Why United States Is the Fourth Reich. Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture. Sep. 27, 2017.
The “secret government” or the “deep state” of the US has been a law unto itself over the past seven decades. The election of Democrat or Republican politicians has no significant bearing on government policy. The shots are called by the CIA and the “deep state” who answer to the ruling elite of corporate power.
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Over the past seven decades, the US rulers have waged overt wars, coups, assassinations and proxy wars against dozens of countries around the world. The global death toll from this American destruction is estimated at 20 million people.
When US leaders extol “American exceptionalism” it is a euphemism for “supremacy” and the “right” to use military violence to further strategic interests. This is no different from the supremacist thinking that the Third Reich invoked to justify its conquest of others.
When Trump and his administration threaten to annihilate North Korea the mindset is not unprecedented. Almost every US leader since the Second World War has promulgated the same unilateral use of violence towards other nations deemed to be “enemy states”. What Trump represents is simply a more naked version of the same aggression.
The Killing of History. John Pilger, informationclearinghouse. Sep 21, 2017.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries.
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Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism.
Trump’s UN Speech. Paul Craig Roberts. Sep 19, 2017.
I listened to part of Trump’s UN speech this morning. I was so embarrassed for him and for my country that I had to turn it off.
I wonder if whoever wrote the deplorable speech intended to embarrass Trump and inadvertantly embarrassed America as well, or whether the speechwriter(s) is so imbued with the neoconservative arrogance and hubris of our time that the speechwriter was simply blind to the extraordinary contradictions that stood out like sore thumbs all through the speech.
I am not going to describe all of them, just a couple of examples.
Trump went on at great length about how America respects the sovereignty of every country and the people’s will of every country, and how the US, despite its overwhelming military power, never tries to impose its will on any country.
What was the administration thinking, or can it think? What about Yugoslavia/Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Crimea, Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, just to mention countries in the 21st century that have been subjected to US military attacks, government overthrows, and removals of political leaders who did not conform to US interests?
Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to force them to support US sanctions against Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela? Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to impose sanctions on the countries? If this is not imposing Washington’s will on other countries, what is?
Is it respect for other countries to inform them that unless they do as they are told, “we will bomb you into the stone age”?
I heard Trump complain that the UN Human Rights commission had as members countries with the worst human rights records of our time, and I wondered if he was talking about the United States. Clearly, Trump, the speechwriter(s), the State Department, the National Security Council, the US Ambassador to the UN, indeed the entire administration, do not think that the endless slaughter, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dispossessing of millions of peoples in many countries, producing waves of refugees, comprise human rights violations.
The arrogance conveyed by Trump’s speech is unprecedented.
After assurances that America respects everyone, Trump then made demand after demand and threat after threat against the sovereignty of Iran and North Korea, demanding that the rest of the world back him up.
Neither country is a threat to the US. Unlike the US and Israel, Korea has not been at war since 1953. Iran’s last war was in the 1980s when Iran was attacked by Iraq. Yet both North Korea and Iran are subjected to constant threats from the US. At the UN Trump threatened North Korea with destruction, and Washington is telling more lies about Iran in order to justify military action.
Here is what former Secretary of State Colin Powell says about how carefully Washington thinks about other peoples:
“We thought we knew what would happen in Libya. We thought we knew what would happen in Egypt. We thought we knew what would happen in Iraq, and we guessed wrong. In each one of these countries the thing we have to consider is that there is some structure that’s holding the society together. And as we learned, especially in Libya, when you remove the top and the whole thing falls apart . . . you get chaos.”
That’s what Washington does. It brings chaos to tens of millions of peoples, destroying their lives and the prospects of their countries. This is the behavior that Trump described as American compassion for others. This is what Trump says is respecting others and the sovereignty of their countries. Washington dresses up its crimes against humanity as a “war on terror.” The tens of millions of slaughtered, maimed, and displaced persons are merely “collateral damage.”
Listening to The Donald at the UN. The Saker. Sep 19, 2017.
My only explanation for why this kind of nonsensical drivel was included in this speech is that it has become part of the ritual of typical American “patriotic liturgy”: big hyperbolic sentences which mean nothing, which nobody takes seriously or even listens to, but who have to be included “because they have to”.
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What we see here is undeniable evidence that far from being “real warriors” or “strategists” the military gang around Trump (Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, etc.) are either primitive grunts or folks who owe their rank to political protection. Why do I say that? Because none of what Trump describes as a “strategy for victory” is, in fact, a strategy. In fact, the US has not had anything remotely resembling a strategy in Afghanistan for years already. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be laughable, really. What we really see here is the total absence of any strategy and, again, a total reliance on magical thinking.
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[Sidebar: When my wife and I watched this pathetic speech we starting laughing about the fact that Trump was so obscenely bad that we (almost) begin to miss Obama. This is a standing joke in our family because when Obama came to power we (almost) began to miss Dubya. The reason why this is a joke is that when Duya came to power we decided that there is no way anybody could possibly be worse than him. Oh boy were we wrong! Right now I am still not at the point were I would be missing Obama (that is asking for a lot from me!), but I will unapologetically admit that I am missing Dubya. I do. I really do. Maybe not the people around Dubya, he is the one who truly let the Neocon “crazies in the basement” creep out and occupy the Situation Room, but at least Dubya seemed to realize how utterly incompetent he was. Furthermore, Dubya was a heck of a lot dumber than Obama (in this context being stupid is a mitigating factor) and he sure did not have the truly galactic arrogance of Trump (intelligence-wise they are probably on par)].
In conclusion, what I take away from this speech is a sense of relief for the rest of the planet and a sense of real worry for the USA. Ever since the Neocons overthrew Trump and made him what is colloquially referred to as their “bitch” the US foreign policy has come to a virtual standstill. Sure, the Americans talk a lot, but at least they are doing nothing. That paralysis, which is a direct consequence of the internal infighting, is a blessing for the rest of the planet because it allows everybody else to get things done. Because, and make no mistake here, if the USA cannot get anything constructive done any more, they retain a huge capability to disrupt, subvert, create chaos and the like. But for as long as the USA remains paralyzed this destructive potential remains mostly unused (and no matter how bad things look now, Hillary President would have been infinitely worse!).
Unmasked: Trump Doctrine vows carnage for new axis of evil. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Sep 20, 2017.
"North Korea, Iran, Venezuela are targets in "compassionate" America's war on the "wicked few." It's almost as though Washington felt its hegemony threatened."
Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against Forever War? By Maj. Danny Sjursen, The American Conservative. Sep 19, 2017.
Christmas, 1914: Nearly a million men are already dead, and the war is barely four months old. Suddenly, and ultimately in unison, the opposing German and British troops begin singing Christmas carols. At first light, German troops emerge unarmed from their trenches, and walk out into “no-man’s land.” Despite fearing a ruse, the Brits eventually joined their sworn enemies in the churned earth between the trench lines. Carols were sung, gifts of cigarettes exchanged—one man even brought out a decorative tree. It only happened once. Though the bloody, senseless war raged across three more Christmases, the officers on each side quashed future attempts at a holiday truce. And yet, for that brief moment, in the ugliest of circumstances, the common humanity of Brits and Germans triumphed. It must have been beautiful.
Ultimately, nearly ten million men would die in battle. For all that, little was settled. It rarely is. The ruling classes still ruled, the profiteers profited, and Europe went to war again not twenty years later. So it went, and so it goes.
Nonetheless, World War I boasted countless skeptics and anti-war activists both in and out of uniform. Their poetry and prose was dark, but oh was it ever powerful. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen from the Brits; Erich Maria Remarque for the stoic Germans; and our own Ernest Hemingway. A lost generation, which sacrificed so much more than youth: their innocence. They call to us, these long dead dissenters, from the grave.
They might ask: Where are today’s skeptical veterans? Tragically, silence is our only ready response.
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Under the circumstances, perhaps silence is understandable. But it is also complicity.
By now, the wars are lost, if ever they were winnable. Iraq will fracture, Syria collapse, and Afghanistan wallow in perpetual chaos. It will be so. The people will forget. Our professional, corporate regiments will, undoubtedly, add banners to their battle flags—sober reminders of a job well done in yet another lost cause. Soldiers will toast to lost comrades, add verses to their ballads, and precious few will ask why.
How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency. Moon of Alabama. Sep 18, 2017.
Trial and Terror. The Intercept. Sep 21, 2017.
The U.S. government has prosecuted 810 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never even got close to committing an act of violence.
Happy Birthday CIA: 7 Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years. Carey Wedler, Anti-Media. Sep 18, 2017.
It’s Time For Everyone — Left, Right And Center — To Admit They Were Lied To About Trump. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Sep. 16, 2017.
as I said in my last article, Trump’s most evil actions have not been those which are unique to Republicans. His replacing Scalia with an ideological clone of Scalia or pulling out of the worthless Paris agreement pale in comparison to the suffering and slaughter caused by his continuation and expansion of Obama’s bloodthirsty neoconservative foreign policy, which was itself a continuation and expansion of Bush’s bloodthirsty neoconservative foreign policy. He’s expanding the same Orwellian surveillance state Bush and Obama worked to expand, he’s facilitating the economic injustice which enables the plutocratic class to rule America, and he’s on track to have dropped more bombs in his first year in office than Obama dropped in his last. People should be worried far less about Trump’s similarities to Adolf Hitler than his similarities to George W. Bush.
"The Vietnam War" - Documentary Or Epic Of Fiction?. Moon of Alabama. Sep 20, 2017.
Arte TV yesterday showed the first parts of The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It also runs on PBS.
The first three parts of the ten part "documentary" are a whitewash of the motives of the politicians who sold the war to the public. The CIA's and military "deep state" machinations behind them is not investigated but covered up.
A comment in the first episode declares that it was a "civil war" of Vietnamese against Vietnamese. That is ahistoric nonsense. ...
Never Forget: The US Government Has A Known History Of Using False Flags. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Sep. 10, 2017.
mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.
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This is why we’ve been seeing increasingly blatant panic from existing power structures about alternative media. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. It is only by general societal consensus that power exists where it exists, that money works the way it works, etc. At any time the public could stop honoring existing power structures and create an entirely different model for itself, deciding to distribute resources and allocate responsibilities in a way that benefits more people more efficaciously than the current paradigm. It is only by their ability to manipulate and control the mainstream narrative that powerful people have been able to keep this from happening.
If the power elites didn’t need the consent of the public to rule, they wouldn’t have to lie constantly about their reasons for war. The public would never consent to military interventions if politicians were allowed to appear on CNN and say “Yeah well America has become a stronghold for the most powerful plutocracy in the history of civilization and it needs to maintain its status as the world’s only superpower in order to protect the investments of that plutocracy. This is why we have to keep knocking the pillars of support out from underneath Russia and China, and why I get millions in re-election campaign donations.”
My more pessimistic readers won’t like hearing this, but the reality is that Americans are basically good people who generally want what’s best for the world. If they weren’t, the unelected power establishment which rules over them wouldn’t have to keep making up lies about babies in incubators and protecting their family from Weapons of Mass Destruction in order to secure US hegemony. If they ever told the public the truth, they’d be dealing with hundreds of millions of heavily-armed Americans telling them to get their sociopathic asses out of here.
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What this means is that those of us who want what’s best for America and the world instead of endless war and economic oppression are necessarily locked in a media war with the plutocracy and its cronies.
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There is no reason to believe anything these lying sociopaths say, especially not about something that has served such a crucial role in their openly stated agenda to ensure US dominance over the world using its military and economic might. When you’ve got the extremely influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century saying in September of 2000 that it would require “a new Pearl Harbor” to advance this agenda, and then getting exactly that one year later in an American tragedy which was used to manufacture support for greatly expanded US military interventionism, there’s no good reason to take all that in with a trusting “Yeah, that sounds legit.”
The Anti-Empire Report #151. William Blum. Sep 26, 2017.
There was a country called Libya. It had the highest standard of living in all of Africa; its people had not only free education and health care but all kinds of other benefits that other Africans could only dream about. It was also a secular state, a quality to be cherished in Africa and the Middle East. But Moammar Gaddafi of Libya was never a properly obedient client of Washington. Amongst other shortcomings, the man threatened to replace the US dollar with gold for payment of oil transactions, create a common African currency, and was a strong supporter of the Palestinians and foe of Israel.
In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the prime moving force behind the United States and NATO turning Libya into a failed state, where it remains today.
The attack against Libya was one that the New York Times said Clinton had “championed”, convincing President Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as Secretary of State.” 5 The people of Libya were bombed almost daily for more than six months. The main excuse given was that Gaddafi was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so the United States and NATO were thus saving the people of that city from a massacre. The American people and the American media of course swallowed this story, though no convincing evidence of the alleged impending massacre has ever been presented. The nearest thing to an official US government account of the matter – a Congressional Research Service report on events in Libya for the period – makes no mention at all of the threatened massacre. 6
The US/NATO heavy bombing sent Libya crashing in utter chaos, leading to the widespread dispersal throughout North African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of weaponry that Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of terrorists. He had declared Libya as a barrier to terrorists, as well as African refugees, going to Europe. 7 The bombing has contributed greatly to the area’s mammoth refugee crisis.
Why Won't American Media Tell the Truth About What's Happening in Venezuela? Justin Podur, Alternate. Sep 7, 2017.
A right-wing insurgency, with the United States' backing, threatens a fragile democracy.
The Rohingya refugee crisis and the problem of objectivity. Gearóid Ó Colmáin. Sep 14, 2017.
Human rights agencies financed by the US State-Department and Saudi Arabia, such as Human Rights Watch have blamed all of the violence on the Tatmadaw. As Burmese expert Rick Heizman. has shown, Human Rights Watch have published images of Buddhists fleeing Bengali terrorists, including an image of a Buddhist man being beaten to death by Muslims, and claimed that Rakhine Buddhists were responsible for the attacks. Heizman has called this deliberate disinformation and intends to supply the evidence to the International Criminal Court and pursue Human Rights Watch for crimes against humanity.
In previous articles I have explained the reasons for the media war on Myanmar and the complex ethnic, religious, historical and geo-poltical forces fueling the violence. No researcher – not even the Burmese government- claims that all of the violence is coming from one side. But all the mainstream media and most alternative media sources blame the Myanmar government and ‘fascist, racist Buddhist monks’. I have contested that consensus for the last two years as being a crash oversimplication of a complex ethno-religious conflict and will continue to do so.
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When I was in Syria late March 2011, just two weeks after the first attack by Islamists killed several police and civilians, I spoke to many really amiable anti-Assad people. Some of them were in the Muslim Brotherhood. I had dinner with them. They were extremely friendly. They told me things, lots of things. I heard stories about the ‘Shabiha’- government militia etc, about the lack of freedom in the country; about how countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia would be better. I listened and noted what they said. Then I had dinner with pro-Assad people. They were extremely friendly and amiable too. I listened to them. They told another story. When I had spoken to people from all sides, I looked at the wider picture, the global powers involved and the reasons for their hostility to Syria and the history of their destabilisation techniques. It was easier for me to contextualise what was happening as I had read many US foreign policy research papers and understood what the goal of Zionism was in the Middle East. I had also been writing about the war in Libya and had studied the build up to the French bombing of Ivory Coast the year before. When you study NATO or Western-led wars closely, you begin to see patterns and motifs that recur like movements in a symphony. Many people were fooled by the Arab Spring because they had not researched the history of US democratisation programmes. Although the US government confirmed that they organised the protest movements, many activists still repeat the slogans and memes diffused by the US agencies. The US empire is not omnipotent but many of its strategists have a higher IQ than their leftist critics.
The mass media regularly publish horror stories from ‘Syrian refugees’ about Assad’s alleged crimes. Yet they never interview people who support him and who have been protected by the Syrian army from Western-backed terrorists. There are millions of such people. Why are they never heard? Did your reporters investigate the pro-government protests which have taken place in Myanmar denouncing the Bengali terrorists and their human rights lobbying groups? Have you looked into all the examples of fake news, photoshopping etc?
The beginning of the war on Syria was very like the one in Myanmar now.
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