.
aljazeera | It is undoubtedly true that the greatest unacknowledged achievement of the European Union is to establish "a culture of peace" within its regional enclosure for the 68 years since 1944. This has meant not only the absence of war in Europe, but also the absence of "war talk", threats, crises, and sanctions - with the single important exception of the NATO Kosovo War of 1999 that was part of the fallout from the breakup of former Yugoslavia. This legally controversial intervention was undertaken by the US-led alliance to achieve several goals: to rescue Albanian Kosovars from a feared imminent humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of their oppressive Serb occupiers; to facilitate the de facto independence of Kosovo from Serbian rule; to demonstrate the post-Cold War viability of NATO; and to reinforce the victory claims of the 1991 Gulf War, thereby showing that the West could win wars with minimal casualties on its side due to a recently acquired technological ability to shift the human burdens of war almost entirely to the adversary.
The contrast with the first half of the 20th century is stark when Europe seemed definitely the global cockpit of the war system in the East-West struggle for global supremacy. Tens of millions of Western soldiers and civilians died in response to the two German attempts by force of arms to gain a bigger role within this European nexus of geopolitics, as organised in the West. Germany challenged the established order, not only by recourse to massive aggressive wars in the form of World Wars I and II, but also by establishing a political infrastructure that gave rise in the 1930s to the violently genocidal ideology of Nazism, the most diabolical rendering of fascism.
'Culture of peace'
Even during the Cold War decades, Europe was not really at peace, but always at the brink of an unimaginably devastating third world war.
For the more than four decades of the Cold War there existed a constant threat of a war fought with nuclear weapons, a conflict that could have produced the scourge of apocalyptic warfare resulting from provocative US-led deployments of nuclear weapons or inflammatory Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe, or even from the periodically tense relations in the divided city of Berlin, or due to such mundane causes as human error and technological accident as with the misidentification of innocent behaviour as hostile.
Russia warns US over missile-defence shield
Also, to some extent the Soviet Union, with its totalitarian variant of state socialism, was as much European as it was Asian, and thus to a degree the Cold War was being fought within Europe, although its violent dimensions were prudently "outsourced" to the global periphery.
Despite the current plans to surround Russia with "defensive" missile systems, purportedly to construct a shield to stop Iranian missiles, there seems little threat of any war being fought within European space, and even a war-threatening diplomatic confrontation seems improbable at this point.
In many respects, the EU has incubated a culture of peace in its homeland, which although partial and precarious, has been transformative for Europeans - even if this most daring post-Westphalia experiment in regional integration and sovereignty has been wrongly assessed. It is almost always evaluated from an economistic perspective best appreciated by examining trade and investment statistics, monetary union, and regional economic management.
HNN | The obscure history of nuclear weapons and the Korean War provides the answer. The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.
The forgotten war -- the Korean war of 1950-53 -- might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.
Korea is also assumed to have been a limited war, but its prosecution bore a strong resemblance to the air war against Imperial Japan in the second world war, and was often directed by the same US military leaders. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined from many different perspectives, yet the incendiary air attacks against Japanese and Korean cities have received much less attention. The US post-Korean war air power and nuclear strategy in northeast Asia are even less well understood; yet these have dramatically shaped North Korean choices and remain a key factor in its national security strategy.
Napalm was invented at the end of the second world war. It became a major issue during the Vietnam war, brought to prominence by horrific photos of injured civilians. Yet far more napalm was dropped on Korea and with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than North Vietnam. In 2003 I participated in a conference with US veterans of the Korean war. During a discussion about napalm, a survivor who lost an eye in the Changjin (in Japanese, Chosin) Reservoir battle said it was indeed a nasty weapon -- but "it fell on the right people." (Ah yes, the "right people" -- a friendly-fire drop on a dozen US soldiers.) He continued: "Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . It was terrible. Where the napalm had burned the skin to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips." (2)
Soon after that incident, George Barrett of the New York Times had found "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war" in a village near Anyang, in South Korea: "The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, 50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No 3,811,294 for a $2.98 'bewitching bed jacket -- coral'." US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of "sensationalised reporting," so it could be stopped. (3)
One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested "to have the following towns obliterated" by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: "fired 11 villages." (4) Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.
In a major strike on the industrial city of Hungnam on 31 July 1950, 500 tons of ordnance was delivered through clouds by radar; the flames rose 200-300 feet into the air. The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. (5) Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.
Air force sources delighted in this relatively new weapon, joking about communist protests and misleading the press about their "precision bombing." They also liked to point out that civilians were warned of the approaching bombers by leaflet, although all pilots knew that these were ineffective. (6) This was a mere prelude to the obliteration of most North Korean towns and cities after China entered the war.
newstatesman | The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms
of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment,
but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political
development over the past several decades has not merely been divided
into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender
equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked
into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat
inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to
expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security.
From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was
better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy
wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous,
immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of
which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a
regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11
raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland”
safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless
war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that
has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US
wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their
own worst enemies?
The spectre of civil war might be better
understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US
empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a
regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis”
fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising
affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great
Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social
democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution
that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time
in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging,
and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime
roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded
that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.
Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change
In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other
means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to
power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”.
Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while
declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal
government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with
expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan
put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994,
forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies
explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While
we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the
ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.
The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at
the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian
institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for
reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public
regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering
congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal
spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise
state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a
woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register
to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral
outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative
behaviour at every opportunity.
In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of
the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark,
50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal
voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and
overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody.
Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a
minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during
periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by
other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.
In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the
Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant
partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify,
in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate
taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit
of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has
sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic
recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak
executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and
more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to
choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement
against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed
imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and
public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against
police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or
else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on
the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have
instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken
coop.
Thomas Powers in the NY Review of Books brings yet further insight into the makings of WW-III. First the escalation in foreign policy, then the escalating resistance to this movement from within the Pentagon;
At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.
Keep in mind that the rising price of oil already threatens the world's economy. Iran also has a large army and deep ties to the population of Shiite coreligionists next door in Iraq. The American military already has its hands full with a hard-to-manage war in Iraq, and is proposing to send additional combat brigades to deal with a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yet with all these sound reasons for avoiding war with Iran, the United States for five years has repeatedly threatened it with military attack. These threats have lately acquired a new edge.
Whether the threats of massive escalation materialize, or not, the consequences to the American way of life are going to be pretty much indistinguishable.
With its time in power rapidly running out, the Bush administration is mired in two frustrating wars, stretched thin militarily, living on borrowed money, and exhausted intellectually. It would be hard to name a time when the United States faced a wider range of political problems, or had better reasons to avoid additional military entanglements. Bush and Cheney concede nothing of the kind, but promise "serious consequences" for continued Iranian defiance. It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon, where an insider told the reporter Seymour Hersh two years ago, "There is a war about the war going on inside the building." When the administration planned to add a third aircraft carrier group to the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the move was blocked by the then newly promoted chief of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who told friends that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch."
Until his resignation in March, Fallon often contradicted and undermined the tough talk of the administration, speaking dismissively about the prospects of war with Iran. "Another war is just not where we want to go," he told the Financial Times. "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful," he said to al-Jazeera television. In recent months Fallon also traveled in Afghanistan and spoke at candid length with the military writer Thomas Barnett, who was working on an article for Esquire. When the article was ready to go to the printer Fallon invited an Esquire photographer to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to take his picture. War with Iran, yes or no, Barnett wrote, would "all come down to one man"—Fallon. The White House was not happy with Fallon's interference, Barnett reported. Washington rumor said Fallon's time was short. His removal, Barnett predicted, "may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year...." A week after Barnett's piece appeared in Esquire, Gates announced that Fallon was retiring at his own request. The Esquire article had been the talk of the Pentagon nonstop; leaked stories were coming from all directions. Fallon wasn't just on his way out; Gates said he would be gone by the end of the month.
Fallon's open and outspoken resistance to the idea of war with Iran represents something new and extraordinary—maybe. It is too early to be sure. But beneath the surface of recent statements by Fallon, Gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, something large seems to be swelling up—resistance by the Pentagon to passive acceptance of a wider war. To see the shape of the conflict one must first accept the seriousness of both parties—the administration in making its threats to stop Iran's nuclear program, and Pentagon officials when they say a wider war would be practically difficult and strategically unnecessary.
This showdown—if it is truly taking place—has been a long time coming. Ten years ago a young Army major, H.R. McMaster, published a history of American escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. McMaster's argument, stripped to its core, was that against their own best judgment the joint chiefs passively acquiesced to White House pressure to expand the war. Johnson, with his eye on a second term, did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, and the joint chiefs did not want to run their careers aground. Despite the harshness of McMaster's conclusion his book was widely read in the Pentagon and made a deep impression on a generation of rising officers, many of them now of flag rank and in positions of responsibility.[*]
National bankruptcy with or without the reorganization and force majeure of world war is going to prove a wrenching and protracted period in the history of the republic no matter what.
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on
Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a
two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective
was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union.
By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United
States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S.
President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston
Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days
before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by
recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian
armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of
his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic
leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic
bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War
rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear
historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial
theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the
species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute
at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war
crime; it was a crime against humanity.”
***
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and
save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
***
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia,
Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an
invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the
atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US
secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days
before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for
peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and
Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that
there was no military need to use the bomb. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President
Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so
“bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its
strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was
seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have
to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified:
“There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and
that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after
Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with
the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.
We’ll give the last word
to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former
Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S.
Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:
Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing
numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to
use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this
essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American
military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended:
Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,”
as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far
more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral
than American liberals in the years following World War II.
***
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting
the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed
to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8
Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and
Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions
among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive,
strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part
because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian
Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the
Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic
sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have
been a significant factor.
***
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War
II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic
bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans
haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously
concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders
think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally
offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of
Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations.
Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
***
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended
the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying
that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
After all, a good deal
of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only
semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The
draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were
designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have
ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether
cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership
collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to
avoid mentioning.
By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous
dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his
predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam
Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering
regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.
I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.
The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000
That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu
Diplomacy requires an
understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to
make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world
politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the
virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the
foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual
accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the
moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”
Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until
Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden,
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal
is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has
repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is
not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will
settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory
occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro
Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on
Russia to induce its political collapse.
Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of
overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing
unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly
invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes,
for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour
ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely
be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic
pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these
weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct
clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties
inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy
guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases
the risk of accidents and escalation.
The proxy war embraced by Washington today would
have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the
very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war
make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO
expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from
its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia
perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in
this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear
deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring
and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly
both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this
heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of
the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war
aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk,
Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is
unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly
unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow.
Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with
compromise.
Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would
need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute
significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its
part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk
and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised
by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would
grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional
Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to
concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a
land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would
need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic
relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union
(to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its
rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO
membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to
forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.
Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s
goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014,
and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that
Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the
war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for
Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad”
(that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the
imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and
defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).
Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be
anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again,
the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To
enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers
spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally
withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact,
Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he
had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its
missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles
from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved
not by steadfastness but by compromise.
But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a
generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American
public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president,
JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the
face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with
the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering
that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These
false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons
that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in
Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have
informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars
ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and
“resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a
response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews
compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and
circumstance.
Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole
superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive
European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That
settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the
vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and
Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to
resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles
de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the
Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what
de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a
superpower across the Atlantic.
ejmagnier | Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has been chosen as the
best US war theatre for its loyalty to Washington and readiness to play
the most crucial role in confronting Russia regardless of the
consequences. Kyiv is ready to offer the country and its inhabitants to
fight Russia in a proxy war. The US could have done nothing against
Russia without Ukraine’s readiness for sacrifice.
This US objective has been carefully planned since the 2014 Maidan
coup when Washington was responsible for appointing the future Ukrainian
leaders, disregarding the EU interest and well-being. The US-NATO
training of the Ukrainian army for confronting Russia started in 2015
under President Barack Obama and not in February 2022. The current US
administration officially wished to annex Ukraine with minor damage but
had been preparing for war for a long time. He who sows the wind reaps
the storm, and Biden got what had been wished for.
Some people in the West resist the idea that the ongoing war in
Ukraine is between Washington and Russia. However, a four-star general
Jack Keane (former vice chief of staff of the US army), has said that
“the US has invested $66 billion in the Kyiv regime, a relatively small
sum, which helped in arming Ukraine and motivating the public for a war
against Russia. It is quite well worth it. We (US soldiers) are not
doing the fighting, but Ukraine is (on our behalf).”
Moreover, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin said that
his country, along with more than forty countries – beyond NATO allies –
have established a Contact Group at the US Air Base in Ramstein,
Germany, “to express commitment and intensify the support to Ukraine.”
The US has been the driving force ahead of all European and western
countries in sending weapons, offering intelligence support and “US and allied Special Forces” on the ground in Ukraine. Many more elements confirm that the US and its NATO allies are directly involved in an entire proxy war to weaken Russia and
outlast President Vladimir Putin by investing more than $200 million
per day to achieve its target. Ukraine just volunteered as a theatre to
defend the “global international security order” (in fact, the US hegemony), as General Mark Milley, the Joint Chief of Staff Chairman, said.
So far, the US has succeeded on several military and economic levels
and gathered enormous gains from the war on Russia in Ukraine. It is
reviving NATO, suspending the Nord Stream 1, selling its expensive gas,
breaking the financial Russian-European relationship and pushing Europe
to send weapons to Ukraine to confirm the continent’s military
involvement. All these are tremendous achievements for the US in a war
where those killed are tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers but no
Americans.
Russia cannot win all its battles against the 30-NATO nations. But
its withdrawal from several cities does not confirm the victory of the
West in the ongoing war. The Russian President is preparing a new army
of hundreds of thousands of men who will plunge into the battle this
winter, which is expected to be harsh on everyone in Europe. Putin has
appointed a new Russian military commander – the seventh since the
Russian war began last February – to lead the upcoming winter battle to
end Ukrainian gains in the east and south of Ukrainian territories and
exhaust the West’s resources. That indicates that more ties of troops
will be seen, and more intelligence services hit on both sides are
expected.
For a long time, the CIA did not act so openly against Russia, and
the United States did not engage in a war of this magnitude against a
superpower country determined to win at all costs. However, Ukraine’s
territory is the theatre of the military operations, and the collateral
(economic) damage affects Europe this time, the natural US partner in
its last decades’ wars. Washington can withstand long years of this war
of attrition. Does Moscow have the patience to sustain a long battle
with the will to win at any cost? It seems so to Putin’s determination
to grab more Ukrainian territories and destroy more of the country’s
infrastructure. Undoubtedly the belligerents are preparing for a hot but
rather cold forthcoming winter.
History observes the shake-up of the Pax Americana that is taking
place in modern times. Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan and other
states are prepared for new world order. This is building up in Asia
with solid industry, an exchange of trade in local currency, large
reserves of food, and a prosperous future for those who represent almost
half of the world’s population. This leaves the West, which means only
11 per cent of the world’s population, struggling to find enough energy
to fill up its gasoline stations and thinking about its crumbling
industry and gas reserves in 2023.
npr | "To be clear, I'm not arguing that this is at all representative of
Vietnam veterans — this is a tiny, tiny percentage of returning
veterans," Belew says. "But it is a large and instrumental number of
people within the White Power movement — and they play really important
roles in changing the course of movement action."
In her new book, Bring the War Home,
Belew argues that as disparate racist groups came together, the
movement's goal shifted from one of "vigilante activism" to something
more wide-reaching: "It's aimed at unseating the federal government. ...
It's aimed at undermining infrastructure and currency to foment race
war."
The Vietnam War narrative works first of all to unite people who had
previously not been able to be in a room together and to have a shared
sense of mission. So, for instance, Klansmen and neo-Nazis after World
War II had a very difficult time aligning, because Klansmen tended to
see neo-Nazis as enemies ... the people they were confronting in World
War II. But after Vietnam they see common cause around their betrayal by
the government and around the failed project of the Vietnam War. So
that's one function.
Another function of the Vietnam War is to
provide a narrative that shapes the violence itself, and this is partly
material in that veterans who are trained in Vietnam War boot camps come
back and create boot camps to train other White Power activists. People
who didn't serve in Vietnam War combat even use U.S. Army training
manuals and other kind of paramilitary infrastructure to shape White
Power violence and they even choose Vietnam War issue weapons, uniforms
and material and even obtain stolen military weapons to foment activism.
On the White Power movement turning on the state
The
turn on the state happened in 1983. It happened at the Aryan Nations
World Congress, which was a meeting of many different factions of the
White Power movement and the thing that's important about this turn on
the state is that it's openly anti-state for the first time in the 20th
century. Prior Klan mobilizations had really been organized about
maintaining the status quo or maintaining what historians would call
"systemic power," which is to say, state power and all of the other
kinds of power that are bound up in state power.
thenation | The belief expressed here is that the majority of Americans are soft
and insulated, ignorant of a long-running war, and that revolutionary
racist terror is the only remedy for an American society suffering from a
terminal cancer of liberalism and tolerance. This conviction may seem
obscure and The Turner Diaries mere fiction, but as the historian Kathleen Belew demonstrates in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, it has been at the core of decades of white-supremacist organizing and violence.
Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Belew’s
book isn’t only a definitive history of white-racist violence in
late-20th-century America, but also a rigorous meditation on the
relationship between American militarism abroad and extremism at home,
with distressing implications for the United States in 2018 and beyond.
Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a
profound relationship between America’s military violence and domestic
right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character
of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and
early ’80s.
paulcraigroberts | Amitai Etzioni has raised an important question: “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” http://yalejournal.org/2013/06/12/who-authorized-preparations-for-war-with-china/
Etzioni says that the war plan is not the sort of contingency plan
that might be on hand for an improbable event. Etzioni also reports
that the Pentagon’s war plan was not ordered by, and has not been
reviewed by, US civilian authorities. We are confronted with a
neoconized US military out of control endangering Americans and the rest
of the world.
Etzioni is correct that this is a momentous decision made by a
neoconized military. China is obviously aware that Washington is
preparing for war with China. If the Yale Journal knows it, China knows
it. If the Chinese government is realistic, the government is aware that
Washington is planning a pre-emptive nuclear attack against China. No
other kind of war makes any sense from Washington’s standpoint. The
“superpower” was never able to occupy Baghdad, and after 11 years of war
has been defeated in Afghanistan by a few thousand lightly armed
Taliban. It would be curtains for Washington to get into a conventional
war with China.
When China was a primitive third world country, it fought the US
military to a stalemate in Korea. Today China has the world’s second
largest economy and is rapidly overtaking the failing US economy
destroyed by jobs offshoring, bankster fraud, and corporate and
congressional treason.
The Pentagon’s war plan for China is called “AirSea Battle.” The plan
describes itself as “interoperable air and naval forces that can
execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and
defeat enemy anti-access area denial capabilities.”
Yes, what does that mean? It means many billions of dollars of more
profits for the military/security complex while the 99 percent are
ground under the boot. It is also clear that this nonsensical jargon
cannot defeat a Chinese army. But this kind of saber-rattling can lead
to war, and if the Washington morons get a war going, the only way
Washington can prevail is with nuclear weapons. The radiation, of
course, will kill Americans as well.
Nuclear war is on Washington’s agenda. The rise of the Neocon Nazis
has negated the nuclear disarmament agreements that Reagan and Gorbachev
made. The extraordinary, mainly truthful 2012 book, The Untold History
of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, describes the
post-Reagan breakout of preemptive nuclear attack as Washington’s first
option.
Democracy Now | A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.
A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.
The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
