War and Empire Links: September 2018

Another Coalition Strike On Yemen Civilian Bus Occurs The Same Day US Affirms It Stands By Saudis. zerohedge. Sep. 13, 2018.

America's Death Trail in Yemen, and the Importance of Showing Graphic Images of War. Walker Bragman, Paste Magazine. Aug. 24, 2018.

When We Commemorate The Tragedy of 9/11, Why Do We Ignore The Tragedy Of The Iraqi Women And Children We Killed Because Of It? Evert Cilliers, 3QD. Sep. 17, 2018.

When it comes to evil, nobody beats Hitler. He committed the biggest mass murder of innocent humans in all of history. 

Six million Jews, and that’s not even mentioning all the people who died because Hitler started the Second World War. 

But Hitler is not the only mass murderer in human history: there’s Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. 

And then there’s us. The people of America. 

Often given to calling America the greatest country on earth, we’ve had a very recent example in which we ourselves committed mass murder. President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cabinet of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others, persuaded our noble American nation to go to war against Iraq and mass-murder a million and a half innocent Iraqi women and children.

oh, yeah, and it was NOT, as Cilliers says

"our hysterical reaction to the terrorists killing over three-thousand of us on 9/11, a tragedy which we commemorated this past week."

No, it was, as per below, the plan all along, for which 9/11 was required as a pretext.

"A million and a half innocents. We bombed and shot them to smithereens."

A Diabolic False Flag Empire. A Review of David Ray Griffin's The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? Edward Curtin, Behind the Curtain. Sep. 4, 2018.

We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad. 

But, as Pinter said,

“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.” 

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world. 

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been “more malign that benign, more demonic than divine.” He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11th, while in this one – a prequel – he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a “false flag empire.” 

The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the false flag fulcrum upon which his two books pivot. Their importance cannot be overestimated, not just for their inherent cruelty that resulted in thousands of innocent American deaths, but since they became the justification for the United States’ ongoing murderous campaigns termed “the war on terror” that have brought death to millions of people around the world. An international array of expendable people.

...

And again, how many Americans are aware of this depraved proposal that is documented and easily available? How many even want to contemplate it? For the need to remain in denial of the facts of history and believe in the essential goodness of America’s rulers is a very hard nut to crack. Griffin has written a dozen books about 11 September 2001, trying to do exactly that. 

If one is willing to embrace historical facts, however, then this outstanding book will open one’s eyes to the long-standing demonic nature of the actions of America’s rulers. A reader cannot come away from its lucidly presented history unaffected, unless one lives in a self-imposed fantasy world. The record is clear, and Griffin lays it out in all its graphic horror.

Dupe Throat: Bob Woodward's Self-Parody. Patrick Blanchfield, n+1. Sep. 12, 2018.

It is a bleak fact of American life that a brilliant woman can publicly speak the devastating truth about a prominent man for decades without his success being affected much at all. Joan Didion had Bob Woodward’s number back in 1996. Writing in the New York Review of Books, she skewered the famous journalist and his “disinclination . . . to exert cognitive energy on what he is told.” Selling a sexily packaged “insider’s inside story,” Woodward, per Didion, did more than just spin a “crudely personalized,” Great Man narrative history of recent events: he offered his powerful subjects near limitless opportunities for comprehensive image rehabilitation. For all his self-proclaimed rigor and attention to detail, Woodward’s work was at core defined by its “deferential spirit”—a basic, transactional pact in which he would be allowed access as long as he maintained his unquestioning credulity.

In the twenty-two years since Didion’s diagnosis, Bob Woodward has gone on to write eleven further books, seven of them about contemporaneous presidencies. America’s turn to global war has been particularly good for Woodward, not least because the inside story of leaders in wartime makes for especially sexy copy—and since the reversals and tragedies of war itself mean politicians have added need for P.R. triage of the sort Woodward happily provides.

But if his four books on George W. Bush and two on Barack Obama were case studies in proving Didion’s point, Woodward’s latest, Fear: Inside the Trump White House, drives it home with almost excruciating feats of self-parody. It’s not just that Woodward’s self-consciously Serious approach to Serious People sputters and short-circuits when confronted with the ludicrously Unserious figure of Donald Trump himself (who, unlike previous Presidents, did not make himself available for Woodward to interview.) Rather, Fear showcases Woodward in his most abject and pathetic role as what Christopher Hitchens, who also saw him for what he was, called a “stenographer to power.” For page after dumbfounding page, Fear reproduces, with gobsmacking credulity, the self-aggrandizing narratives of factitious scoundrels. Didion was absolutely right to class Woodward’s work as fundamentally a kind of “political pornography.” But Fear is to Woodward’s previous oeuvre of political pornography what Fifty Shades of Grey is to Twilight: vampiric fan-fiction repackaged as middlebrow smut.