Tensions are running high in the Middle East in the waning days of the Trump administration.
Over the weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claimed Israeli agents were planning to attack US forces in Iraq to provide US President Donald Trump with a pretext for striking Iran.
New intelligence from Iraq indicate that Israeli agent-provocateurs are plotting attacks against Americans—putting an outgoing Trump in a bind with a fake casus belli.
Be careful of a trap, @realDonaldTrump. Any fireworks will backfire badly, particularly against your same BFFs.
Israeli military leaders are likewise preparing for potential Iranian retaliation over the November assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Dr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — an act Tehran blames on the Jewish state.
The United States flew strategic bombers over the Persian Gulf twice in December in a show of force. Image: Air Force/AP
And in another worrying sign, the acting US Defence Secretary, Christopher Miller, announced over the weekend the US would not withdraw the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group from the Middle East — a swift reversal from the Pentagon’s earlier decision to send the ship home.
Israel’s priorities under a new US administration
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like nothing more than action by Iran that would draw in US forces before Trump leaves office this month and President-elect Joe Biden takes over. It would not only give him the opportunity to become a tough wartime leader, but also help to distract the media from his corruption charges.
Any American military response against Iran would also make it much more difficult for Biden to establish a working relationship with Iran and potentially resurrect the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
It’s likely in any case the Biden administration will have less interest in getting much involved in the Middle East — this is not high on the list of priorities for the incoming administration.
However, a restoration of the Iranian nuclear agreement in return for the lifting of US sanctions would be welcomed by Washington’s European allies.
This suggests Israel could be left to run its own agenda in the Middle East during the Biden administration.
One of Israel’s key strategic policies is also to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapon state. Israel is the only nuclear weapon power in the Middle East and is determined to keep it that way.
While Iran claims its nuclear programme is only intended for peaceful purposes, Tehran probably believes realistically (like North Korea) that its national security can only be safeguarded by possession of a nuclear weapon.
This is a significant step and could prompt an Israeli strike on Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear facility. Jerusalem contemplated doing so nearly a decade ago when Iran previously began enriching uranium to 20 percent.
A satellite photo shows construction at Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. Image: Maxar Technologies/AP
How the Iran nuclear deal fell apart Iran’s nuclear programme began in the 1950s, ironically with US assistance as part of the “Atoms for Peace” programme. Western cooperation continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution toppled the pro-Western shah of Iran. International nuclear cooperation with Iran was then suspended, but the Iranian programme resumed in the 1980s.
After years of negotiations, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed in 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (known as the P5+1), together with the European Union.
The JCPOA tightly restricted Iran’s nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions. However, this breakthrough soon fell apart with Trump’s election.
Iran initially said it would continue to abide by the nuclear deal, but after the Soleimani assassination last January, Tehran abandoned its commitments, including any restrictions on uranium enrichment.
Iranians burn US and Israel flags during a funeral ceremony for Qassem Soleimani last year. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
Israel’s history of preventive strikes
Israel, meanwhile, has long sought to disrupt its adversaries’ nuclear programs through its “preventative strike” policy, also known as the “Begin Doctrine”.
Starting in 2007, Mossad also apparently conducted an assassination program to impede Iranian nuclear research. Between January 2010 and January 2012, Mossad is believed to have organised the assassinations of four nuclear scientists in Iran. Another scientist was wounded in an attempted killing.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the killings.
Iran is suspected to have responded to the assassinations with an unsuccessful bomb attack against Israeli diplomats in Bangkok in February 2012. The three Iranians convicted for that attack were the ones recently exchanged for the release of Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from an Iranian prison.
Bomb suspect Mohammad Kharzei, one of the men released by Thailand in November in exchange for Kylie Moore-Gilbert. Image: Sakchai Lalit/AP
Fakhrizadeh is believed to have been the driving force behind covert elements of Iran’s nuclear programme for many decades.
The timing of his killing was perfect from an Israeli perspective. It put the Iranian regime under domestic pressure to retaliate. If it did, however, it risked a military strike by the truculent outgoing Trump administration.
It’s fortunate Moore-Gilbert was whisked out of Iran just before the killing, as there is little likelihood Iran would have released a prisoner accused of spying for Israel (even if such charges were baseless) after such a blatant assassination had taken place in Iran.
What’s likely to happen next?
Where does all this leave us now? Much will depend on Iran’s response to what it sees (with some justification) as Israeli and US provocation.
The best outcome would be for no obvious Iranian retaliation or military action despite strong domestic pressure for the leadership to act forcefully. This would leave the door open for Biden to resume the nuclear deal, with US sanctions lifted under strict safeguards to ensure Iran is not able to maintain a covert weapons program.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later that someone of high notoriety would blurt out the truth about the American genocide in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and lift for a moment the curtain of imbecility that keeps why-me-worry silly American society, self-indulgent in sales and sports, gung-ho slap-happily accepting what its criminal media tells it about being proud of its Vietnam War veterans and proud of today’s American soldiers, who have invaded whatever little countries on criminal orders or are stationed in active duty in 150 countries.1
What comes to mind are photos of dead babies and their mothers lying in a ditch in South Vietnam shot point blank by American soldiers; of America soldiers setting fire to the straw roofs of village homes with their cigarette lighters; of an American tank dragging a roped Vietnamese ‘enemy’ behind it down the road; of naked children with burnt skin running from fiery napalm dropped from an American fighter plane over farm houses … of photos of B-52 bombers high-altitude carpet bombing ‘free fire zones’; of planes dropping Agent-Orange to destroy whole forests in South Vietnam; of super heroes like US Senator and presidential-candidate-to-be pilot John McCain, who dropped bombs for months on Hanoi city before being shot down, and who Nuremberg Trial Prosecutor Gen.Telford Taylor would have prosecuted as a war criminal.2
“We were wrong, terribly wrong,” the former Secretary of Defense broke down in tears.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from 1961 to 1968, formerly President of the Ford Motor Company, had pushed so hard for deeper American military involvement in Vietnam that the US conflict in French Indochina became nicknamed “McNamara’s War,” but 20 years after the US embarrassingly mortifying withdrawal in 1975, he wrote a book in which he confessed “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” He broke down in tears while talking to Diane Sawyer of ABC News.
McNamara claimed he once sent President Johnson a note warning, ”There may be limits beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission … is not a pretty one.” After presiding for years as the Devil incarnate over the deaths of millions, McNamara, upon his resignation, was appointed President of the World Bank! (In America, war seems to be just business and money, while life, on the other hand, is cheap. Like many Americans, McNamara was emotional about the Americans who died because of his decisions but never seem to care about the nearly a hundred times more Vietnamese who died because of his commands.)
Recently, more than a half-century after the US lifted its years of cruel international sanctions on Communist Vietnam, an American president reportedly called the American war in Vietnam “a stupid war.” From Associated Press and according to one former senior Trump administration official: “When the President spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, ‘It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.’” Jennifer Griffin, a national security correspondent for Fox News, confirmed the president’s remarks. What is important is how something critical said about the Vietnam debacle that took millions of lives has been ridiculed and characterized as wrong headed and improper by America’s criminal media which lied about that war in its time and continues to lie about it even today.
What did today’s US president have in mind when he reportedly referred to the war as “stupid”
#1. Why “stupid?”
The war was supposed to prevent a communist run government in Vietnam.
Today the Communist Party of Vietnam runs Vietnam which is currently America’s 8th biggest trading partner at $9 billion worth of goods traded per year. So why did Americans bring death to all those millions of fellow human beings. For what? For nothing. All that mega colossal amount of grief and sorrow and pain. For what? Stupid right? Why is a Communist Vietnam okay now, but before was worth murdering millions of people to block Communism and protect Capitalism — French Colonial Capitalism at that?
#2. “Stupid?” Before sending in American armed forces, President Truman brought back the French Colonial Army in US ships, and America funded eight years of France’s bloody war to reconquer Vietnam. That French Colonial Army had been Vichy French fascist, an ally of Nazi Germany. It had run Vietnam for the Japanese, causing a million Vietnamese to starve because the Japanese took away rice to feed their soldiers. Stupid? Americans on the side of racist murdering former fascist French military colonialism? How infamously brutal the French were in Haiti and Algeria and on into in Indochina. (Oh, the French were so joyous when US troops liberated Paris from the Nazi Germans.)
#3 “Stupid?” America betrayed its Vietnamese WW II ally Ho Chi Minh, who the US awarded a medal for his work saving the lives of American downed airmen. A high America officer had stood by Ho Chi Minh’s side as he declared Vietnam independent. Then Americans murderously betrayed their Vietnamese heroic WW II ally!
#4. “Stupid?” After the Vietnamese, at a great cost of lives, had defeated the US backed French Colonial Army, President Eisenhower blocked the election for president of all of Vietnam that he admitted Ho Chi Minh would have won with 80+% of the vote. “Stupid?” Or were, are, Americans undemocratic by nature and imperialists in trying to have made the South of Vietnam a separate country and a US neo-colonial satellite. (Eisenhower also had both Congo and Guatemalan democracies murderously overthrown and Laos bombed. Ike was very beholden to the Military-Industrial-Complex he warned against.) No, not stupid! Undemocratic! and a crime against humanity.
#5 “Stupid?” Six US Presidents oversaw 30 years of genocidal slaughter of the soft-spoken Buddhist, basically farming population of the three French colonies of the Indochinese peninsula, first by the US-backed French and afterward with the Americans dropping three times the amount of bombs the US dropped during all of the Second World War in Europe and Asia,3 while eventually introducing a half-million US troops with tanks, helicopters, river patrol boats, and state-of-the-art military equipment. Then Americans ignominiously gave up and enacted cruel international sanctions on the then liberated Communist Party-run Vietnam. In retrospect, super stupid, just plain daft, and genocidal!
#6 “Stupid” for an American fascination with body counts
58,310 American troops were reported ‘Killed in Action.’
These 58,310, plus two and a half million more American troops, who didn’t die, executed a 15-year invasion and occupation war that brought death to ten times that number: 587,000 poor Vietnamese civilians and death to 1.1 million of the amazingly brave and patriotic Vietnamese, who fought against the American invaders.4Were Americans just highly stupid or just enthralled with killing? Were many Americans cruel people then, during their Vietnam debacle war, or are many still, rotten, uncaring people today causing children in Yemen to die of starvation or American guided missiles, while American soldiers kill in Afghanistan and Somalia.
#7 “Stupid” or evil?
Unexploded illegal anti-personnel cluster bombs dropped by Americans from planes so many years ago, continue to detonate and kill people today. The Vietnamese government claims that unexploded ordnance has killed some 42,000 people since the official end of the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia according to Vietnamese government databases. Horrible birth deformities and cancers by the thousands continue to occur from Agent Orange. Were Americans, are Americans, inhumanly irresponsible in their behavior?
The current US President also is reported to have said regarding Vietnam, “Anyone who went was a sucker.”
Since the TV channels of America’s CIA overseen six giant entertainment/news controlling conglomerates still hail Vietnam veterans as heroes, let’s try to imagine what today’s US president had in mind when he reportedly insinuated that Vietnam War veterans were all “suckers.” Let us consider the President calling Vietnam veterans ‘suckers’ in the context of Americans seeming to love, or at least accept, watching their military continually bomb and invade smaller countries.
Did the current American president actually mean, “Anyone who went” to risk his life to participate in what turned out to be the slaughter of upwards of 3 million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian men, women and children, “was a sucker” for believing his government was decent and would not send him to kill poor and innocent people? Or was he “a sucker” for not knowing what his government was doing in French Indochina or a sucker for not wanting to be threatened with time in prison if he refused to be drafted into the US Army?
Well, apparently, half-million guys refused to be suckered into killing anyone, because during the Vietnam War, approximately 570,000 young men, more than half a million, were classified as draft offenders,5 and approximately 210,000 were accused of draft violations; however, only 8,750 were convicted and only 3,250 were jailed.
Some draft eligible men were angry enough at the government’s attempt to sucker them into war to publicly burned their draft cards, but the Justice Department brought charges against only 50, of whom 40 were convicted.
Those who were drafted made up more than one third of the 3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore) personnel, who served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, including flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters).
World Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali’s draft board statement should have been guidance for all prospective draftees: “I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.”
If we take the word of the only American whose birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, then guys who participated in the merciless slaughter of the men, women and children of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia did not ‘serve’ their country. No, what they did to poor people in France’s Indochina colonies shamed their country, and was worse, much worse behavior than that of those Americans who Martin Luther King said betrayed their country at home by their silence.
In his world shaking New York sermon a year before he was shot dead, King pointed out, “So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They languish under our bombs …primarily women and children and the aged as we herd them into concentration camps. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. They see their children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food, see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”
Anybody who let themselves be suckered into participating in the genocide that was an American war on Vietnam is to be pitied. Sure men were being drafted and threatened with jail time if they refused induction into the US Army, but 20 or 30 thousand just moved to Canada. Thousands more demanded and got deferment as conscientious objectors. Few went to jail.
Huge percent of GIs in combat realizing that they had been ‘had’ turned to drugs and some turned to ‘fragging’ their officers.
A great percentage of GIs, in constant danger of being killed or maimed in combat, realized that they had been suckered into a deadly and ignominious trap to kill people fighting in and for their own country. These GIs turned to illegal drugs and quite a number covertly murdered their immediate officers or non-commissioned officers in what was called “fragging,” being that fragmentation hand grenades were the usual weapon of choice. A well calculated estimate is that 1,017 fragging incidents may have taken place in Vietnam causing 86 deaths and 714 injuries of U.S. military personnel, the majority officers and NCOs.6
According to a 1971 report by the Department of Defense, 51% of the armed forces had smoked marijuana, 31% had used psychedelics, such as LSD, mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms, and an additional 28% percent had taken hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. But drug usage wasn’t just limited by what enlistees could illicitly buy on the black market. Their military command also heavily prescribed amphetamines, which were used to boost endurance on long missions, sedatives were prescribed to help relieve anxiety and prevent mental breakdowns. In his book Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War, author Lukasz Kamienski argues that amphetamine withdrawal may be partly to blame for some of the atrocities committed against Vietnam’s civilian population, with strung-out young servicemen overreacting to the already stressful conditions of war.
How many veterans committed suicide out of shame for what they did in Vietnam? More U.S. veterans have committed suicide between 2008 and 2017 than the number of U.S. soldiers that died during the entire Vietnam War. According to the defense news site Military.com, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shared these alarming rates in a September 2019 report. The U.S. suffered around 58,000 fatalities over the course of the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. This number has now been eclipsed by the more than 60,000 U.S. veteran suicides in a recent span of just 10 years. More than 6,000 veterans committed suicide every year during that timeframe. Many were veterans of horror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Panama or Somalia, but a lot of suicides were by Vietnam vets.7
Years after their service in Vietnam ended, certain veterans continue to exhibit shame, guilt, self-hatred and a sense of being interminably unforgivable, all feelings related to the atrocities they committed. …Some have committed suicide and others remain at risk. … The American combat soldier in Vietnam averaged between 19 and 20 years of age and had little more than a high school diploma.
One suffering veteran’s guilt was apparent as manifested by emerging themes of retaliation. He believed that it was only natural for his enemy to kill him. After all, if they did to him what he had done to them, wouldn’t he be seeking revenge?
The impossible-to-describe amount of suffering caused by Americans willingly, though some against their will, to Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in French Indochina must be brought to attention.
Calling that unjustifiable genocidal American war in French Indochina “stupid” is a mega vast understatement, inappropriately dismissive sounding regarding the crimes against humanity Americans committed.
Calling the unfortunate Americans who went there, some to die, some to be crippled and all to kill, “suckers” trivializes the inestimable suffering and seems dismissive of the deadly crimes of those who went and those who sent them to make war on poor and innocent people.
This Writer Was Himself ’a Sucker’ During the American War in Korea
The writer of this article can give a personal parallel experience, because in 1952, he, with his 19 year old head filled with thoughts of women, music and making his pals laugh, let himself be drafted into the US Army during the Korean War without even attempting to find out what that war was about and didn’t even read the newspaper and as didn’t realize his government was killing Koreans by the hundreds of thousands in their very own country.
I was a sucker to believe in my government. I know now that the North Korean army had overthrown the American Army-created mass-murdering police state in South Korea in a just few weeks. Then the Americans invaded the South while it bombed flat all 38 cities of the North.8
I was so distracted by the healthy routines and camaraderie of basic training that I never once had the thought that the weapons I was practicing with could kill somebody, and never thought about Korea while having fun training in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
I could have wound up killing relatives of the Korean students I came to be teaching in subsequent years. I could also have wound up having my dead body thrown into a pit in North Korea as did four bunkmates and members of my squad from basic training. My poor buddies had never even heard of Korea before being sent there to fight and die.
I was a sucker to believe my government was not a criminal war investors run government and to have allowed myself to be drafted and be part of its killer war machine, but ignorance is never a legal or moral excuse. I was fortunate to have been sent to be part of the occupation forces in former Nazi Germany, while my buddies were sent to kill and be killed in Korea.
I was so blind and ignorant to have been comfortable in my US Army uniform, but I was stationed in what had been criminally insane Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which most of the world including America had to fight a war with. I didn’t know then what I know now that it was American industrialists that had armed Nazi Germanyby heavily investing in, and joint venturing with, a financially prostate and completely disarmed Germany building Hitler’s army up to world’s number one military power in five short years. But I only learned of American tycoons backing of Hitler to attack Communist Russia many years later. In 1952, I was a patriotic sucker, indulging in my youthful life and not much interested in my government’s anti-communist war in Korea.
Another famous African-American gave succinct guidance for those, who like your author, were foolishly asleep to the reality of a murderous war yawning. Malcolm X reasoned, “You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
Of Importance
This writer has sought to take advantage of a inadvertent awkward slip-up by a high official lackey of the deep state investors in war who control our existence. Apparently, a criminal American President, just one in a long series of criminal US Presidents, let himself be overheard making an off-hand truthful remark that contradicts what the CIA overseen criminal media tells the world in excusing America’s genocidal crimes against humanity.
When a crack in the deep state wall of TV inculcated self-indulgence, dis- and mis-information and limitless militant subservient patriotism opens up, with an awkward truth jutting out, jump on it! Don’t let smiling commentators make a joke out of some truth about America’s genocides that accidentally slipped out in relaxed conversation. No, don’t let a truth that slipped out and contradicts the lies told on TV about Vietnam and Vietnam veterans be forgotten.
Remember how “they” made a joke about Senator Barack Obama’s family pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anguished cry, “God bless America? No, no, God Damn America for killing innocent people!”
Remember how American peace activists failed to take the ball from presidential candidate Ron Paul, and run with it, failed to keep repeating what he said on prime time coverage of the presidential candidates debate: “All the bombings and invasions beginning with Korea were illegal, unconstitutional and a horrific loss of life! ”The silence of the rest of the candidates and the commentators was striking, but seemed to fit the public apathy. Our war torn world continually threatened with nuclear winter is our payment for public apathy.
* Whether anyone actually called the Vietnam war stupid and its veterans suckers is not what is important. Important is how criminal media sought to ridicule someone saying something truthful about the genocide of poor and innocent men, women and children Americans committed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and keeps calling Americans, who participated in that horrific genocidal crime of Holocaust proportion, heroes.
Call attention to that crack in the wall within your family, among friends and acquaintances! Humankind is in an ugly period of suffering in the bloody hands of imbecilic investors in war, who own our governments and media and who cannot stop themselves from planning war, even terminal nuclear war, since they know from centuries of experience that wars make money.
If and when we can have the resources and money the reigning investors in war dedicate to war and preparation for more war to use for maintenance of the planet and feeding well the starving, what a happy world it will be!
Let’s have a New Year’s resolution to start talking about our Democratic and Republican parties’ immensely dangerous subservience to the investors in war! Would that being independent of political party affiliation were compulsory for all candidates for public office!
“’Endless Wars,’ Here’s Where About 200,000 Troops Remain,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2019.
Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, is reported as having said that he would be proud to lead the prosecution of U.S. pilots captured in Vietnam. Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008: “I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.” History News Network. Jay Janson, “U.S. Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Would Have Proudly Prosecuted McCain As a War Criminal,” OpEdNews.com, 10-19-08
Clodfelter, Micheal Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars, 1792—1991. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1995): p. 225.
Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Appendix 1, p. 450–53.
Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008): p. 164–165.
Gabriel, Richard A. and Savage, Paul L., Crisis in Command, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978): p. 183. Lepre, George. Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted their Officers in Vietnam. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011).
South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung (once condemned to death under military governments), established the first Truth Commission in 2000. When this Commission completed its work in 2004, the Parliament felt that a further, much broader Truth and Reconciliation Commission was needed to examine Japanese colonialism, the partition of the Peninsula, and decades-long anticommunist dictatorships. In 2005, the South Korean Assembly therefore enacted a law establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Here are excerpts of Commission member of five years Prof. Kim Dong-choon’s article for Asia-Pacific Journal, March 1, 2010, titled: “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War -The Other War: Korean War Massacres”:
“Few are aware that the South Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953). These incidents may be categorized into four types.
The first category involves summary executions of civilians and political prisoners suspected of opposing or posing a threat to the ROK (Republic of Korea) regime.The second category involves the arrest and execution of suspected North Korean collaborators by the ROK police and rightist youth groups. …
The third category includes killings conducted during ROK counterinsurgency operations against Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Minority Perspective, UK and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which Dissident Voice supports with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.communist guerillas.The ROK employed a three-all policy (kill‐all, burn‐all, loot‐all), which was a scorched earth policy used by Japanese Imperial forces while suppressing anti‐Japanese forces in China. [Officers of the Southern armed forces were made up of Koreans who fought in the Japanese Army, whereas the cadre of the Northern armed forces were Korean guerrillas who had distinguished themselves fighting the Japanese in Manchuria.]
Counterinsurgency atrocities also occurred in North Korean occupied territory. As the ROK police and rightist youth groups followed the U.S. military across the 38th parallel, they encountered people they suspected to be communists and collaborators. A typical massacre occurred in Sinchon (a county located in southern North Korea). North Korea accused American troops of killing 35,380 civilians, but newly released documents disclose that right‐wing civilian security police, assisted by a youth group, perpetrated the massacre.
The fourth category involves civilian and refugee deaths from bombings and shootings in U.S. combat operations.
A History of Silencing Bereaved Families and Oppressing Memories of Atrocities
The Jeju Island April 3 incident of 1948 occurred shortly before the first general election, and was unique in the number of victims, and the lasting effect on the Jeju Island. Since the incident occurred during the period of US military government, the operation, which resulted in numerous civilian deaths, was conducted under the sponsorship of U.S forces. Embedded in a strong collective regional identity, the Jeju people’s tragedy became a popular theme for novels and poems. The world’s most famous artist Pablo Picasso painted his masterpiece Massacre in Korea. There is a wall in Jeju Island Peace Memorial Park with the names of the estimated 30,000 Jeju uprising victims. While the final report of committees of investigation failed to confirm or spell out a US or UN role, it concluded that 86% of the 14,373 deaths reported were committed by security forces including the National Guard, National Police, and rightist groups. …
Frantic anti-communism paralleled the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S., heavily influencing South Korea’s political atmosphere from 1953 onward and resulting in society’s collective amnesia over the mass killings committed by ROK and U.S. troops. …
In 2008, President Ro Moo-Hyun made an official apology on behalf of the state for the massacres of the Korean War.
In 1996, Chun Doo-hwan, former South Korean army general who ruled as the President of South Korea from 1979 to 1988, ruling as an unelected coup leader was sentenced to death for his role in the Gwangju Massacre of 1980. His successor as president, Roh Tae Woo, was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. The Gwangju Uprising, alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO, and also known as May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement. This past February 2018, it was revealed for the first time that the army had used McDonnell Douglas MD500 Defender and Bell UH-1 Iroquois attack helicopters to fire on civilians. Defense Minister Song Young-moo made an apology.
Prime Minister James Marape … “Our resources. Our country. We deserve more.” Image: Scott Waide/Lowy Institute
COMMENTARY:By Scott Waide in Lae
Dear Prime Minister Marape
Our government has to admit the fact that there is a glaring imbalance between Papua New Guinean and foreign ownership of businesses. We own very little in our country.
The retail, wholesale and real estate in our towns and cities are controlled by Chinese interests. We own almost nothing in the logging industry. It is, as we all know, controlled by Malaysian interests.
There is an increasing push by (new) Chinese business owners who are buying up National Housing Corporation (NHC) properties and forcing out Papua New Guineans – YOUR people – onto the streets.
There is no strong legislation that prevents 100 percent foreign ownership of property and land. We need those laws in place now. We need the political will to do it. Now.
The justice system can’t protect our people. They don’t have the money to fight long protracted legal battles… …and the syndicate – yes, syndicates – know this and they take advantage of it.
Recently, local people along the North Coast of Madang protested against a sand mining proposal. The people associated with the sand mining company have also evicted families from NHC properties in Madang.
It is no secret. It was reported by the media.
Tack Back PNG more than a slogan Take Back PNG must not remain a political slogan for elections. The people must live it.
I am calling for legislation that protects the social and economic rights of our people. I want lower taxes (or no taxes at all) for struggling SMEs.
Give them tax holidays like the government did for RD Tuna and the petroleum sector. Give them REAL financing. Not a figure on paper they can’t access.
We want shop spaces in the centre of our towns and cities. Give it to us. This is our country. We want what is ours.
If the laws don’t allow it. Change the laws to suit our people’s needs.
We cannot continue to exist on the fringes of a large Pacific economy that boasts a “healthy” GDP yet cannot show it in the impact on the lives of our people.
Tax the alcohol companies. They contribute to the widespread abuse and the violence associated with it.
Society not mature enough Our society is not mature enough to allow the widespread consumption of alcohol.
Tax the cigarette companies. Make them all pay for the ill health of our people.
We are not taking back PNG by allowing these cancers to continue untreated. We are in fact, selling off PNG’s future.
Reduce the cost of medical treatment at the private clinics and hospitals. Reduce the cost of dental care. It’s UNAFFORDABLE. How can a papa or mama in the village afford K500 for a tooth extraction.
Give your people the means to look after themselves. Give your people the means to pay for their children’s education so they don’t become enslaved by politicians who peddle election policies that don’t really serve our people.
We don’t want to be dependent on government. We want to make our own money. Wealth in the hand of its people is real wealth.
We demand preferential treatment for US.
Our resources. Our country. We deserve more.
Scott Waide is a leading Papua New Guinean journalist and a senior editor with a national television network. He writes a personal blog, My Land, My Country. Asia Pacific Report republishes his articles with permission.
On the ground at the site of the Saki alluvial mining landslide disaster. Image: Central Govt
SPECIAL REPORT:By Central Governor Robert Agorobe at Saki, Papua New Guinea
It was with a heavy heart when we flew into the landslide disaster zone in Saki, Goilala, on New Year’s Eve.
The weather was terrible with heavy rain and clouds right down to the tree tops.
The Bell 212 flown by Captain Sam Onno, fully loaded with rescue equipment and food crept in through to the landing pad only a few metres in diameter and cut out of the side of a hill at a elevation of around 1300m above sea level.
I looked ahead of me and saw a group of my people – even children – braving the rain to see what this great machine was about to deliver to this beautiful, but yet very harsh, area that had just claimed 15 lives only a few days ago.
This was no village in Goilala but an alluvial gold mining camp that brought people from all over district with the prospect of making it rich from mining gold in a very traditional way.
The day started early with Provincial Administrator Francis Koaba and his team procuring the final additional tools that we needed up at the disaster area to assist and speed up the excavation of those who had died on December 28.
We picked up additional water pumps, hoses, generators, coffins, body bags and food for the trip.
When we landed, the Minister and Member for Goilala, William Samb, was on the ground.
Grieving families He had spent two nights with the grieving families while I organised the rest with our provincial team.
Out of the 15 suspected victims, three were discovered yesterday. Five more were found today including a mother still hugging her baby as if they were in deep sleep.
Our plans for the New Year is to start repatriation of the deceased as the bodies are starting to decay.
If all goes well, we should have all the bodies that have been found repatriated to their homes and families for a proper funeral.
On behalf of the Central provincial government, I want to thank the Minister and Member for Goilala, William Samb, and his DDA team, our PA Francis Koaba and our Provincial Disaster team, Central police, Captain Sam Onno and the Helifix team for dropping every thing and giving priority to assist with this disaster.
Our search is continuing and we pray that those that perished and are still missing be found soon and return to their loved ones.
Central Governor Robert Agorobe posted this brief report on Facebook on New Year’s Eve and it was republished by PNG journalist Scott Waide’s My Land, My Country blog and in return published by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.
— John Lennon
No doubt about it: 2020—a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom—was the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for freedom.
Government corruption, tyranny, and abuse coupled with a Big Brother-knows-best mindset and the COVID-19 pandemic propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which nationwide lockdowns, egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians were accepted as the norm.
Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades and in the past year, in particular.
The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers that have been amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.
Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces continued to be a menace to the citizenry and the rule of law. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies acquired even more weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. Police officers were also given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons and subject them to forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.
The courts failed to uphold justice. With every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts more concerned with protecting government agents than upholding the rights of “we the people.” This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. A review of critical court rulings over the past two decades, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
COVID-19 allowed the Emergency State to expand its powers. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) could expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. While COVID-19 took a significant toll on the nation emotionally, physically, and economically, it also allowed the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, with talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, forced vaccinations, snitch tip lines and onerous lockdowns.
The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans have become sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
America became a red flag nation. Red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws generally push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States. Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
The cost of policing the globe drove the nation deeper into debt.America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense. The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Yet America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world. This is how a military empire occupies the globe. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is falling apart.
Free speech was dealt one knock-out punch after another.Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, shadow banning on the Internet, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good. On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow. The reasons for such censorship varied widely from political correctness, so-called safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of free speech.
The Deep State took over. The American system of representative government has been overthrown by the Deep State—a.k.a. the police state a.k.a. the military/corporate industrial complex—a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad. The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished. In its place is a shadow government, a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House. Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. This shadow government, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.
The takeaway: Everything the founders of this country feared has come to dominate in modern America. “We the people” have been saddled with a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
So how do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs, and then locked down and stripped of any semblance of personal freedom?
No matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.
For that matter, protests and populist movements also haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.
So how do you not only push back against the government’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means?
You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics.
Take your cue from the Tenth Amendment and nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government.
For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants.
Nullification is one way of doing so.
America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.
Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.
The power to change things for the better rests with us not the politicians.
As long as we continue to allow callousness, cruelty, meanness, immorality, ignorance, hatred, intolerance, racism, militarism, materialism, meanness and injustice—magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality—to trump justice, fairness and equality, there can be no hope of prevailing against the police state.
We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent and push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse.
Gulf Province is only six hours away from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital city, and is one of the most least developed provinces in the country.
Its main town, Kerema, is in a sad state. The market has closed, forcing locals to sell their fresh fish and garden food in an open sports field. The BSP Bank closed after a robbery, forcing locals to withdraw cash from Chinese shops in town.
I haven’t been to the hospital or the police station yet, but the town is littered with outsiders who have come to town to buy betelnut.
I think its time the town authority sat down and really looked into mapping out the town area and rehabilitating existing infrastructures. There must be laws also governing the influx of betelnut buyers to protect the locals’ interest.
The provincial government should also help find and establish markets for fish with buyers outside of the province, because Gulf definitely has a lot to offer in the fisheries sector. A market for cocoa should also be set up.
Despite having various projects like logging in the province for years, Gulf has little to show in terms of development.
People still walk for kilometres out in the villages to access basic services. There is no sea ambulance, many times pregnant mothers give birth at home – some die, and for them it is an everyday experiance.
No local jail In terms of law and order, Gulf, despite been a province of its own, doesn’t have a jail. Detainees and remands are transported back to Port Moresby’s Bomana Jail. An expensive exercise.
People take advantage of this, knowing that only the serious cases will be prosecuted.
There are a lot of educated Gulf men and women in the country, yet, we are tolerant. We see, we complain but we do nothing.
Most choose to turn a blind eye to the state of their province and live in luxury in Port Moresby.
I say this, with a lot of shame, because I am honest enough to admit that I have never been home, never written about my province, and today I have come.
And I want to write.
It’s time to tell Gulf stories.
Rebecca Kuku is from Uaripi Village in Papua New Guinea’s Gulf Province. She is an occasional contributor to Asia Pacific Report, a content contributor to The Guardian (Australia) and to the PNG Post-Courier. This article was first published on Scott Waide’s My Land, My Country blog and is republished with permission.
I remember a long time ago, finding a Life (or Look) magazine at a swap meet in Arizona, on the outskirts of Tucson. Man, those were the days – 1977. Every sort of snow bird and desert rat out there swapping any number of a million things: from shrunken and powdered dog testicles (for the prostate issues of old men) to silver dollar certificates, from six shooters to bleached out badger bones; dream catchers and gold panning equipment; everything you could imagine, it was out there somewhere in the hundreds of stalls.
The Life story was about this crusty guy, who sailed by himself, maybe circumvented the globe. In any case, I don’t have that old issue within reach, but I do recall this fellow who faced gales, isolation, dead calms, no radio contact, hunger, talking about the hernia he had to deal with onboard. Everyday, he did a headstand on the mainsail mast, to let all the guts go back down so the innards wouldn’t be protruding as much. He took a selfie of himself, upside down, with his feet and ankles held in by some loose rope he rigged.
You/We/They Are What They/You/We Eat
I’m not proselytizing some macho moment here, but rather pointing out the mettle, man, of people then, and, well, now, but also how rotting the USA celebrity cult is. From all the pardons the Orange Accused Rapist has filed through, to all the murders he personally is overseeing at the federal level.
All those celebrities and politicos and the like, either the Proud Boys and their Co-Morbidities of obesity, depression, diabetes, hypertension, or the Gestapo police and their shoot-first-cover-up-later mental retardation. I’m in social services again, as a failed novelist, Working with mostly young adults trying to prep them for jobs in the community. All those skills and insider things. People living with I/DD – intellectual and developmental disabilities. Many with co-occurring challenges – one client has fetal alcohol syndrome (was in the womb with mother drinking and drugging). The outcome is autism spectrum, anxiety disorder, oppositional defiance, paranoia, executive function control issues, and so many more DSM-V labeled “things” happening with her – including physical ailments (thanks to mommy) and a truckload of learning disabilities. Try having a job with one of those “disabilities.” I’ve thrown in as a social worker, helping just-released prisoners navigate a place like Portland, Oregon. Ten or 20 years in solitary, and, bam, out into the community, and then, bam, three months to get their proverbial shit together: housing, job, a thousand classes forced down their throats as part of the conditions of release.
Black people have much higher rates of hypertension, obesity, diabetes and strokes than white people do, and they develop those chronic conditions up to 10 years earlier. Studies link these health problems to stress. The unique, unrelenting strain caused by racism can alter a body’s normal functioning until it starts to wear down. John Henrys, who battle with an unequal system as they try to get ahead in life, bear the consequences in their bodies. “The stress,” James said, “is going to be far more overwhelming than it has a human right to be.”
There is no way that the thousands of people I have met over the years – as teacher, journalist, radio host, activist – could survive those prisoner blues or that sailor’s physical predicament or the life and times of a person with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder.
And I am thinking about the elites, the stem-cell sucking Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Trump and Company, the lot of them, all in the houses of congress and the senate and those east coast graduates of those Ivy League Schools of the Americas. They may know the legal and political and economic tools for killing and maiming and destroying, but not one of those titans could last a day in the joint. Not one of them. Or homeless on the coast, with daily gales and tourists who call the cops for just one evil glare.
No Safety Nets for the Eighty Percenters; I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up
And here I am, almost 64, in between health insurance coverage (this is the American way – new job, 90- day vetting period before coverage, and alas, what the fuck happens if something happens in the interim?). Imagine, you work your ass off, and it takes the evil system of capitalism to get a guy covered for health insurance!
This is why America and any other capitalist shit hole that demands slave wages and slavery and dead-end and shit jobs while the 10 Percent and then the other 10 Percent go their merry ways down to the investment houses, it is, definitely, a killer society. The language, the bridging, the lexicon and grammar, all of that, they are coming from complete two different places when one considers a precarious worker – college educated too, multiple times – and a retired couple in a nice big house all to themselves. The couple is worried about maximizing at least 12 percent profits on their investments, while the precarious couple is just working to, what, save money, beat the body and mind down, until what?
no state bank or credit union
no national health service
no progressive taxation system
no community free drop-in clinics
no community farms/gardens
no public transportation
no public amenities
no intergenerational gatherings
no leadership and governance
plenty of pollution, predation, precarity
You’ve heard all of this before. Here, another aside tying into this screed: So, just a few days ago, I braved the gales along the Oregon Coast. King tides. Days of rain. The beaches were full of logs, and the rivers coming from Highway 101 were a few feet deep and 20 feet across.
All my outdoor and military training went out the window – instead of getting my hiking boots wet, I opted to climb a log jam in lashing rain. Climb and climb, until, yep, not a senior moment, but a slip on a huge log jammed cedar. Bam. I did a backward fall, like a swan dive in reverse, and, yep, a perfectly large limb, pointing straight up, ready for my right side.
Ten feet down this log jam/ gnarled collection of cool trees and logs and limbs and snags got me.
The problem was I went down, 10 feet, and, bam. I took the three second rule, then got up, looked for blood on my head, and proceeded to climb out of the crisscrossing logs, as I ended up wet from the crotch down anyways in rapids of tannin-rich fresh water going to sea.
I did a mile down the beach, and, reversed course, and then things started throbbing. As is the case, a day or two later, and the pain is hard.
I live in Lincoln County, a very rural locale on the coast of Oregon. The hospital system is Samaritan, and, I have zero idea if my insurance has lapsed (since I get all these fucking notices that the deadline to enroll in health insurance is coming up).
No pissing blood. Good. No bruising. Bad or good. Pain when I laugh (lots to laugh about with Biden-Bumbler and Butt-Lick Trump in the news) or move sideways.
Everyone, from my spouse to my daughter are admonishing me to go to the ER, to the doctor, get an x-ray.
Do readers really have that memo yet at how the for-profit hospital-medical system is the reason Covid-19 has taken that toll, what, 19 percent higher rate of deaths in USA for 2020 than in the year 2019, not all attributed to the DARPA-Fort Detrick mutated bat virus concocted in several labs. Attributed to the failure of private for gouging medical care (sic) and the number of people who were told – “Wait on that heart ailment, no CAT scans today, etc., etc.”
Death By a Thousand Bills-Fines-Surcharges-Taxes-Levies-Loans
Suicide by delayed health care. Suicide by lockdowns. Suicide by the news news news.
This is North America – my choice is to go into a hospital and then have this or that test, this or that specialist yammer on, and, then, what, $8000 bill later, some diagnosis?
My own background in knowing a thing or two about medical needs, well, I did the old UCSF orthopedic surgeon lecture I found on the worldwide almost-not-free web, and alas, the verdict is my ilium is possibly fractured, maybe a few tendons ripped out of place, and, two ribs cracked?
My spouse checked on me this morning, since it was sort of a day off from my social services job and I slept in, as I also don’t sleep worth shit anymore, for the past 20 years. She thought, “Man, what if Paul is dead.”
I am here writing this, and the point of this screed is that every way I turn, and that means everyway any decent and compassionate person turns, the screws get tighter and tighter. Capitalism is the evil, and the evil doers are the elite, the one percent, then their two percenter lawyers and CEOs and thieves of every ilk. Then the two-income families with a doctor here and a defense contractor there. You get the picture – until we are the 80 Percent, while the 20 Percent not only hoards dreams and hoards community futures, but that slice of the American pie is gorged by the very people who should be, well, sent in capsules into outer space to see exactly what happens to the rich and the very rich and the somewhat rich in an oxygen-free environment at zero gravity.
There is no manner of discussion with the GOP or Libertarians or the Biden Boosters or Trumpies that can come at this fucked up capitalist penury system any other way than to say it is totally not working for the 80 percent. Story after story of the inequities, the inequalities, the ineptitudes, the inertia, the incongruence, the insipidness, and the insanity capitalism has gifted the world. From Blacks and Latinx dying in much higher proportions form the Fort Detrick Bat Virus Militarized Pathogen, to the private hell of privatized prisons, hospitals, education, and just banking.
The system of participatory socialism I describe at the end of Capital and Ideology some people would prefer to call social democracy for the 21st century. I have no problem with this but I prefer to talk about participatory socialism. In effect, this is the continuation of what has been done in the 20th century and what was successful. This includes equal access to education, to health, to a system of basic income, which to some extent is already in place but needs to be made more automatic; educational justice needs to be more real and less theoretical, as it is too often the case.
Regarding the system of property, which has always been the core discussion about socialism and capitalism, the proposal I am making relies on two main pillars: one is co-determination, through change in the legal system and the system of governance of companies, and the other part is progressive taxation and the permanent circulation of property. — Thomas Piketty
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which is an eight-trillion-dollar enterprise, and the largest shareholder in almost every company that matters to the future of the Earth.
Better Dead Than Red!
You know, I was just with a client of mine – major Autism Spectrum Disorder. He has a job at a fish processing plant. I mean, like sometimes 70 hours in a week. He’s almost 30, and his mother is his paid personal support worker. That’s cool, for sure. Something like 80 hours a month she is paid above minimum wage to get things done for her son. Things like banking, personal hygiene other things.
Obviously, I work with him and her, and with a non-profit which gets paid through the county and state for our services. This mother is also a military veteran. In any case, the person I work with is amazing, knows a thousand species of sharks and fish and other by-catch that comes in with the nets during certain harvest seasons, and, well, this man needs more men in his life.
They live in cramped quarters, and for the most part, they seem happy.
The problem is, this mother, with sort of hippie like ideology, still, she can’t even imagine socialism. “I don’t even want to hear that word, socialism.” Imagine, military (purely socialistic) veteran (socialism a la health care) and the feeding troughs from the Joints Chief of Staff on down the Raytheon line, and then add to that, everything she gets now is based on a form of socialism – socialized health care for her (VA) and him (ACA); the money she gets paid is from the government, and all those special education schools and programs over the years? Well, again, government-financed, as in public schooling and public commons.
This is why I believe Americans are really more than stupid and perverse, but they are the enemy of earth on so many levels. “It’s easier for an American to imagine a world depopulated, dead and dying from calamities, climate change, war, resource shortages, than a world without capitalism.”
This is a continual conversation I have, daily. Sometimes in the community, other times personal. Just the other night, at a solstice gathering with another couple, well, more of the ugly side of Americans who Have, and those who Do Not Have (And why don’t they have? Easy answers to be gathered).
Paranoia on Steroids (or on MSNBC)
We had already fought about what solstice means, and I like fires outside, breaking shared bread, candles, talking about some crazy pagan and even farther back rituals and thinking. But because of Covid-19 Paranoia, and all the mask fever, all the complete lunacy of our times, well, no fire outside, no swapping of recipes.
We were told not to bring food, and the idea is that food from anywhere outside this couple’s house might have the militarized bat virus lurking on it. Forget about the fact that this fellow served condiments and some other food items prepared outside of the house, packaged and sent to his local Fred Meyers.
The bone of contention was that the husband started talking about how troubled he was about his next investment fandango, and that is the crypto-investment, the post-bit coin realm. Blockchain madness. He pleads Marxist in his belief system, but like so many broken people, he is out for himself and his wife. Life is all about fear and loathing, and listening to Rachel Maddow and the other titans of stupidity on mainstream Democratic Party TV. One day you can love listening to Richard Wolff, but the next day it’s all about the Motely Fool.
My discourse was around the fact that a) I am not well off and therefore I am not in any investor class, and b) that a majority of the world should be paid in cash, in the coin of their realms, not enslaved by some digitized scam called cryptocurrency. That the USA greenback/dollar may collapse (his prediction); therefore, blockchain bit coins are the way to hedge those bets, again, more than 80 percent of Americans have no ready cash to invest in Crypto Bullshit Currency.
We have tens of millions who are food insecure NOW, and unable to feed their families. We have hundreds of millions of Americans with huge debts – from school, to mortgages, to just paying for the daily living, on credit. Of course, medical debt is a trillion dollar albatross around the necks of millions. Once you get taken into a hospital with “Fort Detrick/DARPA virus,” you might come out alive owing several hundred thousand dollars.
No jobs, bad jobs, failing jobs, and alas, the language of investors infected the Solstice. The lexicon of crypto-mancers, well, I was not in the mood, so I was snarky and, well, showed my communistic colors. Sure, it gets frustrating!
All of which leads to the same soft shoe song of “I can’t see how we can stop this technology, this digital currency … I don’t know how we can stop Russia and China from exploiting fossil fuels and resources, while we are supposed to be green, so, therefore, we should be the first at the takings …”
Cynical, Skeptical, Jaded: Part of the Problem, not the Solution
Mainstream media and the mush that is what Americans consume in TV and in la-la land movie-ville, well, that has colonized and co-opted the minds of people who were once friends with a shared and dynamic lexicon and language.
It is now, them against us. More and more, this is the relationship between friends, sometimes good friends.
Giving up, throwing hands in the air, just saying, “you do good work … you should be compensated for that” is just not enough to move a conversation forward.
We ended up talking about movies, and I said that Steve McQueen’s five movie brilliance, Small Ax, was worth the time. The fellow recommended, The Art Dealer, and alas, I reminded him that my glass was more than filled up with World War Two themed movies, Holocaust-themed flicks, flicks about grandkids looking for stolen loot or artifacts. I said, “Hey, try some different stuff than just the chosen people’s produced, or directed, or financed, or scripted shit on cable TV.”
The language of friendships are daily getting more and more cross-wired.
Here is another doozie – so, a fellow I helped over the years, a veteran, homeless, well, he put me into his will. I did not want that, and the funny thing is he came into some money from a father, and, well, nothing to shake a Trump or Clinton stick at, but the money would have been enough to make his amputated leg/ diabetic/ depressed life into something more than sheer homelessness, when I first met him.
I got him set up into an apartment, and they put him in the only ground floor unit that made it impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair safely. They were saying they’d hire someone to put in a special walkway/path to the tune of $5,500 charged to the veteran.
I tried my damnedest to get the largest apartment rental property management service (sic) in the USA to respond to empathy, logos, pathos, ethos, and, not one of my dozen emails got even a response. Pinnacle Property/Real Estate Management, look them up.
Property management investment corporations, and Pinnacle charged him for a sidewalk feature we had the local boy scouts, Rotary and a construction company all ready to put in for, well, supplies, at the tune of $500, which would have been paid by some charities (this was before he came into a few thousand dollars inheritance).
He then went from apartment to assisted living, quickly — and that nightmare, again, in a local facility that is part of national chain, and alas, $4,000 a month for a single room, and then another $2,000 a month they charged for special services? Weekly, when he was still cognizant, my friend complained about the lack of food, the small portions. He did not have a caseworker for more than two months. Then he started to fail. This is America, and, alas, this veteran died due to isolation, Covid-19 insanity, and the threads of assisted living where the workers treat the inmates like scum.
He had outstanding ambulance bills, Comcast would not shut down his phone, the banks froze his assets, the apartment complex previous to this assisted living joint had a bill for breaking his lease, the assisted living outfit had $250 late charges here and there, and alas, this is how America and capitalism runs – middle man, person x and y, corporation a and b, sticking it to you.
He had a newish friend as his executor, and she had to pay the state of Oregon $350 to take a four hour online mandatory class on being an executors (this is the society of nickel and dimes, fines and taxes, fees and surcharges, add-ons, late fees, service charges, hidden fees, surtaxes, forced certifications, levies, and more).
She had him cremated, and again, the deal is, lucky for her, she has some disposable income, so she had the finances to pay for the death certificates, the filing charges, the body burning, the moving fees, the late fees, all of that. Eventually she got the death certificates, and still she had to fight months to stop Comcast. Imagine, the hundreds of millions of dollars companies like Comcast get for phone and cable services and wifi services for the dead.
The lawyer working with the executor, for the few shekels in my friend’s investment account, needed an my W-9, for tax purposes, and I let out my disgruntled ire to him, “that, alas, capitalism and the rules written by the banks and the lawyers, demand my social security number and my name and address be given to the IRS for a paltry sum, an inheritance?” Obviously, it was a point of contention, not an attack on him personally, but surely it must have been an attack in his profession (lawyers, hands down, YUK).
What are 20,000 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Sea? Answer: a start!
These conversations go nowhere, because, a, lawyers do believe their lies and the game they play because they set the rules of the game minute to minute. I ended up saying something positive about the USPS, and he called me on his cell phone. All things looked like he was an agreeable liberal, though he said in his field, investment law, he was a rare democrat.
Again, the dreaded “socialism” came out of my mouth, since I am not and never have been a dedicated Democratic Party proponent, and alas, this country tis of thee needs the new MAGA hat – Make America Go Away.
That crossed the line for this quasi-liberal lawyer. He texted me saying – “I think I need to ask you not to overshare your politics w/ me, I don’t agree on all accounts, but support your right to believe what you want. I try to minimize my cell phone usage for work purposes, and certainly don’t want to have it be a medium for political or religious debate.”
This is how the dimwit smart lawyer types who love democrats think. Just the fear factor, too, of his ultra-conservative partners finding out his liberal leaning ways. On his cell phone. One he used to contact me with, including many texts.
This is how these $300,000 a year gutless wonders work, man. “I have mine, I get mine anyway I can, I will follow the rules, toe the line/tow the line, and alas, I make my money money money while I give a few shekels to the WWF, United Way and some democratic candidate for president. But SOCIALISM? You are worse than Trumpies! Do not contact me again!”
Oh, the level of discourse is so bastardized, so broken with mainstream and idiotic-stem media, all the barking and wailing, the pure shit coming out of the internet, the blogs, the podcasts, and more and more. There are no rational conversations with a broad mix of perspectives, that’s for sure.
Until we live in a world where any narrative, any science, any doubts, any humanity pointing against fascism, digital platforms for crypto-currency, for universal butthole/basic income, any discussion about how bad Zoom doom is for the K12 and post K12 crowd, but now, for the people who embrace working from home, never having to step foot in the office again.
Join, Believe, Comply, Be Coerced, Obey, Lock-step or DIE!
Any level of pushback against Facebook or Musk or self-driving cars or forced vaccinations, forced closures, forced kettling during protest, forced shut downs, forced evictions, foreclosures. Any level of going against the bullshit libertarian-Ayn Randian-Neoliberal-Lords of War narrative, and we are dead meat, literally or figuratively. Forget about having a smart discussion about sea level rise, anthropomorphic causes of global heating, global resource collapse, global pandemics, global pollution, global cancer rates, global hell!
I have so-called lefties denying the whole thing, even making up some shit about Covid-19 isn’t real when the evidence is that it IS real, really manufactured REAL, really perfectly Phase One of a Many Phased/Headed Hydra of Hell.
As if all those bioweapons by USA and Israel and the like are not historically Real. As if the poisons meant for humanity, as in Agent Orange, isn’t really REAL. Phosphorus bombs, Napalm bombs, Smart bombs, the mother of all bombs, nope, not real. Stealth drones and mini-poison delivery systems by CIA-Mossad. Nope, not really REAL at all.
These are subhuman, the murderers of MLK, Kennedys, Malcom, and on and on. So, no, these pieces of human scum would never ever really create REAL biotoxins. Nope. No PR-spinners saying a pack of cigarettes a day pushes the blues away. Nope, not those people, those Salvador Allende plotters. Not those Henry Kissinger types, and Dulles Brothers, and COINTELPRO, and the entire profit system that would have Tyson Foods rule the lives of not just the workers, but the fetuses of workers, the land, the very ecology where the Eerie Lake worth of Blood and Offal and Guts and Shit drain off.
No, the virus is not really a REAL invention of these murderers and experimenters. NOPE.
Imagine, here in Oregon, there is a mink industry (sick sic), where the purveyors of Auschwitz for Animals pack in minks, and they have outbreaks of not just SARS-CoV2, but other pathogens. Imagine that this is an industry? And it isn’t locked down, closed for good.
Imagine that, the democratic Governor Brown, and the lunacy of a country led by leeches and piranha and the almighty power of the imperial president and all the president’s Military-IT-AI-Banking-Medicine-Pharma-Big Ag-Prison-Chemical-Real Estate-Surveillance Complex Men/Women, messing with lockdowns, ICU’s 110 filled up, no PPE, no nothing, and this is what we have. No screaming at the top of their lungs from the NPR pundits. All those worthless millionaires and multimillionaires that are part of the medium is the message pukes.
The character Howard Beale gave the following speech in Network that still resonates today.
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Oh well, the lying lefties who think it is all a Greta Spin or Bill McKibben muse, they too are right about green as the new black, how the greenie weenies want capitalism to save the planet, but these same lefties are wrong wrong wrong about the reality of how messed up the world really is, and will be due to a WORLD without ICE:
John Englander is a co-author of the paper and author of the books “High Tide on Main Street” and the soon-to-be-released “Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward.” He says this paper is a reaction to a “chorus of concern in the scientific community that the projections for rising sea level were understated.”
He said the research team hopes their work can inform the next major IPCC report, since that’s the most widely cited document on climate change. “With the next report now being prepared for release in 2021-22, our intent was to make the case to the IPCC leadership to explain the reality of Antarctic potential melting better, as it might significantly add to sea level rise this century.”
Since the last Ice Age, which reached its maximum extent about 20,000 years ago, global temperatures have warmed about 18 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels have risen 425 feet; that’s greater than the length of the football field.
Historically speaking, simple math reveals that for every degree Fahrenheit the Earth warms, sea-level eventually rises by an astonishing 24 feet. There is, however, a sizable lag time between warming, melting and consequent sea-level rise.
Considering that Earth has already warmed 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, we know that substantial sea-level rise is already baked in, regardless of whether we stop global warming. Scientists just don’t know exactly how long it will take to see the rise or how fast it will occur. But using proxy records, glaciologists can see that as we emerged from the last Ice Age, sea level rose at remarkable rates — as fast as 15 feet per century at times.1
These days, for the 5% of Americans who have substantial cash to invest, it has become increasingly easy to acquire large capital-gains in stock-market equities, even over the short-term. Super-wealthy investors, with periodic bolstering from the Fed, nowadays produce the frequent bubbles of absurdly inflated share-prices, later cashing out just before the predictable slump occurs. Such gains are then taxed at only a 15% rate, far lower than the 28% rate imposed on most wage-dependent earners. Moreover, of course, as such investors die — notwithstanding their frequent hubris about mortality (cf. my article “Greedy Old Plutocrats”), they leave behind obscenely massive “estates,” the cash-value of which is then passed on tax-free (up to the current lifetime gift tax limit of $11.58 million).
CNN’s quite-serious assertion about human motivation is constantly calculated in their “Fear & Greed Index.” One may laugh at the fatuous reduction of the human being to a subhuman creature, reduced to such two “basic instincts,” but few would deny that the typical big investor is just such a creature. What about the immeasurable joys of just being alive? All is frozen and reduced — to this one primal craving for “more” (and dread about “less”). “Having” becomes all, and with it, the reduction of all qualitative experience into the calculable: “how much”?
A century ago, in his brilliant essay on “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” (1903), sociologist Georg Simmel linked this drastic diminution of human experiential-values to urban life , with its all-embracing “market-values” imposing a price-tag on everything. (These days, for instance, billionaires routinely acquire “trophy-wives.”). Historically, the city has always been a marketplace, in which human consciousness increasingly exhibited the shared delusion that daily living consists almost exclusively of “buying” and “selling.” The informal rhythms of pastoral-agrarian life — with its ever-varied aesthetic-sensuous qualities (sunsets, newborn calves, the melting-of-the-last-snow) — were increasingly forgotten.
The basic human motivation — in extreme cases, described by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm as an “anal-hoarding” fixation — became a single-minded, obsessive avarice, and with it the often-pornographic obsession with the “pleasures” such wealth may bring. In our current, urbanized world, vast realms of human experience, subjective and interpersonal states which cannot be quantified, perhaps do not even “exist”–from the affectively stunted, diminished awareness of such ever-calculating wealth-addicts.
Exultant feelings of emerging “enlightenment,” poignant moments of pathos about a loved one’s fallibility and transience, loving glances of devotion and tragicomic forbearance, solitary jubilation when one’s embattled integrity is redeemed, enchanted delight in the buoyant song and graceful flight of a single bird, wounded yet unbowed moments of somber resolve — such are some of the high-points of the incalculable affirmation of being fully alive.
Two groups with powerful political voices have provided a lifeline of support to the Trump presidency. The Pro-life and Pro-gun lobbies have been with him from the beginning, and likely will be there for whoever attempts to follow in his footsteps. While not solely confined to those avowing religious dogma, Pro-life sentiment is largely extolled from a Christian/Evangelical base. And while having little religious pretext to their cause, pro-gun sentiment is often found within the Christian (particularly Evangelical) community (nearly 60% of Evangelicals oppose stricter regulation). To many it seems a conflict; how can one be both Pro-life and Pro-gun? How can one believe in the sanctity of life and not oppose the proliferation of guns? “Quite easily,” is the seeming response of those with a foot in both camps. “Pro-life and pro-gun is not a contradiction,” writes Matt Bowman. The position is echoed in writings by others: Derryck Green, Alexandra Desanctis, and Russell D. Moore.
The “not a contradiction” argument is confidently made, but relies on a dubious approach: gun regulation is complicated and equivocal; Pro-life advocacy is simple and unequivocal. It’s “eyes wide open” with guns and an “eyes wide shut” with abortion.
With eyes wide open, there’s no denial that guns are lethal killing machines (in 2017 there were over 14,000 homicides and nearly 24,000 suicides committed with guns). Yes, it’s an admitted reality, but to see the whole picture, one shouldn’t be tethered to simple statistics. Matt Bowman intones, “Though it’s a cliché, it’s still a literal truth that guns don’t kill people, people do. Or to be more precise, most guns don’t kill people. Someone can own a gun without killing anyone or committing crimes.” So, the reasoning goes, most guns are purchased with absolutely no intent to commit murder or cause bodily harm. But the same can’t be said of abortion. Alexandra Desanctis writes, “Every successful abortion ends an innocent human life. A gun, meanwhile, can be used for ends that aren’t immoral, including self-defense.” In a nutshell, the position is this: most guns are not purchased with intent to end a human life, while every abortion is purchased with intent to end a human life. Conceivably then, one can purchase a gun without the intent to kill, therefore being Pro-life and Pro-gun is not a contradiction. Derryck Green takes it a bit further. Drawing from the words of Jesus, he implies it’s a Christian duty to carry a weapon: “Yet Jesus did encourage his disciples to carry swords (Luke 22:36, 38), plural, for protection and self-defense . . . which can and should be applied to gun ownership.”
“Eyes wide open” allows for a liberated sense of culpability. One can take part in gun proliferation, one can observe the deaths taking place, but one needn’t assume responsibility if personal involvement is without the intent to murder or cause bodily harm. In pro-gun mode, you are responsible for your own actions. What others do is on them, and is not your concern.
The “eyes wide shut” imperative is to accept the current Catholic/Evangelical determination that human life begins at the moment of conception. The determination is unequivocal; no other opinion is valid; there’s nothing else to see. In the words of Russell Moore, further consideration is an implausible annoyance: “Tut the question of whether the unborn child is a human person bearing all the right to life.” An abortion then can only be seen as a murderous act that Christians must morally and politically oppose. In Pro-life mode, you are responsible for your own actions. What others do is on them, but is also your concern.
So, there seems to be divergent approaches taken. When a Pro-life Christian is in Pro-gun mode, he appears compelled to regulate the conduct of himself only. When he’s in Pro-life mode, he appears compelled to regulate the conduct of everyone.
For Matt Bowman et al., being Pro-life and Pro-gun is not a contradiction. Perhaps then, it’s merely duplicitous. In the Pro-life camp, the preservation of human life is sacrosanct. In the Pro-gun camp, the preservation of unfettered gun rights is sacrosanct, but human life is not. Can one have a foot in both camps and be guileless in either? If quoting scripture, how about consideration of Matthew 6:24? “No man can serve two masters.” Putting a foot inside the Pro-gun camp confers support to the arms industry and all it begets, just as stepping inside a casino confers support to the gaming industry and all it begets (whether one gambles responsibly or not). Is it really possible then, to avow Pro-life principles when stepping into the Pro-gun camp (whether responsibly or not) and abetting the deaths taking place there?
An odd affinity with the Pro-gun crowd is not Pro-life’s strangest affiliation. That distinction should go to its unwavering and unconditional support of the Trump administration. They’ve abided with Trump through all of his assaults on human life. And it’s not been only from outside; much of Trump’s cabinet/staff is (or was) declaratively Pro-life and actively involved in his decision making. Mike Pence, Mark Meadows, William Barr, Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pompeo, Kayleigh McEnany, and Paula White are just some of the avowed Pro-life Christian adherents who acknowledge no contradiction or duplicity in abetting Trump’s endeavors. His immigration policies have caused death and despair, both inside and outside our country. He’s promoted violence against opponents and critics. Most visibly, Trump’s actions (and inaction) are responsible for thousands of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths. Through it all, he’s been blessed with the abiding support of a Pro-life constituency (still evident in 2020 election results). How can it be?
The Pro-life rationalization for its Pro-gun involvement dismisses accountability for all activity other than one’s own. If there’s a Pro-life rationalization for its allegiance to Trump, it probably involves math rather than accountability. While the disregard for human life within the Trump administration is clearly visible; while children (and adults) are dying at our southern border; while thousands are turned away to face violence and death elsewhere; while DACA and asylum-seeking families are torn apart; while thousands of American lives are needlessly sacrificed to COVID each day; while all this is real and clearly visible, for the Pro-life crowd the numbers don’t add up to much; a math based incentive to reappraise isn’t there. It’s merely several hundred thousand human lives lost – maybe half a million, but only just that. The lives lost to Trump’s disregard for humanity doesn’t come close to abortion numbers. If every embryo and fetus is deemed a human life, abortion accounts for up to a million human deaths each year. So, that’s the rationalization, the Devils’ bargain that Pro-life Christians have made with Trump: thousands of human lives traded to promote the full embryonic development of the unborn millions. It makes for good mathematical sense, especially in the abstract, but is it a choice one could humanely make if it were more than a numerical abstraction? Instead of sterile numbers, what if the bargain involved real people; living human beings known and dear to you? If the bargain entangled friends or family, could you still take part in it?
Replace the numbers with real faces. Perhaps your mother is 65 years old, quite alive and healthy. She might be slightly diabetic, but it’s under control. Conceivably, she could have 25 or more years of a robust and enjoyable life still before her. You also have a 17-year-old daughter looking forward to college next fall. She comes to you with an urgent issue: she’s two months pregnant. You both have a deep respect for Pro-life values, but you’re now facing an immediate dilemma and a decision to be made that’s suddenly become too real. As if it’s not already complicated enough, the Devil abruptly appears and presents an untenable yet mandatory choice. If you and your daughter agree to an abortion, your mother’s life will not be taken. If you decide against it; if you refuse the abortion, your mother will die. There’s no way out; you have to decide. Would you consent to your mother’s death and allow the embryo’s continued development, to become a child with its lifetime yet ahead, or would you abort and grant your mother the possibility of 25 more years of enjoyable life? Yes, it’s an impossible situation, but it’s reflective of Pro-life’s bargain made with the Trump administration: to look away from and accept the human atrocities (like sacrificing your mother’s life) in exchange for Pro-life Christian empowerment (like saving your daughter’s embryo). It’s the Devil’s bargain that Pro-life Christians have made with Trump. They’ve tied themselves to “the Devil” and all the inhumanity that the Trump administration begets. It wasn’t a one-off acceptance. If Trump’s disregard for the sanctity of human life came as a post 2016 surprise, it’s had no effect on Pro-life’s continued allegiance. Even after four years of Trump exposure, the Devil’s bargain retains Christian support (80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020).
It wasn’t forced upon them; the bargain was voluntary. That it was so easily made with one whose inhumanity and disregard for human life is so blatant – and that it still continues, gives rise to suspicion. That so many Pro-life Christians seem to easily immerse themselves in Pro-gun rhetoric furthers the suspicion: Pro-life is not so much about pro-life; it’s not so much about protecting human life. Perhaps Pro-life is most concerned with promoting pro-Christian political empowerment.
Trump saw the Pro-life and Pro-gun blocs for what they were: easy pickings. It was an art of the bargain opportunity – he knew what he wanted and how little he need give to get it. It was just a few bones tossed their way: a call-out; some empowerment, and they jumped at the offering with all the circumspection of hungry chickens thrown the entrails of their own kind. It was so easy for him. He saw them and knew what it would take. It was a little for a lot: the art of the bargain.
Trump’s dalliance with autocratic regimes was visible before he took office. His own efforts to subvert democracy in America have been openly displayed throughout the four years of his presidency. If it was too difficult to recognize during his abbreviated reign, it’s should be impossible to deny or gloss over now. Since his overwhelming election night defeat, Trump and much of his Republican Party have wallowed in vain attempts (thus far) to sabotage electoral results and overturn the democratically expressed will of the American people. Trump and his obliging party are defiantly attempting to upend democracy and gratuitously replace it with autocratic leadership. It’s the Republican Party; it’s not just Trump. When he finally boards the helicopter and is dropped at the resort of his choosing, his Party will still remain. It’s a party shown to be filled with autocratic sycophants; it’s the party of easy pickings. Someone with a loud voice and autocratic yearnings will come along to lead them. Like Trump, that someone will need an initial base of public support. He’ll offer a little something in return: a bargain of sorts.
On December 9 a regional planning body, the Delaware River Basin Commission, gave a green light to a mammoth fracked-gas export terminal in Gibbstown, New Jersey. It would export fracked-gas from the Marcellus Shale gas fields to Angola, among other countries. The Governors of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey voted yay. Governor Andrew Cuomo of NY abstained. Environmentalists and concerned citizens had hoped Governor Phil Murphy of NJ would oppose the project. Here is my letter to the Governor.
Dear Governor Murphy,
I suggest a Zen workshop.
You know – the kind where you sit cross-legged. You stare at a blank wall. Once-in-a-while someone sneaks up behind you. They hit you with a stick. Presto, you wake up.
Clearly, you are not awake. After all, you just did a big favor to an investment fund based in Tokyo, the SoftBank Group. They own – through a labyrinth of holding companies – Delaware River Partners, LLC. That’s the company that made the application for the project.
Bookmark that LLC.
Please explain. Why did you vote for this project?
Was it because you think the residents of New Jersey and Pennsylvania should make sacrifices for the people of Puerto Rico and Jamaica – the countries where agencies have contracted to buy this fracked gas, even while significant segments of their populations know wind and solar is much more appropriate for sun-drenched and hurricane-prone islands? What about Angola? Is that top on our list of priorities?
Was it because of the jobs generated in New Jersey? Granted jobs are desperately needed, especially during these Covid-19 times. But did you take the time to think, what if we took the $900 million or so this port is going to cost and spent it on weatherization and retrofitting programs in Trenton or Newark or Philadelphia? Wouldn’t we generate thousands not hundreds of jobs?
Was it because you believed that Delaware River Partners, LLC was really interested in the well-being of the citizens of your state? (The marketing team did well with that name. How cozy, how environmentally-benign it sounds!) Delaware River Partners, by the way, only has seven employees. Wasn’t that a tip-off that the company was a front?
And what about the LLC part? Limited Liability Company.
What about an accident? After all 100-tank-car trains making the 185-mile trip down from Wyalusung, PA to Philadelphia and then across the Delaware River via an ancient bridge trip is concerning. That’s twice a day on an old railroad bed and over the Delair bridge, built in 1896. What if a bolt comes lose, a train-coupling breaks, a railroad engineer dozes off for one second? What if there is an explosion?
Who or what is liable? Is it Delaware River Partners, LLC? Is it the New Fortress Energy Project, which owns Delaware River Partners? Is it the Fortress Investment Group that owns New Fortress Energy? Is it the SoftBank Group?
Surely, this is a question your staff looked into. Isn’t it?
By the way those sticks used in Zen meditation are called Kyosaku. I was once hit by one at a meditation center in Rochester, New York. Apparently, the New York Governor visited the same center. At least, he had the decency to abstain on this scurrilous project.
Mina Hamilton served on the Board of Directors of Greenpeace, USA. She was a co-founder and co-director of the Sierra Club Radioactive Waste Campaign and President of the Delaware Valley Conservation Association. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones magazine, the Progressive, the Nation and is a frequent contributor to dissidentvoice.org. She lives in New York City. Read other articles by Mina.
This article was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2020 at 1:27pm and is filed under Fracking, Opinion.
I listen to NPR a lot. I’m not going to go into all the reasons I do this, but there are many, and they are contradictory. Generally it’s a combination of a desire to know what’s going on from a news source that has actual reporters on the ground, and wanting to know how the liberal elite is spinning everything. Depending on the stories they’re covering, my nickname for the news outlet changes — Nationalist Petroleum Radio, Nationalist Pentagon Radio, Nationalist Privilege Radio. The nice young, intersectional crowd of reporters working for NPR did not necessarily sign up to be part of the liberal elite, nor do they know they are part of any elite, nor are they necessarily even being paid very well, even! But that’s the role they unwittingly play, along with most of their guests.
Wow, you may be wondering, how can you unwittingly be part of a liberal elite, when you’re not even necessarily rich, white, or any of those traditional liberal elite things? Simple: you do it by ignoring the elephant in the living room.
It’s an easy elephant to ignore, for a variety of reasons. Your editors know it’s there — they’ve been around the block, they know what they’re doing and who they’re working for. Everybody else generally ignores it, either because they don’t see it there with any clarity, or they’re not really given a chance to mention it within their story’s allotted sixty seconds, or because at every turn, growing up in the US or elsewhere, they have been told it’s not about the elephant, it’s about something else. The favorite standbys for a long time now? Race, gender, and sexuality.
I’m not now going to name any names, because this isn’t about specific hosts or guests. Nor do I want to pick an argument with an author who was being interviewed recently whose book I have not read. I understand how little time they have, and how little can be said within the confines of such an interview. And it’s not about the interview or the individual, but the overall message communicated by both the format, which issues are often addressed and which aren’t, and the preponderance of privileged people who tend to be involved with mainstream media.
The word “privilege” gets thrown around a lot without being defined, so I just thought I’d join in. But no, let me define it a little bit more here. Privileged people — who are unaware of their privilege, which is part of the deal with privilege generally — don’t tend to see people who aren’t privileged. The non-privileged majority are invisible, unless they are normative, in which case they are visible. That is, Black men are supposed to be hanging around on the street corner wearing a hoodie, hands in their bulging pockets, looking like they’re up to something illegal. So when we see a Black man acting like that, we might manage not to block out that image. When we see white guys engaging in exactly the same behavior, we’re more likely either not to see the same behaviors the same way, or, even more likely, we just don’t see the person at all.
This is because white poverty is institutionally invisible. Here in Portland, it just doesn’t fit any of the usual narratives. Oregon was founded as a white homeland, with Portland as its capital city. The land was given away to white settlers, almost exclusively barring people of color from owning land. Exclusion laws were on the books for decades afterwards, with both formal and informal forms of institutional racism rife to this day. That’s all very true, and some aspect of this racist history is now mentioned daily on NPR, as it should be.
Portland was for a long time also one of the main bases of operation for a radical labor union that was explicitly anti-racist and anti-sexist and actively welcomed women and people of color. The union still exists, and it’s called the Industrial Workers of the World. You will never hear this union or this union’s radical and transformational local history discussed on NPR. You will not hear about the lynchings of the white union organizers. But you will hear about the lynchings of the Black ones now, occasionally. One lynching fits the racial narrative, the other doesn’t, and is best ignored, as with labor history generally. Is this absence of labor history on NPR — and PBS — intentional? You can ask Elsa Rassbach, one of the few directors who managed to address labor history on PBS, before giving up on further efforts and moving to Berlin. Yes, it’s very intentional.
Given the history of exclusion and extreme racism, why, even after the Vanport flood destroyed the biggest Black community in Portland, even with a vicious police force targeting people of color from before Oregon became a state right up to the present moment, even with all kinds of formal and informal forms of discrimination, did Portland’s Black population continue to grow throughout the latter half of the twentieth century?
The answer is pretty simple. There were jobs here, to some extent. That’s why Portland developed a Black neighborhood in the first place. That’s why most cities did. Not just a Black population, but a population, period. This is mainly why people move to cities, whether they suck to live in or not.
And far more importantly, for the purposes of the point I’m making here, why has Portland lost more than half of its Black population between 2000 and 2010 — and many more since then? Has Portland become a more racist place now than it was in the 1980’s? If you talk to any person of color who lived in Portland in the 1980’s, I doubt you will find one who will say that it was a great place to live back then.
So, what happened? What explains this flight of the Black population?
I’m hoping you already know the answer, but if you don’t, you can be forgiven, I suppose, if your main source of news is NPR.
It’s called capitalism.
Portland has lost most of its Black population for the same reason that it has, invisibly, lost most of its working class population generally, that being mostly its white working class population: because there is no real rent control, we are all subject to the whims of the real estate marketplace and the oligarchs investing their Russian and Norwegian and Texas oil money into the profitable US property and rental markets.
I have seen the Class C apartment complex I have lived in here in Portland since 2007 completely transform, from a place that housed mainly white, Asian and Latinx families, to a place that mainly houses young white people, living together in apartments where each resident is an income-earner, paying their rent, the only way many people can afford to live in cities like Portland anymore, with the multi-generational families forced out.
To the privileged NPR guests lecturing their listeners about unconscious bias and rarely-defined forms of privilege day in and day out, these young people with their parents’ Priuses and their Black Lives Matter bumper stickers are the white people. The rest are invisible. The fact that most of the tent-dwellers on the sidewalks are white men is an inconvenient reality best ignored, or referred to in passing as “white poverty” or the “white poor,” as if this group of people is a tiny, insignificant little segment of the population that we can basically sweep under the rug.
White people make up a bit more than half of this country’s population and are the biggest group of people living in poverty as well. These kids in their Priuses are not representative either of the population as a whole, or of the white population. The average Black family can’t afford to live in a two-bedroom apartment in Portland. While the average white family is in a better position to afford the rent in this city, most of them would opt to leave the city and go somewhere where their money goes a lot further in terms of a spacious place to live, if they have any options. And whether white or Black, that’s what they are doing. As they leave, the liberal elite increasingly populates the city, turning it into a playground for the rich, like San Francisco, Seattle and New York have largely become. Which are the white people they are generally referring to when they talk about the displacement of Black Portlanders (or San Franciscans, or Oaklanders, or New Yorkers, etc.) on NPR.
And yes, those rich people are mostly white. But to say that these people spending $500,000 on a house in north Portland, displacing the Black families that lived there, and putting Black Lives Matter signs on their lawns represent the white population of the country is like saying that the Cosby family represents the Black population.
What is making them leave is the fact that they can’t afford to live here. What is making them not be able to afford to live here certainly has nothing to do with the invisible white working class families who are also fleeing the city they grew up in in droves, who aren’t even worth mentioning on NPR, almost ever. Even the privileged people coming in from New York and San Francisco to buy up houses in Portland, even this set isn’t necessarily responsible for causing the chaos and devastation of all of this massive displacement of the white and Black working class of this city. Because even these yuppie house-flippers didn’t necessarily create this system. They don’t even necessarily believe in it. They’re just playing along with the way the system works, with what makes money, doing what we’re all supposed to do in this society, and being “successful.”
Of course, on the upper end of privilege, with the corporations who do the lion’s share of the house-flipping and profit the most from the housing crisis, it’s another matter entirely. These corporations and their lobbying arms actually created this crisis, that being the housing crisis, and more broadly, the crisis that unregulated capitalism represents, on so many different levels, from the cost of housing to the minimum wage to workplace safety to environmental destruction.
They created this crisis because they run the country. The “they” I’m talking about are the capitalist elite. The system they are running is called capitalism, specifically a corrupt and unregulated (or wrongly-regulated) form of capitalism. This is why Portland is getting whiter. This is why gentrification is happening. This is why the working class white and Black populations and the artists and so many other people left or are leaving this city. The corporate landlord lobby. The capitalist elite. That’s the elephant we need to address here.
And we will be, regardless of whether NPR ever does this in any serious or systematic way. Capitalism itself is making sure of that, by giving us no other options. But the sooner we can stop over-emphasizing the importance of microaggressions and unconscious bias and stop talking so much about the racial and gender diversity of Biden’s cabinet full of privileged corporate stooges, and talk about the fact that they are a bunch of privileged corporate stooges, the better. If Black lives really matter, that is, and it’s not all just about appearances. And by the same token, the sooner we stop pretending that the average white person is this country, or even in Portland, is possibly represented by the privileged elite that can afford to spend $500,000 on a house, the better.
There are said to be around 30 armed conflicts currently taking place in the world, some large, some small, all deadly. The warring factions of today are more likely to be insurgent groups – ‘rebels’ (sometimes fighting proxy wars for a regional or global power) or terrorists, extremists – right and left, battling with a federal army or police force – than nation squaring up to nation.
Research shows that less people are dying in such clashes than at any time in history. This is positive, of course, but the number of deaths isn’t really the issue, although clearly less is better. What’s important is to unearth the reasons for violence, to create a world in which the causes of conflict are removed and allow peace, that long held ideal, to be realized.
In addition to armed battles, societies everywhere are violent, dangerous places in varying degrees, as are many personal relationships and homes. Then there is the vandalism mankind is inflicting on the natural world, on intricate ecosystems, on plant and animal species, on the air, the waterways and the earth itself. Although this form of abuse may appear separate from uniformed killings, stabbings or roadside bombs, it flows from the same destructive source – human consciousness and behavior.
Humanity appears to be incapable of living together in peace, or in harmony with the other kingdoms in nature; our long past is punctuated and in many ways shaped by war, by death, destruction and suffering, and by wholesale vandalism and exploitation, of one another, of groups that are (militarily/technologically) weaker, and of the environment.
Some argue that human beings are inherently brutal, others that we are conditioned into violence. This is the reductive nature versus nurture debate; a conversation that centers around the degree to which each aspect influences and colors the behavior of the individual: is humanity (or a specific individual) inherently violent and abusive, for example, or is such behavior the result of conditioning, the way we are raised, nurtured, the type of atmosphere we are exposed to, the prominent values and modes of living that are promoted and unconsciously absorbed?
While people’s natures vary and we are all unique individuals – different yet the same – within each and every human being the potential for tremendous good exists (routinely demonstrated in times of need), as does the propensity towards great cruelty, to which some appear more at risk than others. The environment in which an individual lives, the conditioning factors he/she is exposed to, the values and beliefs, all influence the extent to which one or other innate tendency is expressed and or comes to dominate.
Although some forms of conditioning are more damaging than others, all conditioning inhibits, divides, and creates a false sense of self and a distorted view of others. Conditioning into competition, into tribalism/nationalism and adherence to any ideology – religious, political, economic – constructs a barrier, fuelling division, facilitating violence; that which is inherent, the seed of the good, is stifled, consigned to the margins, merely an alarming echo, the voice of conscience. As a result of the current socio-economic system, which has found its way into all aspects of life, including education and health care, such conditioning is widespread.
It is a socially unjust model, a violent system founded on ideals that agitate the negative and breed violence. Competition, ambition, greed and desire are promoted, in fact, they are essential for its survival; nationalism, via the agency of competition, encouraged. All perpetuate and strengthen separation, dividing humanity, one from another, and where division exists – within the individual and/or within society – conflict is inevitable.
Under the Doctrine of Greed everything and everyone is seen as a commodity, a consumer of relative value, or an obstacle to enrichment of some kind (indigenous people living in the Amazon rain forest for example), something or someone that can be used and profited from, and when drained of value, discarded. Inequality of all kinds, wealth, income, opportunity, influence, is built into its mechanics, which grind the goodness out of all but the strongest; social justice denied, injustice ensured.
Social injustice is a form of mass violence, perpetrated by the architects and devotees of the system, all of whom have profited well and are determined to maintain the cruel status quo and remain in power for as long as possible. Given the level of injustice, particularly between the rich global north and impoverished south (albeit with pockets of enormous wealth), it is surprising that riots don’t break out all the time. There is resentment and anger among people everywhere, but physical exhaustion, economic insecurity; fear and a conditioned sense of guilt and inadequacy coalesce to inhibit action.
Barriers to Peace
The concept of peace has been held in our collective consciousness for at least two thousands years, probably longer. Peace between nations, peace within countries and regions, peace in our communities, longed for by people everywhere and routinely promised by politicians and leaders of all colors, while they invest in the machinery of war, trade in arms and follow the ideology of conflict. Hollow hypocritical words uttered without intent like a mechanically recited prayer, and so (for the most part), like other noble constructs, peace has remained an ideal. And believing in the ideal alone, the conditions for its realization have not been created, systems that ensure conflict are maintained, and so, inevitably violence has erupted, again and again and again.
Despite this fact, and contrary to our history of brutality and cruelty, peace and harmony are the natural order of life. They are aspects of life that are eternally present – like the sun, which even when obscured by cloud or darkness remains in the heavens. All that is required is that the obstacles to their manifestation be identified and removed.
The principle obstruction is division, followed by selfishness and greed. The notion that we are separate from one another, from the environment and from that which we call God; divisions based on tribal/nation affiliations, ideologies of all kinds (including religions), race and or ethnicity; inequality and social injustice in its myriad forms. Greed and the focus on material wealth, and with it political influence, is itself divisive and has led to the violent exploitation of people (the slave trade being perhaps the greatest and most abhorrent example) and the natural world.
In order to rid the world of violence an understanding and rejection of those modes of living that create environments of conflict and fuel discord is needed; a shift in consciousness away from selfishness, greed and tribalism; and recognition that humanity is one. We are living in extraordinary times, transitional times, and such a realignment is well underway; there is a growing awareness that if humanity is to overcome the issues of the day and save the planet we must come together, cooperate and share. In the pursuit of peace sharing is essential, for without it there can never be social justice, and social justice is critical in creating trust and community harmony.
Together with justice and freedom, peace is no longer simply a dormant ideal, a cherished aspiration. It is a living force flowing through the hearts of men and women throughout the world, inspiring collective action, demanding change and an end to all forms of violence. It’s time for humanity to come of age, to reject all that divides us, to unite and create a space in which peace and harmony can ring out across the world.
Graham Peebles is an independent writer and charity worker. He set up The Create Trust in 2005 and has run education projects in India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Ethiopia where he lived for two years working with street children, under 18 commercial sex workers, and conducting teacher training programmes. He lives and works in London. Read other articles by Graham, or visit Graham’s website.
Last week, President-elect Joe Biden announced he was looking at Brian Deese, global head of sustainable investing at investment firm BlackRock, to lead the National Economic Council. Despite the sound of his current title, Deese’s track record of supporting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction when he worked in the Obama administration did not make climate activists particularly optimistic, and the New York chapter of the Sunrise Movement staged a protest against his appointment.
Others protested the protest. Former Vox journalist Matthew Yglesias accused the Sunrise movement of “doing enormous damage to the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” criticizing it for wasting time sparking “intra-party fights,” and for being “simultaneously detached from actual policy analysis AND political reality.” Among the many people Yglesias pissed off with these remarks was MSNBC climate columnist Emily Atkin, who responded in her newsletter Heated, “Yglesias appears to have forgotten about scientific reality.”
It was only a matter of time before Biden’s first moves as President-elect would spark clashes along familiar fault lines and between those with competing visions for an energy transition: one side accused of being too idealistic, removed from the political reality Biden faces; the other too complacent, removed from the reality of the planet’s cataclysmic warming.
But before we get too disheartened, let’s first take a moment to register this as progress: We are finally seeing real and meaningful debate on the federal level about what climate leadership should look like, rather than bickering over the basic notion that we need it. Gone, hopefully forever, are the days when the contours of the discussion were outlined primarily by the questions: “Is the climate changing?” “Are humans causing it?” and more recently, “Should we be alarmed about it?”
Now we are in a new kind of conversation, in which our incoming administration (and increasingly, young Republicans) openly recognize that the answers are “yes,” “yes,” and “yes.” Now, at last, we can focus on the more constructive question: What should our government do about it?
This can’t be answered by graphing the data on rising temperatures, modeling the greenhouse effect, or analyzing how rising seas and sweeping fires are linked to it. Ultimately, it is not a question of atmospheric physics or ecology. It is a question of governance. And so the same scientists who tell us we must act quickly cannot also tell us how to act quickly, who best to turn to, or which combination of public policy and private initiative will help us pull off this radical pivot.
Instead, we turn to a new set of experts: the impassioned economists, policy wonks, financiers, entrepreneurs, activists, sustainability consultants, and technologists who are offering evidence-backed ideas about what an alternative energy economy might look like and what the state can do to help us get there. These ideas are what we need to debate. These ideas are what will or will not save us.
The hard part is that these experts are far from consensus. Unlike in climate science, there is no process of peer review that can tell us which policy or Cabinet pick will be most effective.
On the one hand, energy economists like Deese are savvy and familiar with the financial levers of the energy system, even if complicit in the way it currently operates. We might speculate that such candidates are best equipped to steer this transition, particularly given the Senate’s resistance (even with possible Democratic wins in Georgia) to more progressive approaches. On the other hand, those with more sensitivity to what’s at stake — namely, frontline communities and those without the means to adapt to or evade the changing climate’s effects — might be the more committed and trustworthy champions.
But these are differences in opinion; neither is rooted in a complete denial of facts the way one side of the climate “debate” used to be. In the recent clash, it was almost as if climate Twitter were stuck in that old, bitter script. For years, that script was essential, as the media legitimized science deniers and created the false impression that the facts of climate science were somehow subjective or partisan. At this point, however, the driving questions are subjective and partisan — and we’ll cede the power and potential of this moment if thought leaders don’t adjust their language and modes of critique to keep up.
It won’t be easy. In a world where the meaning of words like “clean,” “green,” and “sustainable” have been diluted by marketers, we know that not everyone who says they’re addressing climate change actually is, and so the task of parsing genuine progress from hollow commitments will not necessarily get easier just because the new White House accepts the scientific consensus. If we can learn anything from the debate about Deese, it’s that for the next four years, the climate conversation will not be as simple as fact versus fiction, planet versus profit; it will require the weighing of factors and the splitting of hairs.
The day after the protest against Deese, veteran climate activist Bill McKibben shared on Twitter the bizarre coincidence that he officiated Deese’s wedding and knows the guy well enough to attest that he cares about the climate and will “work steadfastly and competently and honorably, to the betterment of the world, and that he’ll get a lot done.” His testimonial seemed to soften some of Deese’s harshest critics.
This was a fluke: Typically, the work of vetting good-faith climate leadership will not be able to draw upon character testimony from such a trustworthy voice. More often, that work will be fuzzy and prolonged: an evaluation of both dedication and skillset, prudence and urgency, with ample room for people with the same goals to come out on different sides.
We caught a glimpse of that work being done in the conversation about Deese, even as we saw old patterns playing out. It was exciting. Because as Biden works to maintain the fragile coalition between the moderate and progressive wings of his party while also taking on the climate issue, there is the potential for these clashes to yield a formidable union of pragmatism and urgency — so long as we accept that we’re finally debating theories of change, not the fact that we need one.
Got a bold idea or fresh news analysis? Submit your op-ed draft, along with a note about who you are, to fix@grist.org.
Colonial Armed Constabulary units at Parihaka in 1881. Image: Alexander Turnbull Library
COMMENT: By Crosbie Walsh
Media giant Stuff, after a protracted study of its own history, announced this week that much that it has published on Māori has been racist. It has apologised for this and introduced guidelines (a Treaty of Waitangi-based charter) to improve its record.
Surprisingly, left-leaning journalist Chris Trotter has condemned these initiatives, saying apologising for your history is to admit you don’t understand it (with which I disagree) and that the apology is likely to result in a White backlash, with which, unfortunately, I cannot disagree.
But he appeared unconcerned or unaware of the ongoing Māori backlash evident since at least the 1950s. He did not mention Nga Tamatoa, Bastion Point, the Land March, the Raglan and Wanganui protests, the foreshore and seabed issues, or the creation of the Māori Party.
He wrote of rewriting history while failing to recognise that it had in fact already been rewritten, by commission and omission— by Pākeha.
Only relatively recently have the “Māori” Wars and the Wairau “Massacre” been renamed the Land Wars and the Wairau Affair.
Until relatively recently the Treaty of Waitangi was considered meaningless, and a number of influential Pākeha still think so.
What is more, Māori are still being held solely responsible for the consequences of the Pākeha rewriting and resultant marginalisation: their poor health and crime rates, poor education levels, family breakdown, child abuse, drug use, and on and on.
The appalling story of Parihaka Trotter wrote that to rewrite was to not understand, but the appalling story of Parihaka that he mentioned in passing was not even known to Pākeha until Dick Scott, who died this year aged 97, wrote The Parihaka Story (1954) and its expanded Ask that Mountain (1975).
Te Whiti-o-Rongomai … arrested and imprisoned without trial. Image: Crosbie Walsh blog
In 1881, some 1600 troops equipped with cannon invaded the village on the slopes of Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont?) in response to Māori removing surveyor pegs and ploughing confiscated land. The ploughmen and leaders Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi were arrested and imprisoned without trial. Te Whiti was arrested again in 1883 and 1886.
Today, if you see Taranaki women wearing white feathers in their hair it is in memory of Parihaka and Te Whiti whose repeated peaceful passive resistance has been likened to that of Mahatma Gandhi.
Not too long ago, no Māori language, cultural mores or history were taught in our secondary schools (indeed, there were few Māori teachers) and the universities were little better.
I well remember a quite heated argument with my history lecturer at Victoria, Mary Boyd, in the early 1960s. She maintained the Treaty had no validity or use. I only got a “B” in that paper!
I remember also the PPTA Journal article in 1970 concerning teachers’ college students who researched Wairau. They concluded Māori had ambushed the NZ Company, starting the killing, ignoring the fact that it was only after Te Rangihaeata’s wife had been killed that the Māori responded in earnest; the fact that the NZ Company had illegally provoked the affair, hoping to forestall Commissioner Spain’s enquiry that was likely to determine the NZ Company’s title was invalid.
Māori land was invaded It was Māori land that they had invaded.
This is not what those teachers’ college students were taught, or what they would teach to their pupils. I know because one of them was a young colleague of mine.
The Journal printed my response (“Another view of the Wairau Affair”) but much of the damage was already done. What was taught in our schools and universities, if it was taught at all, was this sort of a Pākeha version of history.
I’m sorry, Chris Trotter. We definitely need to rewrite history, if only to correct what little we know.
Thoughts on the Stuff’s Charter Stuff’s charter recognises the media’s “enormous impact in shaping public thought … and societal norms”. It claims to be “a brave new era for NZ’s largest media company”.
The intentions of the charter are commendable but there’s no mention in the charter of Māori editors, columnists and journalists, only a separate acknowledgement by the CEO to redress their under-representation.
Also, there appear to be no explicit Māori organisational structures within the organisation, and no mention of any Māori inputs to the charter. I wonder if any Māori helped to write the charter, or whether this is another example of well wishers hoping to do things to and for Māori?
Without these structures and “by Māori” inputs, good intentions may not amount to very much. We’ll have other Oranga Tamariki sagas.
But it’s a start in the right direction for which Stuff should be congratulated. I wonder how many other organisations will follow its example.
On Saturday 21 November 2020 Russia celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials which started on 20 November 1945 and lasted almost a year, until 1 October 1946. The Tribunal was given the task of trying and judging 24 of the most atrocious political and military leaders of the Third Reich.
For this unique celebration – so we shall never forget – Russian leaders and people of the Arts and History organized a Special Performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” at Moscow’s Helikon Opera Theatre. Daniel Hawkins, from RT, introduced this extraordinary event, as a journey through history, a journey through life and death, when some of – at that time – most genocidal people in history had to answer for their crimes.
This opera event was prepared for more than a year and was first performed in January 2020 for the Holocaust victims and the victims of the Nazi concentration camps in Leningrad. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an International Military Tribunal. They resulted in 12 death sentences.
The idea of the “Requiem” performance is “not just to appeal to emotions, but to reason. Because if we fail to learn from history, the tragedy could be repeated.”
This is precisely what Sergei Novikov, head of the (Russian) presidential directorate for social projects, intimidated. He says, “Despite of what we have seen happening 75 years ago – we do not seem to have learned a lesson. Today we seem to go down the same road, which is frightening.”
The musical performance interplays with theatrical realism – so memories are awake and moving – better than a museum. The educational impact of this celebration of remembrance is extremely important especially for the young people, who do not remember these events, but with this first-class performance, they may learn a crucial lesson, a lesson hardly talked about in history books and even less so in the west.
If we compare what has happened then – 75 years ago – actually the anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on 9 and 10 November 1938, effectively the beginning of WWII, and look at today’s extremism in Europe, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, we know that we are not far from a tyranny we knew as “Nationalsozialismus”, a political Nazi-concept of the late 1930s and up to mid-1940s, that today can best be compared with extreme neoliberalism and merciless oppression of peoples’ rights by police and military.
In fact, we may be steps ahead of what Hitler and his crime and war cabinet had done, but again, today, like then, we are blind to it. There may be a time when we can no longer move, when we are in constant lockdown, masked with dismembered faces, so to speak, kept away from each other under the pretext of social distancing so that we cannot communicate with each other, all for reasons of public health, for the “good intentions” of our governments to protect us from an evil virus – the corona virus.
Today, this oppression is the result of a long-term plan by a small elite to implement The Great Reset (Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020).
*****
There is, of course, a good reason, why Moscow wants the world to remember what WWII meant and how eventually Nazi-Germany was defeated – yes, largely if not solely by enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. Some 25 to 30 million USSR soldiers and Soviet citizens had left their lives for salvaging Europe – and possibly the world – from an all invading fascism.
The United States, nominally an ally of the Soviet Union, had clandestinely funded the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union. One of the key purposes for the US getting “involved” in WWII, other than defeating the British Empire, was to defeat their arch-enemy, communist Soviet Union. The Rockefellers funded Hitler’s war machine by providing them with hydrocarbons, with petrol, the energy that drove the war.
On the other hand, the Federal Reserve (FED), via the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) – the pyramid tower still omni-present in Basle, Switzerland, near the German border – transferred gigantic monetary resources to the Reichsbank (at that time Hitler’s equivalent of a German Central Bank)
Verdi’s Requiem Performance in Moscow on 21 November is important to go back in history and open the “memory books” in front of our eyes. It is even more important, as we see the trend of fascism taking over the entire European continent and possibly also the United States.
Europe basically ignores the importance of the 75th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials which still, as of this date, provides precedents for international war crimes – except, these precedents are miserably ignored. If not, we would have multiple repeats of Nuremberg in our days and age with European and US leaders (sic) in “retirement’ but still with power. Our dystopian western world is beset by war criminals even to the point where they blackmail judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, not to touch their – the European and US – war crimes, or else…
That’s where we have arrived.
Since we are going back to the times when WWII and Nuremberg happened, we should take the opportunity to also look at the Big Picture, one that may be at the root of this new wave of fascism invading Europe. It is, in essence, a health dictatorship; it has become a Health Martial Law. Many countries have ratified, quietly, or rammed it through Parliament without the public at large noticing – a law allowing them switching from everyday life to an emergency situation; i.e., (health) Martial Law.
The Big Picture, though, is a diabolical plan of eugenics. Yes, it’s a term nobody wants to use, but it must be said, because it’s one of the fundamental principles that lies in all that is planned, the 2010 Rockefeller Report and the extremely important WHO Report “A World at Risk” – Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies, by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – GPMB (September 2019).
Key members of this Monitoring Board include the World Bank, IMF, CDC and many more influential players, who have been concocting the “Preparedness” for a new epidemic since at least 2016, when the World Bank set up a special “Health Emergency Fund” to face the “next pandemic”.
Also, part of the SARS-Cov-2 preparedness and planned outbreak, was Event 201 (18 October 2019, NYC, sponsored by Gates, the WEF, and the Johns Hopkins School for Medicine (Rockefeller created and funded), which simulated the outbreak of a SARS-Cov-2 virus which curiously happened a few weeks later. The “outbreak” was actually officially announced on the dot of the beginning of the Decade 2020.
The Big Picture scheme also includes as an aftermath to covid, The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020), a plan to implement the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enslavement of the remaining population. The Rockefellers and Bill Gates, Kissinger and many more have nurtured the idea of massively reducing the world population for at least the last 70 years.
Ever since the Rockefellers espoused the concept of the “Bilderberger Society” (a parallel organization to the WEF (World Economic Forum), with overlapping and an ever-moving memberships) their one and only continuous “project” was a selective population reduction. And they actually never made it a secret. See Bill Gates TedTalk in February 2010 – just about the time when the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, the one that has us now in “lockstep” following all the rules and regulations, issued by WHO and supported by the entire UN system .
Why then was the eugenics agenda never seriously picked up by the mainstream, by the public at large? – Possibly, because nobody can even imagine people so evil – or allow me to call them non-humans – to actually want to make this reality. But these non-humanoids do exist. How they infiltrated themselves into human society is a mystery.
By the way, have you ever seen Bill Gates – with his obnoxious grin – wearing a mask? Or the Rockefellers, Kissingers, et al? How come they are always spared from this deadly virus, SARS-Cov-2? How come they get very old, but appear to be always in good health? What kind of life elixir are they using?
Back to the Eugenists. To implement such a massive plan on a worldwide scale, one needs a uniform approach to world health. In 1948, just a couple of years after the Nuremberg trials started, where war criminals like the Rockefellers should also have been indicted for supplying the enemy (German Nazis) with energy to drive their (anti-Soviet) war machine – back then, in 1948, Rockefeller created WHO, the World Health Organization.
The philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation (RF) has marked the field of health like no other organization. The oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Hence, the RF created and provided the original funding to set up WHO in 1948. On 7 April 1948, WHO inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health Organization, which had been an agency of the League of Nations. Twenty-six (out of then 58) UN members ratified WHO as a UN agency under the UN Constitution.
Once you have “Global Health” under one roof, the WHO, funded primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the pharmaceutical industries (predominantly GAVI – Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – also created by Bill Gates in 2000) and you also have the predominant donor, Bill Gates, an obsessed vaxxer (and eugenist) without any medical training, choose WHO’s Director General – Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a buddy of Gates and former Board Member of GAVI – it is relatively easy to make the foundation of WHO’s health policies based on vaccination.
That’s what we see today. As we have heard from Gates’ TedTalk (2010 see above), vaccination seems to lend itself perfectly to reduce the world population. It has the further advantage, that if anything goes “wrong” – no vaccine company can be held responsible, let alone being sued. For example, if people get seriously ill or die from the vaccinations – which would not be a surprise, after the Covid-19 are planned to be administered in warp speed – the vaccine pharmaceuticals cannot be sued.
In fact, vaccine companies do not bear any liability risk. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34), was signed into law by US President Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1986. NCVIA’s purpose was to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury, since lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the vaccines, a lame argument, but that shows once more the lobbying power the pharma industry commands.
That’s where we stand today. Any sinister vaccination agenda, no matter how hurtful to the public, is home free. Today we are at this crucial point of massive forced vaccination. Many governments; i.e., UK’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Scott Morrison, have already advanced the idea of a vaccination-pass. Without it you are banned from flying and from just about every public event. That’s promising.
And one might ask what does that have to with public health? What is the real agenda behind it?
Again, returning to the Nuremberg Trials, aren’t we in the midst of a world tyranny to which all 193 UN member countries subscribed, or were coerced into – a tyranny that has already been genocidal, in as much as it destroyed the world economy, creating countless bankruptcies, unemployment – untold poverty and misery and death, and now a potentially genocidal massive vaccination campaign, the effects of it might be death in the medium to long term, but “untraceable”, or too late by the time the cause is discovered.
A world tyranny inflicted by all 193 UN member countries – whatever their motivation – all these governments and the heads of WHO and the entire UN system belongs before a new Nuremburg-type Tribunal – where the same legal principal would be applied as 75 years ago in 1945.
Who says this will not happen? We can make it happen. We, the People, are the 99.99%. They are only 0.01 %. We have the power to resist – and we will prevail.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.
Nationalism—placing the interests of one’s own nation above the interests of other nations—has been a powerful force in world affairs for centuries.
But it seemed on the wane after 1945, when the vast devastation of World War II—a conflict fostered by right wing, nationalist demagogues—convinced people around the globe of the necessity to transcend nationalism and encourage international cooperation. Indeed, the widespread recognition of the interdependence of nations led to the creation of institutions like the United Nations (which established a modicum of global governance) and the European Union (which established a regional federation).
Thus, it came as a shock when, during the second decade of the twenty-first century, a new generation of nationalists, invariably right wing populists, made startling political breakthroughs in their countries. Feeding on popular discontent with economic stagnation and widespread immigration, nationalist demagogues like Matteo Salvini of Italy, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands stirred up mass support. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s new United Kingdom Independence Party spearheaded a campaign for a British exit from the European Union, leading to passage of a June 2016 Brexit referendum. In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the neo-fascist National Front, who focused on what she termed a battle between “patriots” and “globalists,” came startlingly close to election as her country’s president in 2017. Another flamboyant nationalist leader, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, campaigning under the slogan “Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone,” was elected his nation’s president with 55 percent of the vote in 2018.
Perhaps the best-known of the new crop of nationalist leaders, as well as a keen inspiration to them all, was Donald Trump, the surprise victor in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Adopting the slogan “Make America Great Again” during his election campaign, he spelled out his nationalist views even more plainly at a December 2016 rally of his supporters. “There is no global anthem,” he declared. “From now on it is going to be: America First. Okay? America First. We are going to put ourselves first.” Contemptuous of the United Nations, he told it off with remarkable bluntness in September 2019. “The truth is plain to see,” he informed the UN General Assembly. “Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first. . . . The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”
Recently, however, the nationalist wave appears to be receding. Although Britain’s ruling Conservative Party took up the Brexit torch, it proved unable to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. Today, more than four years after nationalists’ referendum victory, Brexit talks are stalled. In France, Le Pen’s National Rally party (which replaced the National Front) was trounced in the July 2020 local elections, and polls indicated that, in the 2022 presidential election, she would lose once again to the internationalist Emmanuel Macron. Similarly, in Brazil, President Bolsonaro made almost daily Facebook Live broadcasts this November, encouraging his supporters to back specific candidates in local elections. Subsequently, most of them went down to defeat.
From the standpoint of the new nationalists, their most disastrous defeat occurred in the United States, where, in November 2020, President Trump lost his bid for re-election. Despite numerous nationalist antics during his campaign, such as hugging and kissing the American flag, Trump was defeated by the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, by more than 6 million votes. Moreover, Biden was a strong supporter of multilateralism and, as the New York Times noted in a front-page article shortly after the election, “makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury `America First’ as a guiding principle of the nation’s foreign policy.” In fact, Biden was already committed to having the United States resume support of the United Nations, rejoin the World Health Organization, and re-enter nuclear arms control and climate agreements.
Furthermore, global cooperation and institutions retain widespread support among the people of the world. A Pew Research Center poll of 14,276 people across 14 nations during the summer of 2020 found that 81 percent believed that “countries around the world should act as part of a global community that works together to solve problems,” while only 17 percent thought that such countries “should act as independent nations that compete with other countries and pursue their own interests.” When it came to the United Nations, a 2019 Pew survey of 34,904 respondents in 32 countries found that a median of 61 percent had a favorable opinion of the world organization.
Most Americans shared these views. The summer 2020 Pew survey found that, among U.S. respondents, 62 percent had a positive view of the United Nations, compared to 31 percent with a negative one Indeed, a February 2020 Gallup poll discovered that 64 percent of U.S. respondents wanted the United Nations to play a leading or a major role in world affairs.
Polls also found that world public opinion toward the European Union was quite positive—even, ironically, within Britain, where support for Brexit sank below 40 percent by November 2020.
The continuing popularity of transcending nationalism should not surprise us, for it coincides with the fundamental necessities of today’s world. After all, how can the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, the nuclear arms race, and numerous other worldwide problems be handled effectively without strengthening global cooperation and governance?
I have heard a lot of discussion about when the war will end that began in April 2020.
Yes, war. I have spent the better part of the past ten months trying to determine what the best attitude or approach to the current unpleasantness ought to be taken.
A tension has been created over the course of the year between those who think about what has been happening and those who do not. I have alluded to this tension in previous articles. Meanwhile there are a few others who seem to have grasped not only the urgency but the necessity of appropriate language for the current situation.
As I argued in February, we are not faced with a health issue and never have been. The People’s Republic of China was faced with a health issue and acted accordingly. This is not the place to discuss that history. However, at no time from December 2019 to the present has any national or international authority in the West ever been in the least interested in health and well-being of the inhabitants of the planet or those particular political entities that comprise the Anglo-American Empire and its suzerain states.
In a recent conversation with my music teacher I remarked that I was never very good at memorising anything. In previous articles I have alluded to this quality. Hence my entire intellectual development could be said to have been devoted to observation and the construction of relationships. For relationships to make sense one has to have an appropriate perspective or context. One way to see this is as a kind of pyramid or hierarchy, as metaphor an explanatory regress. The point is to construct a sufficiently broad view of events so as to organise the observations as intelligible relationships.
One day several years ago I visited the battlefield of Waterloo, a tiny place in Belgium not far from Brussels. There the visitor will find an artificial hill topped by a bronze lion, symbolising the forces of the British Empire and its allies who defeated Napoleon’s armies there. Atop this hill, a kind of observation post, there were plates depicting more or less the topography of that battle. By chance while I was there I overheard a conversation by two British NATO officers in mufti discussing the battlefield. Of course, when the battle was being fought there was no such hill and hence no such perspective. One officer said to the other, look at that small space and imagine. First the artillery fires across that field. Then the cavalry charges. Hundreds of horses churn up the earth. Then the infantry in line has to try to advance through all these mud and holes, marching in formation, trying to reach the range from which to fire on the French lines. The conversation continued in a technical fashion which I certainly found informative. But the point here is that from the top of the Waterloo monument one could contemplate the entirety of practical, tactical and strategic difficulties of two massed 18th/early 19th century armies battling in a space comparable to the Champs de Mars in Paris or the Mall in Washington or Green Park in London. Thousands of soldiers could barely see in front of them — this was before the introduction of smokeless powder — trying to maintain the infantry line which constituted massed firepower in the age before the machine gun.
From the top of the hill nearly two centuries later, it was easy to adopt a perspective that would explain many details of the battle as well as the problems each belligerent had to confront. In 2020 it takes some concentration and perhaps audacity to find a “hill” from which to see what has been happening and where the fronts are. It takes no imagination if one has studied the plans and the operations of the belligerent — the aggressor — to see what has been done so far. It takes only a bit more work and analysis to determine what the probable tactical objectives of the aggressor are — his strategic objectives are a matter of record.
In the course of the 20th century a kind of “rule of thumb” has become established in strategic circles that says essentially, the destruction, displacement or demobilisation of about 20% of a country’s population is sufficient to subjugate the country as a whole. I seem to recall this point being made while Ronald Reagan was presiding over the subjugation of Central America in the face of democratic movements in Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. At the official conclusion of those undeclared and illegal wars fought covertly through US proxies in the respective countries, 20% of Guatemaltecans and Salvadorans were either dead or in exile — many of whom comprising part of the despised migrant labour force north of the Rio Bravo.
If, however, we look back at the period from 1936 until 1945, we find that conservative figures record a 20% loss of population in both the Soviet Union and China as a result of combined Allied aggression. Unlike some sentimentalists I do not believe it appropriate to treat dictatorships that were heavily funded by the Anglo-American Empire (whether residing in Rome or Berlin) as hostile to it. The relationship between the Japanese Empire and the American Empire was comparable to that prevailing between Britain and Germany. The details of those relationships have been discussed elsewhere so those who are interested and not dismissive can find them with a bit of effort.
So reviewing the 20th century, roughly from 1912 onward from atop the hill at Waterloo, I find one cannot avoid some conclusions or some forecasts.
After the longest economic crisis of the 19th century in which the greatest gangsters the world had ever known, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, DuPont (just to name those in the US) had seized unimaginable fortunes, the accumulated and slowly consolidating organisations of labour were educating and mobilising people throughout the empires to demand economic and social justice. The parallel competition among the elite demanded conquest. While competing for empire, all empires were agreed that labour had to be disciplined. Some 4 million dead ought to do the job. Even if in 1914 there was no hill from which to see the Somme, Verdun or Yprés, the spirit of victory was there: victory over the competition and above all victory over the lower classes.
A hundred years later the same vile gangsters, some with other names and more plebeian sartorial tastes, have been faced — no later than 2008 with the same dire problem. Well, in fact, that is the absurd aspect of this war. Unlike in 1912, there is no organised lower class, no organised middle class. In fact, since 1989 class has ceased to mean anything at all except — until air traffic came to a virtual standstill — the section of the aircraft one happened to occupy. For thirty years there has been no opposition to the plutocracy that emerged victorious in 1945.
So what is driving the war by those same “types” against the rest of us? They have managed to organise most of our youth around MTV, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. What more do they want?
However, that is the wrong question. When in New York or some other city dominated by elected and unelected criminals you are cornered at gunpoint, there is no natural limit to what you are expected to surrender. When you are audited by someone from the tax office who has been told, “your retention or promotion depends on bringing home the bacon, without litigation”, there is no limit to what you may have to pay.
When, however, you are dealing with the descendants of those vile aristocrats and monarchists, the power of the feudal system, many of whom continue to resent the revolution of 1789 and its continuation in 1917, then you are also dealing with an equally irrational, rabid pack. When the GDR was annexed and the Soviet Union dismantled, their assets stolen from the citizens to feed vultures, this was not merely gratuitous capitalist enrichment. It was vengeance.
We are not faced with a war — with the attack of the 0.01% just for money and assets. In fact, since they destroyed our public service sectors, plundered our pension systems, and squandered whatever taxes we paid on wars to conquer what they had not yet stolen, they have nonetheless remained unsatisfied.
Why were Louis Capet and his Habsburg spouse Marie Antoinette beheaded? Not because the French would not have a king. Rather because that king refused to be French. Louis XVI refused to accept the end of a regime in which people and countries were dynastic property. He refused to accept the role of citizen rather than owner of people and land in France. For the same reason the somewhat more thorough Russian Revolution abolished the dynasty and not just its paramount member.
The British — all their insincere claims to democracy and constitutional monarchy notwithstanding — and their North American cousins in the Anglo-American Empire never accepted either the French or the Russian Revolutions because they violated their deep feudal convictions. I have omitted the Papacy here for the purpose of brevity. However, what we currently face is the monstrous vindictiveness of the Reaction to 1789 and 1917.
This is not a virus. It is not a pandemic. If we are honest what we face today is a plague borne by the vermin that never accepted the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity — the humanist values that drove ordinary people to overthrow the feudal order in which the Church and nobility owned us.
If you ask them what they learned from history they will surely tell you — just like the WEF — “back then, they owned nothing, and we were happy”.
I reviewed Sra. Michelle Bachelet’s Report on Venezuela, and was quite outraged at her lack of consideration and due diligence. I will, in a moment, tell everyone why this report needs to be trashed, but even before that, I think I should mention two systemic flaws about this type of reporting regardless of which country it is written for.
First
The Report treats Venezuela as an isolated entity, along with other entities, such as the United States, Colombia,… floating in separate air space, without impacting or being impacted by any other country, in any way, shape, or form.
Everyone knows, however, that the truth is otherwise, that the funds the United States government has allocated to bring down the Maduro Bolivarian Government are probably more than some small countries’ annual budget, and that the United States’ sanctions to punish the Venezuelan people and deprive them of food, medicine, and fuel amount to no less than crimes against humanity. That clearly tells me that Venezuela is on earth and not in space, and both its government and its people are greatly impacted by the actions of other countries, and in particular the United States. It also, in my mind, invalidates the entire UN Report, but it takes spine, and we all know that Sra. Bachelet would not remain in office long if she attempted to produce one such report that takes into consideration all players influencing Venezuela and its people’s rights.
In this report, there is no mention of international criminals, such as Elliot Abrams (what a shame), who have been convicted in his own country and is now running loose, being employed by the Trump Administration to bring death and horror upon the people of Venezuela, as they did in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala,… CAN A TRUE HUMAN RIGHTS OBSERVER REALLY REMAIN SILENT ON THESE ISSUES?
Second
The expression “Political Prisoner” is loosely defined and even more loosely utilized. A political prisoner is someone who has been imprisoned or subjected to other restrictions by the State, because of his beliefs, party affiliations, or peaceful protest. Such description is generally accepted by most, but loosely used to include violent opposition as well. As Fidel Castro would often ask: “Don’t we have the right to defend ourselves?” This issue is seldom addressed by ‘human rights’ organizations. Many people who are presented as political prisoners are often violent individuals of no independent character who are funded by the United States government or private individuals, somehow tied to the US government. Unless the HR report presents a list of the individuals, their alleged crimes against the State, and their investigated claims, one can never be certain if they can be categorized as political prisoners.
In addition, repressive actions by ‘friendly governments’ are oftentimes ignored whereas ‘unfriendly governments’ are placed under constant scrutiny. As an example, how can we put Venezuela under a magnifying glass when daily crimes by the repressive State in Saudi Arabia are often ignored? In my opinion, those who place the Bolivarian State right next to the Saudi Arabian Dictatorship must be mentally deranged.
The report is all unproven innuendos and play-with-words. It keeps referencing itself so many times that one starts wondering where the meat is. What is the real content? Where are the emperor’s clothes?
And Now For the Meat
The first paragraph (graves vulneraciones)… que se han documentado en el pais. (POR FAVOR, QUE SON ESTAS?)
Where are your research data?
So where is the meat?
The Seventh and Eighth Paragraphs
Sra. Bachelet admits that the Bolivarian government announced its commitment to cooperate with her men to deal with the various themes. “The issue is complicated,” claims Sra. Bachelet. Why? The Venezuela government’s cooperation, which is pretty significant, is mentioned in a one-sentence blurb, perhaps intended to imply the Bolivarian government’s admission of its guilt which would be not true.
The next paragraph (one of very few statistics) refers to 66 deaths, 52 of them allegedly inflicted by Security Forces. What about the other 14? Venezuelan opposition is notorious for miscategorizing pro-government deaths as its own, and many opposition members walk around armed. Is there any verification of such claims?
Speaking of efficiency, there are, of course, many government functions that could be done better and much more efficiently if more funds were available, and the country’s wealth wasn’t robbed so much by the United States and the European Union countries, such as the case of the $2 billion British robbery of Venezuelan gold. Sra. Bachelet, how many more kids could receive milk and other alimentation if the stolen gold could be handed over to the constitutional government of Venezuela?
Te Whiti-o-Rongomai … arrested and imprisoned without trial. Image: Crosbie Walsh blog
