we lost another great one

Ugh, first Howard Zinn, and now Chalmers Johnson.

votes, terrorists, criminals

Today I'd like to offer you three links of essential reading. All three issues are straightforward examinations and interpretations of incontestable reality, and yet all would likely be immediately dismissed as extremist hysterics by most everyone I know. People who genuinely prioritize truth and morality are rare.

1.) At Harper's, Scott Horton has Six Questions for Mark Crispin Miller. The discussion is about how election fraud, and the media's failure to report on it except derisively is an ongoing scandal that undermines our (already thin claim to) democracy. I'd note that while Republicans are overwhelmingly the perpetrators and direct beneficiaries of these dirty tricks, Democrats have done very little to oppose them. For me the most shocking example of Donkle capitulation is Al Gore's blocking the attempts of few Democrats from the House of Representatives to contest the 2000 Presidential election, and every single Senate Democrat siding with Gore.

2.) Chris Floyd discusses the bloody doings of "the most dangerous terrorist organization at work in the world since the Second World War," the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Your tax dollars pay for an unaccountable Presidential army that has "overthrown governments, sponsored wars, carried out assassinations and terrorist attacks, organized and financed death squads, kidnapped and tortured, trafficked in drugs, bribed and blackmailed, even worked with the Mafia." If America was even the least bit serious about fighting world terrorism, it would take Chalmers Johnson's advice and abolish the CIA.

3.) Winter Patriot makes the point that needs to be made every single day. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Ari Fleischer, and Scott McClellan "by any civilized standard... are obviously guilty of mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity." I don't share his hope that they all be tortured to death in front of a worldwide audience of billions (life in prison in the strictest sentence my conscience can allow to even the most vile criminal, a category to which all of them clearly belong), but I do share the outrage behind the sentiment. And I also share his frustration that nothing will ever happen about it.

simple solutions to problems

The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's an interesting tidbit:

Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

- Chalmers Johnson reviewing Stephen Holmes reviewing Geoffry Stone (that sounds confusing because it is)

Who ever said we learned nothing from Vietnam?

Here's the prescription to cure our ills:

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

- Chalmers Johnson

While we're wishing that the American people will dismantle their empire and military, we might as well wish for flying ponies for everyone. Shall we lament how much easier it is to suppress objections to destructive rampage than to avoid destructive rampage?

Is there anything worth saving anyway?

to fight fire with fire

[At a speech at West Point, Bush] added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that, in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion, amounted to an announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place." The preamble to the National Security Strategy document that followed claimed that there is a "a single sustainable model for national success" - ours - that is "right and true for every person in every society... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."
- Chalmers Johnson, pp. 286-287

We often hear how militant Islamists want to use violence to force the whole world to follow their belief system, which they uncritically accept as superior to all others. Our response to this alleged existential threat has been to use violence to try to force the whole world to our belief system, which we uncritically accept as superior to all others.

Blowback*

I've been working my way through an "inadvertent trilogy" by Chalmers Johnson. After a few years in the Navy he became a scholar of Japan and all of Asia at UC San Diego. In 2000 he published a book called "Blowback," because after decades of studying the region, he became convinced that US imperialist behavior in Asia was going to keep coming back to haunt us. Nobody really paid much attention to that book, but after 9/11 it became a best seller. He felt the need to write 2 more books over the last 6 years, expanding on those works both geographically, discussing mainly the Middle East and South America, and thematically, elaborating on our militarism and imperialism and the "sorrows" it has brought and will continue to bring. His calls for changes are obviously going unanswered.

He devoted a few paragraphs to Diego Garcia in one of the books, which was noteworthy for me because my father did a few months of Navy duty there when I was a kid. I didn't know that it was actually a British island on a 50-year lease to the US (at no charge). Apparently the American military boasts that the base at Diego Garcia is invulnerable to local politics, and the reason is that there are no local politics because the British moved the entire population of the island to some other island, where they now live in extreme poverty and face constant ethnic prejudice. The natives have been fighting that relocation in British courts for decades, where a judge has already ruled their forced relocation illegal.

Think about how those natives much feel about the British and Americans.

The Pentagon officially acknowledges about 800 bases in ~130 countries around the world, and likely has another few hundred kept secret for various reasons. Every one of those bases causes some kind of local tension, from frustration with forced displacement, to epidemics of drunk driving and sexual assault by America military around our bases (which cannot be prosecuted in local courts because the military quickly whisks the criminals back to the US), to official violent military action against defenseless civilian populations. That tension leads to resentment, leading to hatred, leading to "blowback."

Bin Laden made his issues with America very well known: (1) objection to American military presence in Saudi Arabia, a Muslim holy land, where we have numerous semi-secret bases and support a corrupt a brutal theocratic regime (while at the same time hypocritically pretending that we care about spreading democracy to the Middle East), (2) American support of Israel (a long mess of a story unto itself), and (3) American/British sanctions against Iraq, which we enforced by violating international law, which led to the death of millions of innocent civilians who couldn't obtain basic necessities (all of that was before we invaded again in 2003).

9/11 was a classic case of blowback, violent reaction to US militarism and imperialism, and yet our politicians refuse to acknowledge it. We hear nonsense about how "they hate us for our freedom" and when a rare honest moment happens where a politician actually acknowledges the reality of the situation (Ron Paul), he gets attacked by Giuliani and the rest of the pundit class as some kind of America-hater or terrorist sympathizer or just a lunatic. The Republicans lead this willfully ignorant suicidal charge, the Democrats refuse to fight it, essentially making them enablers, and the press gleefully reports the whole thing without criticism or question. And so like 35% of the American public still believes the outright falsehood spread by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was directly involved with planning the 9/11 attacks, and we're spending $2 billion per week to occupy Iraq and police a civil war hellhole that we needlessly created.




* Yes, Dave, you probably heard this term on The Simpsons before Chalmers Johnson claims to have popularized it. He doesn't claim to have invented it. It was a CIA term, and obviously The Simpsons makes all kinds of obscure references. I don't think this takes away from the scholarship of the books.