W.J. Astore
“Global” includes the “homeland” here in America
There’s an important point about America’s Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) that people often miss.
When the Bush/Cheney administration announced the GWOT after 9/11, I think nearly all Americans assumed that “global” meant everywhere but the “good” countries. That global meant the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) and similar so-called bad actors, but that it didn’t mean countries like Canada — and certainly not the U.S. homeland.
But global really did mean everywhere on earth as we’ve watched the war on terror escalate domestically. The U.S. government/security state has built the foundation and superstructure for a permanent war on terror, and it simply isn’t going to go away. The Iraq and Afghan wars are essentially over (both lost), and fears of North Korea have subsided as the military-industrial-congressional complex focuses on Ukraine, Russia, and China, but the GWOT continues. It’s now turned inwards, within and along our own borders, and those techniques that were practiced (if not perfected) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are now being used and inflicted upon ordinary Americans who are attempting to resist state-corporate authoritarianism.
The GWOT has come home — but perhaps it’s always been here. What’s changed is how state-corporate entities can define almost any form of determined protest—even civil and nonviolent ones—as “terror.” Labeling someone a “domestic terrorist” gives state-corporate actors a whole host of powerful ways to punish activists, notes by Michael Gould-Wartofsky at TomDispatch.com.
At the same time, America has witnessed the “rise of the warrior-cop,” as Radley Balko noted in his book by that title.
Three years ago, I wrote about the militarization of police forces at TomDispatch. This is what I wrote then:
America’s violent overseas wars, thriving for almost two decades despite their emptiness, their lack of meaning, have finally and truly come home. An impoverished empire, in which violence and disease are endemic, is collapsing before our eyes. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” America’s self-styled wartime president [Donald Trump] promised, channeling a racist Miami police chief from 1967. It was a declaration meant to turn any American who happened to be near a protest into a potential victim
As such demonstrations proliferate, Americans now face a grim prospect: the chance to be wounded or killed, then dismissed as “collateral damage.” In these years, that tried-and-false military euphemism has been applied so thoughtlessly to innumerable innocents who have suffered grievously from our unending foreign wars and now it’s coming home.
A few days ago, The Onion, a satirical news site, compared America’s obedience and passivity to power to the current situation in France. Here’s how they put it:
In an ongoing struggle against ruling-class oppression, the people of France again protested in a way that Americans are welcome to at any time, sources confirmed Thursday. According to reports, French citizens across the country were spotted hitting the streets en masse as a unified front against the institutional bondage that seeks to subjugate them while never failing to apply forceful pressure every time injustice strikes, which Americans can and should feel free to do whenever they so choose.
Yes, but are Americans truly “welcome” to protest “whenever they so choose”? We’d like to think so, especially as July 4th approaches (America! Land of the Free!), but who wants to be detained and thrown in jail for domestic terrorism? Anyone in America hankering to be labeled as a terrorist by the state, whether on the right or left of the political spectrum, even if the charge is eventually dismissed?
Remember those innocent days of the 1960s when for some the police were “pigs” and the protesters were “bums” (Richard Nixon’s word for the students killed at Kent State)? Now those protesters could be charged with domestic terrorism even as various heavily armed enforcers of the law would likely be celebrated (consider all those “blue lives matter” flags, for example).
Remember when “defund the police” was briefly a thing? By which people meant less funding for militarized police forces and more for mental health services and the like. President Joe Biden and the Democrats realized any serious effort to restrain police power would leave them open to charges of being soft on crime, so Biden and the party simply declared: Fund the police. (Republicans concur, of course, even as they still accuse Biden and the Dems of being soft on crime.)
And there you have it. Fund the police at all levels, local, state, and federal, and grant them the kind of powers given to America’s “warriors” in the GWOT. Set them loose on all of America’s domestic “terrorists.” After all, the GWOT went so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. Surely it will go equally well in the Homeland. Right?
Addendum: In writing this, I came across a superb article by Patricia McCormick at the Washington Post on Mary Ann Vecchio, “the girl in the Kent State photo.” She was just 14 when the above photo was taken. She paid a high price, as the article recounts. Letters to her family accused her of being a “drug addict,” a “tramp,” or a “communist.” The then-governor of Florida suggested she was a “professional agitator” and therefore responsible for the students’ deaths. A Gallup poll back then, cited by McCormick, said that 58% of Americans blamed the students at Kent State and only 11% blamed the National Guardsmen who opened fire and killed the four students.
“Professional agitator” sounds much like today’s domestic terrorist. And let’s reflect on those 58% of Americans who believed the students at Kent State were responsible for their own deaths. How dare they block the free flight of “Made in USA” bullets with their young bodies? The “bums”! (“Domestic terrorists.”)
Bracing Views 
Something like this?
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I was a Navy Medical Corps Battalion Surgeon for a Marine Corps Infantry battalion in Vietnam in
1970 when the Kent State antiwar demonstrations happened , dutifully if sketchily reported by the Armed Forces newspapers, creating an interesting dichotomous reaction between the career Marine officers and
senior enlisted “lifers”–and the younger Marine junior officers and enlisted draftees plus Navy Medics
who were loyal to each other and the Corps but increasingly skeptical of the whole war effort and hopeful
for a ceasefire and peace agreement. I was certainly one of those, and note that we were the ones in the most direct combat, mostly on 2-4 year active duty enlistments/commissions–though the senior Marine
Battalion Officers and NCOs were right out there with the troops, different I believe from many Army
Infantry units where Battalion-level officers and NCOs were REMFs…
Having coffee tomorrow with a former Army Infantry officer who was a young Lieutenant Forward Artillery Observer in the Dien ben Phu area during the 1968 Tet Offensive–his Unit was in constant combat for 3 months; he lost 90% of his unit wounded or killed– I met him when I was working at the VA (2009-2014)
and we became colleagues/friends , tried to initiate some improvements in the beleaguered VA system,
got nowhere with the Senate Oversight/ VA bureaucracy. He has however helped many disabled Vets navigate the overwhelming disability/compensation system–
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As an enlisted U.S. Navy veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-72) I can certainly appreciate the reference to REMFs. Back then as now, they proliferate in positions of power and zero accountability. Hence:
Return of the REMF
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)
Abroad, of course, the victims daily die
Abandoned by the ones who sealed their fate
From war and chaos refugees would fly
But having not the means they cringe and wait
And pray to prophets profiled in their books
To have it all end earlier than late
Before the very earth goes to the crooks
Who start these wars and leave the poor to fight
Then baldly brag: “It’s better than it looks.”
They’ve made of day an endless nasty night
Who would command although too blessed to serve
Descending on us like some locust blight
These vapid, vain vaqueros slip and swerve
To duck the fight for which they’ve not the nerve
As Dante’s dire De Born holds his own head
At arm’s length like a lantern by its hair
A stain of noise and lies begins to spread
Like smog that chokes the filthy city air
Which poets cannot breathe without a mask
In search of words with more effective flair
How can one answer that which none will ask?
The question of just why the madmen reign
So like the one unequal to his task
Who’s glib gesticulating gab profane
Divides and disunites the cheerless throng.
A heedless, headless, hollow, sleepy thane
Unable to accomplish missions wrong,
He stalls for time and just renames them “long.”
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006-2010
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The Planetary Plague of Profitable Peacock Pugilism, or:
A War on Very Bad
(From The Triumph of Strife: an homage to Dante Alighieri and Percy Shelley)
A “war” on “Very Bad” he once declared
This man who had in no war ever fought
So, not surprisingly, he badly fared
As nothing went the way he first had thought
The cowboy movies that he had imbibed
And Batman comic vengeance that he sought
Conspired to leave him curbed and circumscribed
As bats who hang in real caves upside down
See better blind than all the ones he bribed
To tell him “yes” and never make him frown
With facts and truth he wished to have no truck
His GAWD he said, had placed on him a crown
Which he believed left room to pass the buck
Forever “upward” to The Dumbest Cluck
For what Celestial Fowl would crow out loud
About anointing such an oblong egg
Its progeny and chicken spokesman proud?
To chirp cheap lies and every question beg
He pecks at straw men with red-herrings fished
From slander sewers dredged to their last dreg
For falsehoods “proving” any thing he wished
Ad hominem non-sequiturs refined
From dirt dug up and none of it undished
The soiling smear in which he soaked his mind
Left his defining deity defiled
As “wars” on “Very Bad” turn out unkind
With George’s bloody rhetoric, GAWD piled
His work in morgues upon which Satan smiled
Yes, George has told us that he got the word
To do the things he’s done from “up above”
Too bad the message somehow slipped and slurred
So that he thinks his hatefulness means love
And bombings of “bad weddings” prove he cares
That GAWD gave him the right to curse and shove
“Democracy” at anyone who dares
To hang himself if that’s the only way
To live his life and rule his own affairs
George says that GAWD gave him the right to slay
And throw in prison those that he dislikes
He’s learned this from some people in his pay
Who sanctify the targets that he strikes
And seethe at wedding vows for gays and dykes
The “war” on “Very Bad” can have no end
For by design its vague and nameless foe
Can never die or cease to rip and rend
Our peace of mind, no matter where we go
So we must fear what none of us can see
Much less defeat in years that we can know
And since we cannot possibly agree
The fools who foment controversy think
They’ve found a way to keep us never free
But always deep in debt to their red ink
And shouting matches meant to mask with noise
The “war” on “Very Bad” that leaves a stink
Which George the Worst has found that he enjoys
Because it lets him spend time with the boys
But vague and nebulous as all this seems
To those removed from war upon the ground
In real life where the dying ends the dreams
The victims of King George have heard the sound
Of calls to arms now motivated by
A loathing for him, depthless and profound,
And all that he purports to signify:
A worldwide epidemic of unease,
Revulsion and disgust at those who ply
The tacky trade of tyrants borne to ease
Who’ve given terror now at last a face,
Surrounded by a court that aims to please.
A once-great nation falters in its pace
And in its “war” on “bad” has won disgrace.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006-2010
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Most of us know what the old adage ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ means. We also know Power Corrupts!
Here is a prime example of Max Blumenthal Speaking Truth To Power in his recent speech to the United Nations Security Council on the US WAR with Russia over control of Ukraine. We need so many more people like him talking Truth to Power these days. THE DAY AFTER will be TOO LATE.
Just since this WAR began, Prime Minister Trudeau has committed Canadians and their Children’s Children to buy some $22,000,000,000 in new weaponry from the US Military-Industrial Complex with making a killing off this proxy WAR with Russia.
CanaDa is only 1 Country out of 31 US compliant NATO VASSAL States placing new military purchase orders with the US MIC waging WAR against 1 Country.
Having watched and studied the unfolding events that brought THIS World to the precipice of WWIII/Armageddon since the Kansas City Times was quoting me September 13, 1976, publishing these exact words in a collage, excerpted from the much larger revealing Picture only NOW unfolding in this much larger World these 2 Generations later.
“He came to town for the Republican National Convention and will stay until the election in November TO DO GOD’S BIDDING: To tell the World, from Kansas City, this country has been found wanting and its days are numbered […] He gestured toward a gleaming church dome. “The gold dome is the symbol of BABYLON,” he said.” […] He wanted to bring to the Public’s attention an “idea being put out subtly and deceptively” by the government that we have to get prepared for a War with Russia.”
That 1976 FUTURE is NOW with the Revelation of the details GENERALLY unfolding in the spirit of the letter.
I agree and see the same FACTS Max sees in SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER!
If only the scripted talking heads in the US/NATO MSM, now acting like a 5th Horseman of the Apocalypse, developed some Common Sense, Integrity and Courage like Max showed at The United Nations Security Council, there may still be hope for a World at Peace with Security.
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