American foreign policy remains in the grip of heretics. They believe that the Prince of Peace is actually a god of war. They believe America is strengthened by entangling alliances (think here of our so-called alliance with Israel). They believe in constant war as a recipe both for dominant power and greater freedom and democracy throughout the world. They believe that spending roughly a trillion dollars each year on weapons and war is a wise “investment.” And they believe they are the toughest and truest of patriots, the ones who see further, the ones with the guts to get things done, no matter how poorly America’s wars have gone from Korea and Vietnam through Afghanistan, Iraq, and today’s proxy wars.
There used to be a different America, a much less militaristic and bellicose one. The American tradition is rich and complex; it contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman might say. Why are we so stuck on warmongers, thieves, and vainglorious simps of empire?
As an American, I’m very much a part of my country’s complexity and richness. And the America that speaks to me contains elements and lessons such as these:
George Washington’s prescient warning about the dangers of entangling alliances with foreign powers.
James Madison’s warning that constant warfare is the direst of enemies of liberty, freedom, and democracy in America.
General Smedley Butler’s confession that “war is a racket” and that he had often served as a “gangster for capitalism.”
The Nye Commission in the U.S. Senate that investigated arms manufacturers and weapons makers as “Merchants of Death” that profited greatly from war.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “cross of iron” speech and his warning about the growing power and insidious nature of the military-industrial complex.
President John F. Kennedy’s powerful peace speech in which he extended an olive branch to the Soviet Union.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful speech against the Vietnam War and the perils of militarism, racism, and materialism in America.
Of course, America has always had its dark side, with slavery and the genocidal treatment of Native Americans being at the top of the list. Yet America also has had its triumphs of wisdom and goodness. That is the America we should be embracing and celebrating. I believe it’s captured in the words of Washington, Madison, JFK, MLK, and so many others who’ve fought for peace and sanity, people like Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist who fought against war and all its awful excesses.
All that said, sometimes cartoons can express truths in ways that are as powerful as they are simple. In the cartoon below, the heretics of U.S. foreign policy are so many Calvins, spreading destruction and employing nukes in the name of manly seriousness. They are wrong. They are heretics. And if we continue to allow them to rule, they will surely lead America (as they already are in Gaza) to mass graves.
These are strange times in America. Today the New York Times is telling me there’s already a movement afoot to resist Donald Trump if he wins the election, in the cause of defending democracy, naturally. Here’s the blurb:
Now, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I won’t be voting for Trump or Biden. I’m not a Trump supporter and I hope he loses. Yet, assuming the election isn’t “rigged,” as Trump likes to say whenever he loses, I’m prepared to accept the result as an expression of democracy, or at least as much “democracy” as the electoral college in America permits us to express.
I’m glad an “emerging coalition” is planning something, apparently, to curb the worst excesses of Trump and the Republicans. I hope this coalition will act to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pursue diplomacy to end the Russia-Ukraine War, pursue peace wherever and whenever possible, lower the threat of nuclear war on the planet, and cut the Pentagon budget while rebuilding America. How about fighting for America’s workers, raising the minimum wage, providing affordable health care for all that’s untied to employment, and similar steps that put the health and welfare of people first.
Or, is this “emerging coalition” motivated purely by animus against Trump and his followers? Is it still going to fully fund the Pentagon and wage war across the globe? In which case I’m not so excited.
Again, I come back to this question: If an “emerging coalition” is so worried about a Trump victory, why not put forward a candidate more fit to beat Trump than Joe Biden? Don’t “resist” Trump after he’s already won again—defeat him at the polls by putting forth a dynamic candidate with a populist worker-first platform.
I’m with James Madison that the biggest threat to liberty and freedom in America is perpetual war. War breeds authoritarianism and weapons built in the name of war represent, as Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said in 1953, a theft from the people. Weapons do not represent an “investment”; quite the reverse. And incessant preparations for war are not a recipe for peace.
If you truly want to defend democracy, resist war and the authoritarianism it breeds. Make major cuts to the Pentagon budget and invest in education and health rather than death and destruction. That’s the “emerging coalition” I’d like to see.
If you have to kill 274 people to free four others being held hostage, is that a “successful” military operation? According to the Israeli and U.S. governments, it is.
Israel, apparently with some U.S. help, attacked the Nuseirat Camp in Gaza and freed four hostages seized by Hamas. In doing so, however, Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children.
It’s a brutal calculus that sees Palestinians as being “in the way” and essentially worthless and therefore expendable. Put differently, Israel sees all Palestinians in Gaza as “guilty,” as “terrorists,” therefore there are no innocent Palestinians and Israel can kill as many as they need to, without guilt or remorse, to achieve a desired end.
Coverage by the mainstream media in the West generally has been glowing, praising Israel for rescuing four hostages while downplaying the Palestinian dead as collateral damage that’s hardly worth noticing.
Here’s an example from the BBC:
You see a happy young woman freed by Israeli forces, but you don’t see any images of the more than 200 Palestinians killed by Israel in this “special military operation.” And note how the Palestinian dead are consigned to a sub-heading and a smaller font, using the passive voice (“were killed”), as if it’s unclear who killed them and why.
Yes, it’s good to see four hostages freed. But if hundreds of other innocent people must die or suffer grievous wounds in the process, that’s not a “successful” operation. It’s a massacre.
The vacuity of Democratic strategy is astonishing if you take at face value the claim that a Trump victory this November will “end democracy.” Apparently, Trump paying Stormy Daniels $130K in hush money, after which some creative accounting obscured the source of the payoff, renders him “unfit for office.” And that claim is now a “top 2024 issue” for Democrats, as The New York Times notes here:
Democrats Push Biden to Make Trump’s Felonies a Top 2024 Issue
Interviews with dozens of Democrats reveal a party hungry to tell voters that Donald Trump’s conviction makes him unfit for office, and hopeful that President Biden will lead the way.
Meanwhile, this was the lead headline in the NYT “top news” send-out this morning:
A Felon in the Oval Office Would Test the American System
Some are wondering how the Constitution’s checks and balances, meant to hold presidents accountable, would work if the next president elected were already a felon.
“Some are wondering”: What a vapid phrase!
I think there are more severe “tests” of the “American system.” How about a president enabling a genocide in Gaza, for example?
If you want to beat Donald Trump this November, how about running a more attractive, more dynamic, more charismatic, more populist and popular, candidate? Whatever else Biden is, he is very much lacking in dynamism even as his actions render him increasingly unpopular among key segments of the Democratic base.
My wife jokingly said today: Just what we need, another election featuring two tired and seriously old white guys. She has a point. It’s not that Trump is now a felon that renders him allegedly unfit. Trump is, in my view, constitutionally unsuited for the presidency. Biden, in contrast, is a fading political hack who will be 82 years of age at the end of this year. Yet, this is what the “American system” produces. Maybe that “system” needs an overhaul?
So, which tired and seriously old white guy do you want to vote for this year?
JFK in 1963. Read his famous “peace speech” at American University
It seems hard to believe that in my lifetime we had a young, dynamic, and visionary president, JFK, who was 43 years of age when elected. A president who grew in office, rather than fading. A president who in 1963 made a commitment to pursuing peace with the Soviet Union. A man with flaws, but also one with potential.
Of course, the DNC with its superdelegates has created a system to deny anyone like a JFK (or even RFK Jr.) any chance at securing the nomination. Only corporate stooges need apply. That has allowed a populist-fraud like Trump to emerge from the right, a billionaire who poses as a man of the people. That Trump’s claim is plausible to so many is a measure of how far the Democratic Party has fallen.
It’s already been a very long election cycle, and it’s only early June. Five more months of total BS to go, America.
Suella Braverman is a Tory MP in Britain. Here she debates a student about Gaza and the ongoing genocide there.
Watching this interview exposes the playbook of Western politicians and the media. It’s about accusing student protesters of antisemitism; of getting them to denounce Hamas; of asking them about Israel’s “right to exist”; of starting the debate with the Hamas attacks on October 7th. Those are the “facts” that matter to the Western media and politicians like Suella Braverman.
Fiona Lali, the student here, does a superb job of focusing on the facts that matter: the roughly 40,000 Palestinians already killed by Israel, the more than 100,000 wounded, the millions displaced from their homes, together with the Western policy of covering for Israel while sending them more weaponry to kill more Palestinians. Those facts don’t seem to matter to the mainstream media, and politicians are careful to ignore them or to dismiss them as “necessary” since Israel has “a right to defend itself.”
Apparently, Fiona Lali is associated with “the revolutionary communist party” and is a critic of capitalism. Perhaps the British establishment believed that she’d come across as a crazy radical. As you watch the interview, you realize Lali is the rational “conservative” in that she’s trying to conserve the lives of Palestinians while arguing for free speech and a system that doesn’t exploit the many for the benefit of a few.
I hope Lali is correct that the majority of Britons are against sending more weapons to Israel, though I doubt the Tories in Britain care here.
It’s rather incredible that this Tory MP argues there is no evidence of genocide in Gaza and that the real issue is antisemitism and Israel’s right to exist.
When Barack Obama took over as president in 2009, the global war on terror, or GWOT, just didn’t seem to fit the tenor of his “hope” and “change” message. So wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were rebranded as “overseas contingency operations.” Talk about the banality of evil! Even Orwell’s Big Brother might be impressed by OCOs as a substitute for invasion and war.
A euphemistic word Obama didn’t banish was “surge.” The “surge” in Iraq allegedly had worked under General David Petraeus, even though its gains proved as “fragile” and “reversible” as Petraeus hinted they would be. So Obama conducted his own surge in Afghanistan, the so-called good or smart war after the Bush/Cheney disaster in Iraq. And of course the “gains” in Afghanistan also proved both fragile and reversible, though no one was held to account for the miserable failure of the Afghan War. Whoops. I mean the Afghan contingency operation for democracy and enduring freedom.
Showing that he too could learn from America’s folly, Vladimir Putin termed his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” U.S. leaders laughed at this, criticizing Putin for his propagandistic euphemism, even as they persisted in using terms like “overseas contingency operation” for America’s “kinetic” military actions. The eye of the beholder, I guess.
These thoughts came to mind as I perused my Twitter/X feed yesterday and spied this illustration posted by Chay Bowes:
Though the Russian flag is on the left, it could be the flag of China, Iran, North Korea, or any other alleged evildoer. The Russians invade, we intervene (for the sake of democracy, naturally). The Russians commit war crimes, we have unfortunate instances of collateral damage. In the war of the words, the U.S. military is clearly rather clever in a self-aggrandizing and self-exculpatory way.
Looking at comments from this Twitter feed, I came across another useful illustration of manipulating language and information in the cause of war. Take a gander:
I confess I’d never heard of Arthur Ponsonby and his book, Falsehood in War-Time. I need to check it out.
This may prove a handy list to keep around as America’s national (in)security state acts to gin up the next war.
Protesting genocide in Gaza gets you punished as layoffs and job losses loom for teachers
Two stories landed in my email inbox this morning that tell us something about the state of education in America. The first from The Boston Globe shows how students are being punished for protesting against genocide in Gaza:
Suspended MIT and Harvard protesters barred from graduation, evicted from campus housing
Dan Zeno’s suspension from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for participating in an encampment protesting the war in Gaza had a swift impact on his family’s life. The graduate student has not only been barred from classes, he was also evicted from campus housing, along with his wife and 5-year-old daughter, with just one week to find another place to live.
He is among the MIT students who won’t be graduating as planned or have lost income by having their fellowships canceled or have had their research projects halted.
And on Friday, Harvard University began suspending protesters. They were told they can’t sit for exams or participate in commencement or other school activities, and will be evicted from student housing.
That’s the way you handle “rebellious” students: make them homeless and perhaps even degree-less. Want to protest mass murder and famine? Prepare to be evicted and probably suspended, if not prosecuted. And this is happening in the “liberal” state of Massachusetts at “liberal-leftist” Harvard.
Schools like MIT and Harvard, having intimate connections to Israel and the military-industrial complex, as well as huge endowments, are corporations rather than schools of higher learning. And, as we learned from “Rollerball,” you are not to interfere with management decisions. Corporate boards at MIT and Harvard are pro-Israel, and so must you be, else keep your mouth shut and maybe we’ll let you graduate. Open your mouth and we’ll shut it for you.
The second story involves teacher and staff layoffs as federal subsidies related to COVID are set to expire at the end of September. A quick summary from CNN:
Schools across the country are announcing teacher and staff layoffs as districts brace for the end of a pandemic aid package that delivered the largest one-time federal investment in K-12 education. The money must be used by the end of September, creating a sharp funding cliff.
Too bad we don’t have any money after September for those teachers and staff. I guess we sent all the money to Ukraine and Israel. Priorities, people.
For a bit of inspiration, consider this student from the University of Chicago, who explains why stopping mass murder is more important than his career prospects:
He gets it right. I wonder how he’ll be punished? “Criminal trespass”? Suspension? Expulsion? Imprisonment?
Someone should compare the funding of police forces, with all their riot gear and weaponry, to the funding of teachers and staff in K-12 schools across America. I’m sure America’s politicians, if pressed to make a choice, will fund the police first and to the max. Teachers? Who needs them. Our students are learning invaluable lessons from the police, who are “teaching” them about Tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, and other instruments of “higher” learning.
Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, again. That’s America’s choice in 2024.
Biden is mainly running to “save democracy” from Trump as well as on abortion rights. Trump is running on a MAGA platform that includes stopping the flow of “illegals” into America. You’re going to hear a lot about Biden’s age and Trump’s alleged designs for a dictatorship.
It’s Biden versus Trump again!
The presence of third-party candidates might enliven the race. Jill Stein is running again for the Green Party. She has good ideas but virtually no chance. Robert Kennedy Jr. may cause some excitement. especially if he chooses former governor Jesse Ventura as his running mate. Americans, unexcited by the Biden/Trump repeat, could conceivably vote in large numbers for RFK Jr.
As grim as the Biden/Trump repeat is, it does capture the end of the American empire. I’ve been reading an interesting book: “The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image,” by Burton Peretti. Image may not be everything for a U.S. president, but it surely is vitally important. Biden and Trump capture something of the essence of America today. Biden, obviously in decline, is thoroughly obedient to corporate and banking entities, special interests like AIPAC, and the military-industrial complex. He is the “nothing will fundamentally change” guy.
If Biden were a dinosaur, he’d be a steady, stolid, past-his-prime triceratops.
Trump, with all his bluster, his boasting, his bragging, his bullying, is the image of a swaggering imperium that refuses to recognize its time has come and gone. Self-involved, bent on vengeance, spoiling for a fight against his enemies, real and perceived, he is the image of an angry America blinded by perceived slights and grievances, always demanding respect rather than earning it.
If Trump were a dinosaur, he’d be a predatory, angry, carnage-seeking T-rex.
Trump and Biden frame the other as a danger to democracy when it’s the both of them who demonstrate democracy is just a sham. More than half of Americans said in 2021 they didn’t want to see a Biden/Trump rematch in 2024, but here we are. The DNC acted to ensure Biden had no real challenger and the RNC sold its soul to Trump, who has an ability to connect with people because he occasionally blurts out an uncomfortable truth, even as he’s spinning his usual con.
One thing is certain: It’s very difficult to reform entrenched power bureaucracies, especially when we’re given an illusion of “choice,” Biden or Trump. And when we’re so heavily propagandized to believe that we still have a democracy and that the biggest threats come from Russia and China.
As Yoda the Jedi Master once said, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” America needs to unlearn the idea that we’re a democracy, that we have choice, and it needs to learn the biggest threat to America is from within, partly our largely unaccountable government and partly a system that places nearly all the power in the hands of those with the most money.
How to effect a democratic awakening, without shedding barrels of blood, is a question for the ages. One thing is certain: no awakening is coming from either Biden or Trump. Both will ensure the further decline of the American empire; the problem is that, as empires decline, they tend to lash out militarily, in desperation, mistaking military action for a resurgence in strength and vitality.
Biden or Trump: Neither man has what it takes to manage the decline of the U.S. imperium. Neither man has the wisdom, the vision, the fortitude, to imagine a new path forward for America. Both men, in their own way, are dinosaurs.
It’s Triceratops Biden versus T-rex Trump. What drama! But both men are fossils—dinosaurs, after all, are extinct, much like democracy in America.
Today is Super Tuesday in America, where sixteen states go to the polls, including mine. At the presidential level, the expected winners are Joe Biden and Donald Trump, setting up a grim rematch of their 2020 contest, won by Biden, who campaigned mostly in Covid lockdown from his basement.
Down in the basement, we hear the sound of machines …
The revolution America needs, of course, isn’t going to take place at the ballot box. The big money and powerbrokers make sure of that. The DNC has acted to ensure a one-horse race for Biden, as Marianne Williamson has noted. Biden should perhaps be put out to pasture, if not sent to the glue factory, but the horse is not dead yet. Even if it stumbles to the finish line in November, losing to Trump, that’s still a win for the DNC, whose main job it is to ensure no progressive Democrat ever wins the nomination. No matter who wins in November, with Biden the DNC has already won.
On the Republican side, Trump should win easily over Nikki Haley, who’s basically a younger female version of Biden when it comes to fighting wars, kowtowing to Israel, and serving Wall Street and big finance. A conundrum in American politics is that a Con Man is the most genuine mainstream “big party” candidate, the one most likely to blurt out uncomfortable truths.
Speaking of Con Man Trump, he said something the other day that was so outrageously Trump that I had to laugh. Naturally, it was about immigrants (recall in 2015 how Trump said Mexico was sending drugs, crime, even rapists, to America, but “some I assume are good people”). This time he hit a Trumpian home run describingthe languages young immigrants speak in New York schools:
“Pupils [come] from foreign countries,” Trump explained, “from countries where they don’t even know what the language is. We have nobody that even teaches it. These are languages that nobody ever heard of.”
Something about “languages that nobody ever heard of” tickled my funny bone. OK, maybe if these young people were from previously uncontacted tribes deep in the Amazon rain forest, or perhaps from the lost island of Atlantis…
I know, maybe it’s not that funny, but if I couldn’t laugh I’d go insane, to quote the late great Jimmy Buffett.
America desperately needs a new generation of leaders
President Biden sees dead people. Recently, Biden resuscitated François Mitterand, the former leader of France who died in 1996. He’s made references to Helmut Kohl as being Germany’s leader in 2021 (he died in 2017). Yesterday, he tried to reassure Americans his memory is just fine; it didn’t go well, as CNN reported this morning:
President Biden in a speech forcefully rejected what he said were inappropriate and incorrect statements about his memory lapses. But just minutes after defending his cognition, the president misspoke and called President of Egypt Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the “president of Mexico,” a moment that undercut his forceful pushback against the report.
The report CNN is referring to is by a special counsel who investigated Biden’s illegal holding of classified information. The special counsel decided not to charge or prosecute Biden, partly because he believed a jury would sympathize with the president, seeing him as an old, forgetful man who probably made an honest mistake due to his deteriorating memory and cognitive skills.
Here’s how the British Guardian reported this yesterday:
Special counsel worried jurors would see Biden ‘as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’
Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that he was concerned jurors would not believe that Joe Biden “willfully” kept classified documents, and that was one of the reasons why he does not think the president should face charges.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur writes.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Hur wrote that: “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully – that is, with intent to break the law – as the statute requires.”
Special counsel Robert Hur wrote that in an interview last year, Joe Biden struggled to recall key chapters in his personal and professional life:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
Biden’s lack of ability to remember things would make it hard to prosecute him, Hur said:
We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.
A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of. We have considered – and investigated – the possibility that the box was intentionally placed in the garage to make it appear to be there by mistake, but the evidence does not support that conclusion.
*************
Box of classified documents stored haphazardly in Biden’s garage (FBI photo, 12/21/22)
Now, it’s certainly possible that some of Biden’s memory lapses were tactical in nature, i.e. better to say “I don’t remember” rather than to lie or admit a mistake that could lead to criminal charges. Still, there’s been plenty of evidence, over the last several years, that Biden is under increasing mental and physical strain due to his age, not surprising for a president in his early eighties.
My criticism is not so much directed at Biden as the DNC and media sites like MSNBC that tell us that Biden is doing just fine, that he’s still on top of his game, that we shouldn’t worry at all about reelecting a president who would be 86 at the end of his term. That, based on the evidence before us, is total BS.
Also, my criticism of Biden and his age-related gaffes does not imply an endorsement of Trump. Far from it. Trump is no spring chicken; though four years younger than Biden, Trump has a family history of dementia and recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.
Outspoken as usual, Caitlin Johnstone may have put it best: “A Dementia Patient Is President Because It Doesn’t Matter Who The President Is.” Real change in America will have to come from us. The so-called Deep State isn’t about to allow the election of anyone with fresh perspectives and a truly populist agenda.
America desperately needs a new generation of political leadership. Both Biden and Trump should be passing the torch to younger public servants who actually want to serve the working and middle classes. The rich, after all, can take care of themselves.
Bracing Views 