There is a famine of peace in the world today. I came across that phrase, “famine of peace,” in an article in the New Yorker that reported on a papal envoy sent to advocate for a truce and diplomacy to President Joe Biden. Biden, a practicing Catholic, gave the envoy a hearing, but as yet I’ve heard no change from the White House with respect to sending more weapons to Ukraine and maximum support for the war effort.
Pope Francis, working for peace, is exactly what I’d expect from Christ’s representative here on earth. Indeed, it is what I’d expect from all Christians everywhere. Yet we continue to have a glut of war in the world, with plenty of war pigs feeding at the trough.
Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi brought a message of peace to President Biden.
I’m a lapsed Catholic, but I have nothing but respect when the Church does its best to embody, obey, and manifest Christ’s two commandments: love God, love thy neighbor. Being faithful to these commandments is everything for Christians.
War is a terrible sin that enables and empowers so many other sins. Meanwhile, a famine of peace and a glut of war means terrible suffering for the world’s most vulnerable. War is thus to be avoided or averted under nearly all circumstances; indeed, Christ implored us to turn the other cheek when we are struck.
I’ve read enough “just war” theory to see how almost any war can be twisted as “defensive” and “necessary.” And I believe in rare circumstances the evil of war may be necessary to stop or prevent even worse evils, e.g. World War II put a stop to Nazi domination and the enslavement and massacre of millions of people, most especially Jews and gypsies, among other “undesirables” and “lesser humans” according to Nazi ideology.
The Pope in those days, Pius XII, did not speak forcibly enough to condemn the crimes of the Nazis. In Francis it is good to have a pope who’s willing to speak of today’s famine of peace. All Christians everywhere should look within to consider why peace is dying and war is thriving. Under these conditions, if we fail to act, do we dare even call ourselves “Christian”?
Time for Glasnost, Perestroika, and a New Generation of Leaders in America
A year ago, I asked whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump were too old to serve as president. Recently, concerns about advanced age and failing health have come to the fore in Congress. Senator Diane Feinstein, 90 years old, recently had to be told by her aides to vote “aye.” Senator Mitch McConnell, 81 years old, recently froze mid-sentence at a press conference; he may have suffered a mini-stroke, possibly related to a bad fall he had previously that resulted in a concussion. Meanwhile, concerns about President Biden’s age and declining health are being openly aired even among Democrats, with Hillary Clinton opining that Joe’s age is a legitimate campaign issue. At the young age of 75, is she angling to ride to the rescue in the 2024 election?
Glenn Greenwald did a long segment on Washington’s gerontocracy that is well worth watching. A point he made is one that I echoed in my article from a year ago. Back in the 1970s, the U.S. pointed to an alleged gerontocracy in the Soviet Union to criticize the hidebound nature of the Communist party there and the way its leaders were holding back much-needed reforms.
Americans made fun of “old” Soviet leaders of the 1970s and early 1980s. They were younger than Biden, Trump, Feinstein, McConnell, and the U.S. gerontocracy of today
The same, of course, is now true of the U.S. empire and its uniparty of Republican and Democrat enablers. An American gerontocracy with a near-death grip on power are holding back much-needed reforms here, especially reductions to the enormous sums of money being spent on weapons and warfare by the federal government.
Much like the former Soviet Union, the United States is a declining empire that’s been debilitated by constant and unnecessary wars and wanton spending on weaponry. Fresh thinking is needed. Remember glasnost and perestroika? Openness and restructuring? They were ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, who at age 54 was relatively young when he assumed the reins of power in the USSR.
I still remember when Americans made fun of “old guard” Soviet leaders and used words like “sclerotic” to describe them. They were a visible symbol of Soviet tiredness and decline, the refuse of the past when compared to a younger, more vigorous, United States with its dominant and thrusting world economy.
Who’s laughing now?
Surely, America needs a new generation of leaders who are willing to fight for glasnost (much greater openness and transparency in government) and perestroika (a restructuring of government away from imperialism, weapons, and war). The collapse of the Soviet Union should teach us something about the fate of sclerotic empires that refuse to change.
Reason and Rationality Have Little to Do with Them
It is often hard to understand the reasons for America’s wars, especially since World War II, but they always have a rationale backed up by lies. The rationale for Vietnam was the containment of communism and the domino theory. The lie was that U.S. naval ships had been attacked at Tonkin Gulf. The rationale for Iraq was overthrowing a ruthless dictator and spreading “freedom.” The lie was that he had WMD and that he was somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks.
Nations and peoples are not dominoes
The real reasons for America’s many disastrous wars are opaque. Domestic politics are almost always paramount. No U.S. president wants to be accused of losing a war or appearing to be weak, so starting or continuing a war is considered as “strength.” Congress doesn’t want to be accused of “tying the hands of the president” or of “betraying the troops,” so most members happily go along with wars. The military, of course, always thinks it can win, and wars are good for promotions and power. And military contractors, the “merchants of death,” are even more happy to make money off war. Not surprisingly, perhaps, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961 warned America of the military-industrial complex, to which Ike had added Congress in an earlier draft. Ike’s warning has been largely forgotten; even his own monument in DC obscures it.
In Washington today, the Democrats accuse the Republicans of being weak on Russia; the Republicans return the favor by accusing the Biden administration of being weak on China. Military and industry are happy to play this blame game, knowing the Pentagon budget will soar as a result, as it has. And thus a dangerous “new cold war” appears to be a certainty.
The folly and fallaciousness of America’s wars, along with their carnage, are enough to make any rational human angry, especially one who has served in one of these wars. Mike Murry, a Vietnam War veteran, is angry, and so am I. Back in 2017, I wrote a piece on the atrociousness of the Vietnam War, to which Mr. Murry appended this comment. It merits consideration by all thinking Americans.
The ”Rationale” of America’s Wars. Comment by Mike Murry in 2017.
An excellent choice of words, “rationale.” Not the reason for doing something in the first place, but a conscious lie made up beforehand just to get things started, or an excuse invented afterwards to avoid accountability and, where required, the necessary punishment that true justice occasionally administers. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler once said that we have only two acceptable reasons for going to war: to defend our homes or defend the Constitution. In not a single case after World War II has either of these conditions applied, so that none of the pointless and ruinous fighting — I won’t dignify these Presidential/Career Military misadventures by calling them “war” — has had any justifiable reason or purpose. Not surprisingly, no Congress has declared war on another nation state since 1941 because no nation state on planet earth has attacked either American homes or America’s Constitution. The United States has not just “gone abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” as our sixth President, John Quincy Adams, warned us against foolishly doing, but has invented imaginary hobgoblins at home before even setting out to vanquish them on the far side of the globe.
Of course, Smedley Butler only made his remarks after serving for thirty years as an admitted “gangster for capitalism,” probably the best summary description of the U.S. military offered to date by one who ought to know. Today, as for the past seventy-plus years, the U.S. military simply fights — aimlessly and disastrously — for the sake of fighting. The fighting has no “reason” other than to provide a steady stream of outrageous corporate CEO bonuses, stockholder dividends, and the pensions and perquisites of retired senior military officers. This Warfare Welfare and Make-work Militarism has secondary beneficiaries, of course, most notably the hothouse orchids, special snowflakes and privileged peacock pugilists known as United States as “political leaders.” Naturally, the feeding and maintenance of this system of corrupt cronyism requires a death grip on over half the nation’s discretionary budget. As George Orwell wrote in “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” (the book-within-a-book from 1984):
“The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”
In other words, the entire U.S. military/security monstrosity — which I like to call the Lunatic Leviathan — has only one purpose: to suck the life out of the domestic economy so that the productivity of the people’s labor will not result in the betterment of their station in life, which might in due course result in the discarding of America’s useless parasitic economic and political “elites.” Any transparent euphemism designed and deployed to disguise this ugly, fundamental truth properly deserves the label “rationale.” In no way do the usual and time-dishonored obfuscations amount to a reason. Reason has fled the United States, replaced by a deserved and rancid Ridicule. The country now consumes itself, lost in its own vicarious fears and fantasies featuring the celluloid exploits of our vaunted Visigoths vanquishing visions of vultures somewhere, someplace, at some time, until … eventually … after some “progress” and “fragile gains” … as T.S. Eliot wrote of The Hollow Men:
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Men and women so hollow that you can hear their own bullshit echoing in them even before they start moving their jaws and flapping their lips to begin lying.
A blast from my past, vintage 2009, with a postscript
Back in 2009, when President Barack Obama was debating a new “surge” in Afghanistan, I wrote an article for TomDispatch that urged him to reconsider, citing the words of Norman Mailer that he applied against the Vietnam War. Naturally, my article had no impact whatsoever on policy, though it was picked up by many outlets, including Salon. I was checking something else today at Salon and came across my old piece. I hope you enjoy reading (or re-reading) it.
This was that rare article I wrote that was actually excerpted at the New York Times. My article is mentioned at the end if you follow this link.
After this piece appeared, I had an opportunity to write a chapter for a book on “Star Wars and History.” Through the grapevine I heard George Lucas wasn’t too sure he wanted a retired military officer to write for a book in his “Star Wars” universe until he heard I’d recommended Norman Mailer (or someone like him) for Secretary of Defense. That seemed to persuade Lucas that my contribution might be acceptable.
POSTSCRIPT: In retrospect, I got one big thing right and one wrong here. I was right: the Afghan surge was doomed to fail. But what I didn’t realize was that its failure didn’t matter. What mattered was that Obama showed his obedience to Washington rules. He showed he’d largely defer to the Pentagon and the generals. His deference, his willingness to play the game rather than trying to end it, probably ensured his second term as president.
Yes, the surge was a failure, and the Afghan War would last another 12 years. But Obama easily won a 2nd term by showing he could wage war just like his predecessors, Bush/Cheney.
So, how was Joe Biden finally able to end the Afghan War in 2021? Two reasons. He could blame the Trump administration for putting him in an untenable position, and he could neutralize Pentagon opposition by giving them even more money even as he pulled troops from Afghanistan. Instead of the Pentagon budget decreasing by roughly $50 billion, the yearly cost of the Afghan War, it increased by that amount even as that war finally crashed and burned. There was never, ever, any talk of peace dividends, and once Russia invaded Ukraine early in 2022, vast increases in U.S. and NATO military spending were guaranteed. And so today’s Pentagon budget soars toward $900 billion, which doesn’t even include aid to Ukraine.
If Biden wins a 2nd term in 2024, it may be largely because he’s shown himself to be a slavish servant of the military-industrial-congressional complex and the national security state.
Anyhow, from October of 2009:
Norman Mailer for secretary of defense
On Afghanistan, Obama needs the input of freethinking outsiders, not generals. What if LBJ had listened to Mailer?
Author Norman Mailer speaks at an anti-war rally at the bandshell in New York’s Central Park, March 26, 1966.
It’s early in 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson faces a critical decision. Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say “yes” to the request from U.S. commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, downsize the American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would help him focus on his top domestic priority, “The Great Society” he hopes to build?
We all know what happened. LBJ listened to the generals and foreign policy experts and escalated, with tragic consequences for the United States and calamitous results for the Vietnamese people on the receiving end of American firepower. Drawn deeper and deeper into Vietnam, LBJ would soon lose his way and eventually his will, refusing to run for reelection in 1968.
President Obama now stands at the edge of a similar precipice. Should he acquiesce to General Stanley A. McChrystal’s call for 40,000 to 60,000 or more U.S. troops for Afghanistan? Or should he pursue a new strategy, downsizing our commitment, even withdrawing completely, a decision that would help him focus on national healthcare, among his other top domestic priorities?
The die, I fear, is cast. In his “war of necessity,” Obama has evidently already ruled out even considering a “reduction” option, no less a withdrawal one, and will likely settle on an “escalate lite” program involving more troops (though not as many as McChrystal has urged), more American trainers for the Afghan army, and even a further escalation of the drone war over the Pakistani borderlands and new special operations actions.
By failing his first big test as commander-in-chief this way, Obama will likely ensure himself a one-term presidency, and someday be seen as a man like LBJ whose biggest dreams broke upon the shoals of an unwinnable war.
The conventional wisdom: Military escalation
To whom, we may ask, is Obama listening as he makes his decision on Afghanistan strategy and troop levels? Not the skeptics, it’s safe to assume. Not the freethinkers, not today’s equivalents of Mary McCarthy or Norman Mailer. Instead, he’s doubtless listening to the generals and admirals, or the former generals and admirals who now occupy prominent “civilian” positions at the White House and inside the beltway.
By his actions, Obama has embraced the seemingly sober conventional wisdom that senior military officers, whether on active duty or retired, have, as they say in the corridors of the Pentagon, “subject matter expertise” when it comes to strategy, war, even foreign policy.
Don’t we know better than this? Don’t we know, as Glenn Greenwald recently reminded us, that General McChrystal’s strategic review was penned by a “war-loving foreign policy community,” in which the usual suspects — “the Kagans, a Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand” — were rounded up to argue for more troops and more war?
Don’t we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded us, that Obama’s “civilian” advisors include “Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the president’s special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the “war czar” when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency”? Are we surprised, then, that when we “turn crucial war decisions over to the military, [we] functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well”? And that they, in turn, always opt for more troops, more money and more war?
One person unsurprised by this state of affairs would have been Norman Mailer, who died in 2007. War veteran, famed author of the war novel “The Naked and the Dead” (1948) as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning report on Vietnam-era protests, “The Armies of the Night” (1968), self-styled tough guy who didn’t dance, Mailer witnessed (and dissected) the Vietnam analog to today’s Afghan events. Back in 1965, Mailer bluntly stated that the best U.S. option was “to get out of Asia.” Period.
The unconventional wisdom: Military extrication
Can Obama find the courage and wisdom to extricate our troops from Afghanistan? Courtesy of Norman Mailer, here are three unconventional pointers that should be driving him in this direction:
1. Don’t fight a war, and clearly don’t escalate a war, in a place that means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: “Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America.”
2. Beware of cascading dominoes and misleading metaphors, whether in Southeast Asia or anywhere else. The domino theory held that if Vietnam, then split into north and south, was united under communism, other Asian countries, including Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps even India, would inevitably fall to communism as well, just like so many dominoes toppling. Instead, it was communism that fell or, alternately, morphed into a version that we could do business with (to paraphrase former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher).
We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today’s Af-Pak theater of operations. Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly misleading image: If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely follow, opening a nuclear Pandora’s box to anti-American terrorists in which, in our fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom clouds.
Despite the fevered talk of falling dominoes in his era, Mailer was unmoved. Such rhetoric suggests, he wrote in 1965, “that we are not protecting a position of connected bastions so much as we are trying to conceal the fact that the bastions are about gone — they are not dominoes, but sand castles, and a tide of nationalism is on the way in. It is curious foreign policy to use metaphors in defense of a war; when the metaphors are imprecise, it is a swindle.”
To this I’d add that, in viewing countries and peoples as so many dominoes, which by the actions — or the inaction — of the United States are either set up or knocked down, we vastly exaggerate our own agency and emphasize our sense of self-importance. And before we even start in on the inevitable argument about “Who lost Afghanistan?” or “Who lost Pakistan?” is it too obvious to say that never for a moment did we own these countries and peoples?
3. Carrots and sticks may work together to move a stubborn horse, but not a proud people determined to find their own path. As Mailer put it, with a different twist: “Bombing a country at the same time you are offering it aid is as morally repulsive as beating up a kid in an alley and stopping to ask for a kiss.”
As our Predator and Reaper drones scan the Afghan terrain below, launching missiles to decapitate terrorists while unintentionally taking innocents with them, we console ourselves by offering aid to the Afghans to help them improve or rebuild their country. As it happens, though, when the enemy hydra loses a head, another simply grows in its place, while collateral damage only leads to a new generation of vengeance-seekers. Meanwhile, promised aid gets funneled to multinational corporations or siphoned off by corrupt government officials, leaving little for Afghan peasants, certainly not enough to win their allegiance, let alone their “hearts and minds.”
If we continue to speak with bombs while greasing palms with dollars, we’ll get nothing more than a few bangs for our $228 billion (and counting).
What if LBJ had listened to Mailer in ’65?
Not long before LBJ crossed his Rubicon and backed escalation in Vietnam, he could have decided to pull out. Said Mailer:
The image had been prepared for our departure — we heard of nothing but the corruption of the South Vietnam government and the professional cowardice of the South Vietnamese generals. We read how a Viet Cong army of 40,000 soldiers was whipping a government army of 400,000. We were told in our own newspapers how the Viet Cong armed themselves with American weapons brought to them by deserters or captured in battle with government troops; we knew it was an empty war for our side.
Substitute “the Hamid Karzai government” for “the South Vietnam government” and “Taliban” for “Viet Cong” and the same passage could almost have been written yesterday about Afghanistan. We know the Karzai government is corrupt, that it stole the vote in the last election, that the Afghan army is largely a figment of Washington’s imagination, that its troops sell their American-made weapons to the enemy. But why do our leaders once again fail to see, as Mailer saw with Vietnam, that this, too, is a recognizably “empty war for our side”?
Mailer experienced the relentless self-regard and strategic obtuseness of Washington as a mystery, but that didn’t stop him from condemning President Johnson’s decision to escalate in Vietnam. For Mailer, LBJ was revealed as “a man driven by need, a gambler who fears that once he stops, once he pulls out of the game, his heart will rupture from tension.” Johnson, like nearly all Americans, Mailer concluded, was a member of a minority group, defined not in racial or ethnic terms but in terms of “alienat[ion] from the self by a double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands action and more action to define the most rudimentary borders of identity.”
This American drive for self-definition through constant action, through headlong acceleration, even through military escalation, the novelist described, in something of a mixed metaphor, as “the swamps of a plague” in which Americans had been caught and continued to sink. He saw relief of the desperate condition coming only via “the massacre of strange people.”
To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of Mailer’s analysis here, more emotionally “Heart of Darkness” than coolly rational. But that’s precisely why I want someone Mailer-esque — pugnacious, free-swinging, and prophetical, provocative and profane — advising our president. Right now.
As Obama’s military experts wield their battlefield metrics and call for more force (to be used, of course, with ever greater precision and dexterity), I think Mailer might have replied: We think the only thing they understand is force. What if the only thing we understand is force?
Mailer, I have no doubt, would have had the courage to be seen as “weak” on defense, because he would have known that Americans had no dog in this particular fight. I think he would intuitively have recognized the wisdom of the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years ago in “The Art of War” that “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Our generals, by way of contrast, seem to want to fight those 100 battles with little hope of actually subduing the enemy.
What Obama needs, in other words, is fewer generals and ex-generals and more Norman Mailers — more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying inside the pentagonal box that holds Washington’s thinking tight. What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war emanating from the military and foreign policy “experts” around him, so he can hear the voices of today’s Mailers, of today’s tough-minded dissenters. Were he to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ’s biggest blunder — and so avoid suffering his political fate as well.
Four days ago, I got a story in my New York Times email feed on “A Turning Point in Military Spending.” The article celebrated the greater willingness of NATO members as well as countries like Japan to spend more on military weaponry, which, according to the “liberal” NYT, will help to preserve democracy. Interestingly, even as NATO members have started to spend more, the Pentagon is still demanding yet higher budgets, abetted by Congress. I thought if NATO spent more, the USA could finally spend less?
No matter. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the hyping of what used to be called the “Yellow Peril,” today read “China,” is ensuring record military spending in the USA as yearly Pentagon budgets approach $900 billion. That figure does not include the roughly $120 billion or more in aid already provided to Ukraine in its war with Russia. And since the Biden administration’s commitment to Ukraine remains open-ended, you can add scores of billion more to that sum if the war persists into the fall and winter.
Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times piece that I found especially humorous in a grim way:
[Admittedly,] The additional money that countries spend on defense is money they cannot spend on roads, child care, cancer research, refugee resettlement, public parks or clean energy, my colleague Patricia points out. One reason Macron has insisted on raising France’s retirement age despite widespread protests, analysts believe, is a need to leave more money for the military.
But the situation [in Europe of spending more on butter than guns] over the past few decades feels unsustainable. Some of the world’s richest countries were able to spend so much on social programs partly because another country — the U.S. — was paying for their defense. Those other countries, sensing a more threatening world, are now once again promising to pull their weight. They still need to demonstrate that they’ll follow through this time.
Yes, Europe could continue to invest in better roads, cleaner energy, and the like, but now it’s time to buckle down and build more weapons. Stop freeloading, Europe! Dammit, “pull your weight”! You’ve had better and cheaper health care than Americans, stellar educational systems, child care benefits galore, all sorts of social programs we Americans can only dream of, but that’s because we’ve been paying for it! Captain America’s shield has been protecting you on the cheap! Time to pay up, you Germans, you French, you Italians, and especially you cheap Spaniards.
Look at all those cheap Spaniards. They have good stuff because of Captain America. Freeloaders! (NYT Chart, 7/12/23)
As the NYT article says: NATO allies need to “follow through this time” on strengthening their militaries. Because strong militaries produce democracy. And European “investments” in arms will ensure more equitable burden sharing in funding stronger cages and higher barriers to deter a rampaging Russian bear.
Again, you Americans out there, that doesn’t mean we can spend less on “defense.” What it means is that the U.S. can “pivot to Asia” and spend more on weaponry to “deter” China. Because as many neocons say, the real threat is Xi, not Putin.
We have met the enemy, and he is us. That’s an old saying you won’t see in the “liberal” NYT.
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?
Searing photo of state violence at Kent State in 1970. The dead student’s name was Jeffrey Miller. The young woman crouched in shock and horror was Mary Ann Vecchio. Richard Nixon called the protesters “bums.” What would the state call them today—domestic terrorists?
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.”)
A friend of mine is calling out his progressive friends for saying they’ll vote third party in the 2024 presidential election. Basically, his argument is this. We know Biden isn’t perfect. He leaves much to be desired, notably in obvious signs of his mental and physical decline. But we also know Trump is a monster. And, since Trump and Biden are currently running neck and neck, at least in the polls, your only real “choice” is to vote for Joe against the monster.
In sum, a vote for a third-party candidate of deep integrity and strong character like Cornel West is really a vote for Monster Trump.
A vote for Cornel West is a vote for Trump?
As I told my friend, telling people they’re making a big mistake by voting for a candidate like Cornel West is not the most effective way to win their hearts and minds. Telling them they’re throwing away their vote or that they’re really voting for Trump is hardly persuasive. In fact, it’s alienating and insulting.
If Joe Biden and the DNC want to win my vote, I want to see promises kept, progressive policies enacted, and corruption stymied and reversed. I want to see concrete results. I want changes in policy. I don’t want what Biden promised CEOs when he decided to run in 2020: that “nothing will fundamentally change.”
On so many issues, Biden has reneged on promises or otherwise failed to deliver for the working classes. He’s not a pro-union president. He hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage. He’s failed to deliver on student debt relief. There is no public optionfor health care. He’s approved oil and gas drilling in the most sensitive areas. Meanwhile, military budgets continue to soar as the Biden administration postures for a new Cold War with Russia and China. And I’m simply supposed to ignore this woeful record and vote for Joe because Trump is allegedly worse.
My friends tell me I expect too much from Biden and the Democrats. That they’re hamstrung by the Republicans. That Joe is doing the best he can. That I need to give Joe more chances. And so on.
But Joe Biden and the Democrats couldn’t even protect abortion rights. Barack Obama promised to codify Roe vs. Wade into law as his “top priority” but then abandoned his promise once he took office in 2009. Biden, of course, was his VP and has a long record of being critical of abortion rights. Again, however, we are told that Biden is the best hope for restoring rights that he’s never been keen on supporting, let alone protecting and extending.
If Biden loses in 2024, let’s be clear. It won’t be because some progressives voted third party. And it won’t be because of Putin or Russia or rigged voting machines or what-have-you. It will be because Biden simply couldn’t win enough votes in the right places. Because not enough voters believed in him. That’s not on people like me. That’s on Biden and the DNC.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Echoes JFK’s Peace Speech of June 1963
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running against the Democratic establishment’s position on the Russia-Ukraine War and for the presidential nomination of the party in 2024. He recently gave a peace speech in New Hampshire that echoed the sentiments of the peace speech given by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.
In New Hampshire, RFK Jr. speaks for the possibility of peace and against the MICC and its forever war
In his speech, RFK Jr. stated that Russia has legitimate security concerns, that NATO expansion to Russia’s border was a betrayal of promises made to leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, and that America’s military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) is enabling forever war rather than actively seeking an end to war. He was also careful to say he abhorred Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
I’ve already heard RFK Jr. being called a “Putin enabler,” if not a Putin puppet, for suggesting that Russian concerns about Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO are in any sense legitimate. Doesn’t he know, one reader asked, that Putin rejects Ukrainian identity as a country and a people? Doesn’t he know Russia is killing civilians in terror bombings? Why is he acting as an apologist for Putin’s many war crimes?
Obviously I can’t speak for RFK Jr., but I think his message is plain: a state of permanent war is causing deep harm to American democracy, what’s left of it, and any sustainable U.S. recovery must start with a rejection of war and massive military spending, including the more than $100 billion already devoted to what has become a proxy war in Ukraine. That war has greatly contributed to the rhetoric, and increasingly the reality, of a new Cold War with Russia (and China too), strengthening the MICC’s call for even vaster sums for wars and weapons in the cause of maintaining U.S. full-spectrum dominance around the globe.
Like his uncle, President Kennedy, RFK Jr. fears a world-ending nuclear cataclysm, an event that becomes more imaginable as the Russia-Ukraine War continues to escalate. Again, at no time did I hear RFK Jr. express support of the Russian invasion or its brutal methods; what he did express support for is diplomacy as a way of ending the bloodshed while reducing the risk of nuclear Armageddon.
Any reasonable diplomatic effort would have to recognize the legitimate security concerns of Russia, just as that same effort would have to recognize those of Ukraine as well.
Those who advocate for peace often face the charge of being puppets, enablers, or apologists for enemies who are usually presented as monstrous. All credit to RFK Jr. for departing from standard neocon rhetoric and practices and for extending an olive branch to Russia.
Arguing for more war is easy. It even wins salutes (and money) within today’s Democratic establishment. Striving for peace is far harder, and like his uncle, RFK Jr. has decided to take the harder path. More of us should join him.
Recently, Joe Biden went off script at a gun safety event in Connecticut, concluding his speech by saying, “God save the queen, man.” He also recently boasted of building a railroad from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, among other verbal slips.
JFK said we could put a man on the Moon, and we did. Biden says we can build a railroad from the Pacific across the Indian Ocean—a noble goal!
I’m not making fun of Joe Biden. I just want to restate what the consensus used to be: that being President of the United States is extremely demanding. It requires physical stamina and, even more importantly, mental acuity and clarity.
Biden is 80 years old. In the words of my dad, who lived to be 86, “It’s tough to grow old.” In the words of a blisteringly honest friend: “You know how they call them ‘the golden years’? Well, they suck.” Clearly, Biden is showing signs of his advanced age. Especially troubling is the apparent decline in his mental acuity. He occasionally looks confused and lost on stage. He tries his best to cover for this, even breaking into a hop or trot to try to show his vigor, but, honestly, he shouldn’t be running for president and another four-year term.
“Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” is a question that comes up during presidential elections. I can’t say I trust Joe Biden. Neither do I trust Donald Trump. (Trump’s personal problems are an entirely different story.)
The “choice” of Biden versus Trump is no choice at all. Both are untrustworthy. And if, yet again, those are America’s two leading candidates, we should all recognize how far mighty America has truly fallen.
At NBC News is a straightforward story, presented in a gushingly positive way, of the “campaign cash dash” of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It’s all about Biden and Harris “hitting the trail—and donors’ wallets”—for money. It’s presented as perfectly normal, almost as laudable, an admirable example of democracy at work in America. Biden and Harris need money—what better way to get it than to beg for it from big donors, who of course want nothing in return for their “contributions,” better known as bribes.
I realize I’m stating the obvious here. The U.S. political system is throughly corrupted. What amazes me is how it’s presented in the mainstream media not only as normal but as desirable, even commendable. Here I recall watching a documentary that explained that the first duty of a newly elected member of Congress is fundraising for the next election cycle. Very quickly, you realize the donors are largely running the show, buying access and bribing officials to make or change policy as the donors see fit.
Off they go, begging for money (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
Again, this is hardly a shock; I suppose I just remain somewhat amazed how this is reported in almost gushing terms by outlets like NBC News.
A necessary part of the solution to restoring the republic is getting big money out of politics, which the Supreme Court made even more difficult to achieve with its Citizens United decision. Where corporations are citizens and money is speech, you necessarily have an oligarchy or a plutocracy. And that’s what America is.
Anyhow, here are a few excerpts from the NBC News article:
President Joe Biden is raising money again.
The commander in chief plans to accelerate his campaign cash dash after the White House paused overt political activity during debt-limit negotiations with Congress… Biden will be hitting the hustings — and donors’ wallets — harder over the next couple of weeks … The Biden re-election calendar has 20 fundraisers planned in the last half of June, most of which will be headlined by Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris …
The still-skeletal Biden campaign apparatus has a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC and all of the state parties that are allowed to tap donors for more than the $3,300 contribution limit that governs the president’s principal campaign committee.
On June 26, for example, top donors will be asked to pay $100,000 to sponsor the Harris-headlined DNC LGBTQ gala on Park Avenue in New York — a price that brings with it two “platinum” tables, passes to a VIP reception and an invitation to the photo line. A single seat at the dinner costs $1,500, and there are several giving thresholds between the top and bottom levels that are accompanied by various levels of access.
The ramp up is certain to haul in millions of dollars to support Biden and fellow Democrats, but it may not entirely put to bed the concerns of allies who worry that the debt-limit freeze on political events caused harm and that too much emphasis has been put on filling the DNC’s coffers … [O]ne longtime Democratic donor said he was “surprised” Biden has not put together a finance committee of heavyweight money-bundlers.
This donor pointed out that contributors can give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DNC and its state affiliates while just $3,300 per donor per election — primary and general — can go to Biden under federal campaign finance limits. That is, big-dollar joint fundraising events benefiting the DNC and Biden’s campaign are orders of magnitude more lucrative for the party than the candidate.
As an aside, I’m not sure why Biden is identified as “the commander in chief.” There’s no military content to this article. “Beggar in chief” is far more accurate here. Also, I just love the way the mainstream media suggests this is like a sport, a “cash dash,” and to the victors go the spoils. Which, I suppose, is true.
It’s nice to know the DNC will profit greatly from those fundraising efforts. Small wonder the DNC still supports the Biden/Harris gravy train. Of course, there’s no suggestion in this NBC article that there’s anything wrong with this process. Indeed, Biden is being criticized for his laxness in not putting together “a finance committee of heavyweight money-bundlers.” C’mon, Joe. Show us the money!
Well, dear reader, it’s time for me to take my $100K to Park Avenue in New York. Look for me in the photo line with Kamala Harris.
